The Struggle to Leave Egypt Behind

The readings we hear today are the ones we just heard on Palm Sunday a few days ago.

While the first reading from Isaiah has been interpreted by Christians as referring to Jesus (the so called Suffering Servant passages), I love to take the passage just as Jesus would have read it and think about what it would mean when applied to our lives.

The Lord GOD has given me a well-trained tongue,

That I might know how to speak to the weary a word that will rouse them.

Morning after morning God opens my ear that I may hear

Imagine if we all developed “well-trained tongues” that offered encouraging and uplifting words to the people around us – words that could rouse those who are weary from life.  What might those words be? Who would need to hear them? Is there someone in your life right now who could use some encouraging words from you today?

And what if our ears were opened every day that we might hear.  What would we be listening for? Who would we be listening to?

Even if we took just those two actions – encouraging others and listening for the voice of God – and practiced them daily and mindfully what might change in our lives (and not just during Lent but everyday).

In the gospel, we hear that Jesus is preparing to celebrate the Passover with his friends. Recently, we had an amazing two part scripture study with folks from Temple Sinai who reflected with us on Passover and what it means for them. Part of the Passover (or Seder) ritual is the remembering of the story of the Hebrews being led out of Egypt.

In one of the Seder prayer texts (called a Haggadah, and there are many versions!), Rabbi Deb Till shared a prayer by Alden Solovy called Egypt Inside.  Part of it goes like this:

This I confess to myself: I have taken Egypt with me

I’ve kept myself a slave to grief and loss, fear and anger and shame

God of redemption with your guiding loving hand

Leaving Egypt is easy

Leaving Egypt behind is a struggle

You have given me this choice:

To live in a tyranny of my own making

Or to set my heart free to love you

To love your people and to love myself

God of freedom, help me to leave Egypt behind

To hear your voice, to accept your guidance

And to see the miracles in each new day

I think it is safe to say that we all want to be free, but doing the hard work of inner freedom is not something that everyone is always up for.  Sometimes it is “easier” to hate.  Sometimes it “easier” to blame. Sometimes it is “easier” to rail against. Jesus tried to offer the people of his time a way to “leave Egypt behind” and to set their hearts free to love. But for the most part, they just could not take it up. It seems we struggle still to take this up in our day.

At a training I participated in recently, the leaders pointed out that survival and resilience are two different things.  Survival means that we came through something.  Resilience, however, means that we were open to what the experience had to teach us and incorporated that into our life (personally and collectively). We can “leave Egypt,” but if we do not do the work of “leaving Egypt behind” we may be carrying wounds with us that then get passed down or onto others, and we remain closed to something new in our midst.

Part of the Lenten journey is to learn from history, and that means learning from the Passover journey that Jesus celebrated during the last week of his life. In no way am I suggesting that we “celebrate” Passover as Christians or appropriate it as our own. Passover has a signficance and integrity that is unique and particular to the Jewish people. And yet it is part of our history, and it was part of Jesus’ history, and so we can learn from it as both a lived journey and a spiritual one – a journey that invites us not just to survive, but to be resilient and thrive. Thus we must do the accompanying inner work together.

For today, just sit with whatever this brings up for you.  What parts of your past do you still carry within you? What would you like to release so that you might be truly free. What will this cost you to let go of it? Talk to God about it.