Exodus 12:1-14

The LORD said to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt: This month shall mark for you the beginning of months; it shall be the first month of the year for you. Tell the whole congregation of Israel that on the tenth of this month they are to take a lamb for each family, a lamb for each household. If a household is too small for a whole lamb, it shall join its closest neighbor in obtaining one; the lamb shall be divided in proportion to the number of people who eat of it. Your lamb shall be without blemish, a year-old male; you may take it from the sheep or from the goats. You shall keep it until the fourteenth day of this month; then the whole assembled congregation of Israel shall slaughter it at twilight. They shall take some of the blood and put it on the two doorposts and the lintel of the houses in which they eat it. They shall eat the lamb that same night; they shall eat it roasted over the fire with unleavened bread and bitter herbs. Do not eat any of it raw or boiled in water, but roasted over the fire, with its head, legs, and inner organs. You shall let none of it remain until the morning; anything that remains until the morning you shall burn. This is how you shall eat it: your loins girded, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand; and you shall eat it hurriedly. It is the passover of the LORD. For I will pass through the land of Egypt that night, and I will strike down every firstborn in the land of Egypt, both human beings and animals; on all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments: I am the LORD. The blood shall be a sign for you on the houses where you live: when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague shall destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt.

This day shall be a day of remembrance for you. You shall celebrate it as a festival to the LORD; throughout your generations you shall observe it as a perpetual ordinance.

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1050: that’s how many videos you’ll find on U-tube when you search using the words: “First day school bus.” The range of videos is interesting, but the commonalities among the videos—that’s what’s striking.

In most, a child appears at the edge of a front yard bearing the marks of late summer: green grass with yellow, parched spots here and there,  The boy or girl is dressed in shorts or a sleeveless top and, alternately, looks back at the camera and then down the street for signs of the arrival of the school bus: the big, loud, yellow and inevitable school bus. On the child’s back is an impossibly large backpack, and on the child’s face is often a miserable smile.

Oh yes, I remember what that was like: that mixture of excitement, nausea and panic that came both on the first day of school and on the first day of starting back to school after having had the summer off. I remember the heat, the sound of the bus and the parental reassurances that only served to underline just how stressful it was to be entering or re-entering the seasonal cycle of getting back to work.

We, of course, entered that very cycle this last week. Labor Day shot summer’s last little happy bullets, and then we began what we call “the program year” here at St. Paul’s: the program year—on the one hand, the beginning of a many great programs and on the other, the danger of life becoming, well, too programmatic.

And so I was curious to see what our readings for this morning would yield that might throw more light on the ambivalent experience of cycles and seasons and getting back into the routine of work.

And one of our readings did not disappoint. For our passage from the Book of Exodus begins: “The LORD said to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt: This month shall mark for you the beginning of months; it shall be the first month of the year for you.”

And why does God declare a particular month as the beginning of the yearly cycle? Because it’s the month in which Passover, God’s liberation of the Jewish people, occurs.

Only a few things really stick with you from Seminary. For me, one of those was the day my Hebrew Scriptures Professor ended a lecture on the Book of Exodus by saying: “The most ancient texts in the Hebrew Scriptures are not the creation stories; the most ancient texts are found in the story of Passover. The experience of liberation, not creation, is the defining story for the Hebrew people.”

And, of course, this is why God declares that the month of Passover shall be the beginning of the year in our passage for today. Passover liberation is the defining story of God’s people, a story of the restoration of their and our dignity and freedom, all of which is described as coming at a steep cost, the death of the firstborns of the oppressor.

Which brings me back to my question: What does this story of liberation and death in the realm of the oppressor have to do with you and me standing at the beginning of another program or programmed year, with our calendars and obligations in our big heavy backpacks as the large, noisy, inevitable school bus pulls up to the curb? What is our defining story as we head into another year?

A Jewish commentator’s words on this passage give us a clue. He said that the significance of God’s decree that the month of the Passover would mark the beginning of the year had to do with God making a statement about time. God was saying that from now on time is ours to do with as we will instead of, as in the days of our slavery, our time belonging to our oppressor.

And so for us as individuals, the challenge right now is to look out into our year with all its seemingly fixed obligations, and to ask ourselves how may this time belong to us and to the God who means for us every year to live as a person of dignity with both the gift and the responsibility of my own freedom of choice? And along with this, what in the realm of the oppressor will need to die, will need to be offered up so that this dignity and freedom may be born?

For us as a community the question is similar: as we look into our liturgical year, our life that’s built around the goodness of traveling a holy cycle of time together: how may this time also belong to us in another way, in a way that lays bear and embraces the disruptive, liberating, dignifying action of God, the one who is forever calling God’s people out of the bondage of their own diminished selves into the freedom and responsibility that belong to the sons and daughters of the most high? And what must die in the realm of the oppressor for us to do this?

“The realm of the oppressor:” I keep saying this. For the Jewish people, it was the realm of Egypt and Pharaoh, the realm in which all economic, religious, political, social and family life was controlled by others, for Pharaoh was the priest of every temple, the owner of all land, the leader of all politics, the decider of all things. For us, the realm of the oppressor is anyone or anything we allow to have an undue, destructive power over us, and this must include our own need to give this power away to another, our own need to avoid taking responsibility for our choices, our own reluctance to take back the proper ownership of our time, the ownership that God would give to us.

I thought for a moment last night that I was going to have to watch every one of those videos on U-tube of children mounting their school bus for the first time. What I was looking for, I think, was one video, one account that depicted something different from the typical encouraging, proud parents and the hapless child trying to look happy as, in a sense forced to do so, she boarded the bus, taking one important step toward adult life. And then I found it. It was entitled “Owen’s first day of school” and was dated August 31, 2007.

The pace was slower than the rest, allowing us to see Owen as he talks to his parents, takes off and, with his mother’s assistance, puts back on his huge backpack and looks down the road for the bus. The bus appears at one stop below his own, and instead of clinging to his parents or rushing forward, he readies himself, not by drawing nearer to the curb but by stepping back and getting “into position” to approach the bus. His mother comments “You’ve waited patiently every year,” meaning, I suppose, that Owen has been looking forward to being old enough to take this important step—a step that in a sense he must take, entering the great cycle of study, of work.

As the bus pulls toward the stop, he says to his mother; “And now it’s my time.” With that, he squares his shoulders and in an exquisite act of freedom, walks with purpose toward the bus.

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