My
father was a wandering Aramean. Well, he
wasn’t; my father was from Cumbria and the only wandering I remember him doing
was purposeful moderate hiking. But, if
we were celebrating Passover, it wouldn’t matter if your father was from
LaPorte or La Paz; we would each make that claim, that “my father was a
wandering Aramean,” and we’d make it because Deuteronomy tells us to. As the Jewish people recall each year the
saving wonders God worked for His people in freeing them from slavery in Egypt,
they don’t let that event stay soberly and tamely in the past, they claim for
themselves, “my father was a
wandering Aramean.” In much the same
way, today in this Church we’re invited to hear the Word of God say to us,
personally “you were aliens in
Egypt. Remember.” That’s not a word that we can let sit in the
past, not a word we can hear directed solely to that one generation millennia ago,
wandering in the desert, freed from slavery, approaching the promised land,
receiving the Law as they went; that’s a word for us. That’s the Word of the Lord for us. That’s a word that takes on life in this assembly. That’s a word in which we encounter
Christ. We were aliens in Egypt. We were slaves. Remember.
And
remember not just that. Remember what
God does to the chains of slavery. Remember
the Exodus. Remember what God does to
bonds of sin and of death. Remember the
cross. Remember the great cost to self at
which God acts to liberate his people.
Remember the love. Remember God’s
hearing of the cries of the afflicted, and be comforted and cry out in childlike
trust. Remember God’s wrath for those
who refuse to hear and act with compassion, and remember the finger of that
wrath which could, quite justly, be pointed at each of us, and be challenged,
but still cry out in childlike trust, because we have been freed from fear,
cast out by perfect love. Remember Jesus,
and remember what St. Paul tells us, that he delivers us from the coming
wrath. That he loves us and, refusing to
hold onto love as his own private virtue, loves us into loveliness. Remember.
And
when we remember all that, the result can be miraculous: a healthy love of
self: an awareness of all that binds us, all that doesn’t leave us as free to
love as we dream of being, as God created us to be. We’ll be aware of the times when we turn away
from the hard path of Christ-like love, we’ll be aware of our inability to
overcome an impulse, to conquer a fear, to wisely discern just quite what is a
loving response in each situation. And
we’ll be aware that God is even more aware of all of those things than we
are. And we’ll be aware that none of
that makes God love us any the less, that God’s righteous anger at our
brokenness fires up his love to act in healing, to lead us to the baptismal
waters, free us as concretely as those slaves who walked through the Red Sea, cleanse
us and claim us as his own sons and daughters, to incorporate us into the death
and the resurrection of his beloved son.
We’ll start to learn how to love a self so radically beloved of God, how
to love a sinner being redeemed. And we’ll
look around, and we’ll see we’re not alone at the foot of this cross, that we
are surrounded by sisters and brothers, strangers no longer, no longer aliens
in Egypt, but fellow citizens of heaven, redeemed with us, claimed by God along
with us, not wanderers, but pilgrims, returning to our native land. And maybe then, we can heed our Lord’s words,
and love these neighbors as ourselves, with that brilliant fiery love we
encountered in God for us.
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