Songs of Freedom

A Sermon by Rev. Rachael Hayes

Before I begin my thoughts on our texts today, I want to name that this holiday and the Exodus story would feel easier to approach if the ceasefire still held. What the Israeli government is doing in Gaza is heartbreaking. We have raised our lament and lament still for the hostages returned and unreturned, for the fifty thousand Gazans who have been killed, for all people in Israel and Palestine and Lebanon who live with fear for their safety and their children’s safety.

It feels more complicated this year, because I know that others will tell the ancient Exodus story to justify the actions of contemporary governments and the safety of one child over another. But when I turn to this story that people have told for thousands of years, this long, long journey of Moses and his mixed multitude, I hear something else. And I invite you to pause before closing your heart to this story OR thinking that it holds just one meaning OR thinking that this story is too old to have any truth in it.

This passage from Exodus comes later than we might usually go when telling the story. This is way after the plagues, after Pharaoh relents, after the mixed multitude, which Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg reminds us is the Israelites and all their friends and neighbors who came with them, after the mixed multitude walk through the sea, after God provides them with manna and water in the desert. Moses goes up onto the mountain and God gives him the ten commandments and a lot of laws and instructions.

Moses has been on top of the mountain for a long time, 40 days and 40 nights, and the crowd at the foot of the mountain is getting restless. Poor Aaron, who has been left in charge while Moses is gone, is trying to keep this whole thing from going sideways. Surely some of them have lost faith that Moses is coming back, fear that the God who brought them out of Egypt had abandoned them. And the Israelites and the rest of the multitude do a very human thing: they turn back to a thing they had tried in the past.

The worship of bulls has been a common thing across human history—and these folks have just left Egypt, where the bull-god Apis was worshiped as an intermediary between humans and other gods. So, Aaron takes their jewelry and makes a calf out of gold, perhaps to serve as an intermediary in Moses’ absence. Something tangible in the face of uncertainty. The story goes on to talk about how God overreacts, Moses talks God down, Moses overreacts, a lot of people die. It’s a mess.

And I find it incredibly relatable. We all want something to hold onto. Think of it this way: Aaron, who was Moses’ most trusted collaborator, and the very people God had delivered from Egypt and sustained in the desert, who witnessed miracles firsthand on a daily basis, even they in this time of uncertainty do something that they had specifically been commanded not to do. Yikes.

Rich Orloff’s poem, Resentment Is My Golden Calf, does something different. It asks us to consider what our own idols are. Not literal figures of worship, like Aaron’s golden calf, but maybe what shortcuts are we taking in our convictions?

Resentment is My Golden Calf

Resentment is my golden calf

See how it glistens

It’s always there to receive me

And oh, how good it makes me feel

Resentment is so much easier than love

Love is fragile

Resentment is sturdy

You can feel it without opening your heart

I can pray to it at any time

Openly or secretly

Resentment empowers me without asking that I give up victimhood

Can your god do that?

So, if your god isn’t satisfying your needs

Try resentment today

Resentment accepts everyone regardless of age, gender or race

All it asks is that you reject everyone else

Just look for the Golden Calf

It has more locations than you can imagine

Its glowing shine reflects all who have convinced themselves

That bitterness is the sweetest taste one can experience

 

What do we do that is more convenient than messy, complicated, abundant love? Orloff names resentment, specifically, but I can think of some more idols that I know: always needing to be right or to have the last word, having to see through to the bitter end, perfectionism, either/or thinking, constructing the world into heroes and villains, defensiveness, avoiding conflict, individualism–this list could get long. These are the idols I must remind myself to smash, to say nothing of the larger systems of oppression that con us into participating in them.

The old list of the sources of Unitarian Universalist faith includes a warning “against the idolatries of the mind and spirit.” And there’s a beautiful passage in our hymnal and Reform Judaism’s Gates of Prayer, possibly misattributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, that goes like this:

 

A person will worship something—have no doubt about that.

We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts—but it will out.

That which dominates our imaginations, and our thoughts will determine our lives and character.

Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.

To put it another way, what’s subverting love in how you choose to be in the world. Or, since it’s Passover, and Passover is the celebration of the deep human yearning for freedom, where are you choosing a cheap imitation of freedom? Most of us have something that’s keeping us from fully embracing true freedom, but we don’t have to be stuck with it.

Jewish-American poet and activist Emma Lazarus wrote “Until we are all free, we are none of us free.” Freedom means everyone, everyone.

There is no real freedom that is for me but not you, for citizens but not immigrants, for one soul but not another. This message of the Exodus of the Israelites has inspired us, from generation to generation, throughout the long history of Judaism, from the self-emancipation of people enslaved in this country to the civil rights movement, throughout lands and times and people touched by Jewish and Christian and Muslim traditions, all of which tell this story. People everywhere pray, yearn, and work for freedom, all around the world, and we will continue to do so until freedom and peace come to the whole world.

Photo by Mohamed Fsili on Unsplash