Dreams in the Desert
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
April 5, 2020

This week the two religious traditions that give us our roots are celebrating important holidays. It’s Holy Week in the Christian tradition: beginning today with Palm Sunday and concluding next Sunday with Easter. And beginning on Wednesday evening Jewish people will be commemorating Passover.

I’ve been finding that the Passover story speaks to me much more strongly this year than the traditional Palm Sunday story. Palm Sunday is the day when Christians remember the triumphant arrival of Jesus into Jerusalem. People bowed down before him as he rode into the city, and waved palms. And of course we know that the story took a very dark turn from there, in the days following, as Jesus was vilified, then captured, and then crucified.

But today, here in Gloucester in 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s hard to relate to triumphal journeys and parades and crowds of people celebrating. For we are taking shelter, protecting ourselves, waiting for this difficult time to pass. The story of Passover, when the Israelites who were enslaved in Egypt were waiting for Pharaoh to free them, to let them go, feels closer to what we are experiencing today.

As the ancient Passover story tells us, in the Book of Exodus in the Hebrew Bible, God instructed Moses to ask for the Israelites’ release from bondage. They had been enslaved in Egypt for over 400 years. God warned Moses that, as the text tells us, Pharaoh’s heart would be hardened. And so Moses was to go before Pharaoh 10 times, and each time warn Pharaoh of a terrible event, a plague, that would befall Egypt if the Israelites were not allowed to leave, to worship their own god in their own way. And each time, Pharaoh’s heart was hardened, and he refused. Perhaps you remember the nature of some of the plagues: flies, frogs, darkness, boils, locusts, and so on. And the final plague was that every firstborn in Egypt was going to be killed. The children of the Israelites were spared by people smearing blood of a slaughtered lamb on the doorposts. Imagine their terror, waiting in the dark for the plague to pass them by. Right now, yes, we can imagine. Would they hear anything? Would they know when they were safe? And then, the Israelites fled, grabbing their bread dough that had not had a chance to rise, and disappearing into the desert.

The Israelites were forced to wander in the desert for 40 years, before finally coming to the Promised Land. Our poet this morning said, “I will give you dreams in the desert to guide you safely home to that place you have not yet seen…I am sending you into the wilderness to make a new way and to learn my ways more deeply…”. (“Passover Remembered,” Alla Renee Bozarth)

Here we are today, in a time unlike anything we have ever experienced: a global pandemic. And suddenly the ancient story of how to respond to a new challenge, a new era emerging, speaks to us out of the distant mists of time. Some hearts are hardened. There is a Pharaoh, of sorts, in our story. Some people will not, or cannot believe, that change is coming. There is denial, an unwillingness to see the changes that we must implement in order to stay healthy, in order to do all that we can to keep this new virus from spreading so quickly. We wait, mostly in our homes, for the contagion to pass over us, and be gone in the night. We do all we can to have it pass us by: handwashing, cleaning our groceries, wearing masks and gloves.

The life of enslavement in Egypt for the Israelites was intolerable. And yet, the changes that took place for them as they wandered were intolerable as well. Many wanted to return to Egypt, to what was familiar. We too long for life as it was just a few short weeks ago. It was familiar; it felt safe, for the most part.

And yet, what this time of fear and illness is revealing is that for too many of us, life has not been safe and comfortable. Too many of us live on the edge, with insecurity of food and shelter and especially health care. Too many of us live one paycheck away from disaster, one illness away from bankruptcy.

This time of waiting and the wandering that begins for us as a society now will lead us somewhere new, “to make a new way,” as the poet told us. We are setting forth into a new desert, into an unknown future, one that we cannot see yet. We know one thing: this Passover, this year, life will not leave us where it found us. We have embarked on a journey, and there is no going back.

Our author this morning, the Reverend Victoria Safford, told us, “In the springtime we remember: the promised land is not a destination – it is a way of going. The land beyond the Jordan, that country of freedom and dignity and laughter – you carry it inside you all the while. It is planted in your mind and heart already, before you even start out, before it even occurs to you that in order to leave that life in Egypt, the intolerable bondage of that life, what you need to do is stand up and walk forward.

May your hope for a new and better life sustain you in this dark time, and may your dreams and vision carry you forward through the desert to the promised land.

Blessings on the journey,
Amen.