PASSOVER REMEMBERED

Pack nothing. Bring only your determination to serve and your willingness to be free. Don’t wait for the bread to rise. Take nourishment for the journey, but eat standing, be ready to move at a moment’s notice.

Do not hesitate to leave your old ways behind – fear, silence, submission. Only surrender to the need of the time – to love justice and walk humbly with your God…

Begin quickly, before you have time to sink back into old slavery. Set out in the dark. I will send fire to warm and encourage you. I will be with you in the fire and I will be with you in the cloud…

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…

Some of you will be so changed by weathers and wanderings that even your closest friends will have to learn your features as though for the first time. Some of you will not change at all.

Some will be abandoned by your dearest loves and misunderstood by those who have known you since birth and feel abandoned by you. Some will find new friendship in unlikely faces, and old friends as faithful and true as the pillar of God’s flame…

Sing songs as you go, and hold close together. you may at times grow confused and lose your way…Touch each other and keep telling the stories…Make maps as you go, remembering the way back from before you were born…

So you will be only the first of many waves of deliverance on these desert seas.

It is the first of many beginnings – your Paschaltide.

Remain true to this mystery.

Pass on the whole story…Do not go back. I am with you now and I am waiting for you.

- Alla Renée Bozarth

Reflections on the Yellow Brick Road A sermon offered by Rev. Millie Rochester Unitarian Universalists of Clearwater September 18, 2005

Some phrases are so much a part of our culture that you don’t even have to think about it to have a reference point. How many have ever said, “we’re not in Kansas anymore,” when we find ourselves in unfamiliar surroundings? We don’t have to have ever been to Kansas, it doesn’t matter! And some stories are so ingrained in us that they have become stock metaphors.

This morning’s reading reminds us of an ancient faith journey when Moses led the Jewish people out of slavery. Having beseeched the pharaoh, “Let my people go,” Moses led them in their exodus from Egypt. They all had doubts along the way; at one point, they even complained that if it was suffering they wanted, they could have achieved it without the trek – and at least they would have had food, an improvement over their situation as wanderers! Even if they hadn’t been worried about their survival, their destination was uncertain. There was only faith to promise them that a better life lay ahead, and yet they persevered.

In our married lives, my husband and I have traveled over much of this continent and lived in many states. Our longest term residence was in Oregon. Not far from our home is the Oregon Trail Museum and Interpretive Center, which presents displays of actual articles that have survived all this time. They show videos, perform skits and sing songs to explain and celebrate the Oregon Trail.

From 1840 to 1860, thousands of people – young and old, families and individuals, people who had failed and wanted to start over, people who had been successful and wanted to build on that success in a new place – all of them set out to cross the vast plains and rugged mountains of the West, to fulfill the promise of a better life.

Most people banded together in groups for the journey, and helped each other along the way. There was safety in numbers, and when a wagon wheel broke, or someone became ill, individuals were not abandoned to fare for themselves.

Wagon trains hired an experienced leader to guide them – someone who had been there before, who knew the path well. Each individual was part of a larger body, but in a sense each one of them made the crossing on his or her own. These people set out knowing that their journey was a life-changing one. They were leaving behind family and friends, a part of their past they would probably never meet again. Imagine the enormity of that decision.

Oftentimes, once-treasured possessions – things thought to have been essential when they set out – were left along the wayside. Given their new perspective, some things didn’t seem so important after all. But they knew where they were going. The course of the journey and the destination were definite, predetermined. Many of them settled in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, where my own family spent almost seventeen years. I speak from experience when I say it’s a worthy goal, but for many pioneers their arrival was not always consistent with what they had dreamed or expected. They were taking huge risks in order to achieve a better life. Theirs was a faith journey, as well as a physical one.

Not all journeys involve a physical relocation. Last week, Frank Wells referred to a passage in the Declaration of Independence when he spoke about our first principle. His discussion began with the best known words “We hold these truths to be self- evident.” But it’s the words that complete the declaration that I call to your attention: “…with a firm Reliance on the Protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our Sacred Honor.”

This was no rag-tag assemblage of people from the streets of Philadelphia, but a gathering of men who were mostly privileged, land owners, people with something to lose. There are fifty-four signatures on this document that openly defies the most powerful nation on earth at that time.

These fifty-four formed a covenant, a formal promise of performance. Their commitment was total – they could have lost everything, including their lives – but their goal of self-government was unclear, the outcome uncertain. Who knew what would come of it? That, too, was a faith journey – faith that their path would emerge along the way – along with the unstated expectation that others would join the enterprise. And others were more than welcomed.

Yet another faith journey is described in the classic story of L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz. Now that I live in Florida, I think of fall as the time of year that’s halfway through the hurricane season, but as a child I knew it was fall when that movie was shown on TV. It may be the first one I ever saw in color television. In this day and age of instant availability, we don’t have to wait for it to be shown, but I always looked forward to its annual presentation. The story never got old for me.

Over the years, The Wizard of Oz has been interpreted as a search for redemption, a quest for enlightenment, a spiritual pilgrimage, and a secular myth. The journey along the yellow brick road has proven to be a timeless story of seeking. For us it is also a reminder that we pursue our search in the company of others, not in isolation, for we need the context of a faith community. If the yellow brick road of the story is a metaphor for the spiritual, the purpose of following the yellow brick road is to find one’s own spiritual path. The journey is the destination.

Dorothy sets off for the Emerald City on her own, but she eagerly welcomes others to join in her journey, and like the real life members of long ago wagon trains, she, the scarecrow, the lion and the tin woodman support one another through thick and thin. The four of them can see their destination. The Emerald City always seems to be beckoning just over the horizon – but there are all manner of challenges to overcome before they would arrive. And when they finally do reach their destination, the wizard sends Dorothy and her companions off on a dangerous assignment, promising he will grant their wishes if they can complete the task. They overcome all hazards and accomplish the mission, returning to Oz and an audience with the wizard, only to discover that he is a fraud.

The payoff, of course, is the realization that by rising to the occasion they have each actually put to use the very thing they each thought had been lacking within. The lion, by confronting his fear and acting in support of his friends, has proven himself brave beyond his wildest imagination. By acting with courage he has " received" what he had believed he was missing. Likewise, each of the other characters acts to help one another by using the very capacity they each think is missing — the tin man a heart, and the scarecrow a brain; and Dorothy discovers that all she had to do all along to return home was to click her heels. Her goal was always within her grasp. Their destination was reminiscent of Henry Miller’s words. It had never been “a place, but a new way of looking at things.”

Spiritual growth is a new way of looking at things, of being willing to open ourselves up to possibilities, to see more than what we are looking for. As we let go of preconceptions, we allow change within ourselves to occur. Forrester Church, interviewed by Phillip Berman in The Search for Meaning, asserts, “when it comes to the final Truth, that is absolutely veiled from us. There’s no way we can ever know. The only dangerous people in this world are the people who know that they know.

“Humility and openness are necessary in any kind of religious search.” Humility reminds us how little we really know, and openness how great our potential is “to grow, love, serve, redeem, or be redeemed.”

A large percentage of us have come out of the faith traditions we were raised in, leaving behind the absolutes we once embraced. Many of us have found ourselves in unfamiliar territory, whether gradually or with sudden insight. The simple truths we took for granted no longer seem to apply. The values of the people we find there are completely foreign, and the rules of behavior are completely askew. When we ask these people how to find our way in this strange territory, their directions — though clear and direct — no longer seem accurate. They show us the road, but expect us to follow it alone in our doubts.

From a UU perspective, The Wizard of Oz is special because Dorothy does not go alone. Not only does she find others along the way, she invites them to come with her. Each of her companions is also seeking something, but their objectives are not the same. They join the journey with different visions of what the goal is, but in taking the road together they improve their individual chances of success. (And if I remember right, they don’t expect the Wizard to provide the objects of their desire, but merely the knowledge of how they might obtain it. They come seeking knowledge, not gifts.)

The novelty of Unitarian Universalism is that we know our spirituality grows not only through worship in the strict sense of the word, but from the further development of our intellect. We’re not talking about a dry, distant experience, or about achievement only as an individual – even when we’re learning from a book, that book had to be written by someone first. We travel the path together, in relationship. The teacher and the learner are both important, and we all fill both roles as we grow in mind, heart and spirit.

The faith journey is one of transformation, but it is incomplete – a dead end – if our beliefs and values are not reflected in the way we live, in effective and meaningful action in the world, in the totality of experiences, planned and unplanned – in educating for justice. Of what use is learning about others if we have not learned empathy? According to the UU minister and justice activist Richard Gilbert, transformation occurs through education for empowerment, which “provides space for the programs of peace and justice designed to do no less than change the world.” We pride ourselves in “walking the talk,” called to build bridges, identify and dismantle oppressions – work together to change the world.

Journeying together in relationship, we “address our current dehumanization,” as Rebecca Parker, the president of Starr King School for the Ministry puts it. “We can accomplish this by trusting the abiding presence of revolutionary grace. Our task is to cooperate with this grace as it emerges, disrupts our small worlds and wakes our souls to the larger world in which we meet our neighbors, encounter the divine energies afoot, and find, in our engagement there, our deepest selves and the restoration of our souls.” The faith journey of each one of us is connected with that of each other.

So here we are, standing on the yellow brick road, seekers having found a home. We don’t necessarily have the answers; maybe they are in the quest itself, just over the horizon. The unknown unfolds around us, and it’s a grand journey. Blessed be.

BENEDICTION

We are changed, you and I,
By walking together. We are changed, for
We have shared a sacred gift –
Of knowing one another, of trusting one another,
Of discovering the glue that keeps us together.
And so I say to you, Go forth boldly, you are not alone
–
You carry with you a part of all of us.
And so I say to you: Go forth in peace, and be
blessed.