¹⁷And ye shall observe the feast of unleavened bread; for in this selfsame day have I brought your armies out of the land of Egypt: therefore shall ye observe this day in your generations by an ordinance for ever.

   ¹⁸In the first month, on the fourteenth day of the month at even, ye shall eat unleavened bread, until the one and twentieth day of the month at even.

   ¹⁹Seven days shall there be no leaven found in your houses: for whosoever eateth that which is leavened, even that soul shall be cut off from the congregation of Israel, whether he be a stranger, or born in the land.

   ²⁰Ye shall eat nothing leavened; in all your habitations shall ye eat unleavened bread.

   ²¹Then Moses called for all the elders of Israel, and said unto them, Draw out and take you a lamb according to your families, and kill the passover.

   ²²And ye shall take a bunch of hyssop, and dip it in the blood that is in the bason, and strike the lintel and the two side posts with the blood that is in the bason; and none of you shall go out at the door of his house until the morning.

   ²³For the LORD will pass through to smite the Egyptians; and when he seeth the blood upon the lintel, and on the two side posts, the LORD will pass over the door, and will not suffer the destroyer to come in unto your houses to smite you.

   ²⁴And ye shall observe this thing for an ordinance to thee and to thy sons for ever.

   ²⁵And it shall come to pass, when ye be come to the land which the LORD will give you, according as he hath promised, that ye shall keep this service.

   ²⁶And it shall come to pass, when your children shall say unto you, What mean ye by this service?

   ²⁷That ye shall say, It is the sacrifice of the LORD's passover, who passed over the houses of the children of Israel in Egypt, when he smote the Egyptians, and delivered our houses. And the people bowed the head and worshipped.

   ²⁸And the children of Israel went away, and did as the LORD had commanded Moses and Aaron, so did they.

Here is the account in the Book of Exodus that set up the Passover narrative:

7And the LORD said, I have surely seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters; for I know their sorrows; ⁸And I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land unto a good land and a large, unto a land flowing with milk and honey; unto the place of the Canaanites, and the Hittites, and the Amorites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites. ⁹Now therefore, behold, the cry of the children of Israel is come unto me: and I have also seen the oppression wherewith the Egyptians oppress them. ¹⁰Come now therefore, and I will send thee unto Pharaoh, that thou mayest bring forth my people the children of Israel out of Egypt.

-Exodus 3:7-10

I don’t believe in a supernatural God, which miraculously can or would suspend Nature’s laws, nor do I believe in a God whose characteristics are just larger versions of human vindictiveness, cruelty, stubbornness, or inflexibility. But, I do believe in the value of living a life of the Spirit wherein we see and understand deeper and larger things. I believe the mind is a powerful tool in living the life of the Spirit. I believe that imagination and creativity are the doors through which one needs to pass to become an inhabitant of the Republic of the Spirit.

In other words I do not believe God initiated the miraculous events depicted in the Passover story while human being observed and experienced and recorded those events as supernaturally Divine ones. But I do believe in the capacity of the Spirit to move amongst human beings to free the mind from narrow thought and lifeless creed. I believe in the capacity of the Spirit to move amongst human beings to free the body as it walks through that lonesome valley. I believe in the capacity of the Spirit to move amongst human beings to liberate the human spirit and cultivate it towards a divine unfolding. When I bring my own experience to the Passover story I hear unforeseen events unfolding, creative possibilities not before imagined, and human efforts - courage, risk, hope, faith, and a greater love - bringing about a hitherto before unimaginable thing: peoples living towards and for freedom. I believe the liberation of mind, body, and spirit to be so powerful as to reveal ultimate and Divine forces were at work.

But make no mistake about it! Real people were enslaved. Real people were their slave masters. Real people endured suffering. Real people inflicted that suffering. Real people thought they were right and moral in holding other real peoples as their property, and real people conspired to keep other real people as property. Real people believed that the mind, body, and spirit of others deserved bondage because they believed rightly, while the enslaved didn’t. Real leaders arose amongst the slaves to demand something more: freedom. Real leaders amongst the slave masters resisted those demands. Real natural events occurred, plagues, crop failures, even the death of children. Real leaders relented in their resistance to the demand of the slave leaders for freedom. Real slave leaders led their released people towards freedom. And real leaders reconsidered that they had been defeated by their slaves, and sought to slaughter them. A real water passageway was made passable. And real slaves became former slaves, became free men and women, even as their slave masters were devoured by the most audaciously wicked of all human evils: the hubris of holding that human beings can own anything of other human beings.

You would think that people in this country, of all places, would understand this. You would think that people in this country would comprehend the power of human liberation and the recognition made by a man and a woman that freedom is a gift given by God, and not by the religions or governments of men. And so you would think that people in this country, of all places, would look back upon real events shaped by real people, and would try to understand how the liberation and cultivation of the human spirit is the agency of God, and not some supernatural impossibilities that need be believed in to be called faith. You would think…, but then again, it would require thinking. And the acknowledgement that freedom’s divine workings are not yet complete.

A few months back in a column featured in our own Grand Rapids Press, national columnist Thomas Sowell fondly identified the instigators of abolition in this country to be the 19^th century equivalents of modern "religious fundamentalists," as if they were his religious kin imitating his beliefs. Nothing could be further from the truth. More recently, in a letter responding to a column I wrote about the religious faith of the founders of this country, a local woman derided the Puritans as the "religious fundamentalists" of their time, and the enemy of her secularist freedom. Again, nothing could be further from the truth.

Modern readers project their own beliefs back into the past and into the figures of the past, and interpret their own beliefs to have been found there. We neglect the discipline involved in reading history and thus read so many events in terms of ourselves. It is a selfish, pernicious hubris, a curious modern bondage people in this country evidence when they hold that the Almighty’s appearance in the past echoes their own religious and political views.

The instigators of both abolition and this Republic were liberals, not in politics but in spirit. It is part of the blindness of our time that we cannot conceive of liberal being anything but a political designation. They prized the spirit of liberalis, human liberty, freedom, the liberation and cultivation of the human spirit. In terms of identifying affiliations the early abolitionists were largely Congregationalists, Quakers, Unitarians, and Universalists, if they identified with any religious affiliation at all. We cannot and dare not proclaim their "liberalism" to be related to any such designation today. But, all thought and believed that the liberation and cultivation of the human spirit was the transcendent agency of God working through culture and time. So abolitionists, conductors on the Underground Railroad, both black and white, and escaped slaves all conceived of their active role in this passage from slavery to freedom in the manner of the ancient Hebrew Passover narrative. They were obtaining the freedom God endows all human beings at creation, but their time and culture had denied.

The Puritans - at least the ones who first came over to this continent in the 1600’s and the later ones who became Unitarians – were liberals, not in politics but in spirit. They prized the spirit of liberalis, human liberty, freedom, and conceived of God’s work in the world in terms of an individual perceiving in the depths of conscience what is ultimately right and wrong. It’s why they fled the oppressive spiritual slavery of English tradition and the doctrines of the Church of England itself. We cannot and dare not proclaim their "liberalism" to be related to any such designation today. They did not evidence in their own communities a "progressive" view of the religious life as a "diverse" human phenomenon, which we might label as "liberalism" today. But they believed the human spirit was liberated to love God by individual hearts and minds made free of doctrinal control. They believed that once freed, the human spirit was cultivated in the Divine gift of freedom through the educated mind. They sought the spiritual freedom that God endows all human beings at creation, but their time and culture had denied.

The divine gift humanity has been given is the not gift of a blood redemption. What kind of god would demand his own son’s blood to right an existence that that god had himself created? What kind of god would threaten his creation by demanding adherence to certain humanly determined beliefs about God and the existence he created, with the punishment of eternal damnation? Yet, at the same time, how can the events depicted in the narrative of the Jewish Passover not be of the Spirit of something larger than what history and culture alone creates? What kind of God would allow humanity’s folly to kill the human spirit?

The late 18^th and early 19^th century German philosopher, George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who influenced all of modern philosophy, saw the historical development of the human condition to be found in the freedom that evolved in three stages of history. "In the world of the ancient Orient, people do not yet know that the Spirit - the human as such - is free. Because they do not know this, they are not free. They know only that one person is free; but for this very reason such freedom is mere arbitrariness, savagery, stupefied passion." To place this understanding within the story of Passover, it was the despot, the ruler, the Pharoah who alone was free and understood he was free. He could go anywhere, do anything, think anything, and believe anything, for he alone was free. But because the idea that human being as such is created free, was not yet known or understood, there was not yet freedom. Freedom is a yield of knowledge and understanding about human nature.

Later there was developed a consciousness of freedom, wrote Hegel, in the Greeks and the Romans. "It was among the Greeks that the consciousness of freedom first arose, and thanks to that consciousness they were free. But they, and the Romans as well, knew only that some persons are free, not the human as such." The citizens of the Roman Republic were free men. They could go anywhere, do anything, think anything, and believe anything, for they were free. But slaves and women were not. The Hebrews crossed the Red Sea and began to conceive of themselves as free. And, too, they began to struggle to understand how the Lord their God treated other peoples. Freedom is the yield of a sympathetic affection arising out of human nature.

Finally, through Europe of the Renaissance and Reformation, and then in Enlightenment America there arises the final expression of freedom. That freedom is a characteristic of human nature. All persons are created free. So freedom is both a created right and the goal of life. When freedom is increased, relationships deepen as the foundation of it. When freedom is increased, thinking and reasoning deepens as the structural support of it. When freedom is increased, love deepens as the load bearing walls that keep the whole upright. "World history is the progress in the consciousness of freedom-a progress that we must come to know in its necessity." Historically it is of recent development that we "came to the awareness that every human is free by virtue of being human, and that the freedom of spirit comprises our most human nature."

We are still learning that the freedom of spirit comprises our most human nature. We are still learning that no kind of divinity would find praise in the subservience of the body, mind, and spirit. We are still learning that no divinity would laud the use of coercion, spiritual violence, and human sacrifice for a colossal marker celebrating death, elaborate as we may make that marker with altars, stain-glass windows, and beautiful statues. We are still learning that the dead worship the dead as the dead bury the dead. We are still learning that the freedom of spirit comprises our most human nature, through real, live people. Those who love and are free live towards the fulfillment of creation in love and freedom. Those who love and are free live in hope. Those who love and are free live.

Three years ago this land was in darkness, and its people in bondage. They dwelt in bondage for so long that they came to love their spiritual bondage, to religious doctrine or to the spell cast by various personalities. The people of this dark land had forgotten they were created to be free, in mind, body, and spirit. But out of the shadows of spiritual slavery there arose a group of Moses, who lifted up the light that makes the human spirit free. They gathered themselves into a community, and declared the purpose of their bonds of fellowship to be to hold open to all souls the prospect of the liberation and cultivation of the human spirit. They would voice that prospect to all who lived in West Michigan. All souls could make that exodus from the enslavement of the mind, body, and spirit, unto the freedom with which God has created every soul. All who dwelt in darkness could follow a light towards freedom.

But, in our time it is hard for us to conceive of an exodus as a movement towards freedom. It is a hard thing in our time to hope. For our times are littered with the exodus of people towards chaos and more darkness. The great exodus of peoples in our time is the Cambodians to the Killing Fields, or the Rwandans to the roadside, or the Jews into the ovens. There is a weariness to the human spirit in our times. It has forgotten how it was created. It has come to covet its own bondage to religious doctrine and the curious spell cast by various personalities. So the human spirit has sold its birthright for the pottage of its own comfort. It is not free.

But this religious community has been caught up in the evolution of freedom’s unfolding in history. This religious community has declared itself to be part of that evolution, part of that unfolding history. Thus, you who are within the sound of my voice, the needs of the times and the Spirit that has grasped you, have baptized you as Moses’ of the modern millennium. You may conceive of yourselves as no more equipped for this task than was your namesake thousands of years ago. But, regardless of individual doubts and uncertainties, you have been called. By the bonds of affection which you have created, and which have opened the gates of freedom, you have been called. By its existence this religious community, and the bonds of affection it has created and promised to maintain and extend, has been called to pronounce a new exodus and a new liberation: that the angel of the death of the mind, body, and spirit, can pass over all souls and can pass over our times, and that through love the freedom of the Spirit that comprises our most human nature can unfold towards creation’s fulfillment.

And so unto you, the Moses’ of the modern millennium I would announce:

And the LORD said, I have surely seen the affliction of my people… and have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters; for I know their sorrows; And I am come down [through the bonds of love which you have established] to deliver them out of [the oppression of mind, body, and spirit], and to bring them up out of that land… unto a land flowing with milk and honey… Come now therefore, and I will send thee unto Pharaoh, that thou mayest bring forth my people the children of Israel out of Egypt.

AMEN.