Service on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/seeyouonsunday/videos/1231593778046513
and YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjvUvjAhwOQ
So how did we get here.
Everything of course begins with the promise that God gave to Abraham that we talked about a couple weeks ago… the promise that you Abram will be a great nation that you will be blessed to be a blessing to All Nations. And that blessing was passed down and gifted to his own son who gave it to his son who had 12 sons.
It was the almost youngest and a famine that brought the whole family from Canaan, the land that is promised to them eventually to Egypt.
When we left off, Joseph’s brother’s had come to him begging for their lives to be spared. Joseph’s promise is to take care of them and their descendants and I am sure that after a couple of generations everything was okay. Then the story tells us at the very beginning of the book of Exodus that a king arose as Pharaoh who did not know Joseph, did not know the story. There was in the courts of pharaoh a lack of memory.
The Pharaoh was so worried about this mass of people. Imagine if each of those 12 sons had 12 children of their own and so forth that the numbers would grow exponentially in a few generations. The Pharaoh was worried that if Egypt’s enemies came that these Hebrew speakers will join on the side of their enemies and they will be overrun, for there were more of them than there were Egyptians.
And so either by fast or slow work these children of Israel were confined to one part of a city that wasn’t as nice as the rest of it, they were limited on the work that they could do, on the money they could spend, on the places they could go. They became slaves in the land of Egypt. And almost 400 years would go by. And yet the numbers of the Hebrew people living in Goshen continued to rise. When you are the oppressor and are afraid of a large group of people that you oppress, there is no number at which it will be sufficiently low enough. So the Pharaoh who was ruling at this time decided there was clearly only one option, to have the baby boys thrown into the Nile at the time of their birth. There were rebellious factions, The Midwives Shipra and Pua. And when that didn’t work other Desperate Measures were taken.
In one such instance a baby was placed in a basket and floated down a river, gathered off into the arms of one of Pharaoh’s daughters, one of probably a multitude and raised and cared for in both a Hebrew house and in the palace.
Somehow it seems he knows that he is a member of the Hebrew community and recognizes that it’s his people who are being enslaved and oppressed and brutalized and he murders one of the slave drivers.
Moses flees Egypt, ends up in Midian, gets married, has some kids and becomes a shepherd. I imagine it was a quiet existence. It seems there was a lot of walking in being a shepherd, because Moses found himself at Mount Horeb with his sheep and he looked up on the mountain and saw a bush or a tree on fire that was not consumed. It just kept burning and he was so curious he had to go and see. It was there he met God, heard God’s voice and remembered their Covenant and then called Moses back to Egypt to be God’s voice for setting free the Hebrew people from their enslavement in Egypt
And eventually Moses does. He meets with Pharaoh. Then there are plagues, signs from God who holds the power in Egypt.
The Hebrew people are freed from Egypt and they will go to Mount Horeb where they will receive the law but right now they are here just outside of Egypt not having crossed any waters, not sure if the Egyptians are behind them, not really free yet. They are heading to Canaan by way of Mount Horeb, but right now they are here.
What we have here sets the ritual for the holiest days of the Jewish year. It is the new year because God tells Moses this will be the start of your year. It is an act of community that they will eat together if they can and it is an act of memory and teaching for themselves and every generation that is to come
What’s kind of wild about it is that God is giving it to Moses and Moses is sharing it with the people before they have even gone through the moment that is going to be remembered, before they are totally freed from the Egyptians. Even before they have walked across the sea, they are given an act to remember it. It’s like God knew that memories were flawed and faulty. Looks like God knew they were going to forget if they weren’t given specific instructions on how to remember.
For many years, ritual was given a bad name. Young folks would talk about hollow rituals, marking them as meaningless. And maybe there is a point, if you don’t know why you are doing a thing, performing the ritual, then it is just that, performance.
I think there were many years in which Protestant churches steered clear of anything that reminded them of Catholicism. That’s how you end up with many churches like you might find in the UCC, the desire to go in a completely opposite direction of the ritualized practices you find in the Catholic Church
If you do a search for ritual, see what you would find online. You find a company. Megen daily individualized vitamins, supplements and an app for ordering food and takeout, a non-alcoholic spirit. A Netflix horror movie, a coffee roasters company, and a multitude of yoga and spa-like companies. Then there are the companies that use ritual as their advertising. They say what they have to offer is your new morning ritual or your bedtime ritual. And then there are books and marketing that you should have a morning ritual or an evening ritual. And most of the time they’re just trying to sell you their mushroom supplement.
In the introduction to Casper to Kyle’s the power of ritual, People didn’t just talk about it as their community. “CrossFit is my church” became the refrain. When we interviewed then Harvard Business School student Ali Huberlie, she said, “My CrossFit box [gym] is everything to me. I’ve met my boyfriend and some of my very best friends through CrossFit. . . . When [we] started apartment hunting this spring, we immediately zeroed in on the neighborhood closest to our [CrossFit] box—even though it would increase our commute to work. We did this because we couldn’t bear to leave our community. At our box, we have babies and little kids crawling around everywhere, and it has been an amazing experience to watch those little ones grow up.”
He goes on to talk about community gatherings, community meals, maker spaces, pilgrimages to festivals or sacred places, tough mudder competitions, sporting events and teams, and yoga communities. For his writing and understanding, people are trying to put meaning and purpose and structure around the lives they’re actually living; particularly in these days where fewer and fewer people are participating in religious communities, and religious communities are not always doing a good job of offering those kind of meaning-making experiences.
He goes on the write about how we can imbue ordinary moments or the parts of our day that already exist or a hike into a ritual experience of reconnecting to ourselves, creation, community, and Transcendence or the divine or God, how ever the reader might understand it.
Now if you think the UCC is weak on ritual, I wonder if you have met the Unitarian Universalists? The Unitarians don’t have a history of ritual in a sense that you don’t have to have a particular set of doctrinal beliefs to be part of their community and every congregation you go to and every service within that congregation might look a little different. Allison Palm and Heather Concannon write about having suffered the great loss of a friend and not having the practices and the rituals for how to grieve well and how to transition into the world without their friend. They write “sometimes people use Rachel to mean just repeated actions; other times it implies an element of intention or tradition or spirituality.” They define “ritual as an embodied and participatory way to mark a transition or facilitate transformation. And doing so, ritual connects us to something larger than ourselves– to community, to the holy, to the seasons, to the cycles of life and death.” I don’t think taking a multivitamin every morning is a ritual, but I wonder if the one pill or five pills or 30 pills were the difference between life and death, if they couldn’t be a ritual that connects us to life and death.
They go on to write about how rituals can both be aspirational and memory both facilitating the change and affirming what has taken place. And I think that’s what Moses was doing. Preparing the people for the change that is to take place and imbuing it with memory to come back to it every year. And from the time there was a temple. the Hebrew people, the Jewish community have come back to this ritual. It looks different. There’s actually a lot more to it now, but it is this ritual, imbued with memory and every year they repeat the story. They tell the story again of why the night is different. Why do they eat differently on this night?
It also marked a change in the community, not just to come back to this ritual act but that they will tell time differently. They will mark time differently. They will mark time from being a people owned by the empires of this world to people who belong to God who desired their liberation and their well-being. They would live in community differently. It wasn’t going to be about who was in need. If you have enough, you give the rest away. The Hebrew were people were on their way to Sinai where they would receive the law and they would learn the cycles of life, of work, and a ritual of rest for themselves and for any slaves they might have, for their animals and for the land. It wasn’t just about this moment and about the liberation, but preparing them to be the people they will need to be when they enter the land. It marked the transition from who they were to who they were going to be and return to ritual every year to remember and to try again.
The telling of the story of the ritual was a reclaiming of their place in the story. Not only are they part of the broader community, they’re part of the broader community throughout history. And they tell the story they tell about when we are slaves in Egypt.
I wonder then about the rituals of the church. How are we marking time?
Our year begins on the first Sunday of Advent. Do we mark time differently because we are part of this community? Do we participate in community differently because of our call to love? Does the way we eat change for us to tell the story of who we are and who we’re becoming? Maybe.
Ritual for us is symbolism and acts we can’t do for ourselves. They help us make sense of the world around us. They let us make tangibility intangible. They connect us to the Divine that has been with us, is going before us, and is within and with us always. And ritual connects us to each other in ways that words can’t always do.
This is probably my least sermon-like sermon. But I wondered this week if there were things you hadn’t been able to put words around. Or if you’ve been through something, a grief, a loss, an illness and who you are today is not who you were before and something should be marked there, something that recognizes the change and who you are or in your relationship or your place in community.
I wonder if there are things from your past, things that you did or that were done to you that need to be let go of because you still carry them or need to be remembered because they changed who you are.
Or maybe transition into adulthood for you or someone you know never really seem to be marked. And maybe turning 18 was celebrated and marked and noted and ritualized and every step along the way of what it means to be an adult wasn’t.
I wonder if we, whoever the we is, made a mistake when we spiritualized this place and this time and separated it from the rest of our lives. The world out there or the church doesn’t seem to have much to say about the times of change in our lives. Instead, we try to force our lives to fit into the rhythm and the calendar. We talk about our mortality on Ash Wednesday and grief on All Saints Day and community once a month on communion and then we leave this space. We leave it behind for a week or a month or until next year when the cycle rolls around again.
If we held sacred these moments in our lives and these times of transition, I wonder how it would change our community. If we saw every moment of our own life and the lives of each other as something to hold dear and to hold up before God and before each other and celebrate or grieve or contemplate.
I think it would change how we view our own lives and our faith and our lives and our community in our lives. I think it would mean when the scary shows up. We know we’re not alone. And I think it means that when times of bittersweet change arrive, you know we’re not alone. And when we find ourselves in times of grief of loss, a partner or child or a miscarriage that those are named and not forgotten. And you know you’re not alone.
The Hebrew people stood there outside with their roasting lambs or goats. They could look down the road and see that their whole community was standing there with them and they knew they were not alone and they trusted in the God who would go with them and before them and behind them and protect them. They trusted in the God who recognized that that moment was a turning point in a transition and it needed to be named and remembered and passed down.
There is a place for telling our stories for telling our lives for marking transitions as sacred.
And so I invite you to consider what you want to mark, to set as a sign, to remember and tell the story. For what reason do you wish you had or have a ritual?
Write them down.
Rituals for Individuals and Families
Grounding and Centering
For Daily Reflection
For a New Year
For Everyday Adventures
For Discernment
For Entering and Exiting Silence Milestone Moments
For Preparing to Give Birth
For Adoption
For Weaning
For Starting at a New School
For Life Transitions for a Person with Intellectual Disability and/or Autism Spectrum Disorder
For Coming Out
For Affirming Names and Pronouns
For Release from Prison, Jail, or Detention
For Retirement
Partnership
For the Union of More Than Two Partners
For Acknowledging Community in a Wedding
For a Blended Family
For Separation or Divorce (for Both Partners)
For Separation or Divorce (for an Individual)
For a Partner Near the End of Life Creating Home
For Blessing a New Home
For Bidding Farewell to a Home
For Blessing a Temporary Home After a Disaster Blessing
Our Bodies
For Assisted Conception
For Abortion
For Planned Hospitalization
For a Hysterectomy
For Beginning Gender-Affirming Hormone Therapy
For Gender Affirmation Surgery
For a Service Dog Partnership
For an Assistive Device
For Head Shaving during Chemotherapy
For a Loved One with Dementia or Cognitive Decline Grief and Memory
For Losing a Wanted Pregnancy
For a Baby Who Has Died or Will Soon Die
For Blessing a Body after Death
For Blessing a Space Where a Loved One Has Died
For the Dedication of a Memorial Bench or Tree
For the First Anniversary of a Death For Burying or Scattering the Ashes of a Pet
Rituals for Congregations and Communities Healing, Hope, and Blessing
For Mending a Broken Covenant
For Honoring Grief and Gratitude For Letting Go
For Those Living on the Threshold of Significant Change
For Honoring Elders For Carrying Hope after Collective Loss
For Honoring Our Connection to Water
For Saying Goodbye to a Sacred Space
For Breaking Ground on a Building Project
For Blessing a New or Renovated Church Building
For the Days following a Natural Disaster
For the End of a Natural Disaster Season
For the First Anniversary of a Natural Disaster Seasons and Cycles
For Blessing Backpacks
For Beginning and Ending a Congregational Year
For Celebrating the Harvest For Coming Out Day
For Veterans Day
For Transgender Day of Remembrance
For the Season of Creative Dormancy
For Grief during the Winter Holidays
For the Winter Solstice
For a New Year For Earth Day
For Acknowledging Mother’s, Father’s, and Parents’ Days
For Pride
Working for Justice
For Blessing the Organizers
For Direct Action
For Nourishing Justice Makers
For Lamenting and Setting Intentions to Heal White Supremacy Culture
For Blessing a Congregational Black Lives Matter Banner
For Survivors of Sexual Assault and Harassment
For Trauma in the News