Exodus
12:1-14
As I write this, Hurricane Irma is
bearing down on the Virgin Islands with winds clocking in around 185 miles per
hour, and I cannot help thinking about the day – September 19, 1989, to be
precise – that Hurricane Hugo followed the same path with even stronger
winds. I was there.
I was living on the first floor of a
two-story, concrete building, so I took some security in that all through the
afternoon. It was clear that the
electricity would be going out, but that hadn’t happened yet, so I had the
radio on, more for company than for news.
Whoever did the programming had a grim sense of humor, playing songs
like “Riders on the Storm”, “Windy”, and “Dust in the Wind” before it went off
the air. It grew darker and darker and
then trees started flying around, so I moved to the other side of the building,
away from the direct wind. After a few
hours there, the direction changed slightly and, since there was no room
without a window, I moved again to one that was set back behind a porch, so
that there was less chance of debris smashing into the room. For one small (and I mean small) degree of
safety, I holed up underneath a desk with cushions in front of me to stop any
flying glass if the windows blew out.
That was my big fear. I tried not to picture it too much, but I was
afraid of an injury more than anything else.
If the house collapsed, it would collapse, and that would be it. In a situation like that you learn a lot, and
one thing I learned was that I really do have faith that my soul is in God’s
hands and that I trust him for eternity.
Death does not scare me. Jesus
has already been through it and come out on the other side, and has promised to
see us all through. I found out that you
cannot take that away from me. It isn’t something
theoretical. It’s real.
But
the process of dying is something else, and that has a side to it that is
frightening and difficult and sometimes painful. There is no shame in owning up to that, at
least as I see it. I know of no one who
hears words like “surgery” or “chemotherapy” or “amputate” who just shrugs and
says, “Sounds good to me!” Yes, they may
be resigned to something as inevitable or necessary. They may even accept the truth that gets
pushed away for most of us for most of our lives: one day our living turns into
our dying, which may be slow or fast.
But the prospect is one that no one likes, because we have a sense (a
true one) that God’s will for us has always been life and the dying part comes about
because something has gone terribly wrong along the line. So Dylan Thomas could write to his father:
Do
not go gentle into that good night,
Old
age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage,
rage against the dying of the light.
Though
wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because
their words had forked no lightning they
Do
not go gentle into that good night.
Good
men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their
frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage,
rage against the dying of the light.
Wild
men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And
learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do
not go gentle into that good night.
Grave
men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind
eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage,
rage against the dying of the light.
And
you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse,
bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do
not go gentle into that good night.
Rage,
rage against the dying of the light.
Thus
it is that I picture the Hebrews prepared to flee Egypt, huddled together
indoors in houses marked with the blood of the lamb that they had killed and
cooked and eaten that day to give them strength for their exodus, on the one
hand secure in the faith that the God who had already brought plague after
plague upon the Egyptians would surely bring about their freedom; and on the
other hand filled with fear at this one terrible act of destruction that was
going on unseen outside their walls and doors.
They came to call it the Passover because death passed over them while
visiting every other house in the land.
You do not go through a night like that without being changed, and the
Hebrews were commanded never to forget it.
“This
day shall be a day of remembrance for you.
You shall celebrate it as a festival to the Lord; throughout your
generations you shall observe it as a perpetual ordinance.” [Exodus
12:14]
Ray was the son of Austrian
immigrants who came to Pennsylvania in the 1920’s. At the start of World War II he went into the
army and because he had spoken German at home he became the translator for a
combat unit. They were sent to North
Africa, where they fought their way east and then turned up into Sicily. Many died along the way. They moved on through Sicily into Italy and
fought their way north, with more and more dying around him. The unit moved all the way up into Hungary,
which was where one day Ray sat down in a forest where it was just starting to
snow and leaned against a tree trunk with the sudden realization that he was
the only soldier in his unit who was still alive and free. That stayed with him. When he returned home, he was talking after
church with George, who had come through the Battle of the Bulge, and Richard,
who had told the Yankees he could not take a place as their catcher because he
was needed by the other Yankees, and a handful of others. They did not know quite how to express how
grateful they were to be alive, but they wanted to share it somehow. Then someone came up with the idea that they
would cook breakfast for the church and for anybody else who wanted to come on
Thanksgiving morning. They did it up
big. And when some of them died, their
places were taken by their sons and, occasionally, their daughters. Next some grandchildren stepped in. It’s still going on every November.
Never
forget. Never forget how precious and
how fragile life is. Never forget how
generous is its giver and how careful he is to preserve what he has given. Never forget how he would – and did – give his
own life for yours, and give you a whole new life in freedom to replace the old
one in slavery. As Paul would later
write,
“Christ,
our paschal lamb, has been sacrificed.
Therefore let us celebrate the festival, not with the old yeast, the
yeast of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.”
[I
Corinthians 5:7-8]
Never
forget. Remember and celebrate, and
learn from all the close calls to be transformed, because God is good and his
mercy endures forever.
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