Rev. Louise Green:

Our first reading this morning is inspired by the Passover story, "A Journey in Chains," written by Alla Renee Bozarth:

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 time, to to love justice and walk humbly with your God. Begin quickly, before you have time to sink back into the 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 the weathers and the 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. 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 this story. Make maps as you go, remembering the way back from where you were born, so you will be only the first of many waves of deliverance on these desert seas.

Rev. Robert M. Hardies:

Our second reading is from the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 28, Verses 1 through 10:

After the Sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdelene and the other Mary want to see the tomb. And suddenly there was a great earthquake for an angel of the Lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightening and his clothing white as snow. For fear of him the guards shook and became like dead men. But the angel said to the women, "Do not be afraid. I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here, for he has been raised. Come. See the place where he lay. The, go quickly and tell the disciples he has been raised from the dead and indeed is going ahead of you to Galilee where you will see him." So the women left the tomb quickly, with fear and joy, and ran to tell the disciples. Suddenly Jesus met them and said, "Greetings." And they came to him and took hold of his feet and worshipped him. Then Jesus said to them, "Do not be afraid. Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee. There they will see me."

I've got to tell you it's a little overwhelming to step into the pulpit this morning. I mean, it's Easter Sunday for one thing, and the Easter story is always a big story to preach about. But then, this year Passover falls on the same weekend. So we want to bring the Exodus story in here as well. And then, on top of it all, today is D.C. Emancipation Day, the anniversary of the freeing of enslaved persons in the District of Columbia, nine months before President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. It was an All Souls member, Loretta Hanes, who was instrumental in reviving the citywide celebration of D.C. emancipation. I hope you'll be at the concert afterwards.

So we've got Easter, Exodus and emancipation. It's kind of like the Superbowl Sunday of religion in Washington, D.C. And, you know, as a preacher you kind of wish you could spread it all out over the course of several Sundays. But here I've got to try to fit it all into one 15- to 20-minute sermon. Which is all a way of saying that I'm sure you'll be understanding if I go 40, 45 today. Just kidding!

Whenever the religious calendar brings us around to these great stories of faith, stories like Easter and Exodus, with their eye-popping miracles and their improbable outcomes, an inevitable question comes up. People say, "Those are great stories, but are they really true? Are they too good to be true?" Sometimes these folks will come to me and they'll ask me, "Rob, do you really believe these stories? Do you believe the Easter story is true?" And I tell them, "Yes, I do. I believe it with all my heart."

In fact, I know that the Easter story is true. I know that resurrection is a reality because, like so many of you at one time or another, I have been in the tomb. I know how dark it is there, and how lonely, and how hopeless. And I also know what it feels like to see that stone roll away for the first time and for that first shaft of light to come though the opening and for the fresh air to flood in and for life to return again. Do I believe in Easter? You bet I do.

And it's just a hunch, but I think that maybe you believe in Easter, too. I mean, how else to explain why, year after year, more of you show up on Easter Sunday than any other Sunday? My hunch is it's because you've known something of resurrection yourself. That you've known the tomb of darkness. That you've seen the stone roll away, you've felt life return and you've come to church on Easter to be reminded of that experience. Because that resurrection experience, once you've had it, it becomes a touchstone for your spiritual life. It is without parallel. In future times, when hard times come along, you go back to that story for strength.

Many of you know what my definition of religion is. It's not perfect, but it's gotten me this far. For me, religion is people telling stories of hope. Not stories as in fibs or lies. True stories. And there's no better story of hope than the Easter story. So we come on Easter to be reminded of what we already know is true.

Now people may wonder the same thing about the Exodus story, the Passover story. When I tell that story I get the same question. People say to me, "Great story, Rob, but do you believe it? Do you believe that the people can be freed from slavery and delivered into the Promised Land?" And I say to them, "Friend, how can I not believe it when I've seen it with my own eyes?" Just this Monday, I walked out of my front door and out onto the street, and I saw 20,000 people from this neighborhood, marching down to the Mall to stand with thousands of others to stand up for immigrants' rights. Exodus goes on and on.

I know it is true because today we're celebrating D.C. emancipation, and remembering that an institution as seemingly intractable as slavery could indeed be overthrown. Exodus goes on and on. I know it is true because three years ago on Valentine's Day, I was in San Francisco and I saw one couple after another -- gay and lesbian couples -- coming out of City Hall, married, and going into a throng of well wishers who were throwing rose petals on them. And as they moved through, the well wishers created a path for them and it was like the waters parting before Moses. Exodus goes on and on. I know that it is true.

Now does that mean we're living in the Promised Land? Well, if you go back and read the story, you'll see that actually the Promised Land wasn't all milk and honey. The Israelites had a tough go of it once they got there. The Promised Land is a work in progress. But just because it's broken and just because freedom is never perfect doesn't make the exodus any less true.

So we have an Easter faith, and we have an Exodus faith and I, for one, am grateful for both of them. And I believe there's a lesson to be learned from having the two holidays fall on the same weekend, by being forced to consider them side-by-side, because after all, that's how the stories were supposed to be understood, weren't they? The Jews who were Jesus' first followers deliberately set the story of his death and resurrection in the context of Passover. The last supper was a Seder. Easter Sunday falls in the middle of the Passover story. It was inevitable then that the earliest Christians would interpret Easter in the light of Exodus.

But what's to be gained from this. What do we learn when we tell Easter in the context of Exodus? Well, I'm going to tell you something about the Easter faith. It's just that there is a danger that's inherent in Easter faith. I know that I'm susceptible to it. It's a danger that comes precisely from its greatest strength and power. That experience of resurrection and rebirth is so powerful and so personal that the danger is that people turn in on their Easter faith. They turn in on themselves and their personal relationship with God, and they kind of privatize it. Our faith becomes just a private contract between me and the holy. And salvation can start to look like my own little piece of private property up in heaven. It's a little bit like heaven as a gated community.

People all across the theological spectrum are susceptible to this. It's all about me and God. Well, friends, I happen to believe that there are enough elements in our culture encouraging us to be private and to be selfish and to look out for only me, and that our religion needs to do a little better than that. That our religion needs to call us to be other-focused people, not self-focused people. We need it to help us care for the destiny of all souls, not just some, not just our own. And that's why it's helpful to put the Exodus story back in Easter, to remember that the resurrection story is inextricably linked to the story of the liberation of a whole people, not just one person. A whole people.

I want to tell you a little story about this. I was so proud last year when a teenager from our church, Jay View, stood up in this very pulpit and delivered his credo, his belief statement for us. Jay is here today. Some of you were there that day. Now, Jay is a Unitarian who goes to a Catholic school and he told a story about how sometimes friends in his school come up to him and they ask him if he's saved and if he has a personal relationship with Jesus. And Jay, who is an African-American teenager, responds to that question this way. He said, "If I answer that question truthfully, I have to say, no, I don't have a personal relationship with Jesus. But I have something even better," he said, "something even more powerful. Jesus gave hope to my ancestors who were enslaved. Jesus helped them find their freedom. If it wasn't for Jesus," said Jay, "I wouldn't even be here today."

Jay was putting the Exodus story back in Easter again, shifting the question from "Am I saved?" to "Are we saved? Are we free?" Friends, I think we need to pay attention to this in our own religious lives.

It reminds me of the Buddhist story of the Bodhisattva. The Bodhisattva is the person who has attained enlightenment, someone who has finally gotten it all figured out and is ready to go to that place, retired from the world, and, as the story goes in the Buddhist tradition, the Bodhisattva climbs over the wall to enter into the Garden of Enlightenment. And she gets up to the top of the well and she looks down into this lush, beautiful garden with all the enlightened people. And they're beautiful, it's gorgeous. And then she looks over on the other side of the wall, and there's the world, still broken, and there are her brothers and sisters. And the Bodhisattva climbs down off the wall and goes back into the world because she can't bear the thought of the garden without her brothers and sisters with her.

Friends, that's the kind of faith that I'm talking about this morning. Thich Nhat Hanh called Jesus a Bodhisattva because, as Matthew's account of the resurrection story makes clear this morning, Jesus didn't just go up to heaven and then abandon everyone back down on earth. He came back and greeted the women on the street after he was resurrected and, in a moment which I think is one of the most clear moments of understatement in religious history, after he was resurrected Jesus comes back and says, "Greetings." Greetings! He came back to save others as well.

Let me close with a story this morning that kind of sums up the kind of faith that we can look to when we reunite Easter and Exodus. It's a story that Carol Falk has told me. Carol is a member of this church and it's a story that her family tells about when she was a little girl. I've asked Carol's permission to share it with you today. It takes place back in World War II.

After the United States had entered the conflict, in order to mobilize for the war effort, the government instituted food rationing and other kinds of rationing. People would receive a certain number of stamps for, say, the amount of meat that they could eat in a given month. One day, when Carol was just sixteen months old, her mother was walking her to the store when they happened upon a man who struck up a conversation with them and who began to brag about how he had found a way to cheat the rationing system, to get some more stamps so he could get more meat for his family. He was bragging about this to Carol's mother and, as a justification for his actions, he said to her, "Look, I've got a sixteen-year-old son and he needs his meat." To which Carol's mother replied, "I have a sixteen-month-old daughter, and she'll take her chances with the rest of the world."

Our faith, no matter where it comes from, must inspire in us this kind of commitment. When we are tempted to climb over the wall, into a little gated community of a heaven, our faith must compel us to climb back down, and bring others in with us. When we get too wrapped up in the tomb and the resurrection, our faith must compel us to do as Jesus did and to come back down and to save all the people. When oppression an d injustice taint our land, our faith must compel us to do as Moses did, to say to Pharaoh, not "Let me go," but "Let my people go." Do you think we'd be telling stories about Moses thousands of years later if he had said "Let me go," rather than "Let my people go?" The central theological premise of this church and this faith is that all souls, not just some, not just yours and mine, all souls are to be saved. So much in our culture will tempt us to cheat on the food rations, to ensure our own private heaven, our own security, and "the rest of you be damned." If we are true to our faith, we will be among those who will turn away from such temptation and say, loud and clear, "No, thank you. I'll take my chances with the rest of the world."

Amen.