… the story of Joseph isn’t “happily ever after” when he forgives his brothers. Yes, God was working through all its twists and turns for good, working to provide an opportunity of salvation for the people. But our choices matter and Joseph made some awful choices. After interpreting Pharaoh’s dream about the upcoming famine, Joseph chose not to give back the grain that had been taxed from the people during years of plenty. He stockpiled one-fifth of everything the people produced for seven years and then began to sell the grain back in the years of famine. Even the Egyptians had to pay for their own grain: first with money, and then in subsequent years with their livestock, then their land, and then their freedom. There is no coincidence whatsoever that in the generations following that kind of regime, a significant portion of the people ended up in slavery.
Therefore, four hundred and thirty years later, there came a final plague and judgment upon Egypt. And after the Passover, the LORD, the God of Abraham and Sarah, led the Hebrew people out of their enslavement in Egypt and into freedom once again. This story becomes the premier salvation story of God’s people… As Christians, we are so accustomed to thinking of salvation in Jesus, we can sometimes forget that the original salvation that defined the traditions that Jesus would be born into was actually the salvation that God accomplished through Moses, Miriam, and Aaron.
Salvation, in the model of Exodus, certainly includes and depends upon a restored relationship with God, but its impact is felt in a community–and in this life. Salvation is the return from slavery to freedom; the return from exile to the land of God’s promise; the return from economies of scarcity and oppression to economies of God’s abundance and the common good. All of those latter things are our original state: God’s people are originally free, in the land that is blessed for them, living with a recognition that God has provided enough for all and more, and striving for the common good. To the extent that we have fallen away from such things, salvation means being restored to them.
We, and so many of our friends and neighbors, need salvation. We should pray to be saved. I’m not saying that as if I think we’re heading to Hell. What I’m saying is that salvation means a lot more than just trusting we’ll get to heaven, and we need to claim as much of that hope and salvation as possible!
So as we consider Passover today, on world communion Sunday, let’s consider the model from Exodus for naming our need for salvation. Let’s look at Passover and communion as patterns for the remembrance of God’s saving work.
And let’s reaffirm our communal commitment to sustain ourselves in the transformation that God has made possible.
As I walk through and unpack that, though, today I’m going to draw on examples and insight from an issue that Irv and I haven’t often touched on. Please feel free to make connections and examine any of the other ways you recognize our need for salvation. But having recently attended a webinar to learn more about opioid use disorder, Irv and I wonder whether that issue might offer us a window into the broader and interconnected aspects of salvation, deliverance, and communion. We were particularly struck by the statistic that approximately ⅓ of the families in any given congregation would have a close friend or a relative who has or had an opioid use disorder. So I recognize that this may hit home for some of us, and though I am new to the topic, I hope this connection is meaningful.
With opioids as with sin and salvation, doing justice to the topic isn’t easy. It’s personal. It’s societal. Questions of “free will” come into play. Guilt and shame come into play, and sometimes make things difficult to talk about, though we’d probably be better off if we could speak freely and understand better. So today, let’s try…
The way we tell the Exodus story usually revolves around Moses. Nothing against Moses, but that’s not what we get today. Our readings today focused on the Passover; first in chapter 12 from before the Hebrew people had left Egypt, and then in chapter 13 as the meal becomes a tradition that is supposed to continue as a remembrance. Passover is both what happened on that final night in Egypt when the angel of the Lord struck down all the firstborn of Egypt but passed over the houses with blood on the doorframe, and the name of the holy day commemorating that experience and the salvation from slavery in Egypt. Let’s name our parallels to Passover.
In Jesus’ salvation story, focusing on Passover is like focusing on the Cross and communion. Personally, I love to emphasize resurrection; as a whole, the Church of the Brethren likes to put more weight than most on Jesus’ ministry and teaching before his death. But it certainly is possible from time to time to narrow our focus and look just at the cross: the event that enabled salvation, a horrible death that allowed life. And then at communion: the community’s remembrance of that event retold in a symbolic meal. While Christ’s sacrifice was once for all, we continue to practice remembrance so that this one turning point will continue to shape us. Passover is to Exodus what cross and communion are to Jesus’ salvation.
What about in our stories? Are there moments that we could identify as the turning points, from being trapped in patterns that lead to death, patterns we could call sin, to instead finding life? They could be individual or collective. Collectively, our nation has had several defining moments that were chances to renounce and escape from the sin-patterns of racism, with the Civil War, and Civil Rights Movement, and perhaps again today if the opportunity is taken. It’s a lot like how God’s people needed to be saved from Egypt, and then from Assyria, and then from Babylon; exodus opportunities recurring more than once.
But I wonder if the Passover moment might be compared individually to the moment that someone chooses not to use an opioid again, and instead to seek help. We don’t have to dramatize that with the threat of death to make a connection to Passover, as though their next time would have been the overdose. It’s still a turning point that comes after a long period of suffering. It’s still the kind of choice that will have to be practiced and repeated even as it is remembered, over and over again so that the change will last. It’s still a moment that opens the door to salvation.
And as we think about salvation in Passover and in quitting opioid abuse, another interesting comparison is in the question of agency or responsibility. I opened the sermon today noting how Joseph’s choices laid the groundwork for slavery in Egypt, and we might similarly notice that someone with an opioid use disorder at one point made a more free decision to begin (ab)using, and later on ends up trapped in physical dependency and addiction. But even so, even if we name that as a form of oppression or metaphorically “slavery,” someone in that situation still has agency. In the Passover story, I highly recommend that anyone not familiar take the time to read the story of Shiphrah and Puah in Exodus 1, Hebrew midwives who resisted Pharaoh. And in the story of opioid abuse, there has to come a point when the person with the disorder chooses to quit–and keeps choosing that path. Sometimes we marvel that it took God four hundred and thirty years to bring the people out of Egypt, but considering how often the people grumbled about turning back when facing hardship in the desert, perhaps God was simply waiting until they were truly ready to leave Egypt and come home. Dealing with opioid use disorder, or many other addictions, involuntary intervention almost never works. People simply relapse. If we consider how many times the people turned away from God only to come back again when things have fallen apart, I can imagine that God knows very well the struggle of watching a loved one relapse into their self-destructive behavior. Yet salvation is still on offer, always, up to that point where the one who needs salvation also chooses to accept it.
I want to keep our focus on compassion. And yet I have to take a moment here to say something: A few decades ago, when the most prevalent drugs of choice were either imported or from the street, when the folks making and selling those drugs had no legal legitimacy to hide behind, and the perception was that those with drug use disorders were people of color (though use was similar across races), the response to the drug crisis was the “War on Drugs”: a focus on punishment, not rehabilitation or prevention. Nowadays, because opioids are manufactured by giant pharmaceutical companies, made by folks in lab coats and pushed by folks with legal protection, and we recognize that the profile of someone with an opioid use disorder is predominantly white, the response has shifted significantly. As someone who has traveled that shift in attitude himself, Biden can tell his son’s story of a drug problem and rehabilitation from a debate stage and hope that it will elicit compassion. But I cannot imagine a black politician having any success in the media trying to put a similar spin on the same kind of story, especially not 20-30 years ago. Beyond noting that this unequal response has harmed people and communities of color compared to white folks, let me simply remind us that Jesus’ commandment has always been that we consistently extend love and mercy to all, as God sends sun and rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. God’s willingness to show mercy, offer a second chance, and bring salvation does not vary as human judgment does; we all need compassion.
But with that said, salvation is costly. Pastor Irv let me know this week that he was struggling to try to find hymns for the theme of Passover; in our tradition, we don’t have a lot of those. But I bet we can all think of some lines about the costliness of our salvation in Jesus, right? Were you there when they crucified my Lord? We have songs about that precious blood. We put our Lord and our God upon a cross to die, and Jesus accepted that as a cost of offering sinners like us our salvation.
In the Passover story, the costliness of salvation fell mostly upon Egypt. Although there had already been nine other plagues to sweep through the country, on the night of the Passover, the tenth plague took the life of every firstborn, human or animal. In the houses of the Hebrews, a lamb took the place of the firstborn, and its blood over their doors spared the family inside. Naming Jesus as our Lamb of God, the instructions that none of this lamb should remain until morning inform some Christian traditions that allow none of their communion elements to remain as leftovers.
But even beyond that, later on in Exodus 12:36, we read that on their way out of Egypt, the Hebrew people “plundered the Egyptians.” I remember being unsettled by reading that as a youth, thinking how awful it was that God’s people were stealing. But now, though I wouldn’t say I’m entirely comfortable, I understand with a different lens: Every single day of slave labor was a robbery from the Hebrew people. Taking back a fraction of Egypt’s wealth was not theft, but a claim on what should have been rightfully theirs. Even across four hundred and thirty years of slavery, that which was stolen from Hebrew ancestors was still an inheritance stolen from the living generation.
So perhaps it should not surprise us that salvation remains costly today. The cost of truly overcoming racism in our country, for example, would include reparations for the wealth stolen through slavery and harm done across generations, neither of which has ever been accounted for. Like the rich young ruler who walks away sad instead of following Jesus, our nation hasn’t been sure we’re ready for salvation at that cost.
But how costly is our individual salvation? Our eternal salvation comes free to us because it already cost Jesus everything. But the dimensions of salvation that, in the pattern of Exodus and Passover, should be sought here and now–those could be a different story.
Salvation means returning to live in right relationship with the land of God’s promise; not shrugging our shoulders at yet another record year of fires and hurricanes. If we want to save a world worth living in for the generations being born today and after, it’s time to accept the costs of finding more sustainable ways of living.
Salvation means leaving behind the economy built on scarcity and greed and instead choosing to trust God’s abundance and live in generosity. That’s going to cost something, whether or not Jesus actually calls us to sell all and follow.
Salvation means leaving slavery for freedom, and though I usually hesitate to make that a metaphor because it has been a harsh reality for many across history, there is a cost to naming our “masters” and breaking their hold on us.
For many of us, the first thing we’d think of as our “addictions” might include our phone & social media, our work, or our hobby that’s expensive in dollars or hours or both. An honest review of some of those things might really conclude that we’ve given them too large a place in our lives.
But for someone with an opioid use disorder, as with alcoholism or other forms of serious substance abuse, there really is something beyond one’s self that has a profound influence over both body and mind. Living in that situation is not freedom. It takes over one’s life, to the point that patterns of behavior that never would have been considered before become normal. One of the most common driving factors in crime is financing drug habits. And yet, in this comparison of Exodus and opioids, “Egypt” is really enticing, and “Pharaoh” doesn’t want to let anyone leave. Both of those dimensions make even the acceptance of salvation costly.
On the one hand, we could make a simple connection between the ten plagues and the suffering of withdrawal–the immediate barrier against attempts for freedom. But as a deeper connection, the Hebrew people had to face as they left Egypt the exact same conditions that had led them into Egypt in the first place: It was a famine that drove them into Egypt, and near-starvation in the desert almost drove them back. They had to face that situation one way or another, and returning to Egypt would have been the easy out. But in the wilderness, the people trusted God for mana.
In a similar way, someone with an opioid use disorder doesn’t just have to fight through withdrawal symptoms. Even after that passes, they’re probably left facing a situation at least as difficult as whatever circumstances drove them to begin using in the first place: isolation, a sense of meaninglessness, unemployment, whatever the case may be. It’s important to keep in mind for prevention, but just as relevant afterward: people who have strong relationships, a sense of meaning, and stay busy one way or another are unlikely to abuse opioids. And yet the draw to return will linger: just as the Hebrew people kept inexplicably looking back to Egypt, 90% of those who attempt to quit simply by refraining from using relapse within a year.
That’s why Passover isn’t simply a one-time historical event. It’s also a communal commemoration, a way of telling the story and continuing to make meaning of the Exodus from Egypt. Without giving all that many instructions for the meal, the one thing that is specifically given to the people to say in Exodus 13 is that if a child should ask why the bread is not leavened, parents should reply, “It is because of what the LORD did for us when we came out of Egypt.” More important than praying or giving thanks for the meal is the passing on of instruction: this is about deliverance; God saved us.
In a similar way, though we read in the New Testament that Jesus gave thanks for the bread and cup before he passed them to the disciples, the commandment given to them concerning communion is to do this in remembrance. The point is to retell the salvation story and to sustain ourselves in that salvation with the reminders of what it cost and what we have been delivered from. With (perhaps unleavened) bread and a cup that Christ blessed, we sustain ourselves in the commitment to saved and transformed life.
If I can draw the analogy, the most effective form of treatment for opioid use disorder is medically assisted. There are alternative drugs to be taken, medicine rather than heroin so that instead of 90% have relapsed within a year, only about 40% relapse within four years. There’s certainly physical import of the medicine, but there’s also the reality that every time someone chooses to take it, they are remembering and reenacting their choice to turn from opioid abuse to something else. It makes a difference. In another community, the AA affirmations of “I’ve been sober for this many days” can have a similar function, naming the history and the commitment to change.
So when we come to our communion today, consider all the dimensions of salvation that God has demonstrated in the Bible: Freedom from oppression. Return to the land of God’s blessing. Turning from economies of scarcity and greed to trust in abundance and life for the common good. New encounters with meaning and hope. A restored relationship with our brothers and sisters. And, most fundamentally, a restored relationship with God, our creator.
Amidst all these things, promises for eternity and salvation possible in this life, let’s name the ways that we have been saved and the ways that we would still ask God to save us or to bring salvation to others whom we love. Receive the bread and cup as the reminder that God has saved and will save; that we can be sustained in a community with transformed lives. And like Shiphrah and Puah, and all others following God in resistance to Pharaohs and oppression, let these elements of remembrance renew us for courageous service for the Kingdom of God!
Caleb Kragt is a minister 2/3 time and 1/3 stay-at-home Dad. He and his wife Allie have just moved into their first house with kids age 3 and 6. Caleb and Irvin Heishman are co-pastors for the West Charleston Church of the Brethren in Tipp City, Ohio.
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