The Road to Renewal (for Easter)
April 20, 2025
Today’s reading:
Desert Spring
By Victoria Safford
Rev. Victoria Safford is the minister of White Bear Unitarian Universalist Church in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
They had no idea where they were going, when they left that night, in the dark, without lights, without shoes, without bread, their children smothered against them so they would make no noise.
They had no idea what they were getting into, following this Moses, this wild-eyed one who claimed visions and made promises but who after all could guarantee them nothing, except death if they were caught.
They had no idea, these slaves, what it could mean, this promise of land (their own country) and life abundant. Of freedom they knew nothing, except what they could taste by living in its opposite, slavery, and that taste became a hunger, and that hunger became insatiable till they were ravenous for freedom, and they went out then—but no one knows to this day whether they were led by Moses or by the outstretched arm and mighty hand of something else, of something eternal (as they would afterwards and always claim), or whether their own human, hungry will made them flee that night from Pharaoh.
They went into the wilderness. There they wandered forty years, which in those days was a lifetime. Forty was a good, old age, so many of them died before getting anywhere, and many were born in the desert and grew to adulthood knowing nothing but the journey—not slavery, not freedom, just the going. They whined and complained and muttered, and some mutinied, for they were a stiff-necked and rebellious people (you can read it for yourself); ungrateful people, even when manna rained down from heaven and quails were sent to feed them; unhappy people, longing, out loud even, for the familiar security of Egypt, of all places, where at least they knew what to expect, as awful as it was; impatient people, making cheap little idols and gods of metal to bargain with in secret when the traveling got hard or merely dull, and the days and years became monotonous.
In the springtime we remember: the promised land is not a destination—it is a way of going. The land beyond the Jordan, that country of freedom and dignity and laughter—you carry it inside you all the while. It is planted in your mind and heart already, before you ever start out, before it even occurs to you that in order to leave that life in Egypt, the intolerable bondage of that life, what you need to do is stand up and walk forward.
Today’s reading, a meditation on the ancient Israelites’ flight from Egypt and the beginning of what would be 40 years spent wandering in the desert, might seem slightly out of place on an Easter Sunday.
But the two are related. Easter Sunday is a Christian holiday celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ and freedom from sin and death. Today also marks the end of Passover, the Jewish festival celebrating the exodus from Egypt and freedom from slavery.
It also happens that the day after tomorrow, Tuesday, is Earth Day, which this year is celebrating renewable energy and freedom from dependency on fossil fuels.
And one more: This Thursday is Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, a more somber day that reminds us never to forget, that freedom is never to be taken for granted.
So on this Easter Sunday, we are literally surrounded by the idea of freedom.
I bring up all of these dates and holidays, not to give you a scholarly rundown from the Preacher’s Almanac, but because they all converge right now at an interesting moment in the continuing human saga. Like a comet that only appears once a century, like a constellation that is only visible part of the year, maybe these four days orbiting so closely together this year comprise a cosmic whack on the side of the head, a numinous knock on the door, to say, don’t despair. Don’t be afraid to walk forward into the unknown. This way lies freedom.
Together these celebratory days signal a kind of hope—hope that just as oppression, persecution, genocide and plundering of the planet have always plagued the human race, so too have liberation, freedom and triumph continued to emerge, again and again.
Now let me just say that I think it is overly simplistic and not at all realistic to take in today’s ongoing wars, the abductions, the clamping down on free speech or the right of free assembly or any one of a dozen other causes for alarm occurring these days, to look at all this and say, well, we’ve been here before, and history shows that good will ultimately prevail. After all, the Israelites escaped Egypt. Jesus rose from the dead. We won World War II and liberated the death camps. But those are history, or in some cases, maybe historical narratives. The truth is, we’ve never actually been here before.
I recall a conversation between my mother and my sister years ago. My sister, Jane, was having a hard time with her daughter, Meghan, who had reached her teens and was being, well, a teenager. And Jane was complaining to Mom, and she said to Mom the accursed phrase we of my generation swore we’d never say, “Why, when I was her age ….”
And my mother cut Jane off before she could finish. “But you were never her age,” she said. That bit of wisdom has stayed with me. The world Jane and I became teenagers in was not the world her kids or my kids became teenagers in. My sons’ 15 or 16 were not my 15 or 16. The 2000s, their coming of age years, were nothing like my coming of age years in the 1970s. They didn’t have the Vietnam War on TV during dinner, the women’s liberation movement, or Nixon resigning. I didn’t have the Gulf Wars or 9/11. They could look stuff up on the Internet. I spent many late nights poring over books and thought a mouse was a tiny animal. Different worlds.
And so it would be disingenuous to look at current events and say, we’ve been here before. We have not. What’s going on right now is unique and unprecedented. But what this moment has in common with the flight out of Egypt, the crucifixion and resurrection of a messiah, the Holocaust or even the damage being done to our planet from climate change[1] … is that all of these events were unprecedented, too.
Maybe that is why the story of the Israelites’ release from bondage more than 3,000 years ago lives to this day, complete with the seven plagues and the parting of the Red Sea. Or the resurrection of Jesus Christ 2,000 years ago and the movement that followed that became Christianity. It isn’t so much that history repeats itself, but that the unprecedented happens again and again.
And that, strangely enough, gives me hope. Religion, stripped down to the studs, before the drywall goes up or the entryways are built, without the who’s right and who’s wrong or which guests will be allowed in, is about making sense of the temporary nature of human existence. What is the meaning of it all? And stories like the Exodus, like the resurrection, were ancient people’s attempts to answer those questions, of grappling with their God and the nature of whatever might be beyond the human imagination.
And their answers were these: Out of darkness comes creation. After a flood comes a rainbow. After enslavement, freedom. After death, resurrection and new life. There’s a pattern here. And it’s a pattern whether you believe these stories really happened or are merely stories, whether you believe in a God or not.
The pattern is that time after time, a dramatic event tends to lead to a dramatic result. And, fiction or nonfiction, like the events leading up to it, the result is often unprecedented, too.
In other words, and I know it probably sounds crazy, the more tumultuous the times, the more unexpected—and unpredictable—the eventual victory over chaos might be.
Take Easter, for example. It so happens that here at
First Parish, Easter is very much with us every Sunday, courtesy of one of our Tiffany windows. If you turn your gaze to this window on the right side of the sanctuary, you’ll see what is called the Newbury Window. It dates to 1894 and is called "The Resurrection." The scene is early dawn, with stars still visible in the sky. Mary Magdalene and the other Mary (the mother of James and John) are shown in a field of lilies at the tomb of Jesus, as the angel of the Lord appears to tell them that Jesus has risen. This is the version of the Resurrection found in the Gospel according to Matthew.
The Resurrection was an extraordinary event following the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth. And while crucifixion itself as a form of execution was nothing new for the Romans, the execution of Jesus Christ followed a three-year ministry that rocked ancient Judea. Thousands would turn out to hear Jesus teach and preach, pretty remarkable when you consider that there were no loudspeakers in those days. He clearly captured imaginations. His life had no precedent.
But his life, as remarkable as it was, could have ended with his death and burial, and case closed. Instead, at the moment Jesus breathes his last up on the cross, we get a scene worthy of the final minutes of an Indiana Jones movie. The temple curtain is torn in two, there is an earthquake, and, according to Matthew, “The tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised.” (Matt 27:51-53). Then, in what to me is the most breathtaking aside in all of the gospels, Matthew casually mentions this: “After his resurrection they came out of the tombs and entered the holy city and appeared to many.” (Matt 27:53)
Wow. First of all, shame on Matthew for no spoiler alert. He tells us Jesus rose from the dead fourteen verses before we are told about the scene depicted in our Tiffany window. Second, I don’t know about you, but the fact that multitudes rose from the dead and then showed up all over Jerusalem on Easter Sunday seems worthy of a bit more attention than we give it at Easter time.
I don’t mean to sound cheeky. I just want to point out that there is more to the story many of us have known all our lives … and to suggest that we are so used to the Easter story, even if we were not raised in a Christian tradition, that we are inured to its extraordinariness. Even if you believe the gospels are total fiction, at least consider that some ancient people felt it important to create a narrative that says incredible things happen when you place your faith in love. Not only does our hero rise from the dead, but everybody who lived a good life up to that point gets a second chance. What a comeuppance for the tyranny of the Roman Empire.
We may not know how these stories came to be, but we can appreciate that they point us toward hope. We may not always understand what these stories have to teach, but we can appreciate that there just might be some wisdom there that is waiting for us.
There is much wisdom to be had in the Easter story, but especially now it feels important to embrace the possibility that following crucifixion comes resurrection. Said another way, that following unprecedented setbacks comes progress we could not have imagined.
Today, many things are being crucified. Our environment. Democracy. Human decency. Political bipartisanship and compromise. Our constitutional rights. People in war zones—Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, Yemen, Myanmar, the Democratic Republic of Congo.
It can all feel overwhelming. It feels like everything is building to a fever pitch. It feels … unprecedented.
One could look at all of this and feel overwhelmed. Or one could have faith in love and believe that unprecedented times lead to unprecedented heroes. Unforeseen solutions. Unpredictable turns of events. Unidentified flying angels. Unprecedented means something new. Don’t give up on the possibility of something new. Resurrection and renewal are always just around the corner.
That is true not just out there but in here. Turning back to our Tiffany window … and the Tiffany window facing opposite, our unusual history window all the way to the back, all our other beautiful stained-glass windows, and this magnificent sanctuary … we ourselves at First Parish are living out all the themes we are talking about today.
Like the Israelites released from slavery, we have been freed from religious doctrines and have acted as a voice for religious freedom since 1637. And since that time we have, in a sense, been wandering as we seek the promised land of our fullest realization of what this religious community can be, both to ourselves and the greater Taunton community.
Like Jesus and all the saints resurrected at Easter, we have risen from challenging times, first the pandemic, then changes in leadership, but thanks to the efforts of many, including those here today, we have endured. We are here to claim a new life for our church.
Like Holocaust survivors who remind us that freedom is not free, we pledge ourselves to never forget that fighting tyranny is both a moral and spiritual obligation. First Parish has been a beacon of hope in our community, the church that says yes when the world says no. Just like our Unitarian forebears who in World War II helped European Jews escape the Nazis.
Like those who fight for environmental justice, we see ourselves inexorably linked to the fate of our planet. We are one with the earth, and, as it is with the cycles of the seasons and life bursting forth year after year, we know that we, too, will have seasons of growth. And love has a lot to do with it.
It’s in the lyrics to today’s song, The Rose:
Just remember in the winter
Far beneath the bitter snows
Lies the seed that with the sun's love
In the spring becomes the rose
The message of Easter is a simple one: Stay open to being pleasantly surprised. Something good can always happen. You just might wake up one morning and roll back the stone of the tomb of your anxieties. The stone is all the things you thought were in the way, the news you can’t bear to read, the oppression and repression bearing down. You roll back the stone to reveal an angel, who, upon closer examination, is a mirror image of yourself. You realize it’s another day, you have been resurrected, and that every day is another second chance.
May it be so, and blessed be.
[1] There are approximately 1.4 billion gas-powered vehicles in our world today.