Sunday, April 5, 2026
Readings: Exodus 12: 30-32
Sermon: The Message of Passover and Easter: The Power of Love to Find New Life, By Rev. F. Vernon Wright V
Reading and Sermon text below the video
Readings: Exodus 12: 30-32 and John 20:11, 15
Exodus 12: 30-32 – Pharaoh arose in the night, he and all his officials and all the Egyptians; and there was a loud cry in Egypt, for there was not a house without someone dead. Then he summoned Moses and Aaron in the night, and said, “Rise up, go away from my people, both you and the Israelites! Go, worship the Lord, as you said. Take your flocks and your hearts, as you said, and be gone. And bring blessings on me too!”
John 20:11, 15 – But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. …Jesus said to her, “Woman why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” (Which means Teacher)
Sermon, A New Path Forward: How Easter and Passover Teach Us How to Find New Possibility
By Rev. F. Vernon Wright V
Good morning! First, this is the first time in my life that I have ever had the opportunity preach about Easter and Passover in the same sermon. It’s really quite an honor, and its something that can really only happen at a place like Murray.
This month is all about embracing possibility. Passover and Easter both deal with possibility. What is possible? Can the people escape slavery? Will the message of love survive the tomb? How do we even begin to hope for possibility? I mean especially when times are dark? Well, we’ll dive into the subject.
But first let me open up these two texts a little, so you can begin to understand the fuller context of what I am drawing from. First of all, just because these stories both come from the Christian corpus of scripture known as the Bible, doesn’t mean they have anything in common. They don’t even have the same world view. This was drummed into my head by scholars at seminary who didn’t believe in the Christian appropriation of Jewish scripture.
But there are similarities too. Both stories are about liberation. The Exodus story is about a remembrance of actual liberation from slavery in Egypt. Its a kind of magical story pitting the power of God and Moses against the Egyptian Gods and Goddesses and their high priests and wizards. Moses keeps telling the Pharaoh to let the Hebrew speaking people go. When he doesn’t let them go, a new plague, sickness, or environmental catastrophe occurs..
The last one is the most horrific. The first born of each family who’s house isn’t marked with a blood sign dies. Passover, is reference to the angel of death passing over the homes marked safe. At the end of this one, Pharaoh agrees to let the Hebrew people go.
The Easter story is about a metaphorical and ethical liberation from the dominion of the Roman Empire some 1200-1500 years later in the kingdom of Judea. Jesus was trying to say that we could bring in the promised world of peace, compassion and justice, not by the might of armies who would restore the fortunes of Judea, but by loving one another and treating one another with compassion, justice and mercy.
This was misunderstood by the Roman Empire, who believed that he was talking about a physical kingdom. Jesus was threatening also to the Temple hierarchy and economy. So he was sentenced to death, which was of course crucifixion at that time.
When the disciples check on the body during their time of great grief, the body is not there. A being who at the very least seems a lot like Christ reveals themselves to disciples when they are profoundly missing him as in Mary’s case, or when they break bread together, and treat one another as Jesus had asked them to after the Road to Emaus incident.
So what do we take from these two different traditions? Sometimes in life we find that we have reached a dead end. We can no longer take the oppression, or the grief. Somehow, sometimes by very mysterious ways even, we find a new way to live. We could say we even find new life. New possibility is possible.
The dead end I want to share is my experience of starting out on this path years ago. Despite not even being able to locate the state on a map just three months earlier, my wife and I in our infinite wisdom, had decided to accept a call to ministry in Helena MT- my first church. Candidating Weekend was super intense. The church decided to vote in yours truly, the fresh young thing out of seminary. I had flown back to New England, was ordained in the church I was raised in in Jaffrey Center NH, and one week later I was back in MT. All of this was like a big, hot, golden dream.
My first day in the office had arrived and I was already feeling burn out. Since we only had one car, I had my wife eight months pregnant with River, drop me off.
Plymouth Congregational church was built in the the late sixties. It was a Danish modern, building a lot like ours. It had the same brown carpet we just replaced in here. My office was large. One wall was a big window that had a curtain in front of it. I opened the curtain and I could see into the fellowship hall, and beyond that a full bank of windows looking out over the Helena Valley framed by the sleeping giant mountain far off in the distance. A hundred feet below me rose the dome of the capitol building.
As I sat down, I suddenly had this incredible feeling of being overwhelmed. The great theologians, civil rights activists, mystics, poets that had led the people to do such great things were arguing in my head for space.
I looked at the directory with the two hundred or so names, each person maybe wanting a visit, or in need of listening. I looked at the members of the executive board. Whom should I call first? I started to pace back and forth. I felt like everything I had learned in my three and a half year masters degree was useless.
My heart rate started to go up. I felt short of breath. I called Kat and asked her to pick me up.
“What happened hon? You okay?”
I told her about my feeling of being overwhelmed.
She just smiled at me and shared with me some of the most profound words of wisdom I have every run across, in all of my deep dives into world scriptures, and interviews with indigenous people, and talks with zen masters. “Fake it till you make it!”P She said with a grin.
I mean think about those ancient Hebrew folks on the lam from the most powerful army the world had ever known! Did they not have to fake it till they made it?
Think about that close community that had been following Jesus, this beloved teacher, prophet miracle worker, only to have him be executed, and the body stolen, in a culture that practiced necromancy! Did they not have to fake it until they made it?
Look, I’m not saying here that the Miracles of God in the story of exodus, or the risen Christ in the Gospels didn’t occur, just that, in both instances a community had to do things and go places they had never been before without knowing how to do it.
Sometimes you just got to remember that slogan from a certain sneaker company named after the ancient Greek Goddess of victory, and just do it. Its the power of the stoics too, and all those who talk about Finnish Sissu. Another word for this faking till making, this just doing it, this Sissu is of course faith. Were not talking here about the faith in impossible things, I’m talking about the faith that comes to each person in the depths of the greatest grief or feeling completely overwhelmed and living their day anyway, brushing their teeth, drinking their coffee, fixing their hair, putting on their make up and heading out the door.
When you stop worrying about would could happen, and you start just living your life- its as if reality starts to bend around you. Opportunities begin to arise that you never had before, and yes, it requires yet more risk, but that’s okay, hopefully by that time you’ll have learned your lesson and you’ll live into that too.
And so I did fake it till I made it. And it turned out I really didn’t have to fake anything more than a day. Turned out the congregation I was serving understood that I was a green horn. Some really cool older colleagues even kind of took me under their wing and taught me how to trust my gut.
Because the truth is, in some ways each of us is faking it till we make it every day. Each of us has tremendous challenges. Each of us must live out the passover story and have the courage to find a new way free from slavery every day, slavery of our fear, slavery of this media dome that invades us each time we check our smart phone for the time, living in a nation whose government suddenly sees us as some kind of enemy.
And each of us must live out that Easter story too. Each of us lives in the shadow of great, loving people who unfortunately have died. But we choose to live like they did and love like they did anyway- and in some ways it seems that when we do, there they are with us again.
Some how, some way, each day we find the strength to just do it. And lo, impossible things begin to happen. Blessed be!
