Ken’s e-Pistle

April 24, 2024

This is the week of Passover, the celebration of God’s love which delivered our Hebrew ancestors from slavery in Egypt and led them to the Promised Land.  It is a story of high adventure, torturous endurance, amazing miracles, and the crucible in which a large part of our faith was formed.  We do well to remember it, especially in these days when a miraculous deliverance seems to be on everybody’s wish list.

Someone declared that our nation is more divided than ever before.  I don’t believe that to be the case.  We simply have better news coverage.  Every age has been divided, if we are to take history seriously.  George Washington was pressed into a second term as President due to the dangerous divisions which assailed the new nation.  John Quincy Adams, who followed Washington, finished his term as President and soon after returned to serve in the Congress in order to mediate the voices of separation which were howling from the grass roots.  Andrew Jackson, far from being conciliatory, stoked the fires of contention and unjustly removed the First Nations to the first reservations.  Abraham Lincoln was powerless to stop the drumbeat of civil war which left a tattered nation panting on the roadside of history. The world wars divided the population into a vicious debate of whether we would be participants in the quickly shrinking world or isolationists, ignoring affairs abroad.  Civil rights and the fight for equality for all of God’s children divided us in the 1960s and the Chicago Riots of 1968 showed us the fault lines of our society.  The list goes on.

Thousands of years ago, God chose a stuttering fugitive to work a miracle of deliverance.  Despite his best objections, Moses moved onto the stage of history and became a catalyst for human freedom and the power of the dream.  God was with him then and God is with us now.

Perhaps, rather than praying for a miracle, we should be looking for ways in which we can BE the miracle.

Something to think about as we move with our Jewish brothers and sisters through the memory that is Passover.

I bid you peace! (Albeit a sometimes uncomfortable one!)