Page !1 Next Year in a Just World1 Israel Buffardi, Intern Minister 9 April 2017" Allen Avenue Unitarian Universalist Church We light our chalice, symbol of our Unitarian Universalist values. But this morning we kindle more than one flame, for our tradition acknowledges that the light of truth and wisdom comes from many sources, and there is always room for more light. In the Jewish tradition, candles like these are lit on Holy days as well as on the sabbath. The candles are a reminder of the divine spark present in our coming together. CHALICE LIGHTING by Rabbi Arthur Waskow We are the generations that stand between the fires. Behind us is the flame and smoke that rose from Auschwitz and from Hiroshima, from the burning of our Towers in jet fuel lit by rage." From the torching of our rainforests forests for the sake of hoarded gold. Before us is the nightmare of a Flood of Fire." The scorching of our planet from a flood of greenhouse gases, or the blazing of our cities in thermonuclear fire, or the glare of gun fire exploding in our children. It is our task to make from fire not an all-consuming blaze, but the light in which we see each other." Each of us different, yet all of us connected " We light this fire to see more clearly that the earth, the human race, are not for burning." We light this fire to see more clearly the rainbow in our many-colored faces. 1 Copyright 2017 by Israel Buffardi. Permission must be requested to reprint for other than personal use. " Page !2 OPENING WORDS Tomorrow at Sundown, the Jewish feast of Passover begins, Passover is often called the festival of liberation, for it tells the story of the deliverance of the Jews from bondage in the narrow place. But this message of freedom is so universally important that it is told and retold every year around the world—for in the words of Rabbi Morris Joseph, "Passover affirms the great truth that liberty is the inalienable right of every human being." PRAYER By Rabbi Rachel Barenblat "So the people took their dough before it was leavened, their kneading bowls wrapped in their cloaks upon their shoulders." Exodus 12:34 You’ll need to travel light. Take what you can carry: a book, a poem, a battered tin cup, your child strapped to your chest, clutching your necklace So the dough isn’t ready. So your heart isn't ready. You haven’t said goodbye to the places where you hid as a child, to the friends who aren’t interested in the journey, to the graves you’ve tended. But if you wait until you feel fully ready you may never take the leap at all and Infinity is calling you forth out of this birth canal and into the future’s wide expanse. Learn to improvise flat cakes without yeast. Learn to read new alphabets. Wear Hope & Love like a cloak and stride forth with confidence. You won’t know where you’re going but you have the words of our sages, the songs of our mothers, the inspiration wrapped in your kneading bowl. Page !3 Trust that what you carry will sustain you and take the first step out the door. SERMON 50 years ago this week the Rev. Dr Martin Luther King Jr. spoke these words from the pulpit of Riverside Church in New York: "Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours.” Dr King was talking about the war in Vietnam, but these words ring eerily true this morning. Fifty years later they have lost neither their salience nor their urgency. “I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam.” You could easily replace Vietnam with Afghanistan or Iraq, and now Syria—-but for that matter, you could just as easily replace it with Chicago, or Standing Rock, or Flint. The insanity of constant warfare abroad while constantly ignoring the human needs of those most vulnerable at home cannot be ignored. In the same speech, MLK condemned militarism, racism, and materialism as the triple threat plaguing American society. Three plagues instead of 10 plaguing us because of the arrogance, and the greed, and the obtuseness of the Pharaoh. But this morning, I say to you, In every generation a Pharaoh In every generation LIBERATION! Haggadah, literally means “telling,” and it is essentially the script that is used during the Passover meal, called a seder. In every Haggadah, there is a line that says “In each generation, each person is obligated to see herself or himself as though she or he personally came forth from the narrow place, from slavery.” Passover is the festival of liberation, but it is also a festival of remembrance. But the call in the Haggadah is not simply to remember the story of Exodus (of the Jews escape from bondage), but to fully feel and experience empathy and solidarity with the enslaved. Page !4 It is a reminder that liberation is a collective action, liberation requires us to see and be moved by our dependence on and connection with one another, person to person, nation to nation, generation to generation. By retelling the story every year, it is a reminder that societal transformation is a constant process building upon itself, and that we must be constantly rededicating ourselves to. So while the Passover story reminds us that New Pharaohs arise in every generation, it also reminds us that new movements of liberation do also. In April of 1968, MLK was planning on joining in a Passover seder with the family of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a prominent Jewish theologian and civil rights activist who marched with King in Selma. King never made it to the seder. Exactly 1 year after MLK gave his Beyond Vietnam speech, he was shot and killed on April 4th, 1968, while in Tennessee supporting a sanitation worker’s strike. As perhaps many of you recall, MLK’s death resulted in a great black uprising across the country. By sundown on the first night of Passover, the United States army was occupying, in full force, several inner city communities, across the country including one particular neighborhood in Washington DC. Reform Jewish Rabbi, civil rights and anti- war activist, Arthur Waskow was living there at the time. While he was walking home on the first night of passover he passed by an army unit, he looked up and saw a great machine gun pointed at his block, Rabbi Waskow described his reaction to the guns, he said, “My kishkes, my guts, began to say, this is Pharaoh’s army!” Rabbi Waskow also said “That experience renewed and transformed my own understanding of the Seder. I felt myself called to write a Freedom Seder that would celebrate the freedom struggles of Black America and of other peoples alongside the Jewish tale of liberation.” So Waskow wrote a new Passover Haggadah, entitled, the Freedom Seder, it incorporated elements of a traditional Haggadah with passages from Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Allen Ginsberg, Nat Turner, and Henry David Thoreau to name a few. It was likely the first Haggadah that overtly celebrated the collective liberation of not just the Israelites from slavery but all oppressed peoples, in particular African Americans. One year later during Passover, on April 4, 1969, the first anniversary of King’s death, the first freedom seder was held in the basement of Lincoln Congregational Temple, the oldest African American Congregational Church in Washington DC. Approximately 800 people participated including Blacks, Jews, and white Christians. Rabbi Waskow’s Freedom seder has inspired a whole new generation of Haggadot (plural of Haggadah) that address many forms and intersections of oppression, including movements for women's rights, gay rights, environmental justice, Palestinian rights, as well as black empowerment. In the updated introduction to his freedom seder, Rabbi Waskow has this to say about the ongoing process of liberation today: “ Page !5 “For millennia, from year to year to year to year, the Seder has renewed the lives of families and friends, has welcomed the newborn and accompanied the dying. Now it is we who renew the Seder, rebirthing the Telling of freedom itself as the Telling rebirths us.” So in these early days of springtime, as the Earth begins to rebirth itself even amongst the muddy chaos, I thought that I would share a few of the practices from these new generations of freedom seders with you so that we as a community can re-dedicate and renew ourselves to the process of our mission to empower ourselves to share our gifts to build a world of compassion, equality and freedom. Matzah is eaten on Passover in remembrance of the urgency with which the Israelites fled Egypt, Pharaoh’s army right on their tail. They did not have time to wait for their bread dough to rise, so they took it with them and baked flat cakes in the hot desert sun.