Presented to Swift Current Corps of The Salvation Army, 01 July 2012*
By Captain Michael Ramsay
I heard a harrowing story this week. Dave, a member of the Rotary club here in town, told this story of a family vacation that he took to Acapulco in 1968. Dave and his wife are on holiday down in Mexico. They check into their hotel and there are these little lizards - Geckos or something else – climbing all up the walls; so they speak to the hotel and ask to be moved as far away from the lizards as they can, up to the top floor. They do move up to the top floor. That turns out to be a mistake. In the middle of the night, they are woken up as people are running through the halls screaming. Some girls from Quebec tell them what was happening: the hotel is on fire. The stairs, they are concrete for the top few floors and then wood beneath and they are ablaze. The girls from Quebec jump over the railing from the 10th storey or more up and plunge all the way down. Dave and his wife and their two sons, aged six and nine, are trapped. Without thinking they run to the elevator but the door closes with people inside it just before they get there. Actually I think Dave got his hand in the closing door but they didn’t catch the elevator, which is good because we know what happens to people in elevators in a fire. Dave and his family are trapped. They try to tie sheets together to scale down the outside of the building but as Dave is heading over a balcony, it is good that he has an arm linked through the railing because someone unties the sheets. He then climbs down the side of the balcony and swings onto the balcony below. His wife then drops one of his children for him to catch and then the other and then she scales down as far as she can, then falls and Dave catches her legs and pulls her in. They do this until the third storey or so of the building when they ran out of balconies. Dave then throws one child down onto a straw thatched roof, hoping that it will break his fall. He sees the boy fall through the roof and run away so he throws the other son down who makes a new hole as he crashes through the thatched roof. He too runs to safety. His wife jumps next and Dave is able to scale a palm tree to the bottom. They are injured but they survive. It was quite a tale to hear recalled. They survived by the grace of God but others on their floor, those who leapt over the railing or those who took the elevator, did not.
What had happened was, apparently there was a dispute between two ownership groups – one local and one foreign – the foreign group was residing in the hotel on that day and some local people attacked the building with Molotov cocktails – hoping to collect insurance, I believe.
It was quite something to hear this story. I don’t think many of us in Rotary knew about this incident in Dave’s life at all. There is more to his story too. One of his sons had a piece of the thatched roof he fell through stuck into his foot. The other had a twig protruding from his neck with blood spurting out. They were okay though. As well as their salvation, there was another miracle in this story. (Dave and his wife do recognize this as a miraculous salvation.) When Dave and his wife were climbing down the balconies to escape the flames, they left somewhere her straw purse with their passports, money, plane tickets, and the like. The next day Dave went back and began looking in this burned-out hotel building for this straw purse. God saved it for them. It was on a balcony on a burned-out floor but this straw purse and its contents were still there pretty much unscathed. It was fine. God protected it and God protected them. God was there for them in the midst of this ordeal. They remember and they’ll never forget.
It is the same with the Hebrews in our text today. Those of us who have been keeping up with our reading the Bible plan, will have read the stories of the plagues as recorded in Exodus this week. These plagues are quite something with each one becoming more terrifying and awe-inspiring than the previous one:
- The Nile River turns to blood (7:14–25)
- Plague of frogs (7:25–8:11)
- Plague of gnats (8:12–15)
- Plague of flies (8:20–32)
- Plague on the livestalk (9:1–7)
- Plague of boils (9:8–12)
- Plague of hail (9:13-35)
- Plague of locusts (10:1–20)
- Plague of darkness (10:21–29)
We may have gotten a little taste of hail and darkness this past week here in Swift Current. I don’t know how many of us were outside Tuesday at about 11:30 a.m. or noon. That darkness that swept over a corner of the city was really quite something. I have not seen anything like that before. I heard people refer to it as an ‘ominous presence’ or a ‘fear-provoking experience.’
This blackness is steadily approaching at mid-day; you can see blue skies fleeing from its presence. We leave to pick up Rebecca from school for lunch at that time. There is a tornado warning. The school has just announced that the children are not to go outside because of this. Some students, of course, are pressed up against the windows to see what is happening, others are in tears hiding safely under their desks.
These feelings of fear and awe, of terror and wonder, that people were having here this past Tuesday are probably a but fractional reflection of the intensity of the emotions that would be swirling around the Israelites as they are experiencing the power of God through the first nine plagues and the Hebrews now are, I imagine, in a metaphorical, emotional funnel cloud of shock, awe and terror themselves as they prepare for the final plague, the tenth plague: The Angel of Death (11:1–12:36).
It is in the context of the children of Israel huddled in their houses preparing for Death’s arrival that our pericope today is found. In the opening 13 verses of this chapter, God tells Moses and Aaron exactly what is about to happen. Just like a Tornado alert: ‘Get ready’, God warns them, ‘the Angel of Death is coming’. And just like we have emergency disaster plans that we are to follow for the city and for The Salvation Army when disaster strikes, God here is giving Moses and Aaron their instructions as to how to save their families when the Angel of Death strikes at Goshen in Egypt, killing the first-born sons. I don’t know if anyone here has ever huddled in a storm cellar or has been forced to take shelter on the open prairie or has had to head beneath deck on a boat being tossed about in a storm but I imagine that this is the same feeling. The people take all the prescribed steps and now they are just waiting and hoping and praying for the storm of the Angel of Death to pass, leaving them unharmed.
I have binders and binders full of the city’s and the Army’s plans of what to do in the event of a major disaster: a flood, a fire, a tornado strike… God, in Exodus here, gives Moses and Aaron a disaster preparedness plan to share with the Hebrews in Egypt for the impending strike by the Angel of Death. It looks like this - picture this with me: You and your family, you have received your disaster preparedness plan from your leaders. Disaster is going to strike, you are fearful (like the school children hiding under their desks) and you are in shock, awe, and maybe even terror, as you await the Angel of Death who is coming to claim many from the country where you live on this very night. On this very evening as Death is approaching, this is the plan:[1]
- You are to take a lamb or a kid to share as a meal with everyone in your household. If there aren’t enough of you in your household to eat a whole lamb, you must share it with your closest neighbour (12:3-4);
- The animal must be 1 year-old and without defect (v.5; cf. Leviticus 22:20-25, Malachi 1:8);
- You have already been taking care of the animals for 14 days in preparation for this day – now everyone in town is to go and slaughter the lamb at twilight (v.6);[2]
- You will then – this is important – take some of the blood and put it on the sides and the tops of the doorframes of the houses where you will eat the lambs (v.7);
- Then you will eat the meat roasted over a fire with bitter herbs and bread without yeast and you must eat it all. You may not leave any of it until morning! If there are leftovers, you must burn them (vv. 8-10; cf. Exodus 23:18, 34:25 and Deuteronomy 16:4);
- When you are eating this meal, you are to eat it with your cloak tucked into your belt, your sandals on, and your staff in your hand (v. 11; cf. Deuteronomy 16:3). In other words you are supposed to it on the run. In our language today: you are to have your coats, your hats and your shoes on and your car keys in your hand. You are to be ready to go. You are to eat it in haste because it is the LORD’s Passover.
God is there for them. They are to be ready. God tells Moses and Aaron that as the people follow this plan they will survive the impending strike by the Angel of Death. Then God tells them they must never forget this night. They must remember how He saves them. I imagine this evening must be as clear to those who experienced it as the images were to Dave and his wife, 40+ years later, of that night climbing down the side of the building – and Dave’s wife, she’s afraid of heights. I imagine that every time they think about this night, they remember every feeling that was racing through their heart and mind and I imagine that they’ll never forget it.
I remember when I was in Nipawin and the building exploded right behind The Salvation Army Ministry Centre downtown. My office shook. It felt like a truck had struck it. With others, I headed outside to see what had happened, I saw injured or dead or dying people lying on the ground as the flames began to engulf part of the downtown. My children and everyone else around on that day have stories surrounding those moments. I imagine each of us have had times like these that will never leave our minds. God is there for us and there are many stories of salvation, His mercy and miracles in the midst of tragedy.
The thing with these events as real as they are to us, they are not as real to people who don’t actually experience them and as time passes, people tend to forget the important lessons that come from them. I had the honour of speaking at the D-Day memorial again this year. For those hundreds of thousands of soldiers present on June 6 in 1944 that is a day they will never forget but if I were to guess I would say that this year across our country less people came to services to remember that anniversary than the number of those that lost their lives for us on the beaches on that one day. On Remembrance Day, the Legion and the surviving WWI and WWII veterans remind us of God’s salvation in the midst of the horrors of war, lest we forget. It is no coincidences that since the Cold War has ended and as more and more of our veterans pass away that there are more wars in our world now than ever before. Did you know that from the end of the Cold War -1989 or 1990, until the end of the twentieth century there were more wars in that one decade than there were in the whole rest of the century prior? As people choose to forget God’s salvation, they are not ready and so they seem to put themselves in the midst of calamity. It appears that another generation is cursing itself to experience anew the same horrors and calamities from which the LORD has saved previous generations.
As the Israelite families are sitting in their houses awaiting their impending calamity, God warns Moses that they are never to forget this day.[3] They are to remember it forever. They are to tell their children and their children’s children. This should a permanent feature in the school curriculum, so to speak. They are to incorporate some of their Emergency Disaster preparedness plan into a ceremonial dinner and they are not to have any yeast in the house at all for seven days prior and then they are to eat only unleavened flat breads (Exodus 12:17-20, Deuteronomy 16:3). God tells them, Exodus 12:24-27:
“Obey these instructions as a lasting ordinance for you and your descendants. When you enter the land that the Lord will give you as he promised, observe this ceremony. And when your children ask you, ‘What does this ceremony mean to you?’ then tell them, ‘It is the Passover sacrifice to the Lord, who passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt and spared our homes when he struck down the Egyptians.’” Then the people bowed down and worshiped.
A main reason that the Israelite people are to remember this is so that they will not forget what the LORD has done for them in the past and another reason is to wait for a future deliverance. As this Passover ceremony developed over the generations, it came to incorporate an act of ceremonially ‘looking for Elijah’. This is because tradition later stated that Elijah must return before the Messiah is to come. The Passover isn’t just looking back to God’s deliverance of the Israelites from the Angel of Death; it is also looking forward to God, through Jesus, delivering all of mankind from Sin and Death (cf. Exodus 34:25; Leviticus 23:5-6; Numbers 28:16-17; Deuteronomy 16:16; 2 Chronicles 30:13, 21; 35:1, 17; Ezekiel 45:21; Ezra 6; Ezekiel 45:21; Matthew 26:17; Mark 14:12; Luke 22:1, 7; John 2:13, 23; 6:4; 11:55). Biblical Scholar Norman Theiss reminds us “Jesus construed his last supper with the twelve disciples as the fulfillment of God's plan to inaugurate a new Passover meal.”[4] Jesus, when He is celebrating the Passover with his disciples, generations later, utters the very important words, “Do this in remembrance of me.” (Luke 22:19, 1 Corinthians 11:24).[5] This is, I think, a big reason why God wanted the Passover ceremony etched so deeply in the minds of humanity for so long because just as the when the Egyptians gave up their firstborn sons, God saved His people through the blood of the Passover lamb; so also when God offered up His firstborn son –Jesus Christ – He provided salvation for us all (May we all we choose to accept it!), through the blood of the Lamb (cf. John 3:16; cf. also TSA doc. 6).
This is the most important event in the history of the whole world: The death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. God, through the giving of His only begotten Son has made it – just like with Exodus and the Angel of Death – so that none of us need to perish but each of us can experience salvation through Christ Jesus our Lord. This is important to remember. Jesus pointed out that the Passover ceremony points to Himself (Matthew 26:27-30, Mark 14:12-26, Luke 22:7-28).[6] The early Christians would celebrate Christ’s death and resurrection and the fact that Christ has saved us from Sin and Death with a meal every time they came together (1 Corinthians 11:17-34, cf. 2 Peter 2:13, Jude 1:12). Later the churches summed up this meal of remembrance with a ceremonial act of eating a piece of bread or a wafer and of drinking some wine or grape juice from a common cup or little personal cups. They would do this to remember that Christ saves us from Sin and Death just like He saved the Israelites from the Angel of Death. In The Salvation Army, traditionally, we have held that every meal should be a meal held in remembrance of Christ. As such, we used to always not only ask the Lord’s blessing at the commencement of the meal but we used to return thanks at the conclusion of the meal just as Jesus and his disciples would have done when they participated in Seder meals in the first century C.E. In The Salvation Army, we also have the Mercy Seat and the Holiness Table. When you see people come forward here, it is our way of remembering the salvation that Christ has provided for the whole world (It can also provide a venue for someone to take advantage of that offered salvation for the very first time!) Coming to the Mercy Seat is an act of remembering what the Lord has done for us.
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Today, We are going to do something a little bit different. Instead of singing a concluding song before we leave, Susan is going to play the piano quietly here and I am going to invite everyone up to the Mercy Seat or Holiness Table on this Canada Day to take a card with a verse on it, in remembrance of Christ and what He has done for this nation and what He has done for us. There are three cards.
q One with John 3:16 –the ultimate Passover verse- on it, “For God so loved the world, that He gave his Only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
q One with Hebrews 11:16, the verse from the Order of Canada, “But now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for He hath prepared for them a city.”
q And one card with the verse from Canada’s Motto, Psalm 72:8, “He [The LORD] shall have dominion also from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth.”
I ask us as we exit the sanctuary now to stop at the Mercy Seat or the Holiness Table, pick up a card, and read it quietly or pray it back to the Lord. Then take it with you as you leave and put it in your wallet or somewhere else and every time you see it this week, I encourage you to remember what the Lord has done.
Jesus says, “do this in remembrance of me.” God asks us to remember. Our Lord tells us not to forget, so I encourage each of us to come forward to the Mercy Seat, take a card, read or pray a verse, thank the Lord for His mercy and for the price He paid on our behalf. Now please come, take one of these little verses in remembrance of Jesus and how God has saved us all from Death, just like He saved the Hebrews so many years ago.
In Jesus’ Name, Come.
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* Click here to read a condensed version of the homily by Captain Michael Ramsay presented to Swift Current corps of The Salvation Army, 06 July 2014: http://sheepspeaks.blogspot.ca/2014/07/exodus-1224-28-remember-today.html
[1] Cf. Walter C. Kaiser Jr., The Expositor's Bible Commentary, Pradis CD-ROM:Exodus/Exposition of Exodus/I. Divine Redemption (1:1-18:27)/E. The Passover (12:1-28)/1. Preparations for the Passover (12:1-13), Book Version: 4.0.2. for more detailed list.
[2] R. Alan Cole, Exodus: An Introduction and Commentary. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1973 (Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries 2), S. 113: In the evening: literally ‘between the two evenings’. Jewish scholars are not agreed as to the exact meaning. The phrase is also used of the time for the regular evening sacrifice (Exod. 29:39) and of the time for lighting the lamps in the meeting-tent (Exod. 30:8). The orthodox piety of Pharisaic Judaism understood the meaning as being between the time in the afternoon when the heat of the sun lessens (say 3 or 4 p.m.) and sunset. Other groups preferred the time between sunset and dark, or other similar explanations.
[3] Thomas W. Mann, “Passover: The Time of Our Lives.” Interpretation 50, no. 3 (July 1, 1996): 240-250. ATLASerials, Religion Collection, EBSCOhost (accessed June 28, 2012), 241-242: The Passover narrative is arguably the most important section of the entire book because it is primarily here that the experience of exodus is communicated not simply as a moment in historical time (in the past) but as a perennially recurring moment in the present life of those for whom the story is sacred.
[4] Norman Theiss, "The Passover Feast of the New Covenant." Interpretation 48, no. 1 (January 1, 1994): 17-35. ATLASerials, Religion Collection, EBSCOhost (accessed June 28, 2012), 17: In the eyes of the first three evangelists and Paul, Jesus construed his last supper with the twelve disciples as the fulfillment of God's plan to inaugurate a new Passover meal. In this new meal, Jesus interpreted his death as a new Exodus in which the new people of God were liberated from all that enslaves them and freed to serve God in holy living.
[5] Leon Morris, Luke: An Introduction and Commentary. Downers Grove, IL : InterVarsity Press, 1988 (Tyndale New Testament Commentaries 3), S. 320: Strictly the feast of Unleavened Bread was distinct from the Passover (Num. 28:16f.). But the two occurred together and they could be regarded as the same festival. Josephus sometimes speaks of them as distinct but, like Luke, he can give the same name to both (Antiquities xiv. 21). Walter C. Kaiser Jr., The Expositor's Bible Commentary, Pradis CD-ROM:Exodus/Exposition of Exodus/I. Divine Redemption (1:1-18:27)/E. The Passover (12:1-28)/2. Preparations for the Unleavened Bread (12:14-20), Book Version: 4.0.2 : The OT uses both names to refer to the same feast: "Passover Feast" in Exodus 34:25; Ezekiel 45:21; and "Feast of Unleavened Bread" in Deuteronomy 16:16; 2 Chronicles 30:13, 21; Ezra 6:22. Yet the two rites are treated separately, even if in sequence, in Leviticus 23:5-6; Numbers 28:16-17; 2 Chronicles 35:1, 17; Ezra 6; Ezekiel 45:21 (likewise the NT uses this twofold designation for the same feast: pascha in John 2:13, 23; 6:4; 11:55 et al., while azymos is used in Matt 26:17; Luke 22:1, 7; cf. Mark 14:12).
[6] Norman Theiss, "The Passover Feast of the New Covenant." Interpretation 48, no. 1 (January 1, 1994): 17-35. ATLASerials, Religion Collection, EBSCOhost (accessed June 28, 2012); Cf. RCH Lenski, The Interpretation of St. Mark’s Gospel, (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Augsburg Publishing House, 1964), 613.
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