Exodus 12:1-14

Our story from the Old Testament this morning is the story of Passover. The setting for this story is this: if you remember our Old Testament reading from last week, Moses encounters God in the burning bush that doesn’t burn up. 

“Moses, Moses,” the Lord calls from the burning bush.

“Here I am,” Moses replies. 

To which the Lord says, “take your shoes off, for the ground you are standing on is holy ground.” 

The Lord then gives Moses a job – go back to Egypt and lead my people from slavery to freedom. Moses protests at first, but eventually accepts the Lord’s call on his life. And God promises to be with Moses through thick and thin.

Fast forward a bit. Moses and his brother Aaron go to Pharaoh (the Egyptian king, the most powerful man in the world. And Egypt was the most powerful and prosperous country in the world. But they were not good) to do as the Lord had commanded Moses. With a lot of courage, chutzpah, and I’m sure fear and anxiety they say to Pharoah, “Let my people go.” 

Pharoah scoffs and writes them off. In modern language, you can imagine him saying something like “who are these losers?”. But Moses and Aaron are persistent. They keep going back and demanding to Pharoah “let my people go”. But the Scriptures say that Pharoah’s heart is hardened, meaning he has become even more mean-spirited, cruel, and corrupt than he was before. It’s a spiritual warning for us to guard our hearts and to not let them grow hard and mean-spirited and feast on bitterness, revenge, and corruption when life is hard and we feel we’ve been wronged or owed something.

Unable to get Pharoah to change his mind, the Lord eventually tells Moses and Aaron that it’s time to start getting Pharoah’s attention in a different way. One by one, the Lord sends plagues on the Egyptians to get Pharoah to change his mind and let the Hebrew people, God’s people, go. Water is turned into blood. Frogs come in the millions. Gnats are everywhere. Then a swarm of flies. Then skin boils that cause so much itching and pain. Next, thunder and hail. Then locusts that eat everything. And the ninth plague: darkness so dark ‘that it can be felt’. 

None of this gets the Egyptians and Pharoah to change their minds and free their slaves. Pharaoh and the Egyptians’ hearts only grow harder. It tells us something about what power and privilege do to us as human beings. We’ll hold onto it at all costs because power has a tendency to corrupt someone’s soul if it’s not shared. Think of our own State. We live in a Commonwealth, where no one person has all of the power and money and we have to cooperate as neighbors for the common good, the common shared wealth. But Pharaoh and the Egyptians are about to find out that power and privilege for only the few is not the Lord’s way. In fact, it’s evil, and God does something about it. 

God’s doing something about it comes in the tenth plague. The Lord tells Moses and Aaron to warn Pharoah and the Egyptians that this plague will be the worst of all. Here is Moses’ warning to Pharaoh and the Egyptians:

The Lord says, ‘About midnight I will go through every part of Egypt. Every oldest son in Egypt will die. The oldest son of Pharaoh, who sits on the throne, will die. The oldest son of every female slave, who works at her hand mill, will die. All the male animals born first to their mothers among the cattle will also die. There will be loud crying all over Egypt. It will be worse than it’s ever been before. And nothing like it will ever be heard again. (Exodus 11:4-6)

No surprise here, Pharoah refuses to listen. The Scriptures say that “the Lord made Pharaoh stubborn. He wouldn’t let the people of Israel go out of his country.” Why would the Lord make Pharoah stubborn? Maybe the Lord makes people stubborn as a consequence for their wrongheadedness and wrongdoing. Almost like ‘if that’s what you want, have at it, but the consequences are on you’.

This is where our reading picks up this morning. The Lord tells Moses and Aaron to get the congregation, the community of Israel ready for this and ready for God to free them. It is the Passover. They are to take a good, healthy lamb (and share with their neighbors if they need to), slaughter it, and then take some of the blood and smear it around the door to their home. The blood will be a sign to the Lord and the Lord will pass over their house. Then they are to roast the lamb over fire and eat it with bread made without yeast and bitter herbs. They are to eat everything and burn what remains. And they are supposed to eat it fast and be ready to go with their walking stick in their hand. It’s the night they will start their journey to freedom. 

But for the Egyptians, for the world’s superpower, the Passover is the night of the Lord’s judgement on them for their cruelty and putting power and profit over people. On the night of the passover, the Lord will go through Egypt and here is how the Scriptures puts it: “I will pass through the land of Egypt that night,” says the Lord, “and I will strike down every firstborn in the land of Egypt, from human to animal, and on all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgement.”

Stunned and grieving the death of his own firstborn son, Pharoah relents and allows the people of Israel to leave Egypt. They’re free. However, realizing that he just let all his free labor go and thus his wealth, Pharoah changes his mind and he sends the Egyptian army after them. The Exodus story comes to a dramatic climax at the Red Sea. The Hebrew people are pinned up against the Red Sea and the Egyptian army is in hot pursuit when God makes a way where there didn’t seem to be a way. God parts the waters of the Red Sea and the Hebrew people can safely cross and the Egyptian army is defeated by drowning. They’re free at last.

This is one of the most important stories in the Scriptures for our Jewish friends because it tells the story of what God has done for their ancestors. God freed them and delivered them from slavery in Egypt. But when our Jewish friends celebrate Passover they don’t tell the story as if it were something that only happened in the past, in history books. They tell it in the present tense, meaning that deliverance from captivity is something God is still at today. God is the One who frees, saves, and delivers people from suffering and evil.  

Another story about God delivering people from suffering and evil. This time from the Civil Rights Movement here in America. I read about this in a book called The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ and in a sermon by the Methodist pastor, Jason Micheli.

In 1963, at the height of the civil rights movement, Robert Spike was the head of the Commission on Religion and Race for the National Council of Churches. Spike traveled to Savannah, Georgia that summer where the young black leader Andrew Young was leading mass meetings to prepare for dangerous night marches in order to win voting rights. Hundreds of black protestors in the city had already gone to jail.

Robert Spike was white.

Thus, his position at the Commission permitted him to witness firsthand what few other white people had the opportunity to experience— how the movement’s so-called mass meetings, in reality, functioned as services of Christian worship. In other words, the movement was a movement of the living God.

The meetings impressed Robert Spike for their impassioned preaching of the gospel and their explosive singing of praise. Spike— who had a theological education — wrote back to his colleagues at the Commission on Religion and Race:

“I had the strongest feeling that I was in Egypt on the night of the Passover before the Red Sea parted…”

In his own memoir about the civil rights movement, Andrew Young likewise hearkens back to the Lord’s rescue of captive Israel in order to recall the parting of the waters in Birmingham, Alabama in 1964. Young writes in An Easy Burden:

“Easter Sunday dawned with Martin [Luther King] in jail…We planned a march from New Pilgrim Baptist Church to the city jail for the afternoon of Easter Sunday…By the time church ended some five thousand people had gathered…dressed in their best Sunday clothes.”

The protestors marched in a festive spirit until suddenly they encountered in front of them policemen with dogs and firemen with hoses, blocking their path. The Democratic Commissioner of Public Safety, “Bull” Connor— a Methodist lay leader— bellowed at the marches through his megaphone, “Turn this group around!”

Five thousand people immediately stopped and stood still as they awaited instruction from their leaders.

As Andrew Young recalls:

“Wyatt Walker and I were leading the march. I can’t say we knew what to do. I know I didn’t want to turn the march around… I asked the people to get down on their knees and offer a prayer… Suddenly Rev. Charles Billups, one of the most faithful and fearless leaders of the old Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, jumped up and hollered, “The Lord is with this movement! Off your knees! We’re going on!”

Stunned at first, Bull Connor yelled, “Stop ’em, stop ’em!” But none of the police moved a muscle… Even the police dogs that had been growling and straining at their leashes were now perfectly calm… I saw one fireman, tears in his eyes, just let the hose drop at his feet like it had been struck dead. Our people marched right between the red fire trucks, singing, “I want Jesus to walk with me.” Bull Connor’s policemen had refused to arrest us, his firemen had refused to hose us, and his dogs had refused to bite us. It was quite a moment to witness, the Lord on the move, on our side.

Andrew Young remembers one of the marchers remembering the story of Passover:

“I’ll never forget one old woman who got up from her knees and put her hands down no longer afraid and became ecstatic when she marched through the barricades. As she passed through, she shouted, “Great God Almighty done parted the Red Sea one mo’ time!” She passed through the barricades boldly, confident the Lord was fighting for them— indeed that he had been doing so all along.”

Maybe the word from the Lord to us this morning is a word that is old, but still needed: God delivers people from suffering and evil to freedom and life. It’s in the prayer that we say every Sunday that Jesus taught: “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.”  

Sometimes when we look back at the big stories in the Bible like the Passover, it can seem really important but not exactly relevant to our individual lives. Few, very likely none of us, have experienced slavery like the Hebrews did at the hands of the Egyptians. Similarly, few, very likely none of us, have experienced the kind of racism that America inflicted on African Americans. The Passover and the Civil Rights Movement are big stories of God delivering people from suffering and evil. 

But God doesn’t just do big things. He also does less noticeable things and delivers and works out salvation for us too.

When Jesus was sharing his last supper with the disciples, it was the Passover meal. It’s where we get the Christian sacrament of communion. Jesus identifies himself as the Passover lamb who is slaughtered to save the people. “This is my body, broken for you” Jesus says about the bread. And about the wine, he says “This is my blood, shed for you.”

The Christian view of the world is that we are all in captivity to something. The old school way of thinking about this are the seven deadly sins – pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, sloth. But, we can also be in captivity to feeling like we’re not good enough, like we need to always be entertained, or that there is nowhere for us to belong, or captive to our technology, or gambling, or pornography, or needing to feel better than others, or that it’s up to us to do everything as if the world rested on our shoulders and it was our job to keep all of the plates in the air.

The Christian message is that the same God who delivered the Hebrew slaves from slavery in Egypt to freedom is the same God who was in Jesus Christ, who gave himself over to sin and evil to die on the cross, and and when it appeared that the powers that be in the world would win and Egypt and Pharoah would have their way with the whole world, God parted the Red Sea again and raised Jesus in power to the glory of God, and that he is now Lord of all, the living and the dead. It means that Christ has frees us from whatever captivity we find ourselves in and delivers us to a whole new way of life where faith, hope, and love and prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance govern our way of life and not sin, death, and oppression.

Amen.

Works Cited

Micheli, Jason. “The Promise at the Parting of the Waters.” Tamed Cynic, Substack, https://jasonmicheli.substack.com/p/the-promise-at-the-parting-of-the. Accessed 04 09 2026.

Rutledge, Fleming. The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2017.