by Rev. Thomas Disrud

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

Every year during the Passover Seder, the story of the liberation of the Hebrew people is told. It is a familiar story, and also one that reminds us that freedom is almost never easy.

First there’s Moses, chosen to lead. He doesn’t want to lead his people out of slavery, but he really can’t ignore the burning bush. He tries to convince Pharaoh to let his people go, but Pharaoh isn’t going to listen. And it is going to take a while before he does. There’s one plague, and then another and then another. The Nile turning to blood, the frogs, the vermin, the wild beasts, hail, locusts, total darkness. Still no freedom. Finally during the tenth and final plague, when God passes over the homes of the Hebrews and spares their sons, Pharaoh sets them free. He tells Moses and his people to leave immediately. There was no time to prepare. To be reminded of this the unleavened bread is an important part of the Seder remembrance.

But the story doesn’t end there. The Hebrews find themselves in the wilderness. They are free, but they are in a strange land, tired, hungry and thirsty. All of a sudden, captivity doesn’t look so bad. At least there they knew what each day would bring. They had a few conveniences that weren’t around now. Captivity, they come to learn, wasn’t all that bad.

And that is such an important part of the story. Freedom is not always as great as it might first appear. It can bring with it risk, maybe danger, and, most of all, the unknown. With freedom we are asked to take responsibility in ways that we have not been asked to take before.

Most of us, I expect, don’t spend a whole lot of time reflecting on just how it is that we are free—or how it is that we are not free. We go about the tasks of living—buying the groceries, getting the kids off to school, doing our work, tending to our volunteer assignments, keeping in touch with those in our circle. We watch as one season passes into another season and as one chapter of our lives passes into another.

In the Passover story, we are reminded that the liberation was not just something that happened way back in history to the Hebrews. The Passover story is told every year because every year it is a matter of not only remembering the release from slavery in Egypt, but also remembering that every generation has ways that it is still enslaved. Each one of us needs to ask how we are free, and also how we are held captive.

Captivity comes in many forms. We are held captive by the violence in our world, in our own community, in the movies and television that we watch. We are held captive when not everyone has the same opportunities that everyone else has, when not everyone has access to the kind of education that another person has or when one person can get a good-paying job and another person cannot. We are all in captivity when one couple can marry legally and another couple cannot. And there are very personal ways that we are held in captivity, like when we let old hurts keep us from being in good relationship with others around us.

And then there’s the way that we, as Americans, can be held in captivity by the relative comfort most of us live in. We get attached to our things. In having what we do, we don’t want to lose it. We want to make sure our comfort will continue.

So often we really don’t feel all that free and that plays itself out in apathy, in depression, in cynicism, in the ways that we seem so isolated from other people. And in the end we may not feel like we have a whole lot of power in the world.

Some of these issues seemed to present themselves with an interesting juxtaposition of news stories this week. There was yet another police shooting here in Portland and of course the awful news from Iraq. And at the same time was the story about hundreds of people who lined up to try out for the hit TV show “The Apprentice,” where you put yourself forward for the chance to run one of Donald Trump’s companies for a year for $250,000 salary—and, of course, to more likely be one of the many people told that you’re fired. I will say that I enjoyed the story of the first two people in line at the tryout. They were able to make an immediate profit by selling their places in line. I expect they came out ahead of most of the people there.

I have to say that part of me wouldn’t mind making all that money in a year, but I don’t know that I would want to pay the price that would come with it including the public humiliation that would likely come as millions of viewers look on. We want more and more and that, too, is a way of being held captive.

And yet people come wanting what it is we have. There was a series this week on public television entitled “The New Americans.” The series profiled the lives of immigrants coming here from places including the Dominican Republic, the Occupied Territories, Africa, India and Mexico. People were coming to the United States looking for opportunity and to be free in ways that they are not able to be free in their country of origin. But what they found here was a difficult road. One the opportunities may not be what they have been at other times, but they faced all kinds of obstacles.

But change and freedom can be hard. The familiar, however difficult, had its advantages. A young Palestinian woman, who faced all kinds of hassles where she lived in the Occupied Territories, struggled here in America to find her way into the culture. When asked where she would rather be, she said she didn’t know, but that the struggles there were struggles, but none-the-less familiar.

I was struck watching the series that most of us come from immigrant stock. We once had ancestors who came here from somewhere else. But it is so easy over time to forget about our history, to see where we have come from. To imagine that our people were once strangers in a strange land.

One person’s freedom is very much connected to everyone else’s freedom. It may be too often that freedom simply comes to mean my own freedom. Freedom from intrusion, freedom from want. All that is important but there is also a way in our comfort that we can so easily lose sight of how our person is so much connected to another person. What I have may well come at a cost, but what does that cost mean? How do I see my own life in the larger context of history and how will my actions affect that larger movement towards freedom?

This movement towards our own, and the larger community’s struggle for freedom are at the core of what the church is about. It is about coming to see how what I do is so very much connected to something larger than myself. It is not just about me but about all those I’m connected with. It is about how my actions affect the planet we all live on. It is about how my actions affect the generation that will follow.

In our Unitarian Universalist principles, we are called to enter into a free and responsible search for truth and meaning. Sometimes it is said that we can believe whatever we want as Unitarian Universalists, but in fact, that leaves out the responsible part. We are not only free to discern what we believe, but we are also responsible then, to live that belief out in the world. That, in the end, is the trickier part of freedom.

The freedoms that we have in our lives come because others have come before us, they come because others saw beyond themselves. Our own lives are very much grounded in all that we inherit. In remembering those who have gone before us, our immediate ancestors but also those we will never know, we see our own lives as part of a long progression. What we do today affects the future just as much as what we do is affected by the past. What they did, for better or for worse, very much becomes part of our story. We come to see that others took risks, sometimes they failed badly, but sometimes opened up doors.

Writer Ian Frazier, in his book On the Rez, tells the story of a young basketball player named SuAnne Big Crow. She is part of the Oglala Sioux and they live on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

Frazier sets the context of the story by talking about the barriers that young Native Americans face. Many people, he says, who live in the cities or towns near reservations treat their Indian neighbors decently; but some don’t. In cities like Denver and Minneapolis and Rapid City, police have been known to harass Indian teenagers and rough up Indian drunks and needlessly stop and search Indian cars. Local banks whose deposits include millions in tribal funds sometimes charge Indians higher loan interest rates than they charge whites.

When teams from Pine Ridge play non-Indian teams, the question of race is always present. When Pine Ridge is the visiting team, usually their hosts are courteous, and the players and fans have a good time. But Pine Ridge coaches know that occasionally at away games their kids will be insulted, their fans will not feel welcome, the host gym will be dense with hostility, and the referees will call fouls on Indian players every chance they get.

One place where Pine Ridge teams used to get harassed regularly was in the high school gymnasium in Lead, South Dakota. Lead is a town of about 3,200 northwest of the Pine Ridge Reservation. It is laid out among the mines that are its main industry, and low, wooded mountains circle the town. The school’s only gym was small, with tiers of gray-painted concrete on which the spectator benches descended from just below the steel painted roof to the very edge of the basketball court—an arrangement that greatly magnified the interior noise.

In the fall of 1988, the Pine Ridge Lady Thorpes went to Lead to play a basketball game. SuAnne Big Crow was a freshman, 14 years old. Getting ready in the locker room, the Pine Ridge girls could hear the din from the fans from Lead. They were yelling fake Indian war cries, a “woo-woo-woo” sound. The usual plan for the pre-game warm-up was for the visiting team to run onto the court in a line, take a lap or two around the floor, shoot some baskets, and then go to their bench at courtside. After that, the home team would come out and do the same, and then the game would begin. Usually the Lady Thorpes lined up for their entry more or less according to height, which meant that senior Doni De Cory, one of the tallest, went first. As the team waited in the hallway leading from the locker room, the heckling got louder. The Lead fans were yelling epithets like “squaw .” Some were waving food stamps, a reference to the reservation receiving federal aid. Others yelled, “Where’s the cheese?”—a joke that, if Indians were lining up, it must be to get commodity cheese. The Lead high school band had joined in, with fake Indian drumming and a fake Indian tune. Doni De Cory looked out the door and told her teammates, “I can’t handle this.” SuAnne Big Crow, the freshman, quickly offered to go first in her place. She was so eager that Doni became suspicious. “Don’t embarrass us,” Doni told her. SuAnne said, “I won’t. I won’t embarrass you.” Doni gave her the ball and SuAnne stood first in line.

She came running onto the court dribbling the basketball, with her teammates running behind. On the court, the noise was deafeningly loud. SuAnne went right down the middle; but instead of running a full lap, she suddenly stopped when she got to the center court. Her teammates were taken by surprise, and some of them bumped into one another. Their coach, at the rear of the line, did not know why they had stopped. SuAnne turned to Doni De Cory and tossed her the ball. Then she stepped into the jump-ball circle at center court, in front of the Lead fans. She unbuttoned her warm-up jacket, took it off, draped it over her shoulders, and began to do the Lakota shawl dance. SuAnne knew all the traditional dances—she had competed in many powwows as a little girl—and the dance she chose is a young woman’s dance, graceful and modest and show-offy all at the same time.

“I couldn’t believe it—she was powwowin’, like, ‘get down!’” Doni De Cory recalled. “And then she started to sing.” SuAnne began to sing in Lakota, swaying back and forth in the jump-ball circle, doing the shawl dance, using her warm-up jacket for a shawl. The crowd went completely silent. “All the stuff the Lead fans were yelling—it was like she reversed it somehow,” a teammate said. In the sudden quiet, all you could hear was her Lakota song. SuAnne stood up, dropped her jacket, took the ball from Doni De Cory, and ran a lap around the court dribbling expertly and fast. The fans began to cheer and applaud. She sprinted to the basket, went up in the air, and laid the ball through the hoop, with the fans cheering loudly now. Of course, Pine Ridge went on to win the game.

The writer of the story says that since that time, the games have never been the same and that the Lady Thorpes now receive a much warmer welcome.

Liberation comes in many places, on all kinds of levels, and it is all part of the history that we share. None of us can know what we will be called to do in the next year. We cannot know what the world will be like one year from now or ten or fifty years from now. And we cannot know where we will be in midst of that change. We cannot know when we might be called to the front of the line. Our own stories very much connect with a larger movement towards freedom—and that dance that happens with oppressions in our own time.

What does freedom mean for us this year? What are we called to do in the world? How are we free and how are we not free?

Each one of us has our own particular path that we are called to follow. We have our principles that guide us. We each have our own particular set of gifts that we bring. We are all part of a larger living history. We are called to act, to find our own freedom and the freedom of the larger community.

One month ago, when the news broke that Multnomah County was going to be issuing marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples, it was a time that felt historic. It felt new and wonderful and different and strangely familiar all at the same time. I was very proud to be connected to this faith community at this time in history.

I was aware, in the midst of all this, that it all felt kind of bittersweet, that there were those who had imagined such a day but did not live to see it. That there was so much more that needed to happen to open the doors to others who are not free to be themselves. But I was reminded that all of us are living in history. And that all of us are part of that history. We are called to see that our story is a much larger story. And that when change happens somewhere it happens in our lives and that when oppression happens, that, too, happens to us.

After the Hebrew slaves had been freed, they headed out to the Red Sea. It was then that Pharaoh changed his mind and decided to send his army after them. There they were, blocked by the sea. One Jewish legend goes that even after Moses said words to part the sea, the waters did not part until the first Hebrew placed a foot in the water.

Every day we are asked to place ourselves in the path of liberation. In these days, filled with beauty, may we be mindful of that beauty, may we be mindful of our freedom. May we be mindful of all that is possible and all that needs to be done.

Prayer

Great spirit, hold us in all of our days. For all that we have inherited, we give thanks. Though all our troubles, help us to remember that we are not alone, but part of your magnificent and fragile creation. Help us to be guided in the spirit, having faith that we will find our way home. Amen.

Benediction

In your life, may you live in your freedom. May you know love, may you know joy, may you know hope in all of your days.

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Copyright 2004, Rev. Thomas Disrud.  All rights reserved.