It was the Passover. Jesus gathered his inner circle in an upper room somewhere in Jerusalem to celebrate. He blessed the wine and the bread, told his followers to drink and eat, that liberation was there for them as it had been for the Jews held in bondage.  

It was not a promise of ease. Forty years in the wilderness followed that escape from bondage across the Sea of Reeds. The Jews were spared that last plague, but not the arduous journey to freedom. 

For the community gathered in that upper room, not just the cross lay ahead, but many decades of persecution before some version of his message would receive official blessing. Safety would be a long time coming. 

The celebration of that Passover long ago is called Maundy Thursday in the Christian tradition. It is one of the waystations of Holy Week, approaching Easter. At First Unitarian, Maundy Thursday is the one time during the year when we dust off the original Communion Silver, purchased by the Ladies Sewing Circle as the first act of commitment to the creation of First Unitarian. 

We cannot gather in-person for that service this year, a second Easter season we will celebrate at a distance, though there is reason for hope that there will not be a third. 

The message of the Maundy Thursday service is drawn from the new commandment (Mandatum Novum) that Jesus gave his disciples at the Passover Seder. “Love one another, as I have loved you.” 

Love and Liberation. May we hold both in our yearning hearts this season. There is no promise of ease. Safety is not guaranteed. The way ahead will test us as we emerge from these Covid days and strive to imagine a better, a fairer, a more loving world than the world that closed down more than a year ago.  

Our spirits will be tested. That is certain. The American justice system is already on trial in Minneapolis. And our political will to search for approaches to true public safety is being tested here in Portland. 

But the promise of love and liberation remains present in the mystery and wonder of rebirth around us and within us. And in the promise that liberation can be real for us, if we choose it. 

This poem by Lynn Ungar focused my reflection this morning: 

The Terrible Blessing of the Journey by Lynn Ungar 

Then you shall take some of the blood, and put it on the door posts and the lintels of the houses . . . and when I see the blood, I shall pass over you, and no plague shall fall upon you to destroy you, when I smite the land of Egypt.  

—Exodus 12: 7, 13 

They thought they were safe 
that spring night; when they daubed 
the doorways with sacrificial blood. 
To be sure, the angel of death 
passed them over, but for what? 
Forty years in the desert 
without a home, without a bed, 
following new laws to an unknown land. 
Easier to have died in Egypt 
or stayed there a slave, pretending 
there was safety in the old familiar. 

But the promise, from those first 
naked days outside the garden, 
is that there is no safety, 
only the terrible blessing 
of the journey. You were born 
through a doorway marked in blood. 
We are, all of us, passed over, 
brushed in the night by terrible wings. 

Ask that fierce presence, 
whose imagination you hold. 
God did not promise that we shall live, 
but that we might, at last, glimpse the stars, 
brilliant in the desert sky. 

Blessings, 

Bill