A Sermon by Peter Bolland
Good morning St. Paul’s. I’m very grateful to be here before you today, as one of you. And a very special thank you to our Cathedral Dean, the Very Reverend Penny Bridges for her invitation to speak with you this morning.
Yes, Penny invited me here, but if I say anything upsetting, the fault is entirely mine.
Email me, not her. peterbolland@cox.net
Now I was very excited when I first saw the scriptural passages in today’s liturgy, because here, in our reading from the Hebrew Bible, from the Book of Exodus, we get the origin story of the most foundational figure in the entire Judeo-Christian tradition—Moses.
Yes Abraham before him was a very big deal. But Moses is really where the story, in many ways, begins. And here today, we have the beginning of his story.
And as a professor of mythology, religious studies, and philosophy, I can’t help but notice that Moses’s story is the archetypal Hero’s Journey.
So what is the hero’s journey, and what does it have to do with us?
In 1949 the great scholar of mythology and comparative religion Joseph Campbell published his first book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces where he suggested that the hero’s journey narrative is a universal archetype, found in all cultures and all centuries, and told again and again. The surface details shift, but beneath the surface there is a core narrative that never varies, and Campbell mapped out the stages of this universal journey.
The hero comes from obscure origins, leaves their known world, is raised apart from their family of origin, goes through a series of ordeals, and somehow rises up to claim the boon that moves the world a little closer to the ideal.
The story of Moses is a hero’s journey, and Abraham before him. And Jesus, and Buddha, and Muhammad, and Gilgamesh, and Frodo, and Harry Potter, and Luke Skywalker, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer—and you.
Because even though we’re used to looking outside ourselves for the hero, Campbell’s most powerful assertion is this—that each of us is the hero of our own lives.
That all of the hero’s journey stories are really our story. They are mirrors held up for our deepest reflection.
So as we consider the story of Moses, we are invited to ask ourselves, what is my work? What must I leave behind in order to be of service, in order to become who I really am?
The next thing I notice in this Moses story is that this is an enslavement story, told from the point of view of the enslaved, which would make this story illegal in Florida, Texas, and a dozen other states. There, children would instead be learning about the nobility of the enslavers, the superiority of their culture, and about their beneficent rule over the enslaved, and how the Hebrews through their bondage were gaining valuable life-skills like pyramid building.
(Oh no, he’s getting political!) Again, peterbolland@cox.net
And then next thing I notice about the Moses story is how political it is.
I’ve spoken in churches 100 times, and I’m nearly always invited back. But I’m often cautioned by sensible church leaders to “not get political,” and I take that to heart. And I agree, the pulpit cannot, by law, be a place where candidates or specific ballot measures can be championed or denigrated. So I won’t do any of that, by name anyway.
But I notice that Holy Scripture is not bound by any of those restrictions. Like so much of the rest of the Hebrew Bible, today’s passage from Exodus is startlingly unambiguous and nuance-free on this point—the Egyptians are the bad guys, the Hebrews are their victims, and slavery is an unmitigated evil. This is a clear portrait of a horribly unjust political system with a cruel, inhumane, and autocratic structure, replete with the wholesale slaughter of children.
This is a nightmare scenario from which the system cannot save us, because the system is the nightmare.
As Martin Luther King Jr. wrote from his prison cell, in his immortal “Letter From a Birmingham Jail,” “Everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.”
So when the system that is supposed to protect us is enslaving and exploiting us, what do we do? We have to go around it. We have to look elsewhere for our deliverance.
And the hero’s journey models for us what that looks like.
But here’s the saving grace—literally.
God favors the free.
God’s will is freedom for the oppressed.
God’s will is our freedom.
This text cannot be read any other way.
Enslavement bad, freedom good.
The enslavers, the oppressors, the book burners, have always been, and will always be on the wrong side of history. Even if they appear to be winning at the moment.
The Exodus story has traditionally been read in its own source-tradition—Judaism—as an allegory of ALL of our journeys from bondage to liberation.
Talk about an archetype.
Our task in this body of Christ must be to zoom out, and continue to work for the alleviation of the suffering of all sentient beings, as goes the bodhisattva vow of Buddhism.
To work for the alleviation of the suffering of all sentient beings.
What Hebrew scripture calls justice or righteousness.
To continue to plant trees whose shade we will never rest beneath, and whose fruit we will never taste.
In all of our freedom work, in all of our social justice work, we are working for changes we may never live to see. You know Moses never made it back to Israel.
He wasn’t working for himself.
We are not working for our own freedom. We are working for the freedom of the seventh generation from now.
And all the while working in the consciousness of service, not control, in a stance of humility, not arrogance, in the consciousness of fluidity, not rigidity, embracing our uncertainty, and leaving room for God in all of our efforts. As Gandhi said, “It is for us to do the work, but the results are always in God’s hands.”
Or as Krishna told Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, “You have the right to work, but you do not have a right to the fruits of work.”
To work without attachment to outcomes.
And what is it to take action in the consciousness of surrender and faith? To take action in the spirit of renunciation?
It is to realize—to make real—the joy of knowing that when we show up selflessly, without attachment to outcomes, and offer our gifts in service, the ends will take care of themselves. This is the great message of all of the world’s wisdom traditions.
This, in the end, is the message of all the hero’s journey stories too—that it was never about the hero. It was about the way the hero’s selfless sacrifices awakened everyone and everything around them.
Perhaps this is the “living sacrifice” Paul refers to—“to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God…”
This shift, Paul claims, is to be “transformed by the renewing of your minds.”
This is Paul’s exhortation to each of us, to experience metanoia, or “new mind,” or perhaps, “higher mind.”
As Einstein famously said, “A problem cannot be solved at the same level of consciousness that created it.”
It is not answers to our questions we want—it is to move past the place where our questions have power over us.
It is not solutions to our problems we want—it is to move past the place where our problems have power over us.
This is the Exodus of Moses, this is the hero’s journey, this is our journey out of the bondage of old thinking, and toward the liberation of metanoia.
To be, as Paul says, “transformed by a renewing of our minds.”
And I’ll close with Paul’s closing passage—his favorite analogy, each of us as members of one body. And that we each have “gifts that differ according to the grace given us.”
In other words, none of us alone has ownership of the solution. We are fingers on one hand, strings on one lute, drops of water in one life-giving river.
Yes, our unique individual lives have infinite significance.
But our deeper meaning lies in our relationships with one another, and with the nameless, sacred source coursing through everything as everything.
And on the hero’s journey of our own lives, just as in all the classic hero’s tales, “the trials we endure introduce us to our strengths.” Our suffering burns away from us all that is inauthentic, all that is false, all that is second-hand, all that offends the soul, until we stand stripped, empty, and ready to be the vessel for that grace that we came here to be.
May these words, humbly offered, be prayerfully received, and may their value be measured by the steps of your own hero’s journey.
Amen.
