The Ongoing Exodus:
Lenten Series Highlights
For thousands of years, communities have drawn wisdom and courage from the Hebrew stories of escape from enslavement. The burning bush. The plagues. The sea. The manna. The portable tabernacle. These scenes and so many more reward our attention, and during the first three Sunday evenings of Lent, an all-ages group gathered at St. Barnabas to imagine them together. In the late winter of 2025, their promise and encouragement felt as fresh as ever.
To begin the first Sunday evening, we wrote on index cards about our dreams for our lives. We flipped them over. On the other side, we wrote what we sensed to be the divine’s dream for us. Like Moses before the burning bush, each of us faced our own invitation from something perennial, the voice of God, the presence, the Holy Spirit who has compelled people closer to freedom, rest, justice, and liberating love throughout time.
We entered the account of the Hebrew people at a dire moment. Half of us received the role of acting as the soldiers working for the new Pharaoh. We were told to command our friends to make a wall out of piles of mismatched Amazon boxes. Pitted against one another, half of us barking orders to be more productive with less and less useful resources, we could see how this Pharaoh stood for the opposite of God’s promise to Abraham, the promise of rest and flourishing and blessing for all people.
This was the dream we returned to for our second Sunday evening. Poet Abigail Rudibaugh crafted everyone’s postcard dreams into a polyvocal poem that read like a prayer. Participants then escaped down the youth and choir hallway, holding a red rope of protection as the plagues answered Pharaoh’s refusals to let God’s people go. We watched scenes from Ridley Scott’s imagination of the Red Sea miracle. The film conveyed the scale of the situation: thousands of people trapped between certain death by water or certain defeat and return to captivity. The people seemed small. Their legendary leaders seemed even smaller. This only made the divine deliverance bigger.
We sang. People grabbed shakers, drums, and guitars, and we partied to the camp favorite “Pharaoh Pharaoh” and the African American spiritual and civil rights anthem, “O Mary, Don’t You Weep.” We made a joyful noise with lyrics that declared Pharaoh’s defeat again and again. This song went back before the Civil War, and it sang comfort to Jesus’ mother under Roman occupation, as well as Moses’ mother under Egypt. The chorus repeats for all the threatened and dominated parts of our world. Rest and deliverance is the divine dream that will come, that continues to unfold, we trust. We pray. We celebrate.
Our final week brought us to freedom in the wilderness, building a tabernacle and storing the tablets to remember the voices and visions that have shaped us on this journey. We took communion, feasted, and remembered how Jesus of Nazareth too taught and lived the miraculous escape from oppression.
This was an epic dream, and one that each of us experienced in our own parts of the epic story. As Lent continues, may we help each other and all of creation move toward this timeless vision of Sabbath rest, peace, and abundance together.
