The Bible Binge - Bake me a Story (Exodus 13:1-16)

A Visit from St Nicholas

Last night, Emily and I watched one of the big Christmas movie classics and it includes a scene of a father reading Twas the Night Before Christmas to his kids. That scene in the movie captures the origin story for that poem. In 1822, a professor of Divinity and Religion at New York’s General Theological Seminary sat down and wrote the poem entitled A Visit from St. Nicholas as a gift for his six children. Moore read it to his children that Christmas and every Christmas after that. Much of what is Christmas about our culture can trace their origins back to that poem. Fathers reading stories to children year after year had a profound impact on our culture.

A Story Culture

We love to tell stories. We live in a culture, in fact, a world, where people are absolutely bent on telling their story. Instagram says there are more than a billion stories uploaded to their platform every day. TikTok is at least that. SnapChat says there are 5 billion snaps on its platform every day. When you add Facebook Reels and YouTube, the numbers are staggering. Some social marketing agencies believe there are upwards of 20 billion video uploads on these platforms every day. That’s just video. That doesn’t begin to include all the photos we upload. People love to tell stories and it’s never been easier to tell your story to more people. And that has had an impact on our culture as well.

Storytelling is at the heart of our Bible reading for the Bible Binge this week. In fact, the backdrop for our Bible talk today is both yesterday’s and tomorrow’s daily reading on the Bible Binge chart. What kind of stories do you tell about your own lives? When you pass, what do you want to be on the funeral home’s video slideshow? When it comes to your salvation, you are given a story and placed into a story. You have a story. It has always been this way. We are given a snapshot of what our story looks like in Exodus Chapter 13, the chapter we are to read tomorrow in the Bible Binge.

Exodus: The Story

To get a sense of just what is happening in chapter 13, we have to go back to the beginning of the book of Exodus. The book of Exodus is a book that is about Israel’s exodus from Egypt. They have been in Egypt for more than 400 years. and God says it is time for Israel to pack up and go back to the Promised Land. I think one of the most amazing things about the entire Exodus story as Israel leaves Egypt, is that God doesn’t simply rescue his people from slavery. And they were in terrible slavery. The Egyptians did not treat Israel well. God could have, with one word of judgment, destroyed Egypt and freed his people without any of the drama. He could have simply killed Pharaoh, killed the army, killed the Canaanites, and whisked his people into the Promised Land minus the drama and its difficulty. It could have happened all at once, instead of the weeks and months of unfolding circumstances. If we were to trace the timeline, Moses return from Midian to the final deliverance of the people took weeks and months.

But that’s not what God chooses to do. God first sends Egypt a bunch of plagues. The river turns to blood, millions of frogs show up, there’s utter darkness, a bunch of flies and locusts… none of it is good for the Egyptians. What we glean from the divine interpretation of the plagues is that this rescue of God’s people is a rescue of revelation and redemption. Over and over God says he’s doing things his way so that Egypt knows that He is God… that there is no One like him.

God, through the plagues, is providing a drama and an interpretation of that drama that is to be perpetuated throughout the succeeding generations. This story, God’s story, a redemptive story, is unfolding in front of their eyes and it is to be proclaimed again and again to the children.

The First Passover

This becomes more evident when we get to chapters 12 and 13 in the story of the very first Passover and the Festival of the Unleavened Bread. The night of the first Passover still ranks as one of the all time greatest events of all history. Before the night is over, Egypt will be in national mourning, Israel will be in flight, and when it’s all said and done Egypt’s mighty military and its Pharoah will be at the bottom of the Red Sea.

Among God’s instructions to Israel is that they are to make the Passover meal and the Festival of Unleavened Bread perpetual. God’s redemption is to be proclaimed from generation to generation in the Passover meal and the Unleavened Bread. Year after year, they are to come together and sit down at a meal with lamb meat and unleavened bread.

Unleavened bread is bread made without yeast. It is the bread of pilgrims on a journey. Here is what God says through Moses:

Exodus 13:6 “For seven days you must eat unleavened bread, and on the seventh day there is to be a festival to the Lord.”

They are to remember the night when they ate bread without yeast because there was no time to waste, they would be leaving in a hurry. It’s to be a festival, a time of celebration, and in eating the bread they are taken back to that night when Israel was saved from Egypt.

It’s not just the bread. There’s also this. They are to remember the night when the lamb died and the firstborn sons were saved by the death of the lamb and the blood on the doorpost.:

Exodus 13:12–13 “You are to present to the Lord every firstborn male of the womb.. However, you must redeem every firstborn among your sons.”

In Egypt, the lamb died so that the firstborn would live. And that continues every year. Every firstborn animal in the home was to be given as an offering to the priest, and in that way, the firstborn son in the home is considered redeemed. The life of the animal is exchanged for the life of the firstborn. Celebrate the life of your firstborn sons by offering the firstborn animals.

All this may sound odd. A festival for bread without yeast. A celebration for firstborn sons. But there’s this… mentioned twice in this passage: Embedded in the instructions about the perpetual proclamation of God’s redemption of His people and His judgment exacted on the Egyptians is a presumption that a conversation will take place between father and son, between parents and children.

When you are baking your bread without yeast, this is what you say to your children:

Exodus 13:8 “On that day explain to your son, ‘This is because of what the Lord did for me when I came out of Egypt.’

When you are celebrating firstborns, this is what you say to your children:

Exodus 13:14 “In the future, when your son asks you, ‘What does this mean?’ say to him, ‘By the strength of his hand the Lord brought us out of Egypt, out of the place of slavery.”

This is a time to be telling the story… the story of not Israel saving herself by escaping Egypt. This is the story of Israel being saved totally by God’s doing. By the strength of God’s hand. This is all God. We didn’t do this. God did it. God saved us through lambs exchanged for firstborns. That is why we eat this bread and celebrate.

But notice this… this is very, very significant… That’s not just A Story. Look at the language God uses here:

“The LORD Brought us Out of Egypt”.

The Lord Brought Us. The Lord Saved Us. How is it, that an Israelite who is finally in the land of Canaan centuries later, sitting down for the festival of unleavened bread with his family can say, “The Lord Brought us Out of Egypt”, when in fact these parents and their children were not there? Because the reality is that they *were* there. The entire family, through their identity as a nation of Israelites, through the perpetuation of the proclamation, and through the perpetuation of the sacrifice, through the perpetuation of baking bread without yeast, are participants with the previous generations in the grand story of the Exodus.

When Israel was Delivered, We were Delivered

When the kids are asking, the parents are saying, “When Israel was delivered, we were delivered. When God and his destroyer angel spared Israel judgment, they spared us judgment. Whatever happened to them that night, happened to us. When they left Egypt, we left Egypt. When Israel walked through the Red Sea, you walked through the Red Sea. That night was your night. When God saved Israel, God saved you. Their salvation is your salvation.” In the storytelling, the parent’s exodus is the children’s exodus. There is a corporate solidarity in the Passover’s redemptive history that transcends generations.

Year after year, they bake their bread and they tell their story in the festival of the baked bread. When those moments come, as they bake the bread, when the children ask of their parents, “What do we mean by this? What do we mean by the bread? What is the meaning of this lamb on the table?”, this is not a Hans Christian Anderson moment. This isn’t another Tale from the Brothers Grimm. This is not an invention of oral tradition, meant to pass on community values. This is not a morality play about becoming better selves. These stories come from heaven about the redempion and salvation of people. They are of divine origin. Real events in real time and space orchestrated by God himself to save His people. These dramatic stories told by the firelight in the wilderness of the Sinai Peninsula are life-giving gospel to the children who hear them.

And it is their story. This is what God has done FOR THEM. These Israelite sons and daughters hearing the Passover and Exodus story are to see and understand themselves as redeemed of God on that very night. Their identity and their destiny have been altered because of *that* story, which is their story. A self-made people is not the way God wanted Israel, especially Israelite children, to think of their history. Israel could never say, “we got out of Egypt on our own.” And later generations could never say, “that wasn’t ‘us’”. Israel’s posterity was united in word and deed to its forerunners. In the Passover and Feast of the Unleavened Bread, Israel participated in the original Passover event.

This top-down, from the heavens proclamation of life-giving history is an affront to every other culture, including our own. In fact, we do all we can, as post-moderns, to remove ourselves from history by creating our own history as we go. We believe that our history is self-made and because it is so, there is no need to find ourselves somewhere in the past. We create our own identity and our own story. And into that narrative that we are creating for ourselves comes Jesus.

Baptism: Jesus’ story is our story

Guess who’s been reading this Exodus story. The great missionary Paul is writing to some people in a church much like ours. And he is describing for our how we are to think of ourselves in relation to the redemption Jesus has given us. And in Romans 6, this is what he says:

Romans 6:2–5 “How can we who died to sin still live in it? Or are you unaware that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we were buried with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too may walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in the likeness of his death, we will certainly also be in the likeness of his resurrection.”

You hear what he is saying?

In your baptism, when Jesus died, you died. When Jesus rose from the dead, you rose from the dead.

Now, we could spend another hour talking about all that means, but what we need to see here is that Jesus’ story is our story. This is our identity. When Jesus died, I died to sin. The old Adam died. When Jesus rose, I rose with him to live a new life. That is all our in our baptism. We are participants in the grand story of redemption, just like Israel, as Jesus pulls us into His story.

So as we tell this story throughout Advent about this baby in a manger… when you see a nativity set or if you happen to see the live nativity at St Paul… what you’re looking at is your story being proclaimed to you in picture form. That is Jesus for you. Jesus came from heaven on mission for you. His life is your life. His death is your death. His resurrection is your resurrection. That’s your story. That is who you are. That is who Jesus is for you.

Let’s Pray.

The Table

Bake me a story. This is our story. What happened to Jesus is now ours. We participate in the history of salvation every time we gather here and eat. We gather here and Jesus tells us, this is how I have saved you. This is your death. This is your life. This is your salvation. Only Jesus could do this. Our ideas of being self-made end at this table. This is God’s narrative given to us. This is our identity. Forgiven. Redeemed. Right here. Right now.

Benediction

Numbers 6:24–26

May the Lord bless you and protect you;

may the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you;

may the Lord look with favor on you and give you peace.