My dear friend and celebrated scholar, Dr. Monica A. Coleman sent me a link to a blog by the Rev. J. Mary Luti who is pondering the question of Christians celebrating Seders.
http://sicutlocutusest.com/2014/04/11/no-christian-seders-please/
This is a thoughtful and well argued piece and I actually agree with most of her assertions but I think the topic requires further imagination.
First, the Seder as we have come to know it is not the precise meal Jesus celebrated with his disciples on Good Friday. Seders did not begin to develop until after the destruction of the Temple, 70 C.E. But it is likely that Jesus was remembering the Exodus event in some fashion as the festival is prescribed in Exodus 12:14, “This day shall be a day of remembrance for you. You shall celebrate it as a festival to the Lord; throughout your generations you shall observe it as a perpetual ordinance.”
At that meal Jesus invited us to another act of remembering in what we now celebrate as our communion meal. The Eucharist, for Christians, is an act of remembering spiritual liberation. That being said, I am not sure if it would be appropriate to insert Communion into a Seder celebration. But if we did make that addition it would be adding our story to the story of our ancestors- which every haggadah (telling) I have ever had the privilege to read or share in encourages the practitioners to do.
Rev. Luti also argues that ritual originates and arises from a community’s shared experience. As Christians, she asserts, we cannot celebrate a Seder out of anything like the lived experience of Jews. I would respond with both ‘yes’ and ‘no’. Yes, we cannot, nor should we attempt to claim that our lived experience ‘remotely resembles’ the lived experience of Jews. But if scripture is our shared story, and indeed a universal story, then it is also our story to tell. (I would note here that not all Christians are white and privileged. And those who are white and/or privileged, confront the pharaoh within when telling the Exodus story.)
As pastor of a progressive, feminist church (note the orange on the Seder plate) with a community of women and men, many races, gender identifications and sexual orientations, the Seder is a time of remembering Godde’s promises, given and fulfilled, and Godde’s call for us to live into freedom. In the remembering and telling the story each year we are encouraged, renewed, challenged and sent forth with hope.
I agree that the celebration of the Seder meal should never supplant the Exodus story with the Christian story as the ‘conclusion’ of Godde’s activity in history. The point of the Seder is to remember who we are, to remember Godde’s intention, desire and liberating acts for humanity, to own the places where we participate in our own oppression and the oppression of others, and to depart with the hope of Godde’s continued redemption of humankind.
It is not a Christo-centric story. Neither is a story exclusive to Jews. It is our story, wherever we find ourselves in it. It is a story that brings both judgment and hope. It speaks to Godde’s movement in history and to the journey of the community of faith and of individual souls. It frames for us an understanding of who Godde is and how Godde acts. In the telling of our story each year, we learn as we hear and speak the words, listen with our bodies when we eat the lessons, and sing with our hearts as we insert our personal journeys and lives into the story. This ritual returns us to spiritual center.
If Christians can celebrate a Seder meal in those ways then so we should for it opens us to greater understandings and deeper experiences. If we hear echoes of Jesus’ words for us to remember him in the story, then let our hearts be open to ways the Exodus journey might illuminate those words.