The Maundy Thursday sermon: A new commandment

 When death came it was an invisible enemy, striking down adults, children, animals. It must have been like God's destroying angel, invading bedrooms and bomb shelters, catching the first responders as they raced to save lives and in the process lost their own. There was no Passover for the people of Khan Sheikhoun in Syria.

And on Palm Sunday, as Christians across the world sang Hosanna, "Save us Lord," the bombs exploded in Tanta and Alexandria, Egypt, one in a front pew of the church, the other outside the door, killing and maiming dozens, not only the faithful and their children, but also the professionals assigned to protect them from just such an attack. No Passover protection there either, for the Coptic Christians in their holy places.

When the people of God escaped from slavery under Pharaoh, they knew they were not yet safe. Pharaoh, an unpredictable, dangerously volatile leader, had changed his mind before, and he would probably change it again. It took a national catastrophe, the killing of the first-borns, to distract Pharaoh enough that he finally let the people go. The headlines were filled with terror and death: the mass departure of the Hebrew slaves wasn't the big news of the day. And after their on-the-hoof dinner, they slipped away into the dark, equally afraid of what was behind them and what lay ahead, not knowing where they were going, only knowing that somewhere out there in the wilderness was freedom.

Last Sunday the headlines were once again all about terror and death. Our observance of Palm Sunday would probably not have gained much media attention except for the fact that our Coptic cousins in Egypt had been attacked in the context of the very same worship that we were undertaking a few hours later, and so our voice was sought out. How tragic, how deeply ironic, that as we prepared to commemorate the brutal execution of an innocent man of faith, we gained public attention because of the horrific attack that killed dozens of innocent people of faith. In the very land where the people of God once celebrated the first Passover, the angel of death spread its wings, even as we began our week's journey to the Passover of the Lord. And tonight, hours after our military has deployed a bomb of obscene capacity, we re-enact the first Eucharist, the last meal of a condemned man, a meal shared with friend and enemy alike.

Tonight's Hebrew Scriptures and New Testament readings telescope as much as a thousand years into a few minutes. At one moment the people of God are eating their last meal in captivity, bags packed, sandals on, ready to hit the road, humming the Psalm as they go: I will lift up the cup of salvation ... you have loosed my bonds ... Praise the Lord!

And in the next moment Jesus is washing the dusty feet of his friends as they gather to relax in the holy city, the destination of their ancestors, and he is offering them bread and wine for body and blood, as a symbol of the death that he will now suffer on their behalf, the firstborn of God himself willingly shedding his blood so that God's people may once and for all pass through the valley of death to the land of promise. As Paul reminds us, "As often as you eat this bread and drink this cup you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes."

Jesus gives new commandments in place of the perpetual ordinance of the Passover: "Do this in remembrance of me;" "Love one another as I have loved you." A perpetual ordinance of love.

We cannot escape the sharp juxtapositions of our story: firstborns killed to save God's people. An innocent executed for the sins of humanity. An intimate dinner with a traitor at the table. A congregation that proclaims its trust in God in the midst of anxiety and fear.

Our faith is never tidy: reality intrudes no matter how hard we try to shape our practice with beauty, with carefully rehearsed words and movement, with familiar ritual.

We celebrate the Eucharist tonight, welcoming all, coming to the altar rail with friends and strangers, with the people who annoyed us today and the people we annoyed. We share a symbolic meal, the wafers equally tasteless for everyone, a reminder that the Eucharist isn't about flavor but about coming together before God as one people. But then, after the Eucharist, we will celebrate a real meal together. Our soup supper continues our sacramental gathering, and we will celebrate the wonderful diversity of gifts and personalities in our congregation as we sample the different varieties of soup, knowing that the gift lies in the distinctiveness of each recipe. Think what we would lose if we mixed all the soups together, just as our community would lose if we insisted on a homogeneous congregation. We are one body, but that doesn't mean we are all the same.

The third component of our gathering tonight, the mutual washing of feet, weaves yet another strand into the rich tapestry of our life together. In this intimate ceremony we serve one another as Jesus served his friends and even his betrayer. It may well be that you or I have at some point betrayed or let down the person who washes our feet. It can be excruciatingly uncomfortable to be served in this way. As Jesus points out, your feet may be clean, but that is not why we do this. As we wash each other's feet we wash the feet of the refugees fleeing Pharoah. We wash the feet of Syrian children and Coptic clergy. We wash the feet of all the saints who have witnessed to the power of Christ in our lives. And we wash the feet of Christ himself, who loved us and gave himself for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.

The Very Rev. Penelope Bridges
13 April 2017

Maundy Thursday footwashing

Photos from Maundy Thursday. More photos here.

The Maundy Thursday Sermon: A Call to Service

The Rev. Jeff Martinhauk 

Maundy Thursday C, 

March 22, 2016 

St. Paul’s Cathedral, San Diego 

John 13:1-17, 31b-35

Imagine, for a moment, that the Queen of England has decided to pay you a visit in your home. And imagine just for a second that the first thing she does when she arrives there is to pick up a broom and start sweeping your floor.

Whatever your reaction, I suppose it might have been something like the response of the disciples in the gospel reading this night when much to their surprise, Jesus took off his outer garments and got down on the floor to start washing their feet. Washing feet was the job of a slave, not a master. Jesus is quick to remind them to live in service and not as a master after Peter objects.

And the church has tried to take that seriously, hasn’t it? The call for Christian service has been loud throughout the ages. I’d like to borrow from the work of biblical scholar Sandra Schneiders to unpack that service a little bit. She identifies three different kinds of service I find insightful.

First, there is service as obligation. The roots of the word service come from this first use of the word stemming from the word slave or servant. A servant is obligated to serve the master. Of course that word has changed in meaning through the ages. Most of us today do not, I hope, have servants who are obligated to serve us. But I’m probably not the only one who can get a little impatient when the service in a restaurant isn’t up to snuff. Or who is with me in dreading the experience of service when having to call the cable company? We expect those who are providing service to give it when we are in the power position. In those cases, I all too often end up assuming the worst about the one doing the serving. “They must be incompetent,” I rationalize. Or purposely messing up to irritate me! Or lazy. Or-- my personal favorite go-to judgement-- “they are so inefficient.” The thing is, I can stay at home and serve myself my own water. I do not have to have cable entertainment. In this first kind of service as obligation, the server, though, is bound up in a larger system that he or she has little ability to change, while the one being served has a fair degree of ability to change how they are being served.

Next, Schneiders describes service as a sort of existential privilege instead of obligation. A teacher, for example, serves his students. A priest serves her congregation. A doctor serves her patients. The mainline Church has long leveraged this kind of service as a good thing in its mostly privileged congregations. In this model of service, the server has a high degree of ability to effect change on the situation, but the one being served doesn’t have much leverage.

Since the mid-20th century we’ve explored the impact on those being served by those in power and learned it isn’t always so beneficial to receive service from the privileged. It’s really easy for the privileged person to project needs onto those being helped in ways that may or may not be helpful to the one receiving the service. Take the old model of missionary work, for instance. The early Spanish missionaries showed the native Americans how they “needed” to be clothed for modesty and “served” them by giving them European clothing, as well as imposing other European values and norms including forcing them into Christianity. We look back now and realize that the interference by the Spanish was inappropriate, that the ministry of the church has to ask the served “what do you need?” instead of saying “here is what I think you need” even and especially when we think those being served might make decisions very different from what we want for them. So service of this kind can be beneficial, like most professor/student relationships, for example, but the relationships have to be approached with care so we don’t end up attaching unintended strings or our own need to be needed to our service when we serve from a position of privilege.

But Jesus transitions at the foot-washing to service in the fourth gospel neither as obligation nor as privilege, but as friendship. Friendship removes the dominating nature of the first obligatory model, where the servers have no power in the relationship. If you are friends with your servant it is hard to ignore their lack of power over their surroundings. Friendship also equalizes the privilege of the second model where the servers impose their will on the served- even if unconsciously-- because friendship listens closely to the needs of the other instead of telling the other what is best for him or her. Friendship can begin in the most unlikely of places with anybody- across differences of money, class, station, vocation, ideology, race, sexual orientation, nationality, gender, religion, even politics.

And that is the whole point of the foot-washing narrative in the fourth gospel. Jesus moves from the disciples’ expectation of Jesus as master towards Jesus as friend. He sets the table for a mutual ministry of both server and served, breaking down all sorts of barriers. In just a few chapters Jesus will say, “I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.”

I love the Maundy Thursday service because of Jesus’ focus on mutuality, on friendship. It reveals that we have a God not who sits off far and away. We have a God not who is distant. We have a God not who tells us what we need regardless of what we want. We have a God not even who puts things into effect for our own good, like it or not, out of that God’s privilege nor power.

But instead we have this God come as man, Jesus, who initiates real, mutual relationship, who wants to know and be known, in friendship, in intimacy, in love, in real give and take, in the dirty muck of dust and grime and grit of water that is made messy from washing the travelling dirt from each other’s feet. Dirt that comes from walking afar and made holy from being washed clean by friends who are willing to hear the stories of our travels in life. We have a God who also wants to know those stories because it is what makes us who we are. Whether God already knows the stories is irrelevant: it is the act of sharing, of washing, that creates the relationship of mutuality, and that is the God we have, the God in Christ who wants that intimacy, that connection-- even if it means he has to risk himself, to die, to know us that well. We have a God who calls us to love each other in the same way. We have a God who calls us to be in real mutual relationship with each other, whether rich or poor, whether living in Balboa Park or in Coronado. Whether providing clothing at Showers of Blessing or taking a shower there to get clean. Even no matter which presidential candidate we support, friendship in mutuality is possible because of the love sustained by this amazing God made man in Christ.

We will all at times deny those friendships and community like Peter. We will all betray them sometime, like Judas. We forget what it means to live as friends, as community, as intimate children of God. We forget that the church community isn’t about what business decisions the community makes, or getting it done the “right” way, or any of that, but about this fellowship of mutual friendship and love in Christ, and how we live together. We all forget that love is the whole point. “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.”

And because we forget, Jesus instituted for us on this night a holy meal, this meal where we come to the table to remember. To tell each other the story over and over again, and to be swept up into that relationship again, and to be carried into this miracle of the God who will never leave us- even when we leave him, even when we might shout “crucify,” even when the night turns dark, that we can remember the light that shines to show that love will not fail. We are offered a place at this table to come, and remember, and find love again, in friendship, and peace, by the love that will never end.

So come. Whether you identify with Judas, or Peter, or Mary Magdalene, or none of them. Come and wash the dirt from your journey among this your community of friendship and love. Then come and eat and remember. Remember from a place of the deep memory, in deep time: Christ made you for love. The days to come will challenge that. But for now we watch and wait, knowing that the love given for us will never die even when our own falters.

---

Works Consulted
Feasting on the Word, Year C, Vol. 2. Ed. David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor. Louisville, Kentucky: John Knox Press, 2010.