A Sermon for Maundy Thursday

There are some truths in the Bible that require very little translating for us to understand them, because they seem to transcend culture and time and place. When Jesus says, “consider the lilies of the field,” it doesn’t require a brilliant Biblical scholar to grasp what he means. I think he means: go out, find a field with some lilies in it (or maybe a field with wildflowers will work just as well) and consider. Good old Mary Oliver once wrote, “I’m not sure what a prayer is, but I do know how to pay attention.” Jesus would have said, I think, if you are paying attention, then you are praying.

There are other texts where, if we can get a better sense of the historical context of first-century Palestine we can gain a deeper insight and a light may go on.  “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,” Jesus says about paying taxes. When we notice that the Temple authorities were really trying to trap Jesus, or are reminded about the fact that the combination of Caesar’s claims to divinity and his head on the coin violated the Jewish understanding of the first and second commandments or we consider the politics of living in an occupied territory and trying to remain faithful to the principles of both non-violence and resistance, our understanding is far more nuanced, and we discover new layers of meaning for our own circumstances that go beyond how we may be feeling about the I.R.S. this week. These kinds of texts keep preachers like me employed.

There is, however, a third category, and it’s into that third category that I would put foot-washing. It just doesn’t seem to translate out of its first-century context very well into our world and it’s about more than understanding what happened; we also have to come to grips with our own internal resistance to something we may find awkward or embarrassing that first-century sandal-wearing middle easterners did not.

For them, foot-washing was a part of daily life. It was taken for granted that feet got dirty, and it was an act of practicality and of hospitality to clean them when somebody came into your home. All of that walking around in the desert in sandals made your feet dirty, stinky, and tired. So when the master came home from work, the slave soaked and washed his master’s feet. When guests came for dinner, you welcomed them by showing this act of kindness. It’s just what you did; like offering to take someone’s coat and hang it up.

But since this is not a part of our lives 364 days a year, it can feel not only awkward but difficult to understand on this one Thursday a year. Some of us have this thing about feet, our own and others. I wonder what would happen if we shined shoes instead? We’d still be dealing with feet, but maybe we’d capture the class issues better. But of course even if I edited the Prayerbook in such a way, I suspect that some of us would still go out and get our shoes shined before coming to church tonight.

Jesus doesn’t wash clean feet tonight, but dirty ones. While his action definitely has symbolic and theological meaning, first and foremost it is grounded in a practical and normal task that his culture understood and ours does not. But let’s try.

The Open Door Community, an intentional Christian community in Atlanta, Georgia, offers a foot-care clinic every Thursday night of the year for the homeless. It’s like a spa for the homeless community: 52 days a year they can get a free pedicure. I imagine that living on the streets is hard on your whole body in general and I imagine especially hard on your feet. Thankfully I have no first-hand experience with this. But I’m told that the medical volunteers at the ODC offer their time to take care not just of washing feet, but of dealing with bunions and all the rest. It’s an act of kindness and mercy to people who are not accustomed to being on the receiving end of such acts. There is something both tender and practical about that ministry that captures the meaning of this night and what it means to be the Church in the world.

In tonight’s gospel reading, Jesus takes a towel and a pitcher of water and a basin and he washes his disciples’ feet. Peter resists not because he is uncomfortable with having his feet washed. He lives in a culture where this is normal. What he resists is that Jesus is doing a servant’s job. And in that realization lies our first clue about the meaning of this night: first and foremost, this act tells us who Jesus is. This event is recorded in John’s Gospel, which is above all else focused on the Incarnation:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and was God. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, full of grace and truth.

In spite of this being about as orthodox as theology can get, most days we want to keep God “up there” in the skies, not in the muck and mire and confusion of our daily lives and certainly not washing feet. We want to keep God as God and humans as human. The problem is that Jesus messes up those tidy categories and no gospel writer better understands this than John. Jesus humbles himself to be among us as one who serves. We feel more comfortable, I think, crowning him with many crowns, and pushing him back into the heavens to be at the right hand of God the Father. We feel more comfortable at some level looking up to Jesus, and yet what Peter (God bless him!) initially resists tonight is that Jesus requires him (and us!) to look down, and around, in order to see him as one among us who serves.

Sandra Schneiders is professor emerita at The Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, California. She says that there are three kinds of service. There is service as obligation. We do what we do because we are told we must do it.

The second kind of service, Schneiders says, is the existential mode of service. Here the server acts freely on behalf of the served because of a perceived need that she or he has the power to meet. Whether we get paid for it or volunteer, this is the kind of work that most likely makes us feel good when we do it. We feel a sense of calling and of responsibility to meet someone else’s needs. So a mother nurses her child, a teacher teaches her student how to read, a choir director teaches the choir a new anthem, a doctor prescribes the right medication for a patient, a pastor visits a parishioner in the hospital. While all of this is good, there is a shadow side to responsibility, and the servant needs to guard against fostering dependency and neediness.

Schneidesr says that there is a third way to serve, however: friendship. Friendship subverts both obligation and the perceived responsibility to meet somebody else’s needs. When we seek the good of a friend there is mutuality. The barriers that social power creates are broken down. Where there is friendship we both give and receive. Schneider says that…

…the politics of friendship, at its best, can build bridges over chasms of ideological, religious, racial, and social conflicts. Unfortunately, such friendships are rare and difficult to maintain.

Rare, and difficult to maintain, indeed. 

This is, I admit, a lot of social theory for a Thursday night in Holy Week. But if you are with me so far then I hope you will stay with me for just a few minutes longer before we get to the real sermon tonight: the invitation to share in this act of friendship. Did you notice that Jesus calls the disciples his friends. He calls us his friends.

The dynamics of those first two modes of service are to be found in this and all congregations: they are simply a part of the fabric of our life-together. Both are good and necessary. But there are also inherent dangers of misuse of power and of burnout as well as of fostering a culture of neediness that can infantilize people. When we are always the helper we are also in control. Clericalism is real and although clergy deserve some respect they should never receive all the privilege.

On this night, Jesus takes a towel, and a pitcher of water, and a basin. In so doing, he is giving instructions to the Church in every age and modeling for us this third way of service.

He calls us his friends. And he commands us to love one another as he has loved us. Yes, he is still master and lord. Yes, he is the second person of the Trinity. But by choosing to be our friend and our brother he shows us how to more faithfully be one holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. He asks us to see ourselves—ordained and lay, paid staff and volunteers, young and old, male and female—as friends.

Schneiders points out that friendship holds within it the seeds of radical transformation, because it lets us “build bridges over chasms of ideological, religious, racial, and social conflicts.” Such friendships are not easy to cultivate or to maintain; they do indeed take work and they are rare. But the polarized world we are living in needs for us to get this now more than ever if we really do mean to be living members of Christ’s Body and not simply nominal Christians.

What if St. Michael’s Church committed not just tonight but 365 days a year to becoming a place where friendship can be cultivated across the great divides that we face?

I had a chance once a long time ago in a galaxy far away to sit in a room with George McGovern, who spoke about his close friendship in the U.S. Senate with Barry Goldwater. For those of you who aren’t political junkies like me, they were on way opposite sides of the aisle and they very rarely voted together on anything remotely controversial. But at the end of the day they’d go out to a bar near the Capitol and have a beer together and talk about their families. In so doing they could disagree without de-humanizing each other or calling into question one another’s patriotism or values or honesty.

We have the potential in this congregation to deepen friendships with those who may be as just as far apart on the issues of the day, both theological and political. Tonight we wash feet. Through this action, and in sharing the Eucharist together, the world is changed. These friendships help us to love one another as God has first loved us. They help us to be salt and light and yeast for the world. These things matter. They matter a lot, my friends.

Palm/Passion Sunday Sermon

Today’s liturgy is logistically challenging. Not as a big a challenge as the Easter Vigil, but a close second. We get used to coming into church and finding our ways to “our” pews and we know what is going to happen. But this day unsettles us and there is a lot going on. In part the challenge is about where we should focus our attention. Is this day about the Palms or the Passion? Yes.

 When The Book of Common Prayer was published in 1979, it bought both Palms and Passion into one liturgy. As written, no sooner do we stop singing and waving our palms than we pivot toward the Passion. Today we’ll hold off on that to the very end. We’ll give the Passion the last word and then we’ll depart in silence. I hope that even though my tenure with you will be fairly short, that it’s something that might take hold here going forward, but of course that won’t be up to me.

I’ve been leading pilgrimages to the Holy Land for a while now and I hope to return again this fall. I’ve had the extraordinary good fortune to stand in the Palm Sunday Church in Beth Phagee—“the house of the little fig” – at least ten times. Today an ecumenical procession of pilgrims has already made its way from that Church to the Mount of Olives, and from there into the old city of Jerusalem, amid shouts of “hosanna.” It is a life-transforming experience to walk in those places.

Even so, we don’t have to travel halfway around the world, nor two thousand years back in time, to enter into the deep mystery of this day’s events. Our liturgy today seeks to replicate that same drama in order to bring us closer and to make the story more real. Our goal is not only to better understand what happened once upon a time, but what is happening in the world in which we live, right now. For we believe that this is God’s world and that the story of God’s love continues to unfold even now, even in this unsteady and confusing world.

And so the story begins in Beth-Phagee, where Jesus and his disciples have finally arrived after having left Galilee and the Mount of the Transfiguration to make their way to Jerusalem. Some scholars argue that another parade was happening across town at the other end of the holy city and that’s important to say. That other parade was a display of Roman imperial power, as Pontius Pilate rode into the city with horse and chariot and shining armor and the brass bands were playing John Philip Sousa marches. The Romans are worried that in the holy season when pilgrims came from all over the land to the Temple to remember that old, old story of the Exodus that a riot might break out, that someone might start chanting, “let my people go!” And so they are showing their force to try to make sure no one gets any crazy ideas.

The central religious event of this week, Passover, is centered on that Exodus story. Now I suppose that it possible to spiritualize the Exodus narrative to the point where it no longer has any relevance to the “real” world and that would have suited Caesar and his man in Palestine, Pontius Pilate, just fine. As long as the Exodus story can be confined to the distant past and remembered only as something that happened long ago, then it is of little concern to the Romans. It’s just a nice little story the Jews remember with a Seder meal. Who cares? Pass the matzoh, please…

But the point of the story is that it isn’t meant to be confined to Seder prayers: it’s a story about God’s work in the world. It’s a never-ending story about the move from slavery to freedom, a story meant to inspire both hope and action. The old story of the Exodus that is remembered every Passover tells of how God was with a tiny band of slaves to lead them out of the bondage of Egyptian imperial power by tossing horse and rider into the sea.

Now if the Jews who are gathered in Jerusalem begin to connect the dots and see how similar Roman imperial power is to Egyptian imperial power that might lead to an insurrection. The normal response of imperial power, when it feels threatened, is to instill fear. If you have all the power then you make sure people stay very afraid. Frightened people can’t think straight. So maybe that is what that parade on the other side of town is all about: intimidation. Making it clear who’s in charge.

What then, can we say of our little parade from Beth-Phagee to Jerusalem? What exactly is Jesus up to? I want to propose that it’s a protest march and that today as you’ve come to church that is what you have participated in: not a parade so much as a march, a demonstration. A rally.

Jesus is mocking what is happening on the other side of town the way he always does, by acting out a parable to remind his disciples and anyone with eyes to see that all imperial power is temporal and that all empires will come to an end.  He draws on Old Testament language from Zechariah 9 and Psalm 118: so that in the context of this Passover festival he seems to be suggesting that God is about to do a new thing. Hosanna, Son of David, the people cry, remembering that David was king over Israel and Jerusalem was his capital city and that the Messiah is supposed to come into the city to bring about regime change.

The Gospels tend to give Pilate a bit of a free pass. Most scholars think this is because by the time they were finally written down, the last thing that the early Christian community wanted was a full-frontal assault against Rome. By the time the gospels are written down, the Temple has been destroyed by the Roman authorities because of a Jewish insurrection. Rome responds with the military might at its disposal. So even though we will hear today in Luke’s Passion Narrative that Pilate just wants to flog Jesus and then let him go, we need to hear that with critical and discerning ears. In Matthew’s Gospel, we get that famous image of Pilate washing his hands.

The suggestion seems to be that this was all the fault of the Jewish Temple; that they forced Pilate into this. But almost certainly that isn’t how it went down. Almost certainly, Pilate took care of business in the way that imperial power always does, by letting someone else do his dirty work. He wanted, and got, “plausible deniability” that allowed him to publicly wash his hands of the whole mess. But don’t be fooled, as the people of Jesus own day and the early Christians certainly were not fooled. They knew that Pilate was not a good man who lacked the courage to stand up to the Temple authorities, but a grand manipulator who has plenty of blood on his hands that no amount of handwashing could ever get rid of.

What this day is really about is a clash of kingdoms: will it be Caesar or Christ? Will it be the Pax Romana, a peace that is at best an absence of war, or the Pax Christi, the peace of God that passes all understanding? You can’t sit this one out! You can’t sit in the middle of Jerusalem to wait and see what happens. Who is Lord over our lives? These are two very different cultures: one is about the love of power and the other is about the power of love. Which side are you on?

By Friday we’ll see how it all turns out. Or at least we will see what always seems to happen: the forces of evil will align to destroy Jesus and try to silence him. When people get out of line that is what you do: you stir up an angry mob to have them killed. Or you disappear them. End of story.

Except, as it turns out, the best they can do is kill him and yet that is not the end of the story. Friday’s sorrow gives way to Saturday waiting, which ultimately yields to Sunday’s surprising joy. Please come back next Sunday to hear that part of the story but I suspect you all know what’s coming…

In our own day, separating church and state doesn’t mean that religion is only about spiritual matters. The gospel we proclaim has profound implications for our political and economic choices. Claiming Jesus as Lord transcends and critiques all of our political loyalties and ideologies. As Jim Wallis has said, God isn’t a Democrat or a Republican. But when we say, not just today but every week when we gather to break the bread: Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord we are declaring our allegiance to Christ. We are making a political claim that Jesus is Lord, not Pharaoh, not Caesar, not any one who claims to be king. 

Ultimately we remember that this “Son of David” is “king of kings and lord of lords.” And he shall reign forever and ever. As we once more walk this journey of Holy Week, and in particular the three holy days of this coming week, we are not going back in time. We are being re-membered, re-formed, re-newed by the Paschal Mystery. We are being taken once more to the very heart of our faith and the affirmation and insistence that death does not get the last word. Not this time. 

Not ever. Love is stronger than death.