Maundy Thursday Sermon
April 18, 2019
Grace to you and
peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
I’ve spent the past couple years
doing some focused learning about Bowen family systems theory, and specifically
how this can help us work through times of transition or conflict in the
congregation. A big part of systems thinking, and seeing things through a
systems lens, is noticing where the anxiety is, and how it is playing out in
various ways in the system. Anxiety, of course, is a feeling we are all too familiar
with, and we know it can be triggered by all kinds of things: feeling
threatened or unsafe, feeling insecure, sometimes certain words or situations. And
we also know that anxiety can present in all kinds of different ways – as
anger, sadness, fear, overcompensating, perhaps as trying to make others feel
as anxious as you do to diffuse your own anxiety, as making jokes at
inappropriate times... the expressions are endless! Now, not all anxiety is bad
– indeed it is necessary for survival! If you didn’t feel anxious when you see
a bear, then you become that bear’s lunch! But when anxiety is not recognized
and named, it can wreck all kinds of havoc in our relationships, in our
families, in our workplaces, and yes, even in our churches.
As I have been learning about systems
and anxiety, I have started watching for it in the various current issues and
events we encounter – mass shootings and gun laws, controversial laws about
women’s health, healthcare generally, immigration policies… Each decision made
about these issues has the potential to trigger our anxiety about something:
our safety, our autonomy, our rights, our values. When we feel an attack on any
one of those things, we feel anxious – and we then take our anxiety out on each
other, by name-calling, finger-pointing, blaming, statistic-dropping, clinging
to those with whom we agree, or picking fights with those with whom we don’t. It
can become quite a mess, as we have seen in the decline of civil discourse in
this country. We live, I think, in a very anxious country right now.
Anxiety like this is nothing new –
and it was certainly something all too familiar to the characters in tonight’s
story about Jesus washing the disciples’ feet. Talk about an anxious scene!
Let’s keep in mind the setting here: Jesus is a hunted man. The authorities
have been seeking to arrest him and have him killed for some time now, and
Jesus and the disciples all know this. Now Jesus has gathered them into a room
together. What would we expect him to do in this situation? What would you do?
Arm the disciples? Teach them self-defense? Show them how to make a human
barricade to protect Jesus? All reasonable approaches, especially when anxiety
is high! Remember, I said anxiety is what has allowed humanity to survive for
so many years! Anxiety naturally causes us to seek self-protection.
But that’s not what Jesus does. No,
instead he takes off his outer robe, ties a towel around his waist, washes the
feet of this ragtag bunch of sinners and misfits, and dries their feet with his
towel. It is a stunning action – people in first century Palestine generally
washed their own feet, or maybe a
servant (always a woman) would wash your feet. But never would a rabbi, a
teacher, wash the feet of his disciples. Peter is right to resist – it is
inappropriate, embarrassing, and improper for Jesus do to this. The only time someone would do such a thing…
is to demonstrate a deep and abiding devotion to another.
Ah, and you see, there it is. Jesus
is showing them what love and devotion look like. It looks like humility, like
vulnerability, like selflessness. It looks like making the space for someone to
bare their deepest and most embarrassing self to you, without judgment. It
looks like the willingness to get right up close to their dirtiness and pain,
and not flinching, but rather, reaching out to ease that pain.
But the real kicker is realizing who
all is there: not just Jesus’ loyal and loving disciples, or those who have
proven themselves worthy of such an act. Among those whose feet get washed is
Judas, whom Jesus knows is about to betray him and hand him over to death. (In
fact, that is what happens during those missing verses there – Jesus tells
Judas to go and do what he must do, and Judas departs and heads out into the
night to betray him.) Also there is Peter, who will shortly after this
encounter deny knowing Jesus at all – three times. And the rest of them? They
will desert Jesus in his hour of need. These:
these are the feet he washes. It is to these betrayers, deniers and deserters
that Jesus expresses his deep devotion. It is to these that he later says how
much he loves them, loves them, in fact, enough to die for them.
All of that is pretty remarkable. But
then, another anxiety trigger: Jesus asks us to do the same. He says, “You call
me teacher, and that is what I am. I’m setting an example for you. I’m washing
your feet” [even those of you who are about to betray, deny and desert me] “and
so you should wash one another’s feet.” In other words, Jesus is telling his
disciples – that includes us! – that a part of being his disciple is to show
this sort of radical love and devotion even to people whose actions are not
deserving of love.
Of course, it’s one thing to find
ways to love the people I meet in my day-to-day life who annoy me, or who live
a way I disagree with, or even people who scare me a little. But what about people
like, a school shooter, a tyrannical dictator, or a child molester? What about
someone whose words or actions cause immense pain to another? What about
someone who has caused immense pain to me??
What does this sort of radical Jesus-love look like in those situations? Yeesh,
talk about anxiety…
When the council met last month to
talk about our priorities for St. Paul’s for the coming year, one priority we
brought up was healing, after a long
and painful time of transition. This is appropriate, because I believe that
healing is something God is constantly striving for throughout the story of
scripture – it is, indeed, the primary reason for the event that we remember in
these coming days: Jesus bore our sins and died and rose again so that we would
be healed and restored from the power of sin over us. And so with that in mind,
I find it helpful to approach the various places of brokenness in our lives
with this question: “How can healing happen here?” Sometimes, in the case of
truly horrific instances (like a mass shooting), or really anything that deeply
hurts us on a more personal level, finding healing can be difficult. How do you
love someone who can hurt so deeply?
Well perhaps loving someone with the
love of Jesus looks like seeing that person for the absolutely broken
individual he is, to see him as someone who must be so deeply in need of love
and healing that he got to the point of being capable of this horrific act.
Perhaps loving this person with the love of Christ looks like simply praying
for the healing she might not even realize she needs. Or maybe, praying that we
would get to a place, where we could bring ourselves to pray for that.
Sometimes we aren’t ready to pray for another who has caused pain, so our
prayer instead becomes, “God, I don’t want to pray for that person – so help me
to want to pray for that person.”
And then perhaps while we’re praying,
we can also pray for our own healing. While we may not be capable of some of
the particularly heinous things that happen in this world, our various
brokenness and anxiety can certainly make us do other things that we don’t want
to do – betray or deny or desert our friends in their hour of need, perhaps; or
say things that hurt people, even people we love; neglect helping people in
need; even being too hard on ourselves. And so let us also remember, as we pray
about how we are called to love even our betrayers, deniers and deserters, also
to let Jesus wash our feet. Let us be willing, especially on this Maundy
Thursday, to be vulnerable with Jesus, to take off our shoes and socks, reveal
our deepest sadness, brokenness and vulnerability to him, and let him touch us,
clean us, and heal us. If we can let Jesus wash our feet, we will be one step
closer to knowing how to wash one another’s feet.
No one said following Jesus would be
easy or comfortable. Sometimes, it is a great comfort, yes, and I am grateful
for those times. But with Jesus as our teacher and example, we are always
pulled out of our comfort zones and into a place where radical, life-changing,
world-healing love can happen. May God give us the grace and the strength to do
it.
Let us pray… Rabbi, Teacher, you showed us what true love looks like: to wash the
feet even of our betrayers, deniers and deserters, and to love them with your
own radical and healing love. Give us the courage to follow your example, and
in doing that, make us agents of healing in this broken world. In the
name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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