Maundy Thursday

I have a friend and colleague, someone I knew before she was ordained, who used to haunt the soup kitchens and homeless shelters around Atlanta. These were places where men, women and families could get a meal for the evening, but they were also places where folks could have letters written to loved ones, where they could even have a chance to have a sponge bath after a long day on the street and to have their feet examined, which were prone to infection. My friend, who has continued this ministry in a kind of open-air church in one of the main parks in Atlanta, has many talents, but she had chosen this ministry because of the intimacy she said it gave her with many of God's children that she might never otherwise meet. The dishes she washed, the feet she bathed and scrubbed, were emblems of the love she bore for these folks. She couldn't imagine being anywhere else, she said, and many of us could only admire the care she gave her work, cleaning the most intimate part of people's lives as if to undo the indifference they saw every day and the hardness of the pavements they had to cross. We are here on Maundy Thursday, the beginning of the the three-day mystery at the heart of who we are, and it is this degree of intimacy that Jesus is cultivating with his disciples tonight.In John, there is no account of the Last Supper, and so the foot-washing is his opportunity to begin his long goodbye and to model the servanthood with which he is to leave them. To wash another's feet was emblematic of the love and service we bear for one another; then as now, it brought one into contact with the parts of us we would rather not others know about, the sores and abraded parts of our lives, the crooked toes, the bruises in our lives that we have endured. But by looking and carefully washing these things, we begin to know and to love one another more deeply, to find each other in these parts of ourselves that many of us would prefer to remain covered; having seen them we begin to treat them with infinite respect as belonging to fellow children of God. But it is those bruises and abrasions, the intimacy of those scars that we bring with us here tonight, and they are the ones that Jesus seeks out in each of us. If we have been listening to our lives these past forty days, we know what those tender parts are, the things that have needed attention, the cracks and torn parts of ourselves and our relationships that have desperately needed mending. So when Jesus wraps a towel around his waist, looks up at Peter and tells him that, “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me”, he is speaking not only to the twelve but all the rest of us. Whether or not we have our feet bathed or our hands washed tonight, we are learning that servanthood to which our lives have been moving all these weeks. If it is indeed love that we are expressing, looking at the worn parts of our lives and those of the people we love, we will begin to learn what that love means in a few minutes. However hard the journey has been, however hot or unforgiving the terrain, we are starting our way through the deepest mystery we have in our tradition. What we have as a guide is a final commandment, one we will act-out in a few minutes, that gives this day its name. Maundy comes from the word “commandment”, which is what Jesus leaves with his disciples, that just as I have loved you, so you also should love one another. Just as we are called to show that love in the supper we will have together in a few minutes, so we will be making it known in the journey we will be walking over the next three days. In the midst of the betrayal and humiliation, we have the love of God to guide us, to place ourselves and our souls in the care of God who knows us and the most tender parts of our lives so we can prepare for the mystery we are beginning tonight. My friend has said that the most wonderful part of her ministry is to hear the stories of the people she works with. Often they are stories of estrangement, children from parents, people who have lost control of their lives and have nowhere else to turn. But my friend, who has the most blessedly quiet ministry possible, simply sits and listens, occasionally saying that the love of God is bigger than all they have been through. It is bigger than addictions, mistakes from our past

that continue to haunt us. It is bigger than the scars we bear on our hearts because, however bruised and broken we are from our journeys, and if we dare, we can be more than wanderers: we can be real disciples if can find it within ourselves to love one another. So the commission we have this night is to be the feet of Christ in the world. It is not enough to talk about the depth of the love that bears us; we have to walk it. On this last day before we hear of the suffering of our Lord, we are given a window onto that final love commandment, an admonition that Richard Meux Benson offered one hundred fifty years ago, to “learn a love superior to all social ties or distinctions... Love one another for the reason which will awaken love, then share in one common redemption. Love one another with a love that is pure and free, the love of the redeemed, the love of the heavenly, in the fellowship of a Savior's life, which abides forever.” It is no easier for us than it was for a rag-tag group of apostles in that upper room, but it is hard not to believe that our lives depend on it. It is, in part, the holy mysteries that we celebrate tonight, especially the one we will share at the altar, that are rooted in this love. In it, as our collect says, we have a pledge of eternal life. It is not a life that happens in the bye-and-bye, at the end of things. It is here with us, right now, in this place, if we choose to see it. After all, it is not with our looks of piety that we do the work of the kingdom; it is in our willingness to walk it that we realize the discipleship for which we were created. So, torn heels, callouses and all, our charge is to be the hands and feet of Christ, to be the love in the world that God has called us to be.