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Sermon on Maundy Thursdays, April 21, 2011
Grace Cathedral, Topeka, Kansas
By the Right Reverend Dean E. Wolfe, D.D., Ninth Bishop of Kansas
What Lies Beneath
Come Holy Spirit and kindle the fire that is in us.
Take our lips and speak through them.
Take our hearts and see through them.
Take our souls and set them on fire. Amen.
When we gather together for the various liturgies of Holy Week, we are doing one of the most important things we can do as Christians. Worship transforms reality. We worship in order to give thanks to God, true, but then our worship changes the very realities we inhabit.
We light candles and push back the darkness of the world. We sing together, and our separate voices become a common song. Miraculous! We hear the ancient stories, and we are transported through time and space. We listen in uncommon silence and hope to hear the whispered intentions of God.
In worship, we make great promises before God and before the community of faith, and two persons – I kid you not – can be made one flesh. In worship, ordinary people rise from the waters of baptism marked as Christ own forever. They rise from beneath the bishop’s consecrating hands as bishops, priests and deacons. They rise as newly confirmed members of the Body of Christ. They rise different, somehow, than they were before they knelt. Worship changes reality.
In worship, common, ordinary things are transformed by the Spirit to become the rarest and holiest things on earth.
A simple bath becomes the sacrament of Baptism, the ritual cleansing from sin in which we are buried in the waters of baptism and rise again to a new and Spirit-filled life. A simple meal becomes Holy Communion, where we eat the bread and wine that is the body and blood of Christ, “that he may dwell in us, and we in him” always. And the simple washing of feet becomes a potent symbol of the service and the humility and the self-sacrifice of Christ.
Jesus is always teaching the people around him through his actions, and the lessons we recall from this night are among the most essential lessons he teaches. In this lesson, Jesus shows us that acts of humble servanthood are more important than acts of self-protection.
He teaches us that it is better to servethan to beserved.
“To follow in his example is to create a community of equals in which all are served…faithful and unfaithful" alike. 1
Our Lord gave us a new mandatum, a new mandate: that we love one another as he has loved us.
It has been my great privilege to be able to travel extensively and visit different peoples around the world. Many of you have enjoyed this same privilege.
When you visit many Two-third World cultures, (I prefer this designation to Third World cultures, because they really are in the majority), you become aware that shoes are a kind of luxury, and most people are walking in either their bare feet or in simple sandals.
You also notice that transportation is a kind of luxury seldom enjoyed by the ordinary people, and so you see them walking on dusty roads for miles in order to reach their destinations and run their errands and do their work.
Their feet are hardened and calloused and sometimes misshapened through constant use. They do not have carefully manicured toenails, or bunions and calluses smoothed by podiatrists. They are not pre-washed and prepared like so many of the feet we bring to tonight’s liturgy.
The feet Jesus washes are the feet of fishermen-disciples. They are the feet of the hard-working poor. “The (real) cleansing that Jesus offers through this act is the forgiveness of sins through his self-sacrificing death. Furthermore, this gift is offered to all, even to the one who would betray him." 2
You see, he washes the feet of Judas, too.
There is a reason this liturgy finds fewer takers than we will see filling the pews on Easter morning. This washing feet is hard for us. While foot washing is an ancient and venerated tradition in Christianity (and in most Episcopal churches), there are still a few places where God’s “frozen chosen” choose to take a pass on this particular example from Jesus.
This liturgy gets very incarnational, very human, which may explain some of our discomfort. There are lots of humorous stories of women trying to wiggle out of panty hose, of men trying to hide missing toe nails with band-aids, of everyone trying to brush away the sock fuzz before their feet hit the water.
There is also the issue of what to do with your eyes as your feet are being washed. Where should you turn your gaze? Do you turn away, embarrassed, or is this more like the passing of the peace when we look deeply into one another and discover Christ’s presence?
Stripping feet, as well as altars, for that matter, makes us uncomfortable. We are not always certain we want to see, let alone expose, what lies beneath.
When we strip the altar of its coverings, what is exposed is the hard stone, the place of sacrifice. When we are stripped of our coverings, what lies at the core for those of us who strive to be Christians, is a willingness to be humble, a willingness to be vulnerable, and a willingness to love others as he first loved us.
Worship transforms reality by first transforming us.
Amen.
____________________________
1 Synthesis, April 21, 2011
2. Ibid.