Grace and Peace to you from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ, Amen.
When I was down in Chile studying Spanish my teacher suggested that I get a book of fairly tales in Spanish because these would be easy reading for me, and at about my level of Spanish. They are written usually on or about a 5th grade level, which was humbling to admit, but I bought a book and have really been enjoying them.
The Spanish versions are slightly different from our English ones, but I recently re-read the story of the genie in the bottle. Perhaps you recall it. A poor woodcutter’s son finds a bottle in the woods, hears this voice coming from inside, opens it up and a huge cloud of vapor and fumes come out. It becomes an enormous genie. The genie can become any size it wants, it seems. It can rearrange space in such a way that it can exist anywhere.
Tonight is a very special night in the church’s calendar. It is Holy Thursday, also called Maundy Thursday – an old English term we derive from the Latin word mandatum – or “commanded” because Jesus told us to do two very special things. First, he says to us; “Do This”. Doing What? Doing his supper – eating and drinking together the bread and wine that becomes his body, his blood, that invades our very self and makes us one with him and with each other.
One of the great beauties of the Lutheran understanding of the Christian faith is the emphasis we put on this meal. We believe that Jesus himself gives us his very body and blood in this meal. Like the genie of my Spanish tale, Jesus is able to shrink wrap himself around, with, in, and under these elements of bread and wine. He mixes his corporeality and theirs and they become one and when we eat, we become one with him too.
In our eating, we take in his eternal life because Jesus is resurrected and death is behind him. The communion is our assurance of living with God forever. It is the gift of peace because we have in this bread and wine, this “real body and blood” of Jesus, assurance of our forgiveness. It is an incredible gift, a great and marvelous grace.
Yet, eating this bread and wine can be a bit dangerous too, because it requires us to think of the world and ourselves in a new way. Uniting us, as it does with Jesus, we get the cross which Jesus carried for the world.
We get to forgive our enemies. Sometimes that comes as relief, sometimes it comes as a daunting, seemingly impossible task because it means forgiving everyone, from the drunken alcoholic step-father who was abusive to you, to the business partner who swindled and cheated you, to the sister you haven’t spoken to in fifteen years, to your former wife who left you for someone else. To drink this wine, this blood of Christ, means to dare to remake yourself – with God’s help. It means that you will try to forgive even if that seems like an impossible dream.
The cross also comes in the form of foot-washing. Foot-washing has lost its impact on us modern people because we all wear shoes and socks and bathe everyday. So you have to search your memory banks to decide what the grossest thing is for you. One of my kids was sick with the flu and threw up, that is to say vomited, all over the sofa and surrounding floor. I went and cleaned it – it had to be done and I was appointed because I was able.
I know that seems horribly graphic, I chose that example intentionally. Foot-washing means doing all the humbling, dirty, gross tasks that makes us uncomfortable. I have been pretty amazed at the kids in the Youth Group. They have gone with us to the nursing home off Belvedere Avenue and distributed presents. Some of the folks in those homes are kind of scary. They have Alzheimer’s disease, they drool, they make sounds, some of them, but it isn’t speech. Some of our youth were so bold that they even hugged some of these old folks – getting really close in the process. That is what Jesus calls us too, when we eat his body and drink his blood.
Foot-washing comes in a thousands forms. It involves re-cycling paper, cardboard, glass and plastic, and it also involves our going further and writing our congresswomen and men when clean air and clean water legislation comes before congress in Washington and Annapolis. Foot-washing involves being open to looking at new information about issues of justice for the earth or any of our brothers and sisters who dwell in it. “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another”, Jesus says in tonight’s reading from John. Love is humble. Love means getting down on one knee embracing the dirty feet of someone who needs to be cleansed. It involves touching the pain of this world like Jesus did so that healing can occur.
We are changed in the process. We are softened, we are sensitized. What empowers us always though, is the knowledge that the God of all creation keeps coming to us to nurture, heal, bless, comfort, and when necessary nag at us and push us out of our comfort zone.
God is always coming as and in Christ.
He comes as a little baby, vulnerable to anything we could do to him
He comes as a healer to show us that we will all be whole in his love, working miracles, raising the dead, bring the paralyzed to their feet, opening the mouths of the mute so that they can praise and bless again.
He comes as the crucified one who pours the ultimate balm on the world’s wounds in his own life blood – pouring out his life, spilling out his forgiving liquid love on us his enemies. Doing all this in love.
He comes again in the bread and wine – always eager to reach out for us, reassure us and make his love real and felt.
Communion with him is his gift and our treasure. Take and eat, Take and drink, and do so feeling the awe you should.
Amen.
Who We Are