HOMILY (LENT 2): "In Remembrance of Me"

A Meditation on John 13

Sunday, February 25, 2024 (Lent 2)

1.

Years ago, I spent a beautiful retreat day in the Santa Cruz mountains with Alexander Shaia, writer, psychologist, theologian, who's done some really exciting work on Christian spirituality and the four New Testament gospels.  We're going to explore Alexander's work, and the practices he celebrates, in this Spring's Koinonia program.  So I hope you'll watch for that.  But that day in California, he was most interested in talking about Lent, this six week season between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday.  

What kind of pilgrimage is suggested by this 40-day journey, with Jesus, with the Beloved Community, into the mysteries of faith, leaning into the demands of discipleship and the ways of the cross?  Could a 21st century church find meaning and even renewal in the ancient patterns of the early church?  He's a pretty intriguing thinker, Alexander is, with family roots in Lebanon and the Maronite tradition, and training in several intersecting disciplines.  I was pretty stirred up, to be honest.  And I wondered.  Maybe we were oversimplifying and underselling Lent in the church.  Maybe there was a deeper vein of peace, promise and possibility to be found.

2.

And he started, early that January morning, as the dew still glistened on the redwoods just outside: he started with the story we've read this morning from John.  Just before the Great Festival of Liberation, just before the Passover, Jesus gathering his disciples for a supper and washing their feet.  "Having loved his dear companions, he loved them right to the end."  Is there a sweeter summary of the gospel: "Having loved his dear companions, he loved them right to the end."  And, you know, maybe that's Lent in a nutshell: this deeply unsettling, but powerfully moving story about how it is that God loves you and me right to the end, that God loves the whole world right to the end, that God loves our beauty and our frailty and our brokenness right to the end.  "What wondrous love is this, O my soul, O my soul!"  Lent is our turning, our turning, our turning toward that kind of Love.  Breath by breath.  Day by day.  Week by week by week.

The most revolutionary thing Jesus does, Alexander said, and where the Spirit begins to resurrect Jesus and his body in us, is in that particular moment.  On his knees.  Beside that table.  With an apron around his waist.  The liberation of love begins in God's humility.  Which so quickly enlists and inspires our own.  This God is not a punishing tyrant.  This God is not a bossy moralizing bully.  This God kneels, an apron around his waist, to wash our feet.  Everybody’s feet.  The peace beyond all understanding ripples like a river through Jesus' fingers.  

"What if," Alexander asked that day, "the Lenten practice is six weeks of prayer and fasting, six weeks of preparation, six weeks of letting go and picking up, six weeks of encouragement--so that the church is ready for Holy Thursday?"  

I'm sure we must have looked blankly back.  Because he recognized that he needed to clarify and expand.  "What if," he asked, "the Lenten practice is preparing the church, preparing the beloved community of disciples, for the Holy Week moment when we too fall to their knees, with dinner on the table, and we too tie towels and aprons around one another's waists?"  "What if it's all about getting ourselves ready--spiritually, physically, theologically--to wash one another's grimy, pointy, beautiful and (sometimes busted) feet?"

3.

So, I know, you know, that Lent is the six week season leading us toward Easter Sunday.  I think of it that way.  That's always the way I’ve framed it up and always the way we’ve anticipated the joy at the end of this journey.  Lent disciplines our hearts and spirits so that we're fully, radically open for the good news of hope and light and liberating possibility on Easter Sunday!   Alleluias and Easter lilies and the promise of Spring.

But, no, Alexander said that day.  In the earliest generations of the Christian movement--long before there were creeds and cathedrals and Easter festivals--in the earliest generations of the movement it seems that Lent was organized as a season of preparation, training and even discipline.  Toward what end?  Toward the idea that a diverse community--from many backgrounds and nations, speaking many languages from varied cultures, manifesting many genders and identities--toward the idea that a diverse community of friends could serve one another as Jesus did, could love one another as Jesus loved, could be humble enough and creative enough to wash one another's feet. 

Lent was that.  Ash Wednesday to Holy Thursday (or, as we so often call it, Maundy Thursday).  Easter, then, was the joyous, magnificent, robust celebration of life and promise, on the other side, on the other side of the church's commitment to lovingkindness, servant discipleship and Jesus himself.  "In the same way I loved you," he said, "you love one another."  And then: "This is how everyone will recognize that you are my disciples--when they see the love you have for each other."  When they see the love you have for each other!  Then you've got some Alleluias!  Then you've got an Easter faith sweet enough, practical enough, real enough--to heal the world and end the wars and shower the planet in love.

If we really had it together, I think we'd take this footwashing tradition to the streets.  We’d wash feet on U-Day every September in front of Thompson Hall.  We'd wash feet at the Dover Friendly Kitchen on a Thursday night.  We'd get down on our knees up there and watch the many faces, hear their oohs and aahs, as we wash their feet, towel them off, and wrap them up in love and prayer.  If we really had it together, I think we'd take this whole thing to Pride in Portsmouth every June.  Right?  We'd set up a bunch of basins and chairs, we'd fluff up our best rainbow towels, and we'd wash the feet of every trans kid who's looking for a blessing, and every drag queen who knows she's an angel, and every single child of God who comes our way.  Right?  This is who we are.  

What Alexander reminded us--all those years ago--is that the early church was just like that: wildly diverse, boundary breaking in just about every way, racially, ethnically mixed, integrating different philosophical traditions and spiritual lineages.  Buoyant in practice and exuberant in experimentation.  And within all that wonderful, wacky and (sometime) conflicted diversity (because let’s face it), they learned to serve one another.  Like Jesus.  They learned to wash one another's feet.

4.

So given all of that, and my fascination with Alexander's sense of history and Lenten tradition, I had intended--this second Sunday in Lent--to set up a bunch of bowls, to fill up a posse of pitchers, and to invite you to join me in washing one another's feet.  As we celebrated communion, the supper, in remembrance of him, right?  I had a pretty good idea--because this isn't my first rodeo--that we'd all be a little uncomfortable by the invitation, even the optics.  I mean, let's face it, and the story captures the awkwardness, it's a strange, strange thing Jesus chooses to do that night.  At supper.  At this table.  Washing their feet.  “Do this,” he says, “in remembrance of me.”

Ironically, perhaps, my own foot injury prevents me from turning this idea loose on you all this morning!  Just the same, I want to suggest that we think about these next five weeks along these very lines, as preparation.  As a sacred season of prayer, and renewal, and partnership, during which believers in mystery of Love train for Holy Thursday, for Maundy Thursday, and the sacred, holy sacrament of footwashing at the table.  What would that do?  How would that change our experience of Good Friday, Holy Saturday and the triumphant celebrations of Easter itself?  Wow.

A couple of things about the story this morning:

First, in Jesus' time and in Jerusalem itself, no one was washing anyone's feet at the table.  That would have been not just uncouth, but totally bizarre.  Often, in the homes of devout believers, guests would be greeted at the door: with water, with basins, and with generous hands.  Footwashing was an act of hospitality and welcome.  But most often, it was practiced by servants, often gentiles outside the tradition, folks kept around for such 'hands-on' tasks.  And I frankly imagine that most of the time, female servants were charged with the task.

Jesus says, in effect: "I want to be that servant."  And we are to be those servants.  And hospitality is not only not a menial task, but is quite the opposite: the sacred calling of the people of God.  For women and men, and nonbinary believers alike.  Jesus says, in effect: "We serve God and one another on our knees."  Close to the ground.  Willing to touch and be touched.  Unafraid and undaunted by the dust.  All of us. That's what this whole project means and where it's going.

And even more radically, Jesus shocks his disciples--and maybe you and me, too--shocks us with an interpretation of communion, an interpretation of what happens at the table, that insists on active participation and partnership.  "So if I, the Master and Teacher, washed your feet, you must now wash each other's feet."  In other words, "I've laid down a pattern for you."  What you're doing at the table, he says, is not simply transactional: as if you come to Mass once a week, drink the magic sauce, eat the sacred stuff and are somehow set apart in the world.  Saved and forgiven.  The "Church of the Better and Best."

No, when you're breaking the bread and remembering my body, he says, you're looking one another in the eyes and feeding one another.  When you're passing around a common cup of wine, everyone of you sipping from that same cup (and sometimes this tests our sense of decorum and wellbeing), you're putting others at the center of your universe, you're recognizing in them the presence of God, and you're humbling yourself so that their needs for recognition and sustenance are well met.

Maybe Jesus was concerned that the ritual had become routine.  Maybe Jesus was interested in liturgical renewal.  Because what he does--at least that night in John's gospel--what he does is to reframe and reimagine community and sacrament.  It's about finding and greeting God in the space between your hand and mine.  It's about finding and greeting God in the space between my hand and your foot.  It's about opening our hearts and eyes and lives to one another--at actual tables, in nitty gritty dining halls, with wars raging not so far away.  And committing to the pattern laid down by Jesus.  Because the pattern itself is what Life is all about.  It's the holy land where God's grace becomes so much more than a Hallmark card or a best case scenario.  It's grace and discipleship and Love made flesh in you and me.  Not the “Church of the Better and Best”—but the “Church of the Beloved and Beautiful.”

5.

So let’s all agree that we'll come back to this story on Maundy Thursday.  Five weeks down the road.  Over the past few years, we've done the footwashing thing in the parlor.  It's ordinarily a fairly intimate gathering.  But maybe it'll be different this year.  Maybe we'll need to relocate someplace more spacious, where we have more room.  To splash around.  

And think about it.

If Lent's a community-wide practice, a whole community preparing to humble itself, siblings from all kinds of places preparing to wash one another's feet, then everything we do between now and Maundy Thursday offers opportunities for reflection, courage and repentance.  That's Lent.  

When you put everything together for those two performances of "The Armed Man" in a couple weeks, you're imagining how it is we can put peace at very center of our Christian vocation, peacemaking at its very heart.  Will we be so humble?  When you step into a new Koinonia group this week, you're setting aside any nervousness to welcome God's gift of flesh-and-blood siblings, human beings whose faith will spark yours, partners in ministry whose questions may delight or challenge all you hold dear.  Will we be so humble?  In your prayers, you seek the faces of those whose feet may well be washing on Maundy Thursday.  Over coffee downstairs, you laugh or weep with a new friend, whose weariness may now move you to light a candle tonight.  All of it, all of Lent, becomes a way of training the heart, training our faith for the letting go of all pride, and the setting aside of all privilege, and the simple, humble, Christ-like moment of footwashing.

Can we find God there?  Not in a thousand weighty volumes of theology.  Not in a brilliant, but wordy prayer on Sunday morning.  Not in the proud ranting of judges insisting that only Jesus can Make America Great Again.  But can we find God in a foot, and a towel, and a soft (but mighty) river of water?  Can we find God on our knees?  That's the Lenten question.

Amen and Ashe.