Maundy Thursday 2019 Lessons & Sermon

A reading from Exodus.

The Lord said to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, This month shall mark for you the beginning of months.

It shall be the first month of the year for you.

Tell the whole congregation of Israel that on the tenth of this month they are to take a lamb for each family, a lamb for each household.

If a household is too small for a whole lamb, it shall join its closest neighbor in obtaining one.

The lamb shall be divided in proportion to the number of people who eat of it.

Your lamb shall be without blemish.

A year old male.

You may take it from the sheep or from the goats.

You shall keep it until the fourteenth day of this month.

Then the whole assembled congregation of Israel shall slaughter it at twilight.

They shall take some of the blood and put it on the two doorsteps and the lintel of the houses in which they eat it.

They shall eat the lamb that same night.

They shall eat it, roasted over the fire with unleavened bread and bitter herbs.

Do not eat any of it raw or boiled in water, but roasted over the fire with its head, legs, and inner organs.

You shall let none of it remain until the morning.

Anything that remains until the morning you shall burn.

This is how you shall eat it.

Your loins girded, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand.

And you shall eat it hurriedly.

It is the Passover of the Lord, for I will pass through the land of Egypt that night, and I will strike down every firstborn in the land of Egypt, both human beings and animals, on all the gods of Egypt, I will execute judgments.

I am the Lord.

The blood shall be a sign for you on the houses where you live.

When I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague shall destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt.

This day shall be a day of remembrance for you.

You shall celebrate it as a festival to the Lord.

Throughout your generations, you shall observe it as a perpetual ordinance with the word of the Lord.

How shall I repay you, O Lord?

I will lift up the cup of salvation of the Lord.

I will fulfill my vows to the Lord.

Precious in your sight, O Lord, is the death of your sins.

O Lord, I am your servant.

I will offer you the sacrifice of thanksgiving.

In the courts of the Lord's house.

Do this in remembrance of me.

In the same way he took the cup also after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood.

Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.

For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

The word of the Lord.

The holy gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, according to John.

Now, before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and to go to the Father.

Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.

The devil had already put it into the heart of Judas, son of Simon Iscariot, to betray him.

And during supper, Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself.

And then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples' feet, and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him.

He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, Lord, are you going to wash my feet?

Jesus answered, You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand.

Peter said to him, You will never wash my feet.

Jesus answered, Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.

Simon Peter said to him, Lord, not my feet only, but also my hands and my head.

Jesus said to him, One who is bathed does not need to wash except for the feet, but is entirely clean.

And you were clean, though not all of you, for he knew who was to betray him, and for this reason he said, Not all of you were clean.

After Jesus had washed their feet, he put on his robe and he returned to the table.

He said to them, Do you know what I've done for you?

You call me teacher and lord, and you were right, for that is what I am.

So if I, your teacher and Lord, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet.

For I've set you an example that you also should do as I have done to you.

Very truly I tell you, servants are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them.

If you know these things, you're blessed if you do them.

Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him.

If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself, and will glorify him at once.

Little children, I am with you only a little longer.

You will look for me, and as I said to the Jews, so now I say to you, where I am going you cannot come.

I give you a new commandment that you love one another, just as I have loved you, you should love one another.

By this everyone will know that you are my disciples if you have love for one another.

Amen.

Please be seated.

Well, welcome to the beginning of the triduum.

This is the holiest three days in the Christian year, three.

And uh we have three parts before us tonight.

We have, of course, the foot washing, the institution of the Lord's Supper, and then we have the third and final part, um, the transaction in the garden.

It's going to seem a little scattered.

Hopefully, we'll bring it all together at the end because this is one of those wide days.

Depends on who you read.

Many Christian scholars will tell you that it was uh debatable whether or not you could make a slave wash your feet.

It was so considered beneath somebody to do this that one really ought to take care of themselves.

And here is the interesting bit Jesus looks around the room and he notices not that his disciples are lazy and have not taken care of themselves.

He does not judge them for not washing their own feet, even if they should have known better.

He looks at them and he sees a need.

Now listen, maybe he didn't even have to look.

He might have smelled something interfering with the main course and decided, boy, they really are in need.

But he amounts to using his own shirt as a garment, so you remember as a towel.

So Jesus disrobes to use his own clothes to take care of something that is about as gross as it gets.

This is like changing a diaper.

Again, he doesn't chide.

This is how we're different, he and I.

I would say, you know better how embarrassing.

Ugh, that smell.

What kind of manners do you have?

He sees a need.

And he does not descend to meet it.

Don't you see?

This is the point of the day.

He sees a need and he ascends to meet it.

There's something interesting about feet because we read the Passover story here tonight.

You know, uh Moses had tries to has tried to free the people by his own hand.

He kills the slave master, and of course it doesn't work, so he runs away.

Runs and runs and runs, and after years of learning how to be a shepherd from his wife, one day he sees the bush burning.

The bush is God, we're told.

And Moses approaches the bush, and wouldn't you think the bush would say something really insightful?

I mean, don't you think the bush would offer something about the mystery of life?

And the bush says, take off your shoes, because where you're standing is holy ground.

You know, you can debate what it means to not wear shoes.

You don't want to track dirt in, but remember that people lived on dirt floors, so you don't want to track in dirt on the dirt floor.

This scene, I actually think the bush says something more insightful than we give it credit for.

Maybe the bush is telling Moses to not put anything between him and God.

After all, the definition of sin is separation from God.

And here is Jesus seeing a potential separator.

Boy, and it's not even significant like poverty or hunger.

It's just a mess.

And so he bows.

And the day, of course, is called Monday Thursday because Monday means mandate.

A new mandate I give you.

Love each other as I have loved you.

Boy, that's a tough order, isn't it?

It means meeting a need we see without scorn or judgment or chastisement.

It means loving someone enough to take care of them as they are.

We all learn to do it with small children.

Boy, I never told my daughter who was six months old, how dare you poop in your diaper, that's disgusting.

I said that in my head, but I just cleaned the diaper.

Because she wasn't a prodigal pooper to go backwards.

She was lost.

And that's the difference of the day.

And I want to give you one more thought about this put washing.

It comes from William Blake.

If the doors of our perception are cleansed, everything would appear as it is.

Infinite.

If the doors of our perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is infinite.

Especially people with dirty, stinky feet.

It's not just about removing objects from God, it's about removing the specks and the logs from our eyes so that we can see everything that it is in one another.

Infinite.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke say it is.

I'm gonna go with Matthew, Mark, and Luke just for a second because our reading is about the Passover.

It's pretty important.

At the Passover, the same thing happens every year.

Happens right now.

In fact, it happens every Friday night.

The disciples, stunned from their wet feet, they get up and there's a table.

Not like the one you see in Da Vinci.

It's the triclinium.

They're sitting around.

And the oldest woman in the room, this is important.

There's women in the room.

The oldest woman in the room lights two candles and she prays the blessing that continues to get prayed today.

And then the youngest person in the room has to ask the oldest person four questions.

Maybe Jesus didn't answer, but they all amount to how is this night different from all other nights?

Why do we eat matza and not chalah?

Why is it that we dip our herbs in salt water?

The story is reenacted.

We just got a glimpse of it in our reading today.

Because the temple's still standing, there's a lamb.

A lamb.

This one's important.

This is the one time of the year when a family, a Jewish family, can kill its own meat.

You have to remember that priests were mostly butchers.

People brought animals to the priests to make sure that the animals were a processed correctly because there are two parts of the animal you can't have.

You can't have the fat.

You burn that to God.

Do you know the other part you can't have?

We share this aversion today hint.

Unless you're Irish or English, and then you eat this stuff all the time.

It's the blood.

You cannot have the blood of the animal because for people in the Bible, they decided that the life was not in the heart or lungs.

They knew we had those.

They decided the life of the animal was in the blood.

I didn't just mean the literal, I mean the life force, the qi, the chakras.

And because that life belonged to God, you could not have it.

And so the priest poured it out on the ground, but this night, people who have never butchered before do their own butchering.

There's not time for the priest.

And notice this is a different kind of sacrifice, therefore.

This has nothing to do, the Passover lamb has zero to do with sin.

Zero.

The priest doesn't touch it.

The blood has nothing to do with covering over iniquities.

Nothing.

It's a symbol that you have recognized the animal's life was not yours, it is God's.

It's a symbol that even though you were going to consume that meat for its calories, you are not trying to take something that does not belong to you.

You return the life to God on the ground on the doorpost.

Passover lamb was never taking your place for sin.

Listen, that happens on Yom Kippur, not on Passover.

The Passover lamb is for people who ate meat once or twice a year, who were getting ready to walk for more than 40 days or night.

And of course, what they needed was energy.

And boy, they weren't good at slaughtering.

They ate it as fast as they could, and they burned up the remnants, and they were out the door that night.

Out the door.

Of course, the animals of sacrifice, they gave something up.

They gave up its wool and they gave up its milk.

They traded it for something else.

They traded its life to give them energy for their exodus.

That's really, really critical because the Passover meal, like every other Shabbat, has a couple of other blessings.

First, Jesus holds up the kiddish, which is a silver cup, which looks, what do you know, a lot like that chalice.

This is where we got most of what we do from.

He holds up the chalice full of wine and he blesses it, and he says, And then he says, drink this, it's my blood, which means drink this, it's my life.

Be nourished by my life tonight.

Because I know where we're going even if you don't, and you will need strength for the journey.

And then he says something else.

Whenever you drink wine, remember me.

He gets to the bread.

It's Passover week, so it's definitely matza.

Normally it would be something like hala, yeasty and big and light.

He picks up the hala and he says the blessing.

Ham Mutsi Lehem in Haarritz, we give thanks to God for bread.

Our voices rise in joyful chorus as our simple prayer is said.

And then he breaks it and he says new words.

This is my body.

Take and eat.

Whenever you eat bread, remember me.

Whenever you eat bread, the average person ate two pounds of bread every day.

That was 90% of their diet.

The other 10%, a couple of pieces of fruit if they were lucky, and wine.

They did not meet for the Eucharist once a week.

They were invited to have it every single day.

Every time they ate, to be energized, not just in their body, don't you see?

But by the life of Jesus, the life.

To remember Him.

It doesn't mean I forgot something.

It means I had a limb removed from me and I put it back on.

I remembered it.

Once a week isn't enough.

Some people complain we do it too much.

Once a week is not enough to remember the life of Jesus.

Especially this night.

Especially this night.

Isn't it interesting to you that Jesus includes everybody in his last meal?

He sure seems to know what Judas is gonna do.

Washes Judas's feet and serves him his life.

When the lenses of our perception are cleansed, we see everything as it is.

Infinite.

Even Judas.

Even the blank you don't like.

Tonight is about that.

And then they recline.

And they sing the song Die Genu.

You probably know it.

Die, Die Genu, Die, Die Anu, Die, Die Genu, Die Anu, Die Genu, and there's a million verses.

And then they leave.

And they go out to pray in an olive grove that's just across from the temple.

There's trees there today that were there then, 2,000 years old.

Jesus goes to pray.

The disciples probably had a little too much of Jesus' life because they're sleepy.

And then comes this guy who just had his feet washed.

He was included at the last meal.

And he does this really interesting thing.

You know, I have a Spanish brother from Spain in law, Spanish brother-in-law.

Today, whenever I see his family, they don't hug, they don't shake hands, they kiss.

Once on each cheek.

And because I'm tangentially related, I get that one too.

It's the kiss of greeting.

It's strange.

I'm not using the strangers kissing me.

This is no stranger, this is a friend.

He comes and with the very gesture that is supposed to provide intimacy and hospitality and welcome, he sells Jesus.

He betrays him.

And then his friends, they see this thing and they run.

And there is Jesus alone tonight.

Boy, he sure needed the life at the Passover for what's coming next.

I would tell you they did too.

And you, wherever you are in your journey, you need it just as much to be with and after we desert Jesus.

A call to the table, not to renew some sacrifice, I mean maybe, but I think really so that we can have energy for our own exodus.

An exodus out of the life that we've settled for instead of the life that God imagines for us.

An exodus from our adapted self into our authentic self.

An exodus from service as degrading to service as unifying.

I probably tell you this, I probably told you the story last year, but it is deeply rubbed into my conscience and my memory every year.

It's a song about Passover.

I used to be a chaplain in a narcotics anonymous home for homeless, mostly black, mostly crack addicts in Atlanta.

I was 21.

I'd never seen drugs.

Actually, I think I'd only had alcohol twice.

I went in and they said, well, just minister.

And I said, How do I do that?

And they said, Well, we don't want to put limits on it, so by telling you, so just do it.

Mostly I just sat and listened.

It was good.

That was ministry.

Listened.

These men who had had rock bottoms way lower than I could ever imagine, and yet were somehow grasping for life, were nourished each week by a chapel service that boy, I wouldn't dare to lead.

Wouldn't dare do it.

They had a song they sing every week.

It's this little song by Fanny Crosby.

Do you know this one?

If I turn this off.

Again and again and again.

And their cry was not that the angel of death would pass over them.

They'd already met that one many times.

Their plea was that the angel of life would not pass over them.

And don't you see, whether it's in the garden or at the table or kneeling to wash the feet, that is our invitation on this holy day.

Is to not pass over one another.

Regardless of how dirty or stinky the feet are, regardless of the prison record, regardless of our scruples, to not pass over one another, to cleanse our limbs so that we can see things as they really are.

Infinite.

Paul says, when we eat this meal, when we eat this bread, and we drink this wine, we proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

And I think maybe he's partially right.

I invite you tonight to proclaim the Lord's life until he comes, to receive it in you, and go and proclaim it tonight.

Tomorrow.

And to come back for energy as often as you need it.