We hope you will take the time to read the the readings for today's Maundy Thursday service.
As you read below, imagine our altar and church being stripped of its elements and the silence afterwards, as we prepare for Good Friday.
A somber day indeed. All for our salvation thru Jesus.
The readings are listed first and Mark's sermon is below.
Readings for Thursday April 9, 2020...
Maundy Thursday
1 Corinthians 11:23-26
I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, "This is my body that is for you. 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 the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.
Psalm 116:1, 10-17
I love the Lord, because he has heard the voice of my supplication, *
because he has inclined his ear to me whenever I called upon him.
How shall I repay the Lord *
for all the good things he has done for me?
I will lift up the cup of salvation *
and call upon the Name of the Lord.
I will fulfill my vows to the Lord *
in the presence of all his people.
Precious in the sight of the Lord *
is the death of his servants.
O Lord, I am your servant; *
I am your servant and the child of your handmaid;
you have freed me from my bonds.
I will offer you the sacrifice of thanksgiving *
and call upon the Name of the Lord.
I will fulfill my vows to the Lord *
in the presence of all his people,
In the courts of the Lord’s house, *
in the midst of you, O Jerusalem.
Hallelujah!
Gospel Reading- John 13:1-17, 31b-35
Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and 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. 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 has bathed does not need to wash, except for the feet, but is entirely clean. And you are clean, though not all of you." For he knew who was to betray him; for this reason he said, "Not all of you are clean."
After he had washed their feet, had put on his robe, and had returned to the table, he said to them, "Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord--and you are right, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet. For I have 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 are 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 also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another."
The Sermon-
TAKING JESUS AT HIS WORD
Do you ever wonder, deep in the recesses of your heart and soul, what the world or what your life or what our life might look and feel like if we actually took Jesus at his word? That may sound like an unsettling or even a ‘trick’ question, but I mean it quite seriously. Indeed, I think it is exactly where we need to be on this sacred night. For while all our scripture and all our liturgy on Maundy Thursday is about remembrance, about some moment in the history of God’s work, and about some way in which to commemorate God’s might and power, we are clearly not meant to be stuck. We are not meant to be nostalgic. We are not meant to be dreaming back in glassy-eyed delusion to some halcyonic and allegedly golden age. Neither, to be sure, are we meant to be grinding our way through some repetitive and arcane ritual: we must ever and always guard against becoming mere “technicians of the sacred” as Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold once warned us during a clergy conference. We are not meant to be mired only in ‘what has been’, without a profound and deep and ever awakening sense of call and mission towards that ‘which still might be’, towards that which is yet to come, towards that which is emerging if we will but let it be so.
I am not a trained anthropologist, but in the life of faith and the journey of the Spirit ritual has always seemed to me to be the time and the place and the setting and the mystery where and within which we come to remember and to recall, precisely so that we can then be reinvigorated and renewed and redirected forward on the journey. In the midst of one of the oldest rituals in all of Christendom -- the washing of feet and the breaking of bread -- I am ever more convinced that the living, breathing summons of God in Christ is to go forth from such places and from such ritual, out into an alive movement of spirit and optimism; into some new and pregnant era of possibility and dreams, into a beckoning land of milk and honey and hope and charity and kindness and grace. And this, my brothers and sisters, is precisely where the challenge to truly accept Jesus at his word is placed squarely before us.
Tonight and in this sacred hour we have received a
“new commandment”
-- a
“maundatum novum”
(John 13:34) -- that we should love one another as we have been loved [this is where we get the term 'Maundy' Thursday]. Even more, the appeal is undeniable that we must then take that love out into a disbelieving and heartbroken world and make it manifest, alive, and utterly real. As you know, that is no easy task. The mission is challenging not simply because love takes work, but because unconditional love requires an absolute acceptance of God’s presence, grace and beauty that few are ready for. It’s always easy to love someone or some thing or some idea which we like; it is always far more challenging when the person or place or time or thought is initially contrary to our inner selves. Ours is not the first generation, nor shall we be the last, to seek out someone, some group, some person or persons, some ‘Other’, for whom we will offer Christian love, kind of, but only in a conditional and measured sense. We shall not be the first nor the last to fall short of the Kingdom of God as we often Pharisaically pick our way among the supposed sheep and the goats, the allegedly worthy and the outcast, those who are just like us and those who are altogether different. And this has been happening since the first words of Genesis.
But Jesus will not let us do so. In fact, the steep price and the radical call of this “new commandment” cannot be overstated:
“Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”
[John 13:34]
Now I have read this passage probably 200 times in my life and to me there is no way around it. There is no mincing of words or of sentiments. Jesus is not saying love “some”. Jesus is not saying love others “kind of, maybe, a little bit”. Jesus is not saying “do this kind of in the way that you sort of, maybe, saw me do it” and then only to those whom you like or know personally. Jesus is not saying “just do what you have always done; don’t take risks”. Jesus is not saying “well, just do your best but it’s okay if you don’t feel like welcoming everyone to the table.” It’s really, exactly, precisely, and sometimes painfully, the opposite. We are to love, one another, each other, both known and more defiantly unknown, warts and all, without condition, in the deepest Christian sense. And if there is a more difficult or daunting challenge in all of the life of faith, I, for one, have yet to hear it.
There is always a great risk during Holy Week and that risk is that we shall try to project that love or that message into another time and place, another year, a different setting, some far away land or distant past, even when the fundamental call -- the radical and transforming demand of Jesus, in essence -- is to live that love right here, right now, in this very time and in this place.
Fifteen years ago, when I was serving a parish in northern Canada, I used to walk the mile or so from my small house to church every Sunday morning. One day, just before Holy Week, I passed through Little Park, cutting across the town’s greenspace, as was my norm. And as I did so, 2 profoundly intoxicated men saw me coming, staggered up off the community bandstand, weaved toward me and began shouting for my attention. Instinctively, reflexively, indeed immediately, I crossed to the other side of the street, put my head down, hastened my step and soon enough they had retreated to their sad den of heartache and inebriation. And the truth is this: I have been ashamed of myself ever since. As if this were yesterday. I had failed to abide by the simplest, most Christ-given, most scriptural, and most clear commandment of all -- to love one another. No ‘ifs’, no ‘ands’, no ‘buts’. No conditions, just love. I had the chance, as always, in the guise of a stranger, and I did not take it. I ran. I fled. I jumped on a metaphorical ship like poor old Jonah and sailed away, far from it all. The experience was one which I imagine all of us have faced, at some point, but I can recall the feeling in my heart and in my soul, the feeling of failure and injustice and ignorance, the feeling of defying and disappointing Jesus, the feeling of a cold hard stone weighted within me, as if it happened this very evening.
And so that, in part, is why I am here tonight. And that is why, on this day, and whenever we are permitted, I must always wash your feet. Not in servitude but as a servant, not as punishment but for my own personhood, not in humiliation but with humility. In doing so I pray to be reminded of my own weakness before God, my own failings and brokenness. But I do so also to recapture that idealism, and essence, and spirit of true love and abiding hope without which scripture and faith would have no meaning. The new commandment, made real and lived out. And I pray this hope and dream for all of you as well. Because as ancient and lovely as our liturgies may be, irrelevance is not our goal, and neither is it the call or the expectation of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in this most precious and holy hour.
~
Amen
.
Rev. Mark Hatch
