Sermon for April 9, 2020 - Maundy Thursday - The Rev'd Elise A. Feyerherm

Exodus 12:1-4, (5-10), 11-14 – Psalm 116:1, 10-17 – John 13:1-17, 31b-35

Did you notice, friends, how much more immediate the scripture readings seemed this night? How much more alive, relevant to where we find ourselves at this moment? The Hebrews, enslaved in Egypt, await God’s deliverance at twilight, while a deadly plague swirls around them. A small group of disciples – a family, really – gathers in an upper room for a meal, aware that something ominous is coming. The world outside carries an ill-defined yet palpable threat. Safe for now – but for how long? 

Only the next step is visible, and sometimes not even that.

Last evening our Jewish family and friends celebrated the first night of Passover, over three millennia after that hurried meal prepared in the Egyptian twilight. And they asked, as they ask every year, “How is this night different from all other nights?” Only this year, I imagine, the question rang quite differently in people’s ears. 

Last night was different from all other nights, yes, because it marked the yearly remembrance of God’s liberation of the Hebrew people from slavery. That doesn’t happen every night. But it was also different in a new way, with computer screens connecting people and tables rather than physical hands passing wine, matzoh, bitter herbs, and roast lamb. 

How is this night different from all other nights? And yet, how is it the same? We the followers of Jesus, a son of Israel, are asking ourselves the very same questions. Those questions are windows into what God is doing in our midst, during this time when everything seems strange, and yet strangely familiar at the same time. 

Tonight’s observance is the first of the great Three Days, when we enter with Jesus into the mystery of suffering, death, and new life. We’ve done this before. Christians have done this before, every year for centuries. In the early centuries, it was done, as we are doing, in people’s own homes. We do this each year: we remember and re-enter our own baptism into Christ’s death and resurrection. These are the nights when who we are as the Body of Christ gets reactivated in our lives and in our communities, so that we have the strength to continue as that Body in the months to come, and discover the courage to go deeper. So much about this night, and the next two nights, will be familiar.

This also is painfully true: the way we are gathering tonight, and the next two nights, is completely different from all other nights. It is not like the way we have done it before. We’re not in our beloved church building. We’re not all physically together, and so we’re not able to circle the altar and share the Holy Eucharist. How is this night different from all other nights? How could it be any more different, we ask?

How is this night – this week, this month – different from all others? It is we who are being broken open, just as the bread on the altar is broken open after the Eucharistic prayer. We are exposed, raw, edges rough and jagged after having been torn apart. Maybe that’s true for all of us some of the time, or some of us all the time, but this night it seems even more true, for all of us, all of the time. 

I am actually glad in a way that we are not able to celebrate the Eucharist, because now I understand in a new way that we are the Body that is broken. Without the Eucharistic bread for a time, I can see the reality that it embodies, and that reality is us; it is the world. 

Last night as we were praying the Stations of the Cross I began to see it – Jesus embodied in the sick, the fearful, and those who risk their own lives to care for them. Health care providers and essential workers taking up their crosses so that others might live, living out Jesus’ command, “Love one another as I have loved you.” We took away the traditional images of Jesus on the way of the cross, and suddenly that story came to life. We stopped reenacting Jesus’ journey, and started experiencing our own. 

I think perhaps that’s the gift of this altogether different journey we are taking this Holy Week. I am coming to understand the strangeness of this night – and all the nights that are to come – as in fact a gift, a gift that we would never have received otherwise. Here is what I mean: in its exceeding strangeness, a strangeness that brings fear and grief in its wake, this three-day liturgy might just begin to give us a glimpse of what is always, and always has been, the same. It’s as if this whole quarantine business has been arranged just so we would have to confront the parts of ourselves that are helpless and stupid and stubborn and self-loathing and give them over to Jesus, hearing him say, love one another as I have loved you. 

Have you noticed, in these innumerable meetings on Zoom, that now we can’t meet with other people without staring also at ourselves in that wall of faces? Have you noticed – and tried to control – the expressions on your own face when others talk, or wondered about whether you could arrange for better lighting or a better camera angle? Have you wished you could turn off the camera, which is of course possible, but then people would know you have something to hide? Long after we are back together in one physical room, the memory of the Zoom room will haunt me.

Let me tell you something: I am my own worst enemy. For as long as I can remember, to be loved and found worthy is both my deepest desire, and also the one thing I find the most difficult to receive and accept. The thing I most need for my sense of self-worth is the thing I deflect the most, because, in a bizarre Catch-22 way, I am not worthy of it. So imagine what is going through my head when I hear Jesus say, as I hear every year on Maundy Thursday, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” That whole love thing, Jesus, sounds great, but there’s one big problem – I can’t get past the “as I have loved you” part. That may apply to other people, Jesus, but not to me!

But let me tell you something else – in all the strangeness – and perhaps because of the strangeness – I have been offered the love of Jesus in ways I cannot ignore. When I’ve felt like I’m failing miserably and tears are streaming down my face, I have heard the voice of Jesus say, “I can’t imagine doing this without you.”

Which reminds me that no matter how different is this night, this week, this life that we are living now, one thing is always and forever the same, and that is the One who kneels at the feet of his friends, silently washing their feet.

And so that is what you are invited to do now, friends – with the bowl of water that you have prepared for your sacred space at home. If you are with family, we invite you to wash and dry each other’s feet, as a way of embodying Jesus’ love, and as a way of reminding each other “I can’t imagine doing this without you.” 

If you are alone, you might put your hand in the water, holding in your heart those who have loved you those you have loved in Jesus’ name, those who are longing to know they are loved. Above all, know that you are being held and loved by all of us. You may live by yourself, but you are not alone.

After that, we will pray, we will sing, and during the reading of Psalm 88, we are invited to clear away everything on our sacred spaces, just as we would have stripped the altar at St. Paul’s. 

Tomorrow night we will place our crosses in that empty space as we recall Jesus’ death for our sake. 

Tonight, however, we will tend to each other, on this night that is so different and yet, thankfully, so familiar.