Gary Hall, Seabury's Dean and President, preached on Maundy Thursday at the first service of Seabury's observance of the Triduum; Prof. Ruth Meyers presided at the service.
Maundy Thursday, 2005
I was at home with the flu for the first few days of this week, and I found myself in the kind of fevered mental state where all I had energy to do was to watch cable news on television. Now that I have returned to the land of the living, I come back with a head fulled with images of Terry Schiavo, the Florida woman whose feeding tube has been removed, and Jeffrey Weise, the 16 year old boy who killed ten people in Red Lake, Minnesota. As if this weren't Holy Week already, our culture hands out to us plenty ready-made images of human sinfulness and suffering.
We live in a difficult world, and it is best to begin tonight by affirming that the Gospel lives in that world, too. Christianity faces the world we actually inhabit. The God we meet through the church is One who engages us at the level of our deepest needs and our greatest fears.
When I am honest with myself, I can reduce my deepest needs to two. First, I want to be nourished. I need love, community, food, shelter, and sustenance. When we think of the removal of Terry Schiavo's feeding tube - no matter where we are on the ethical compass regarding termination of life issues - there is part of us that winces at the thought of ending life without food and water. We're finite creatures, and before we need all the other things we strive after, we require the basics.
The second thing I deeply need, when I'm honest about it, is to be known - to be accepted, understood, heard, to matter. Some deep part of Jeffrey Weise wanted to be known, and part of our corporate pain around the killing spree he went on last Monday has to do with the depths of loneliness that he must have endured before venturing on such an act. And of course those he killed need to be known in some other way than as the moment's victims. Neither Terry Schiavo nor those killed in Red Lake wanted to be known for what we now know them for. They wanted to be known, as we want to be known, for who and what we most deeply are.
So those, when I'm honest with myself, are my needs, and my fears are an expression of those needs. As the shadow side of my needs, I fear two things: I fear scarcity - the lack of nourishment, love, community, food, shelter, sustenance; and I fear alienation, the absence of acceptance, understanding, being heard. As I face into the questions of the week - both the week in the news and Holy Week itself, my two questions are: will I be nourished? And will I matter?
The three great days we are embarking on tonight are in some sense God's attempt to answer those two deep questions. Holy Week is about the depth of God's love for us. Tomorrow and Sunday are about the extent to which God is willing to go in expressing that love for us. And tonight is about that same God's provision for us, that God's coming toward us in the meeting of our two deepest human needs. And a couple of our readings help sketch that out.
Our reading from First Corinthians gets at that first need, the need to be fed. As always with Paul, the passage comes to us with some context. In the fractured and divided Corinthian church, it seems that some were coming to the common meal the way clergy often come to meetings - coming late and leaving early - and, like kindergartners, they were not sharing. Paul reminds the Corinthian community and us what the Eucharist is about: it's a meal but it's more than a meal. The night before Jesus died, says Paul, he instituted this meal as a new Passover for us. And in that new Passover we discover God as One who knows us as we are, as creatures who need, most basically, to be fed. And more than that: God knows us as people who need not only food, we need community. We need to be connected with each other in this celebration of our new freedom in Jesus, our deliverance in the passage from death to life. You and I need food, and we need community. And in giving us this meal on the night before he died, Jesus responded to the first of our two deep needs. Our celebration of the Eucharist is not about our own liturgical perfection. It is about God's faithfulness, about God's meeting us in that scared, lonely, hungry place and filling us up.
And then there's our reading from the Fourth Gospel, the story of the footwashing. It is easy to get sentimental about the footwashing, but it is not really a sentimental act. I'll bet that the feet of Palestinian Jewish peasant fisherfolk were not their most attractive aspect. Jesus washes his companions' feet not because he's romantic about it but precisely because he intends to know and love his friends precisely in that part of themselves that they are most embarrassed about. The footwashing is a symbol, of course, of service and ministry. But before we take it out we should take it in. Jesus washes our feet only secondarily as a sign of what we should do for others. He does it first, and we need to hear this especially tonight, as a sign that God loves and accepts and knows and blesses us as we are.
These three great days - Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter Day - are about God's search for, love of, acceptance of you. If you are like me, and I think you are, then you want to be nourished and you want to be known - you want food and community, you want to have mattered. In these two great gifts from Jesus, in the gift of the Eucharist, and in the simple washing of feet, we have been given two signs of God's provision for and acceptance of us. In this meal we receive bread, wine, and community; in the washing of our feet we are known at a level deeper than we can articulate. The God we meet in Jesus over these next three days accepts each of us in full - even that part of ourselves that we cannot accept, let alone understand.
After these three great days we will return to the world of Terry Shiavo and Jeffrey Weise, human beings like us who share our needs and our fears. May all of us go forth from these days as agents of that acceptance, blessing, and love that we meet tonight in this meal which Jesus gives us. And may we all give ourselves to building a world where every precious human creature of God on this planet has enough to eat, meaningful community, and a story to tell which is his or her own.
Amen.