Being Rich Toward God

 Pentecost VIII, Christ Church, St. Joseph, La.

 

I’m pretty sure I’ve shared this story with you before, but it is so relevant again today that I can’t resist.

 

Every fall semester for years, I taught an advanced writing class to college Juniors. The first day of class I required students to complete a diagnostic writing exercise—in class. I gave them several topics to choose among, a time limit and an approximate word length, and set them to work. 

 

One of my topics was “The Last Speech.” For “The Last Speech,” they were to imagine they had six months to live and to write the farewell speech they would give in the waning days of their life.

 

Young people write some interesting things when presented with that particular challenge. I’ll share a few examples with you in a moment.

 

But for the moment, let’s look at the assignment Jesus gives in today’s Gospel lesson. And the first thing I notice is that it is much tougher than the one I give my students. I give my students 6 months to get their affairs in order and define their legacy. Jesus says, “This very night…” This. Very. Night. You must account for what you have done with your life.

 

Goodness, Jesus, that’s harsh! I mean, what happened to the Jesus of love and mercy and endless second chances? It’s almost as though he is upset about something.

 

So let’s go back to the beginning of the passage to look for a clue. What instigates this rather harsh “this very night” verdict from Jesus?

 

Turns out it’s what must seem to us to be a rather mundane request from a guy in the crowd: “Jesus, please tell my brother to be fair to me.” And it sounds mundane to us because we ask Jesus for mundane stuff all the time: Please, Jesus, get me that job. Please, Jesus, help my business prosper. Please, Jesus, get me out of this trouble I’m in and I’ll be good forever, I promise.

 

What’s the harm in that, right? Isn’t that what Jesus is for? To do the hard things for us? To get other people to be nice to us, to hire us, to give us another chance, and on and on?

 

I fear way too much of our prayer time is focused on asking Jesus to fix everything that’s wrong in our lives and every challenge we face.

 

But, no. That is precisely NOT what Jesus is for! Jesus is not our fixer! Especially not when what needs to be “fixed” is another person or a situation “out there.”

 

Notice that the guy who kicks off the story does not ask Jesus to fix himself. He asks Jesus to fix his brother. And that is so classically human as to be simultaneously sad and amusing. Do you see yourself in that? I do. Isn’t it typically the case whenever humans come into conflict or disagreement or whatever, it is the other person who needs to be fixed?!

 

Jesus is not our fixer. He didn’t come to fix the people we think need fixing. He didn’t even come to fix us. What he came to do is show us a better way to be in the world, a kinder, more loving, more generous, more forgiving, more compassionate, more merciful—in short, a more-like-him way of being in the world.

 

Jesus came, and comes again and again to us in prayer and through the indwelling Holy Spirit, and the only “fix” he has to offer is “love God and your neighbor as yourself.”

 

Most of Jesus’ teaching then expands on what it means and what difference it makes when we actually put love—love for God and, consequently, love for all of humankind—at the center of our existence.

 

The story he tells on this occasion has to do with priorities and he criticizes the human tendency to prioritize accumulating stuff—earthly treasures, and typically more than we need.

 

There’s an online platform called “Statista” that can provide a statistical answer to all kinds of questions. So, last night I asked it about the worldwide distribution of wealth and here’s what it told me:

         *75% of global wealth is in the hands of just 10% of the global population

         *the bottom 50% of the global population owns just 2% of global wealth

 

As Mahatma Ghandi once said, Earth provides enough to satisfy everyone's need, but not everyone's greed.

Earlier I promised to return to my students and their assignment. Over the years, students have written some remarkable things that I have taken to heart and remembered.

 

One imagined himself at the age of 46 with many regrets but determined to not waste his remaining time. No more passing up opportunities, he wrote, I’m embracing everything from here on out. He had long wanted to travel to Australia; at 46 and under sentence of death, he was pricing plane tickets.

 

Another had clearly felt some real pain is his short years. He thanked his parents, reminding them that he had had to wear the ill-fitting hand-me-down clothes of his older brother, their “golden child,” but also that they had also always been there for him. And I love you, he says. After noting a couple of other great disappointments —one at the hands of his best friend and another handed to him by his country—he ends with one word: Peace. He has come to terms.

 

A third young man lived his life in a wheelchair, and his last speech is a statement of courage and defiance. My disability does not define me. I define it, he wrote. That is what I want to talk to you about tonight. Doing the best with what you have and never looking back.

 

Jesus ends the story he tells in today’s Gospel lesson by admonishing us that storing up treasures on earth is in vain. And he offers instead the notion of being rich toward God.

 

There’s a meme that makes the rounds every so often. I’ve seen several minor variations of it. My favorite depicts a large number of diverse people gathered around a big table laden with food. Think “church potluck” table. The caption says, “When you have more than you need, build a longer table, not a higher wall.”

 

I’m pretty sure that would count as being rich toward God.

 

“This very night,” Jesus says. What is each of us doing, today and every day, to be “rich toward God”?  That’s the question.

 

 

In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen.

 

Smashing Boundaries

 Pentecost V, Grace Episcopal Church, Monroe, La.

Boundaries are often good things. I’m talking about social boundaries, the kind that help us manage our human relationships.

 

When I finished my Bachelor’s degree at the University of Iowa in the spring of 1980, I went straight to graduate school that fall. I had decided I was called to teach at the college level, and as an Iowa farm girl, I figured  that I really needed to diversify my own experience of the world. So, of the several graduate programs that offered me admission and a graduate assistantship, I chose the University of Pennsylvania—not for its academic reputation but because it was situated in Philadelphia—a major city known for its racial, ethnic and class diversity.

 

I was right! I had many experiences in Philadelphia that taught me about social boundaries and how they guide our behavior in interaction with other human beings. In fact, I found it so interesting that I made that a significant part of my graduate study.

 

One really rather mundane lesson that I still laugh about today actually happened in church. I chose a lovely church full of lovely people near the Penn campus. They were very welcoming.

 

But one Sunday after leaving coffee hour, I got to thinking about the fact that although I loved the worship and thought well of the people, coffee hour was always a bit uncomfortable.

 

Now at that church, coffee hour came after the principal service. It lasted about 20 minutes, and we did NOT sit at tables as we do here. Rather, we stayed on our feet, coffee cup in hand, and mingled.

 

So, after a few weeks of reflection and sort of “studying” my own behavior, I realized what was happening. Basically, I—from small town Iowa—was accustomed to much closer social space than is customary in a big city. I was quite literally backing people around the parish hall and into corners by standing too close!

 

They’d take a step back, and I’d take a step forward. They’d take another step back, and I’d close what was to me a “gap” between us. And on it went. I literally had to learn to plant my feet on the floor and resist with great discipline the impulse to step into their preferred private space.

 

Boundaries. They help us keep our social relationships on track. And they come in all forms. Here’s a verbal one I also had to learn: When the convenience store cashier, with whom you have never done business before, calls you “baby”… if you’re in the Deep South, you smile and say “Thanks, Hon.” If you’re in the north, Yankee Land where I’m from, take a step back and get out of there as fast as you can!

 

So those are some funny examples, but boundaries are also serious business. I think it important to know that many people with autism have difficulty understanding and navigating social boundaries. They often struggle a lot to interpret social cues and to recognize nonverbal communication, and so they are often not sure how to make their own interactions “fit in.” They’re often not sure what is appropriate to say or do in any given situation. It is exhausting and anxiety producing.

 

Cultures also shape boundaries—not just rural vs. city culture, but cultures based in race, ethnicity and social class shape our perception and use of social boundaries. These can become particularly difficult and even deadly boundaries.

 

And that leads me, finally, to today’s Gospel story, in which Jesus is in the business of smashing boundaries.

 

Open Heart by Cromwell Ngobeni

To talk about the boundaries Jesus smashes in this story, I’m going to dwell for a moment on the guy in the ditch.

 

Who was he? Was he a Jew? I’m guessing that’s the common assumption. But in this story, which is ALL ABOUT who people are and the social boundaries they live within, Jesus says not a word about who the guy in the ditch is. It’s almost as though.. it really doesn’t matter! Right? He’s your neighbor. That is all.

 

Jesus also doesn’t answer any of the questions we might ask, like what did the guy do to contribute to his fate of getting robbed? Was he flaunting his wealth? Was he dressed provocatively? Was he careless? You know: What did he do to provoke the attack? All questions we might well ask seeking to justify our lack of desire to help.

 

It is particularly ironic that the religious guys—the priest and the Levite—do not help the guy in the ditch. Loving God and your neighbor as yourself is NOT a New Testament idea. Jesus did not make that up. He was quoting Hebrew scripture when he said that, and the priest and the Levite surely knew it. (Leviticus 19)

 

It is more than ironic, it is positively egregious when Christians today use Jesus himself to build boundaries between themselves and their neighbors—not only the ones who don’t worship Jesus, but even those who do worship Jesus but who perhaps don’t believe all the right things about him, or who don’t live by the right moral standards, or who have decided that Jesus sides with one political party over another, or whatever. Using Jesus to create deep and angry political divisions between people and nations seems to be a favorite past time these days.

 

 Author Barbara Brown Taylor, an Episcopal priest, said this: The only clear line I draw these days is this: when my religion tries to come between me and my neighbor, I will choose my neighbor. (Holy Envy)

 

See, this story of the Samaritan is not the only time Jesus smashes boundaries. Jesus smashed boundaries all the time. He dined with sinners. He hung out with low-lifes, like tax collectors. His smashing of boundaries is precisely what got Jesus into trouble with the good church people of his day over and over again.

 

So today I invite us to consider how we justify ourselves, what kinds of boundaries we use in deciding who is our neighbor and how we should respond to them. We are very invested in determining who “deserves” our help and who doesn’t. I think we are quite good at coming up with justifications that allow poverty and injustice to thrive in our society, and that defend the status quo, which just happens to benefit us!

 

Maybe it’s time each of us spends some time doing an inventory: What are my boundaries, especially when it comes to people who are very different from me? How do I use those boundaries in shaping my interactions with such people? Or do I have boundaries that prevent me from ever having to interact with people outside of my comfort zone? Which of my boundaries might be overdue for smashing?

 

In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, AMEN.

 

Choose Hope, Choose Love

 Pentecost 4, Christ Church, St. Joseph, La.

In today’s gospel lesson, Jesus sends seventy followers ahead of him, two by two to heal the sick and proclaim the Kingdom of God. They go, they do, and they return rejoicing. 

 

 

That’s the point I want to focus on today: They return rejoicing.

 

You have perhaps experienced this phenomenon. You have perhaps heard others talk about their experience. We go out to minister and we are ministered to by those we sought to serve.

 

I went to the Dominican Republic a number of years ago with a handful of deacons. We traveled about the countryside with several Dominican deacons and worshiped with folks in tiny, un-airconditioned churches. Those churches were mostly bare of ornamentation; they might have one cross, one painting of the Holy Family, but very little else. The altars were a wooden table made by the local carpenter. The pews were crude benches.

 

But the worship was heartfelt and joyful, the people in awe that we had come to worship with them. I came home a different person, a bit haunted by the stark contrast between those churches and most U.S. American churches, but also deeply grateful and refreshed.

 

This phenomenon of returning joyful, having been ministered to by those we serve is, not merely the joy of a job well done. It’s not merely the good feeling we get when those we minister to are grateful. Or that glow of virtue we get from having done a good deed. There’s something deeper than all of that going on.

 

The people Jesus sent out were ordinary folks, probably what we would consider working class—literally laborers. We know that because those are the kind of folks who followed Jesus: fishermen, carpenters and such. They most assuredly were not religious leaders—pharisees, sadducees, priests, deacons and such—because those folks spent their time arguing with Jesus and plotting against him, NOT following him.

 

These ordinary folks lived in a terrible time, a time of oppression by centralized political power, a time of corruption and of poverty and food insecurity. Life was fragile.

 

In sending them out, Jesus warned them that it would not be easy. Some would reject them. They were like sheep going among wolves.

 

But these ordinary folks went as sent by Jesus, and they were changed by their acts of mercy. They came back rejoicing, exulting in what they had been able to accomplish—which clearly exceeded their fondest hopes and expectations. You can hear the glee in Jesus’ voice as he greets them, proclaiming that he had seen Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightening.

 

Jesus also explains to them that he had given them power over enemies, but then he cautions: don’t rejoice over the power; rejoice that your name is written in heaven.

 

Here’s what I think all this means: WE, in our mixed motives, are not what bring about the Kingdom of God. Rather, the Kingdom of God comes forth, pretty much in spite of us, through our actions and interactions in service to others. We do not first love God then serve others. We serve others and in serving others become lovers of God.

 

See, I think we pay a lot of lip service to loving God. Yes, yes, I love God, we say. But how do you love… an entity that you cannot see or touch? The only way we can put our arms of love around God is by putting them around another human being.

 

Now that is easy to see and do when it comes to friends and family. Of course we experience hope and joy and the love of God when we put our arms around friends and family! We would be less than human if we didn’t.

 

Just a quick aside here. It should come as no surprise that our prisons are full of people who did not experience the love of God through loving relationships with friends and family as they grew up. This is attested to by the experiences of the men and women who conduct Kairos* ministry, and report that hardened criminals break down into tears when given a dozen cookies baked for them by a complete stranger. It speaks to them of love they have never known.

 

I do not think we fully comprehend how hollow it is to say “I love God,” all while ignoring the plight of the millions of God’s children who live in fear and in poverty and poor health.

Serving others—especially outside our circle of family and friends, those who cannot do anything for us in return, those Jesus describes as the least of these—transforms us--even more than them. 

 

Here’s how Mother Teresa of Calcutta put it: “Only in heaven will we see how much we owe to the poor for helping us to love God the better because of them.”

 

Today we are sent into a world full of “wolves” of war, violence, greed, divisive politics and conflict over scarce resources—like food and water—due not only to war and greed but climate change accelerated by our own behavior.

 

Today’s primary disease is no longer leprosy or tuberculosis, but possibly the utter loss of hope that comes from feeling unwanted, uncared for, abandoned by everyone and unable to make a difference in one’s own life, much less the world.

 

 

It is hard to have hope in today’s world. Yet we are sent, and as we go, I think we will find that hope is like love: It’s not something we have that enables us to act, it’s something that we create by acting.

 

Moreover, love and hope are contagious. Our acting transforms not only us, but those around us. Our hopeful act, our loving act make us more hopeful and loving, and those around us start acting in a more loving and hopeful way.

 

Hope and love are not feelings we have so much as choices we make. And by making and acting on those choices, we are transformed into loving, hope-filled people.

 

In the name of God, Father, Son & Holy Spirit, AMEN.

 

Dancing in the Eye of the Hurricane

Trinity Sunday, June 15, 2025, Grace Episcopal, Monroe, La

A few years ago, I was listening to American Roots on public radio and heard a song called “The Eye” by Brandi Carlile. The key lyric in that song is this: “You can dance in a hurricane if you’re standing in the eye.”

 

Striking imagery. And my immediate response was, “The title of my memoir—when I get around to writing it—will be ‘Dancing in the Eye of the Hurricane.’”

 

Today is the one day in the church year devoted to a point of theology—perhaps our most important but most challenging point of theology—the Trinity. I don’t know if that memoir will ever be written. But today’s Trinity Sunday sermon is entitled “Dancing in the Eye of The Hurricane.”

 

 

Because that’s how I experience the Triune God and God’s call and claim on my life.

 

Now, you are not about to hear some clever theological explanation of how the Trinity is like a hurricane. Rather, like every other sermon I have ever preached, this one comes from my life, from what happened this week, from how I encountered God in the world yesterday, last month, many years ago.

 

God comes to us disguised as our life, writer Paula D’Arcy said. And that quote is now available as a poster, and on a t-shirt, or printed on.. whatever.

 

It resonates. Hear it again: God comes to us disguised as our life.

 

And life is a lot like a hurricane. Sometimes we dance along happily and competently in the relative calm of the eye. And then we miss a step or the roiling turmoil around us lurches in an unexpected direction, and we are bouncing off the walls. It takes time to get back into that eye where we can dance again, and only in retrospect can we see that God was in it… and we in God... the whole time.

 

Many times getting bludgeoned by the winds of the hurricane is exactly how we encounter God’s call and claim on us in a way we cannot ignore.

 

I’m a teacher. I didn’t always know that. I discovered it by way of the really messy business of a marriage ending badly. After careening about for a time wondering where in heaven’s name that had come from, I was left with the task of reinventing myself.

 

I went back to school to get a Bachelor’s degree and got invited to be a teaching assistant while still an undergraduate. I then taught my first college class the summer after I graduated, went straight to graduate school that fall, finally finished all my degrees in the spring of 1990, began teaching full time that fall. And I still teach…

 

Teaching can be made to matter. It can change things. Here’s a story: A few years ago, I had a student, a young woman who wanted to complete the Public Relations major. But she was not the best student and she struggled. I despaired of ever getting her through the program.

 

But finally she made it! She completed all the requirements with passing grades and graduated. A couple years later, I received a large envelope in the mail, from her. It contained a beautiful marketing brochure. It was well designed; the writing was flawless.

 

The attached note said, “Thank you to the woman who taught me I could do this.”

 

Comments like that will keep a teacher going for a very long time!

 

Much has happened from there to here. I’ve lost my balance, been blind-sided, and bounced off the walls by the hurricane of life more than once. Another marriage ended in the death of a spouse. A very real hurricane dumped a boy who needed a mom into my life. And I discovered I needed a son!

 

I think there’s some real truth in the adage, if it doesn’t kill you, it will make your stronger! Each time, a way forward that ends up looking like a call from God has emerged from the chaos.

 

My friends, this is what dancing in the eye of the hurricane looks like for me. I don’t know what dancing in the eye of the hurricane looks like for you, only that you too are called.

 

Whatever you are doing with this one glorious and precious gift we call life, God is already at work loving and reconciling this world and you, me, all of us are called to be a part of that.

 

Please do not hear in any of this the tired notion that “God has a plan for my life and if I just pray hard enough and am good enough, God will send signs to tell me whether to take this job or that one, move here or there, sell the farm or not, start that business or not, etc., etc.”

 

The Way Through, by BJK, 2020

 

Such thinking has never done much for me. I rely on the promise God made to Isaiah in Chapter 30, verse 21: Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, “This is the way; walk in it.”

 

So consider the possibility that God does not care much about worldly details! Whether you teach or sew or practice law or medicine or babysit your grandkids or sell real estate or wait tables, make it matter. God’s plan for your life is that you will be God’s reconciling love in the world.

 

I invite us to look at everything we do, and aren’t doing, and ask, Where is God in this? How does or would this enable me to participate in God’s reconciling love in the world? To serve others? To care for those who need to be cared for, and to enable those who are able to care for themselves to do so, so that all can participate in God’s reconciling love in the world?

 

That’s the way. Walk in it!

 

We come from God, we are in God through the Risen Christ, and God is in us through the indwelling Holy Spirit. Nothing can take that away from us. Not the most devastating storm. Nothing can take that away from us.

 

And when we relinquish our own feeble attempts to control life, when we accept that we cannot, when we forgive life for being exactly what it is and seek only to offer ourselves and our lives to being God’s reconciling presence in the world, ...then we dance in the eye of the hurricane.  

 

Dance on, my friends.  

       

In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, AMEN.

 

Focus on the Light

 Christ Episcopal Church, St. Joseph, La., Easter 7/Ascensiontide

The story of Jesus’ ascension is told near the end of Luke and at the beginning of Acts. Both accounts were thus likely written by the same person since scholars widely believe the two books have a single author.

 

Although there are several differences between the accounts, neither tells us when it happened. Nevertheless, the feast day for the ascension is always on a Thursday—the Thursday exactly 40 days after Easter, which is, of course, always on a Sunday.

 

It’s a bit odd since most churches don’t have a service Thursdays. But… of course, it must be 40 days after Easter to match the 40 days Jesus spent in the wilderness before he began his ministry. And why? Because that’s how the church does things, that’s why!

 

So… today is officially the 7^th Sunday after Easter, but I prefer to think of it as the only Sunday during Ascensiontide! And since you most likely did not go to church Thursday, well, today, is our celebration of Ascensiontide, that extraordinary moment between Jesus’ departure from Earth and the coming of the Holy Spirit—to be celebrated next Sunday—Pentecost Sunday.

 

And it is a moment, so to speak. It is just 10 days between Jesus ascending and the Holy Spirit raining fire on the heads of Jesus’s followers. And this is the only Sunday within that 10 days, thus our main opportunity for thinking a bit about what that time must have been like for the disciples and IS like for us today.

 

The disciples had been on quite a roller coaster ride. Jesus had been crucified. It seemed to have all been over. Their hopes for a new kingdom were dashed. They went fishing.

 

Then Jesus began to appear to them. At first they weren’t sure but he kept showing up. They moved from disbelief to belief. Could it be they had him back again? They hung on his every word. This time when he said he was going away but would send this mysterious presence that would be with them always, I suspect they were readier to believe, but…, did they have any idea what to expect? 

 

 

You know that I always love to look at artist renditions of the Bible stories. The vast majority of paintings of the Ascension show Jesus in voluminous robes and rising, arms outstretched. The focus is all on the glorification of Jesus. The disciples, if they appear at all, tend to be highly stylized hands and faces.

 

But there are a few that only show Jesus’ feet and maybe the hem of his robe dangling down from the top of the frame. In these, the focus tends to be on the disciples and their reactions, and their faces are not always calm! I saw one, in particular, that showed faces contorted by surprise, of course, but also fear and anxiety.

 

It is hard to be in an in-between time! What next? After all we’ve been through, what next?! Here we are alone again, and Jesus says something big is going to happen, but… what is this new thing going to be like?

 

It seems the disciples were kind of frozen in the moment—and wouldn’t we all be?! So the next thing that happens—and my fave thing about this story—is that two men dressed all in white appear. Angels, presumably. And they shock the poor, already stunned disciples out of their reverie.

 

Wake up guys, they say. What are you doing standing there with your mouths hanging open? You’ve got work to do—like “change the whole world” work to do. Better get cracking. Go back to Jerusalem and get ready.

 

So Ascensiontide is a little bitty—10 day, to be exact—in-between time when the disciples prayed and prepared for something to come, they were not sure exactly what or how, but they prepared in faith with prayer and praise, and lo and behold, something wondrous did happen, and they did go out and change the world.

 

But you have most likely noticed… you surely have noticed…the world.. still.. needs changing! Christianity brought some wonderful teachings to the world, and I’ll come back to that momentarily. But some of what Christianity brought was cruel and inhumane, and most assuredly not from God. Christianity brought the Inquisitions and the Crusades and the Doctrine of Manifest Destiny that supported our ancestors in decimating indigenous people and culture in this country.

 

Some Christians used passages in the bible to justify slavery. And then other Christians came along and used the Hebrew Scripture to preach that all humans are created equal and in the likeness and image of God. Christianity has always been a mixed bag and even though the disciples of Jesus changed the world… we have much to do today!

 

Our central teachings--love of God first and foremost then love your neighbor as self—are sorely needed in our still violent and evil world. We have a long way to go and our work cut out for us.

 

So we still need two men in white—or maybe any random priest or deacon—to show up every so often and say, “people of Christ Church, St. Joseph, why do you stand here gazing into heaven? You’ve got work to do! Get cracking.”

 

We too live in an in-between time, not a little bitty one like Ascensiontide but an enormous, ongoing one that stretches from the first Easter until that glorious day when God’s kingdom comes, fully and gloriously, and Divine Love and Perfect Unity rule everything.

 

What we do with our in-between time matters. What we focus on matters, as we play out our lives working toward the coming of that Kingdom. Here’s a gem I found on FB of all places, in the past couple of weeks. The author framed it as…

 

A reminder in these dark times…

 

We must call out the darkness, The unspeakable injustice and evil in this world. But we must never *focus* on it.

Make sure your focus is *always* on the Light. And remember that no matter how great the darkness gets, the Light will always be greater.

 

Yasmin Mogahed, Muslim woman

 

 

Our Gospel lesson today is Jesus the Christ’s prayer for his disciples, and us, as he departs this earth. It is a prayer for love and unity. But we will never achieve God’s kingdom of Love and Unity by striving for conformity and uniformity. It always sounds nice! If we could just get rid of our differences, we could all live in harmony, right? Except that what every human who ever thought that had in mind was the rest of the world conforming to THEIR beliefs, values and way of seeing! BE like me, then we can all get along, right!

 

Our only possible unity is in learning to live with and love in all our variation. That’s Divine Love and that’s the Light—the only Light that can guide us.

 

In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, AMEN.

Do This

 Maundy Thursday, Grace Episcopal Church, 2023

It’s a familiar story. Yet we need to hear it again. And again.

 

So we come together every Maundy Thursday to re-enact, with Jesus in our midst, two expressions of who we are as followers of him and as children of the living God.

 

One of those things is Holy Eucharist: Jesus calls Eucharistic community into being by blessing and sharing bread and wine with his disciples in his last meal with them on this Earth. And he says, “do this in remembrance of me.”

 

Those of us who take seriously our commitment in our baptismal covenant to “continue in the fellowship and the breaking of the bread and the prayers,” tend to be here at least once a week for the ongoing celebration of Holy Eucharist in this place.

 

The other expression of who we are as followers of Jesus that we re-enact this night is our identity as servants, initiated by Jesus’s washing of his disciples’ feet. And this time he says, ‘I’m doing this as an example of what you are to do.”

 

We call this night “Maundy Thursday” because “maundy,” coming from the Latin “man DAH tum,” means “command.” Jesus didn’t just express hope or desire that we do these things, he commands us to do these things.

 

So we participate and are renewed weekly by Holy Eucharist. But do we have an equally powerful weekly reminder of our servant identity? It is there, in our post-communion prayers, and I’ll come back to those. But do we see our Eucharistic life and our servanthood as being one and the same?

 

I’m not so sure, and much as I love the Book of Common Prayer that guides us through our daily and weekly liturgies, I wonder if it’s not a shortcoming that we can so easily miss that point. Certainly I think our role as servants is the harder to remember and make real with regular practice in our lives.

 

I dare say, coming to the holy table reassures us of our belonging and reminds us of God’s grace and mercy toward us. It is, by and large, our comfort zone.

 

In contrast, practicing our servanthood often takes us out of our comfort zone. And isn’t it interesting—and probably quite relevant—that the action Jesus used to drive home his point about servanthood also takes us out of our comfort zone!

 

I grew up in the Mennonite Church—a sharp contrast with the Episcopal Church in some ways. And I will never forget so long as I live the acute discomfort of the teenagers of the church on foot-washing Sunday. Because, you see, in the Mennonite Church, everyone had to do it. Everyone!

 

And so the teenage girls and the teenage boys would congregate in separate groups in opposite corners of the church, as far apart as they could get, and, rather hurriedly, heads down, wash feet.

 

What is up with that? Well, clearly, kneeling down and washing each other’s feet involves more vulnerability than even adults are comfortable with, much less teenagers. But that is exactly as I think Jesus intended it.

 

Now, please. I did not tell that story to pressure anyone into participating in the ritual of foot washing tonight! I love the Episcopal Church’s “some should, all may, none must” approach to such things.

 

But I do want to call each and every one of us, whether we participate by coming to the basins or by sitting in our pew watching, that we not allow this to be just another annual ritual in the church year.

 

I do call each of us to recognize this re-enactment to be a recommitment to our role and identity as servants, along with our brother Jesus the Christ, and along with all of the vulnerability that servanthood involves.  

 

See, the life of servanthood is not about making us feel good. Last week at our monthly pub theology gathering, we got into a discussion about charitable acts—specifically about such things as giving money to someone who is asking for help.

 

Now that is by no means the only way to enact servanthood—maybe not even the best way—but it is one way. Helping people who ask us for help is one way to “seek and serve Christ” in every human face, as our baptismal covenant puts it.

 

But the question that came up was, what if it doesn’t make us feel good to do it? Shouldn’t doing a charitable act, doing some kind of service to another, make us feel good?

 

My first thought in response to the question was, yeah, that makes sense, it should.

 

But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I question my response. Why should it make us feel good? When did Jesus ever say that following the servanthood he modeled for us would make us feel good?

 

Actually, what Jesus did say pretty clearly is that following him was not going to feel good. You know, all that stuff about maybe having to leave behind family, about letting the dead bury the dead, about giving away all your stuff, about the narrow way vs. the broad way…

 

So maybe if doing some charitable or servant-like thing makes us feel good, we really ought to think twice about it. We ought to question our motives. Because following Jesus into the life of servanthood is not about making us feel good. It is far more likely to be about leaving our comfort zone, with God as our help—and that, of course, is what makes it possible.

 

Here’s what servanthood of the Jesus kind is about: Love. That is all.

 

Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. What Jesus did was about love. What Jesus institutes is loving service. And he says, I do this as an example of what you are to do. And when Peter objects, he says, Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.

 

Loving service to each other and all of humankind is intrinsic to our relationship with Jesus the Christ. Without it, we have no share with him.

 

It is the outward manifestation of an inward grace—that inward grace being the love of God through our relationship with Jesus the Christ. Without it, we have no share with him.

 

Our service in the name of Jesus the Christ is an extension of the community we share at the holy table. It is sacramental.

 

And now, Father, send us out to do the work you have given us to do, we will soon pray after receiving the holy food. Or, in the magnificent words of Rite I, strengthen us to do all such good works as thou hast prepared for us to walk in.

 

Service is not merely something we do in our spare time or with spare resources. Loving service is how we walk in the world.

 

In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, AMEN