Sermon Archive
Maundy Thursday
Exodus 12:1-4, (5-10), 11-14
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.
1 Corinthians 11:23-26
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.
Jesus said, "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."
Sermon
The Rev. Jack Zamboni
For as often as you eat this bread and
drink this cup,
you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.
For
as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the
Lord’s death until he comes. So says our patron,
St. Paul. The Eucharist whose institution we celebrate tonight is about
Jesus’ death and it is about the coming of that Kingdom which
Jesus’ first brought near. If we were to look at other
biblical texts, we would see that the Eucharist is also about Passover
and Exodus, about the meals that Jesus ate with outcasts and sinners;
even about his Resurrection. But for tonight, Paul’s words
that tie the Eucharist to Jesus death and the coming Kingdom are more
than enough. For as often as you eat this bread and drink
this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.
We
live between the Lord’s death and his coming – and
to us they are far apart from each other, and far away from us. Except
on this one night of the year when we look for Jesus’ death
to come tomorrow as the inevitable sequel to the events of tonight,
Jesus’ death is something we look back to
– and from a great distance. Here, in the first years of the
21st century, we look back over nearly 2,000
years to a different world, in a different age, in a different culture.
Jesus’ execution at the hands of the Romans is, by now, a
deeply-embedded cultural myth; a story that’s been re-told
again and again in poetry, music and the visual arts. And for
us, it happened very long ago and very far away. We look back
a long distance to Jesus’ death.
To
see the coming of the Kingdom we look in the opposite direction
– to the future. Yet it seems as far, even further,
away as Jesus’ death. For nearly 2,000 years, Christians have
prayed, “Thy Kingdom come” – yet we need
look only to Iraq, where war begin 5 years and one day ago, to know
that the Lord has not yet come to bring in God’s Reign. Many
wonder if it ever will come – or whether history will simple
continue as literally one damned thing after another. Perhaps, instead,
we imagine our own individual coming to God’s Kingdom when we
die. But even if we are old enough to have fewer years left than
we’ve already lived, death still seems far distant, in a
qualitatively other world. The coming Kingdom, like Jesus’
death, is to us very remote: one in the far distant past, the
other in the ever-receding future.
This
distance is a serious theological and spiritual problem.
Jesus’ death and the coming of the Kingdom are vital moments
in the Christian story of God’s love for us. If history has
taught us to perceive these events as far away, is it any wonder that
we often struggle to find God and God’s love close at hand?
If the Lord’s death and his coming are far from us, where
then, are we to find God in our lives?
It
was not so for Paul and the first generation of Christians to whom he
wrote. Paul wrote this letter to the Corinthians a bare 20 years after
Jesus’ crucifixion. The Lord’s death was a living
memory of a recent and extraordinary event – so extraordinary
that, as Paul writes earlier, it seemed folly to most who heard of it.
How foolish to say that God had come down from heaven and, in human
form, been executed in the most shameful way known to the Roman world.
And yet, to those who believed, how wonderful! -- that in their own
lifetime, God had chosen to come near
to them – near enough to die as they surely would!
So,
too, with the Kingdom of God that figured so centrally in
Jesus’ ministry two decades before Paul wrote: “The
time is fulfilled,” Jesus proclaimed,
“The Kingdom of God is at hand!” --- and
the first generation of disciples believed that the Lord would return
very soon and bring the Kingdom to fulfillment. When Paul wrote
“often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you
proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes,” he
was confident that coming would happen in his lifetime –
perhaps this very Passover! The Lord’s coming was not far
off; to the contrary it was very near.
In
fact, God’s nearness
in Jesus was what was so exciting about the new-found faith of his
first followers: that in everything about him
– his stories and sayings, his miracles and meals, his death
and resurrection, and his soon-expected return, God had come near
to them – near in hope, in forgiveness, in joy, in life, in
love. God was not back in the past, nor far above in heaven nor
somewhere off in the future: No, they proclaimed, in Jesus, God has
come near the world; near us, here and now! The nearness
of this loving God was precisely the Gospel, the Good News.
If
the nearness of God in Christ is the good news, I think I know at least
part of why Jesus gave us the Eucharist: that no matter when in history
his followers might live, they would still know the Good News that in
him, God is near. In bread and wine Jesus is, indeed, near. His death a
distant 2,000 years away and the long-awaited coming of the Kingdom
cannot proclaim to us the stunning nearness of God as they did for the
first generation of Christians. But the Eucharist still does.
So that we may know God’s nearness in Jesus as his first followers did, he says to us,
This
is my body; this is my blood. This bread in your
hands is my body; this wine on your lips is my blood. I am near your in
this Sacrament, as near as your own bodies.
Our
friend and fellow priest, Linda Carlson-Scholer, sometimes refers to
the Eucharist as “The Reaching Bread,” a phrase
I’ve come to love. The Eucharist is the bread in which God
reaches to be near to us, to be seen with our eyes, to be looked at and
touched with our hands. “Here, O my Lord, I see
thee face to face; here would I touch and handle things
unseen”
1 God is not back in the past, nor far above in heaven nor
somewhere off in the future. In the Eucharist God is
near – God is here.
And
not just
here. As Mark Bozzuti-Jones has rightly preached:
“God shows up all the time.
God comes to us all the time.
God is [near] all the time.
Still,
it takes a lifetime of awareness to know that what is standing
before you is God.”
2
Jesus
gives us the Eucharist in order to teach that awareness. In the
Eucharist, Jesus says to us, “If you know that I am near you,
standing before you in this Bread and Wine, then maybe you can learn to
know me near you, standing before you, in other places, too.”
Maybe we can see that God is near in all the physical gifts of creation
-- not just bread and wine, water and oil, but in trees, rocks, wind
and desert; in the marvels of bone, cartilage and collagen which my
scientist wife shows me on her laptop; in galaxies, suns, the
planets in their courses, and this fragile earth, our island home, 3as
our Prayer Book says. God is near, too, in us human beings –
made in God’s image, in you and me. Whether in joy or
suffering, in strength or weakness, in plenty or in need, God is near
in you, in me, in each other.
God
is near not only in discrete parts of creation, those objects,
including ourselves, which we name with nouns. As Susy said back at the
beginning of Lent, God is as much verb as noun. God is near in action.
God is near in breaking of bread and in pouring of wine, in eating
together, the sharing of food and love by which community is made and
re-made again and again.
God
is near, too, in the other action Jesus performed the night before his
death and which we have re-enacted tonight – the washing of
feet. Like the Eucharist, Jesus did this act of servant love not as a
stand-alone sign of God’s nearness, but to open our awareness
to the God who is near, standing before us, every time we do or see
servant love in action. In noun and verb, in bread and wine and the
washing of feet, tonight God is near us, before us, to teach us that
God stands before us all the time.
A priest I knew years ago once said,
“Whenever you see, love, worship it.”
“Whenever
you see, love, worship it.”
Bob
meant that every sacrament of love, every act of love, is
the nearness of God, the God who is always standing before us. When see
that love, we are to worship the God who is there, near, hear.