Six

Six years ago this very morning, around 4:30 a.m., my sister in law called with the news of my brother's death.  As it was today, it was a Saturday.  What happened between that Saturday and Monday afternoon is burned in my memory.  I don't dwell on it, but there are moments such as today when it's unavoidable.

My thoughts of Jimmy this week have been of what was.  The kid I knew.  The pain in the neck he enjoyed being for me.  The attention and love he long sought from me that while present, was never quite as much as either of us needed...and yet, we were both too damn proud to admit it.

I've written extensively about Jimmy and processing my grief in the years since his death...they're all labelled "Jimmy."  For this year, I pause, remember my kid brother, and shake my head that it's been six years.  He'd be 40 this year, and I would have so enjoyed rubbing that in.

Maundy Thursday 2010 - "No Greater Love: A Life Made Sacred (Sacrum Facere)"

I'm not bringing a homily this year at Maundy Thursday.

First time in many a year.

The constructs of our worship experience tonight really lent (no pun here) itself to music, action, ancient words read and meditated upon.

But I'm always drawn to this night. Before I had a theological lexicon to describe it, this night held a singular importance for me.

Like my Jewish friends who are celebrating their liberation from another time through Passover, I always feel like asking "Why is this night different that all others?"

Long before I found a blog to reflect aloud for those who choose to read it, this homily has been in me. I continue to return to it as my Credo for who Jesus is, the nature of faith, and the profound challenge of discipleship.

It is the "basic sauce," the "roux," if you will, that when any of a number of contextual ingredients are added, suits what I have come to believe about this significant day.

A simple search of this blog will reveal the various iterations of this homily in the past five or six years.

Last year, in 2009, I engaged in a significant reworking for two predominant reasons. The first was the introduction of Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan's book The Last Week, which I continue to hold in highest regard for framing the central thesis. They gave words to my long felt sense of Holy Week. I count it as a means of grace.

The second reason came as a result of my last Maundy Thursday with a congregation I had led for eight years. I've come to think of this as my Valedictory Address. It's no "The Queen is Dead," by any stretch, but it is me, and it was something I wanted to be sure I said as clearly as ever as I prepared to take my leave.

This year, even though not preached, I continue the discipline of living with it to see what is being pushed in me and what needs to be shared.

Here it is.

There are moments in life when the actions we take, the engagement of our lives with the world around us reveal something about us, whether we’re conscious of it or not. We can talk all day about who we are and what we believe – but there’s nothing more revealing or indicting than action or inaction.

Conscious awareness of our role, place and motivation in life, and the relationships that ebb and flow in the slipstream of our existence is best defined as “mindfulness.” Taken from wisdom of the eastern religions, it is that capacity for us to know that wherever we go, there we are - -and thanks to John Kabat Zinn, the western world is the beneficiary of understanding a spiritual state that belongs to all people of faith.

In times of greatest moment – to act or not to act - - “to be or not to be - that is the question.”

Act with haste, that is, without prayerful discernment seeking guidance from trusted voices, and action becomes an end in itself. Those who yearn to be seen as the hero who sweeps in and saves the day act hastily.

Ask anyone who has been caught up in the aftermath of one’s hasty pursuit of hero worship and they’ll tell you such action may look good on the surface, but there is collateral damage aplenty.

Is there compassion or consideration in the face of collateral damage, or, willingness to put aside being the hero for the common good?

No.

Inevitably, collateral damage, in whatever form it comes, is considered an acceptable loss, and the price of doing business. The end always justifies the means.

Others live with perpetual inaction.

Able to articulate and argue relevant points of whatever their issue is with passion – they fail to act. They feed so much on the energy generated by the problem itself so that their motivation to enact a remedy, is muted by the fear that if the problem is solved, the “stuff” that feeds their lives is gone.

They know the issue.

They know the problem.

But they are crippled to do anything about it.

A vicious cycle, that. Indeed, it is pitiful.

Those who refuse to forgive a wrong because to do so would extinguish the rage that fuels the hellish fire of their every day – choose perpetual inaction. Like the hostage who begins to side with very one who has held them bondage and would do them harm, we, who choose inaction to make right a wrong, or to forgive, suffer from a Stockholm Syndrome of the soul - - loving our pain and anger because it’s what we know. Being liberated from it scares us to death. We love our chains more than being free.

“Repent, and believe in the Gospel,” Jesus would say.
"Repent." "Believe."
"Take" up your cross and "follow."

Action words.

It’s the difference between saying you’re a Christian and actually being a companion of Jesus wherever that leads.

Action and inaction. The transcendent truth of either approach to life is self defining and a prophecy perpetually self-fulfilling.

Maundy Thursday is one of those days when the abstract and absolute, the flesh and the spirit, the universal and the particular collide. It is one of those occasions where “the rubber hits the road.” Here, at the end of Lent and the start of the Triduum, the Great Three Days, it reveals through action the character of the One who draws us into this worship space tonight. It confronts us with the real life, real time implications of what a life made sacred looks like. It makes us look at Jesus’ life and consider what we’re doing with our own.

Is life made sacred because it just is…or is life made sacred by what one does with it?

So, action, these actions give meaning to what Jesus has taught. They give meaning to what we believe. They make all this Jesus business real – incarnate.

On this night we focus on an action of Jesus found only in the 4th gospel. The Synoptics don’t have it. John, historically considered the last of the canonical gospels written, has a particular agenda – the writer has a bias, and his bias is always for Jesus – his life, his teaching, and the nature of the Christ that has always been.

Only John has this text – Jesus, at Passover, after sharing table fellowship, takes upon himself an action that will be self-defining hereon, as it will be for all of us who carry his name.

He, the one called, Rabbi, Teacher, Lord, Messiah, Christ – comes now to assume the role of the menial laborer – literal dirty work is not beneath him – he embraces it...he love us in it.

It defines him. He takes a towel, a basin and a pitcher – and washes his disciples feet.

But why?

Rarely in our observance of Christian liturgy do you find something so profoundly intimate as the washing of feet. Maybe that’s why it’s not a sacrament (which it should be), there’s really no way to observe this liturgy with integrity without literally touching someone.

It’s too close, too intimate. It’s not “churchy.”

Getting on our knees and taking off shoes, using water, towels and basins, it’s beneath the dignity of our erudite gathering.

To which I say, “right.” It is.

But it is supremely of Christ.

And if we are going to be “of Christ,” with integrity, then tonight, our action or inaction is, guess what? Dare I say it again? Self-Defining.

And maybe that’s what all this dramatic fuss is about this Holy Thursday night and there following into the Great Three Days. If nothing else, we observe integrity at work. That’s an awe inspiring thing. For to live with integrity is joyful, because in it we are complete. We are fully what we’ve been created to become.

Don’t forget, though, that just because we live with integrity, even joyfully, does not mean our work is pleasant, or that we’re giddy about it.

To do so was not a choice absent other options. Think of those presented to Jesus in the wilderness temptations, – No, this was a matter of integrity. He did this thing, both in the upper room with his disciples, as well as walk the Via Dolorosa because that’s who he is.

To have done anything other than to be a servant, than to identify with the suffering of humankind by embracing the cross, would have been to have missed his moment – the moment when his action defined who he was.

This is what a life made sacred looks like:

12 ‘This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. 13No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. 14You are my friends if you do what I command you. 15I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. 16You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. 17I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another. John 15.12-17

Another way of seeing this night might be this. Jesus did not miss his moment and he’s imploring us not to miss ours. That our lives are gifts, to be sure, but they are only made sacred when we enact self-giving love as every moment's measure.

Look. Ministry is hard.

Giving yourself away is hard. Following Jesus to where ministry leads you is hard.

It is counterintuitive to everything innately part of our being that cries out for self interest and self protection.

Placing yourself in the role of servant and not hero is tough. Doing ultimate good without lusting for credit is extraordinarily difficult.

If it were easy, wouldn’t more folks be doing it?

Instead, too many of us play at Church, play at following Jesus, use our religious pursuits as a contrivance of convenience rather than a covenantal commitment.

Listen, people. To live with integrity or not is far more in our control that we'd care to admit.

It’s in your grasp, sisters and brothers – right here, right now.

Jesus gathers with us in this room, as he has done with his companions for millennia and says, “Here’s who I am, here’s what I’m prepared to do, here are the depths I’m prepared to plunge – for you.”

How far are you willing to go? Could it be that tonight it is at least to declare that “no greater love have I” than to give myself away, even sacrificially, because of love?

What we do tonight, through bread and cup, is a liturgy you have repeated many, many times. May it be, however, that tonight you see beyond your own action of getting up and coming down here and partaking Eucharist.

Consider and embrace the life made sacred because of what he did…made his life sacred, for you.