Maundy Thursday

Welcome to Maundy Thursday.  The word source is Mandatum or mandate.  Jesus gives us a commandment to:  love one other, pray and work for justice, and practice eating with Christ.

The first commandment is to love.   Thank you for loving us College Avenue folks with meals and music and fellowship.  God is love and Jesus knew that better than any.  How he taught with every word and deed.

I am convinced that God put us in families for love and support.  And families also teach us that we do not yet know all we need to know about love.  Brandy just sent me a picture of Bill Cosby and just his face makes me smile.  The quote is about his mother, now the grandmother of his children.  He says, “This woman who is your grandmother, is not the same woman who was my mother.  Now she acts like a person trying to get into heaven.”  Of course grandparents act a bit different then parents. I am anticipating being a first time grandfather and so I will act in that same way.

Meals are and have always been the very center of life, especially in families.   And many families pray: “God is great, God is good, let us thank him for our food.  Amen

United Methodists are prone to sing the Wesley grace….

Be present at our table Lord.  Be here and everywhere adored. These mercies bless and grant that we might feast in fellowship with Thee.  Amen

A prayer before means that we know that sharing food means much more than soothing our hunger.  It includes thanking God three times a day or more that we are fed by people we do not know.  Someone tilled the soil and cared for it all the way to harvest.  Someone harvested it and someone washed it and someone boxed it and trucked it, unpacked it and brought it into the grocery store. 

But we also know that Jesus loved gatherings like this.  Whenever we do this mean something happens…watch out.   We might remember at a meal like this that some in our land in our town have too little to eat and many have more than enough.  

Jesus is a sign that God is ready to meet us where we are every day….workday, then supper, food to be prepared, dishes to be taken home and washed and put away.

A meal is a place where our souls get fed: reunion, reconciliation, fun, teasing, conversation and life’s highlights.

Kelly Gartner is a great, very intelligent, and bold 1^st grader.  Just recently she gave her long red hair to “Locks of Love.”  Just recently she got to help serve communion.  She was so moved by the experience, the sent me a long letter telling me how the church should do that.  She have me a list of all the names of children who could do this.  Along with a code of who liked each other so I could match them up.  She told me it was unfair to only let the grown ups serve communion.

John says that Jesus’ last supper was on the eve of the celebration of the Passover, which is the Jewish celebration of independence from slavery.  Here O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord alone.  That meant our ancestors refused to bow before Caesar.    Jesus would soon die.  When all of Jerusalem would be celebrating this Holy Feast, Jesus is already in the tomb where he won’t cause trouble.  And Caesar’s gods will think they have won another battle to keep people in slavery.

The Passover means for us that Jesus was crossing over from our world to a new world.  He made the crossing in front of us, and then returning to us.  He turned passed away into passing over.   So as the Jews celebrate bondage to freedom, Jesus was going from death to life. 

And yet here is the night before and he is with his closest friends. 

How could he tell that this is for them, too?  As he lifts the cup and passes the bread he is leading to place we would not have gone without his taking us there.  In Jesus God entered the world to show us the way home. 

And then, of all things, he takes off his robe and takes a towel and washes feet.  That is what a slave would do, not our Lord and Master.

What we are asked to do is to follow Jesus, imitate him.

He is kind, let’s be kind.

Jesus is preparing us for our journeys through life and for our journey home.  The table is not end…it is a transition place…experiencing the love that will bind us together.  When we are with Jesus we worship and adore his presence, and then we know we will arise and go our way.  He nourishes us at the table in order to strengthen us to walk perilous paths in the night beyond the table.

The writers of this story looked back on this night and it was if they were sending Jesus off to another world.  But what really happened was that Jesus was sending them and us into service to the world around us.

And finally I think that Jesus washed the feet of Judas who would turn on him.  Love.  Can you imagine Jesus serving undeserving Judas knowing what he was about to do.  And….washing his feet.  That is love.

I personally don’t think we should have laws that make it illegal for Christians to offer aid, comfort, food, housing, jobs, education, or transportation to undocumented immigrants.  This is an attack on the work Christ assigned us to do.  If I will have supper with Jesus and them in heaven; I do not want to be known at that table as the one who did not want them at my table in this life.

Jesus washed Peter’s feet and Judas’ feet.  Jesus does not allow us to divide the world into the deserving and the undeserving, the documented or the undocumented.  Homeless and hungry are the only qualifications needed for our Christ business.  He commands us actively to love all those in need.

William Willimon has a definition for a Christian and for a church that apply to tonight.  Who is a Christian?   “A sinner who has been washed head to toe by Jesus.” 

What is the church?  “A lively group of betrayers who are regularly saved and nourished by Jesus.” 

And this meal gets us ready to feast in heaven.  If we are going to feast with Christ and I think we are we need to be ready.  And that means practice.  Let’s practice.