The Rev'd Jane Bearden
“Guide us waking O Lord and guard us sleeping that awake we may watch with Christ and asleep we may rest in peace.”
Tonight is a time of remembering and watching. Tonight is a night for symbols and ceremony. We participate tonight in the rituals that will focus our attention on the night in Jerusalem when Jesus and the disciples celebrated the Passover meal, when they spent time in Gethsemane praying, when Jesus spent his first night incarcerated – beaten and bound. Tonight and into tomorrow, we remember our Lord’s suffering and dying with us and for us. And we are called tonight, just as Peter, James, and John were called, to watch. We are called to kneel at the feet of our brothers and sisters in Christ to take the role of servant and to anoint their feet with water. We are called into the humility of being served as we remove our shoes and allow our feet to be washed. We are called to be with Jesus through the long night of despair, to share in His fear and in His grief and in so doing to move through the darkness of this night with Him in faith and with hope.
Maundy Thursday (or Holy Thursday) is the day that we remember the Last Supper. "Maundy" comes from the French word, "Mande," meaning "command" or "mandate", and refers to Jesus admonition to us to care for each other as servants and to share in Christ’s love through the Eucharist. We will repeat both of those traditions tonight. We will wash feet and we will share Eucharist. Then as the lights go dim, we will somberly and reverently remove all of the accoutrements from the altar. We will wash the altar down with cleansing water, and we will drape the cross in black. We will move from this altar with the Holy Sacrament to the Altar of Repose where in a darkened church, a few will come one by one or maybe by two, sit or kneel before the Altar and remember - and watch - and simply be present with Christ for an hour or so. This tradition finds its roots in the account of Jesus in the Garden with the disciples. It is one of the darkest moments in the church year. Darker even for me than tomorrow - perhaps because the rejoicing of Easter seems so far away right now and the despair of Holy Friday is imminent.
I want to share a story of watching with you. Several years ago I was going about my job at the hospital, touring the nursing units, but as usual not much aware of the patients or nursing personnel moving about me. I was feeling pretty good. My desk was clean downstairs and it looked as if I would be finished early enough to beat the worst of the traffic out of Boston. As I rounded the corner of one nurse’s station I saw some lunch buddies (all of them nurses) at the desk. I made some off-handed remark about their not having much to do but sit around when one of them looked at me and quietly but firmly shushed me with a warning that all was not well. You see, someone had just taken a turn for the worst and was dying, and these women, these nurses, were going about the act of being present to the moment, watching with the family and their loved one, being with them in their grief and in their loss.
Death is not really unusual in a hospital. It is not unexpected. I am sure that most of you have stood next to the bedside of someone about whom you cared deeply, held their hand, watched while they slipped further and further away. It is a time of anguish, of helplessness, of heightened awareness of our loved one’s humanity, of the fragile connectedness between two people, and of our own human frailty. We grieve the loss even before it occurs. I can remember dozing in a chair next to my mother – her hand in mine as the time of her passing grew closer and closer. If I shut my eyes I can still feel the touch of my mother’s hand as it slipped out of my own. I could not go where she was going, not yet, but I could be there to watch with her. It was a privilege to do so. We - family, friends; nurses and doctors, priests and deacons - are sometimes allowed to enter a time that strengthens our own faith and give us hope amid all of the chaos of suffering and death.
It is this close, personal relationship into which Jesus invites us tonight, we are invited to experience what it means to love another more than we can love ourselves. We are invited to lower our defenses, step outside of our comfort zone and to reach out to another in a humble act of love and to touch them gently and with compassion that comes from our confidence in God’s ability to heal us and to make us whole. The gospel lesson opens with the acknowledgment that Jesus was preparing to die. And yet even as the man, Jesus, faced the reality of his own passion, he also prepared his disciples to follow in his way by kneeling intimately before them - with humility born of absolute faith in God as Creator and Restorer of mankind.
When Jesus kneels to wash the feet of the disciples he both assumes and models the servant role. His place as sacrificial servant is his path to glory, but he is also modeling our action of servant to our fellow man. He is moved by an overwhelming love for his disciples – we will hear later that “having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end”. John tells us that Jesus knew what was coming. He dreaded and he feared it. But, for the sake of the disciples, he pressed on. When we tell the Good News of Christ we proclaim that the relationship that Jesus had with his disciples is the same relationship that he has with all of us as well. Nothing we do, or fail to do, either knowingly or in foolish ignorance, will stop him from loving us to the end. It is through God’s love, so thoroughly exemplified in Jesus, and from which we can never be separated, that we receive the confidence to walk through tonight and tomorrow, - even all of our tomorrows, - despite the chaos we encounter along the way. Jesus’ ministry and ultimately His Passion were about strengthening people’s faith in order that we might live as a people of hope. “Watch with Me”
Now it may seem rather silly to sit up till midnight on Holy Thursday, in a partially darkened chapel, by yourself or maybe with one or two others. But it is a powerful experience. Silence is not everyone’s favorite past time. I have paced up and down the aisles of churches wondering where or when the next person would come to relieve me. I have laughed at myself for seeming to waste my time, I have tried to pray and I have fallen asleep instead. But I have also experienced a piercing, completely filling love that permeates throughout my very being as I mourned the inhumanity of tonight and tomorrow. The world will not stop tonight if there is no one to watch at Trinity, Haverhill, but we will be the losers if we do not stop to allow Christ to invite us into His suffering, into His death-watch.
In Mitch Albom’s book “Tuesdays with Morrie”, Morrie Schwartz has just been told that he has Lou Gehring’s disease and will die from it. As he leaves the doctor’s office with his wife Charlotte there is this account… “ Outside the sun was shining and people were going about their business. A woman ran to put money in a parking meter. Another carried groceries. Charlotte had a million thoughts running through her mind. “How much time do we have left? How will we manage? How will we pay the bills?” My old professor, meanwhile, was stunned by the normalcy of the day around him. Shouldn’t the world stop? Don’t they know what happened to me? But the world did not stop, it took no notice at all. As Morrie pulled weakly on the car door, he felt as if he were dropping into a hole. “Now what”, he thought”
Tonight, in the face of a rising water, flooded homes and businesses, unemployment nearing 10%, and a world engaged in violence and war on more fronts than I can name - where poverty is pervasive and cultural and political systems oppress and marginalize those who have no power – where an increasingly secular society sees no relevance for church as you and I know it - In the face of all of this we too might ask “Now What?” We are all called in our daily lives to “Watch with Christ”. Somewhere right now, in hospitals, homes, out on the street, in shelters, in prisons, and battle grounds all over the world - there are people who are facing a loss of life – their own or someone else’s - and there are people who are attending to them, washing them, massaging their feet, holding their hand, being with them, living out the role that Jesus lived. The people who attend are invited to share in these most personal of moments and to watch with them in hope. Now we will wash another’s feet, we will admit our complicity in the rejection of God’s perfect love by what we have done or not done, we will share in the body and the blood of Christ. Tonight we are invited to share in this most personal moment of Jesus' life. Tonight we are invited to remember God's promise of life that is the basis of our hope. Will we also choose to remain and to watch?
Guide us waking O Lord and guard us sleeping, that awake we may watch with Christ and asleep we may rest in peace. Amen.
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