April 5, 2007

Exodus 12:1-4, 11-14; 1 Corinthians 11:23-26; John 13:1-17, 31b-35: "Meet the Flintstones"
It seems like only yesterday that our noses were filled the sweet stickiness of Mary's aromatherapy as she poured out her extravagant love gift of designer perfume on Jesus' feet. It was a genuine smell-good moment. Even Judas' carping about Mary's spending habits couldn't spoil it.

Now it's Holy Week, and things don't smell so good. Just now we're in a stuffy upper room, eavesdropping on Jesus' last supper with his friends just before he is arrested. The stink of betrayal hangs in the air.

So what does betrayal smell like?

Father Grant Gallup -- an Episcopal priest who has worked among the poor of Nicaragua and in the inner cities of North America -- shares this story:

"Some years ago in Chicago, a young man came to the vicarage begging for help with his life. He was addicted to cocaine, and ruining every relationship he had, misusing people and stealing from them, he said. He had a terrible cold. He was sweating with fever, trembling. He was not well.

I [felt compassion for him], and talked with him and decided to give him some food.

I went to get hot soup from the kitchen, served him a steaming bowl, and went for bread. When I came back, he was weeping with sorrow there, his elbows on the table, his arms around the soup bowl as around a treasure trove. He said he [had] never tasted soup like that, it was the first time [he had had] soup like that...I forget what [kind of] soup it was. He finished his meal... and bowed out the door.

After he left, I noticed a dust-free place at the corner of the little stand with potted plants that stood next to the table before the sunny window. My favorite toy had stood there - an expensive short-wave radio, with which I listened to news from the BBC and from far away Nicaragua. The vacant spot where there was no dust, and now no radio, glared at me like a gaping wound.

My weeping guest had gone out the door with the radio under his coat, and would no doubt sell it cheap for his next fix.

What hurt me most was the meal we shared. I can still remember his compliments [on] my soup; I have been tempted ever since then to peek under the coats of compliments.

I will always remember that meal in a special way, for its soup of betrayal, its deceitful "delicious." Who can betray us more treacherously than those with whom we have been companeros - companions - sharers of bread and table?"

There's a lot in this story for our Maundy Thursday observance. A whiff of the addiction to self that clings to most of us. A bowl of blessing, soup that saves. The cost of loving another.

Jesus knows the crouching tiger that waits in the shadows for him - the treachery coated in friendship. He has his after dinner speech ready...and oddly, perhaps, it's all about love. But first, he surprises his guests with a bit of dinner theatre that puts flesh and bone on his words.

He slips on the uniform of a slave, and stoops over a basin to take their callused feet, one by one, into his gentle hands, scrubbing off the dirt and grime of their day's travels and travails, soothing them with cool, clear water, then toweling them dry.

He could have done this differently, of course. With all the conceptual truths in the universe at his disposal, he could have left the disciples with things to think about when he was gone. "Instead he gave them concrete things to do, specific ways of being in their bodies together," as Barbara Brown Taylor puts it... "[actions] that would go on teaching them what they needed to know when we was no longer around to teach them."

Sharing supper, washing feet. Something warm and near and fragrant and chewy to pass to one another around the table. In the case of feet, dirt and calluses and stinkiness they could use to enter into one another's lives.

On Christmas Eve we marvel at the mystery of the Incarnation, the divine taking on human flesh. In hushed tones, we tell the children that Jesus was God with skin on - Wonder of wonders! He started out just like each one of us did, a helpless baby... with the difference that while we had clean soft cribs to sleep in, baby Jesus slept in an animals' feeding trough.

Lying in that feeding trough in the Bethlehem stable was food for the whole hungry world. Now at his farewell supper, Jesus is on the menu again.

As the Evangelist John observes, "Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end." Jesus knows that his earthly life is ratcheting to a violent end. He's about to die, and he wants to deliver his final lessons before his students scatter to the four winds.

"This is my body, given for you. Do this in remembrance of me... This cup of blessing I now hold is my life's blood, the blood of the new covenant, the new promise God is making with you, God's beloved. Drink this often in remembrance of me."

And we do.
At this Family Table,
In the holy meal we call Communion.

Anne Lamott is a writer with dreadlocks and an edge. She's a recovering alcoholic, a single mom, a grateful, late-blooming Christian. She writes with a mixture of earnestness and self-deprecating humor about what she calls her "cute little life." Here she writes with an eye, too, on that Family Table.

"...I always pray, [she writes] first thing upon awakening, very simple prayers like the one [my son] Sam prayed years ago when his head got caught in the slats of a chair: 'I need help with me,' he whispered... I know that most of the time, for me, the only real problem is, that left to my own devices, I am on my mind almost all of the time.

But we're not left to our own devices. People help us, and we help them. Some days I just try to give glasses of water to everyone. Maybe that means having patience with the children in my church school, or flirting with old people at the health-food store, or offering chocolate bar communion to the people in line at the DMV...

[I]n the old days, I was so isolated and disgusting on the inside that I had to run around with my glass empty, hoping that other people would have extra water sloshing out of theirs that they would share with me. I thought their glasses were special, while mine was a grape jelly jar with the Flintstones stamped on it. Lots of people gave me water. But what quenched my thirst was the spirit that animated their kindness, and telling the truth, which was that they had grape jelly jars, too. That we all do."

When we come to Holy Communion - that sacred meal that Jesus started, serving as both host and meal - we come with our jelly jars, lifting them up to receive the wine which becomes his blood, our hands cupped into a tiny manger to receive the morsel of bread which becomes his body with the words "For you!" We feast on Christ, the true Passover Lamb, the Beloved Son-of-God-made-food-for-us and for all Flintstones everywhere. In this meal, we who are hungry and thirsty, calloused and dirty, eat and drink hope.

There are a number of young people here tonight who are on the verge of receiving their First Communion. Standing on tiptoes, they are! (We've been making them wait till this night, and they are chomping at the bit, can you tell?!) There are a number of others who had Early First Communion instruction a few years ago and joined the Living in Communion class to brush up on the sacrament.

Actually, Maundy Thursday gives us all the nudge to hit the refresh button, to recharge and deepen our understanding of this holy meal and what living in communion means for our own lives.

There are three questions the pastors will be asking these students in a few minutes as part of the ceremony to bless them on their way as they join the Family Table. As the students answer these questions loudly and boldly, I invite the rest of us to listen, too, and consider them inwardly, in that interior space where you and God hang out.

The first question is, "Do you treasure this gift (of Holy Communion) as a blessing from the hand of God?" Another way to phrase this is, "There's a gift at this Table with your name on it every week. Will you let God bless you with it? Will you show up?" Picking up your gift on a weekly basis would do you good.

The second question is, "Do you promise to prepare yourself faithfully to receive our Lord Jesus Christ in these forms of bread and wine?" That means, think about the kind of cup, the kind of grape jelly jar you are. What is making you anxious, irritable, melancholy? How have you acted like a caveman or cave-woman, cave-boy or cave-girl this week? Confess this to God and to the people you've hurt. Feel the hunger in your spirit and in your stomach. The Bread of Life, the cup of salvation: they're for you, to fill your cup with heavenly food. Come empty...and get filled.

The last question is this:
"Do you promise to use Jesus' death and resurrection to strengthen you to believe in him, and in believing, to live a life of service in the name of Christ?" God gives what God promises: faith, forgiveness, wholeness, sustenance, peace. What about you? Will you give what you promise? Will you too embody the love with which you have been loved, as Jesus showed us?

It's like this story from the Sufi tradition: A holy woman sat outside the temple watching a tide of people pass, a river of need, the destitute and the wounded, the drunk and the lame and the outcast, and during her prayers, she cried out to God, "How can a loving Creator see so much suffering, and not do something to help them?" And God said, "I did do something. I made you."

Show up. Fill your jelly jar. Make a difference.
God bless us all along the way!

Thanks be to God!
[slide of Salvadoran Last Supper]

1. Grant Gallup, sermon from March 28, 2002.
2. BBT, "Faith Matters: Practicing Incarnation", Christian Century, April 5, 2005.
3. Anne Lamott, from a column dated Feb. 14, 2003, originally posted, I think, on Salon.com.
4. Tex Sample in Living the Questions DVD, session 5.
5. From Anne Lamott, same column.