April 5, 2007
Maundy Thursday (Year C)
Exodus 12:1-4,(5-10),11-14; Psalm 116:1,10-17; 1 Corinthians 11:23-26;
John 13:1-17,31b-35
Another thing we did was play the “pig game.” When we had already been at the dinner table for at least five minutes, someone would put their finger on their nose and everyone at the table would follow suit. The last one to put their finger on their nose was the pig, the one too engaged in eating to notice the others around them. My grandmother was notorious for losing until she would put her finger on her nose upon sitting down at the table which is why we instituted the five minute rule – when she was visiting our cousins!
The third thing we always did was say grace. Always. We took turns and sometimes we said it by rote, and sometimes we made up ones, and sometimes we sang “Johnny Appleseed” or some other grace that one of us had learned at camp or at scouts. It is what we did. It was a sign that we were part of the family. All of us kids knew it was going to happen and we counted on it. It also kept us in tune with each other and each other’s lives. I think my parents were very wise to have brought us up that way.
As we got older, the nickel became a quarter, but our enthusiasm for the games and rituals never changed. And they have been passed on to the next generations. Imagine my surprise when I was the pig when visiting my grandchildren last month in
Now you may wonder what all this has to do with the gospel, but I think it has a lot to say about the importance of eating rituals, about how they bond a family or community together. And it is no surprise to me that Jesus chose a meal to be the center of his last instructions to his disciples. It is no wonder that he held up bread and wine, two staples of life and part of most meals and said, “When you do this, remember me.”
We, some one hundred of us, have gathered at dinner tables this Lent to share a meal and conversations, not unlike a family meal, but an all too rare occurrence for most of us these days. We talked of scripture and our lives, our prayers and our faith. And though no nickel was offered for “best things,” I would wager that much of the conversation was positive and hopeful. But most of all I would say, it was Holy. It was sacred time, deliberate, measured time, taken to make space for God and this community to work in the participants. It was grace filled time when things were shared or heard or thought about that were not expected. It was a gift we gave each other and ourselves.
Then to come into the sanctuary tonight, and to hear of that first supper – I know, we think of it as the “last supper,” but wasn’t it really the “first?” The first time that Jesus held up bread and held up wine and said, “Remember me,” remember me when you do this!
And when you do, “I will be with you!”
Now, I do not pretend to understand the mystery of how Jesus is present in the bread and wine, nor how bread and wine becomes body and blood, but I know that God is present by the action we take together, by my hands, called forth and ordained by the church, blessed by a bishop for such a task, and by your voices and presence. Your consent and willingness to participate is just as important as my ordained position to this process for I cannot make communion alone. We need each other to make it happen, just as Jesus needed his disciples to make his truth known and spread around the world, just as my family needed each other to play the games, just as the Connect program would not have worked without the deliberate time people set aside to be here.
That is how I have come to believe holy things happen, through the interaction of people, ordinary people when they are intentional with each other and God.
Tonight we shall share a meal of remembering and taking Jesus into our community and into ourselves as generations of people have been doing since that first time in the upper room. We will say the words and pray the prayers and Jesus will remain in us and work through us. To me that is a miracle. It is, of course, a sacramental miracle, an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.
This is the ultimate eating ritual. As my family can count on prayers and nickels and pigs, we can count on the presence of Christ in what we do here tonight. And because we can count on it in the holy meal we share, we can also count on it in each other. For Christ works through and in all of us.
Jesus was very wise, but that is no surprise is it? Jesus was very wise to choose a meal, a family meal, as the center of what the followers did to remember Jesus and to remember his call to them to follow. The traditions are given to us. We will pass them on to our children, and we will our whole lives be nourished and fed by the beauty, the strength, and the miracle of the bread and wine of the altar table.
So come good people feast. Remember and trust that Christ is working in you, in all of us. Eat! Eat together! And rejoice, for Jesus is with us in the breaking of the bread.
Amen.
Church of the Good Shepherd