a sermon for Maundy Thursday

John 13:1-17, 31b-35

It’s that time of the year, right? March Madness. In the NCAA basketball tournaments, women’s and even men’s, anything can happen. What should be a regular, obvious pecking order of seeded teams and historically-dominant programs can be ripped up and thrown away at the swish of a basket. Cinderella teams can upset the order of things, sending hot shots back home with their dreams dashed. Underdogs can play their hearts out, teaching everyone something about humility and foregone conclusions and great expectations. Stars are born and new legacies forged, and today a new round of March Madness will begin as the men’s sweet sixteen team square off in Boston, Los Angeles, Dallas, and Detroit.

The term March Madness was first coined by a high school official in Illinois in 1939, but it became more widely used once announcer Brent Musberger used it during the 1982 men’s NCAA tournament. I think many of us probably have a favorite moment in March Madness history. I’ve been visiting a number of our homebound members this week for holy communion visits, and at least three local nursing homes have posted giant NCAA brackets that greet you as you come in the door. Tip-off for my own Wolfpack was at 7:09. And if you don’t mind me for a second…(check phone)

But if we really want March Madness, then we’ve come to the right place. If we want to talk about pecking orders being ripped up and thrown away, if we want to talk about an underdog playing his heart out, if we want to be a part of a new legacy being forged, then Maundy Thursday is where it’s at. In the Upper Room where Jesus gathers with his disciples on the night before his arrest, we witness a complete reordering of things. Those who should be at the top lower themselves to the floor and the ones who feel on the sidelines are made members of a team and given a task. It is madness, it is passion, and it will sweep us in.

The first thing that is mad is that a betrayer is among them. He has not been sent away or left out, but rather included in this meal. Judas, called Iscariot, has already made up his mind to turn Jesus in to the authorities so that he can make a clean break and get out of this whole ordeal before it goes south. In most leadership structures, and especially many political organizations, loyalty is of utmost importance. Keeping yourself surrounded by yes-men or yes-women is the way to claim and maintain power. But Jesus doesn’t do this. He assembles everyone he has called, regardless of their allegiance and regardless of their dependability. He shares this meal with absolutely everyone he can, because that’s how expansive his kingdom is, how gracious and generous is love is.

A formal scientific study by researchers at Cornell University and the University of Chicago several years ago looked into the effects that meal sharing had on diplomacy. Previous research had shown that when people ate similar foods together it led to their feeling emotionally close to one another. Building on that, these researchers looked at whether the specific way in which food was shared around a table led to better and more fruitful negotiations. As it turns out, their studies proved that when common food was shared family-style, with people needing to pass bowls and baskets around, people developed bonds much quicker and were able to cooperate on problem-solving tasks better. And this held true, whether the participants were friends or strangers to begin with.

At this table of a new covenant, Jesus means to bring all people in and feed us together, betrayers and deniers and doubters included. It sounds like madness, because loyalty is usually prized. If you have ever felt like one of Jesus’ betrayers. If you’ve ever let God down or let one of Jesus’ fellow followers down, if you’ve ever made a decision you’re ashamed of, know that you are welcome at this table and that all is forgiven.

The next thing that is madness here is this stuff about the footwashing. The number one seed should not be doing thing kind of thing, but there he goes, getting down on the floor, taking off his outer robe and taking each of our feet, one-by-one. This is an act that completely reorients our understanding of where God is looking. God has God’s sights on the ugliest, dirtiest, roughest part of our lives, not the parts we fancy up and present to the world. And God looks there with tenderness and compassion, with a desire to clean and restore, not to condemn. Here we have a Savior who not only devalues blind loyalty, but is completely humble himself, willing to do the work that only a slave would do.

Are you prepared to let your Savior wash your feet? Are you ready to live in a kingdom like this, where the life-giving, vulnerable tasks of the servants among us are lifted up as worthy of God’s name? I think Peter does not like this upset. It busts his bracket, but Jesus persists, loving him anyway, calmly moving through the motions of patience and care. Come, and let the Lord of life clean you through and through. Let him act as your servant even though he is your Master. This is how much he loves you.

The last part of his madness is that Jesus expects us to play right along. He gives us a new commandment, right here in the middle of all this tension and suspense. He means for all of this to be an example so that the great love of God will not begin and end here on this night around this table, but rather flow forth like river, watering the whole earth. “By this everyone will know you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

It is madness first of all that Jesus expects us to go out and wash each other’s feet and to humble ourselves on the floors of the world. Because that can be humiliating and degrading and difficult. And furthermore it is crazy that this is how we will be known to the world, that these kinds of loving and self-emptying will be our hallmark.

In early childhood education there is a concept called environmental print. This is print that occurs in everyday life, such as signs, labels, and logos. Environmental print is used as beginning example of children being able to read. Even though they cannot understand letters yet, they still can “read” a cereal box label that says “Lucky Charms” or a box that says, “Barbie” because it is recognizable to them as text.

Followers of Jesus have an environmental print in the world, and it is the specific ways we serve and love sacrificially. People may not understand everything about us, but they should be able to see something loving we do and say, intuitively, there is Christ among them. That is God’s mercy at work.

But wouldn’t it be easier or more effective if there were another way for us to be recognized? Couldn’t we just wear cross necklaces or something instead? Or what about attending a certain church or youth group? Couldn’t that just signal to the world that we’re Jesus’ followers? What about the way we vote in elections or the political party we identify with? Couldn’t we just own a certain copy of a Bible to prove our nearness to Jesus’ cause?

But, no, that is not Jesus’ command. The command is love one another as he has loved us. For you see, Jesus has other plans for us than what clothes we wear or what groups we join or how we align ourselves politically. Jesus plans for us are ones that will reflect his own his own madness, his own passion, a loving madness of the cross. For he will not just wash feet and gather enemies and strangers around his table. He will feel the brunt of betrayal and undergo the shame of denial. Jesus will also offer himself up for each of us in death.  It is a love that knows no bounds, and yet he has confidence that even in our humble, jumbled lives we may somehow mirror it for the sake of the world.

Maximus the Confessor, a theologian of the early church who lived in the seventh century, said “Love alone, properly speaking, proves alone that the human person is in the image of the Creator.” Said another way, love is what makes us most like God. It is not our ability to create beautiful works of art, or our ability to put people into space or our ability to accomplish great physical feats (although a well-executed alley-oop is a thing of perfection) but rather our capacity to look at the face of another human, even one with whom we vehemently disagree, and empty ourselves for them.

Jesus know the world will see that from his followers, in ways big and small, and say to themselves, “Madness! Holy madness! Look at those silly underdogs…I bet they’ll go all the way.”

Thanks be to God!

The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.

a sermon for Palm Sunday/Sunday of the Passion

based on Walt Wangerin’s “Cry of the Whole Congregation”

Four voices. Four distinct, unique voices from four people who, as far as we can tell never knew each other or even came into contact with one another. And not only are the voices distinct and unique, but each one is uttered with an urgency and clarity untarnished for roughly two-thousand years. And, despite their differences, their individual perspectives, all four speak with remarkable similarity, especially given their independence of each other.

As it happens, we know their names—at least, the names that got attached to each voice fairly early on—but we know almost nothing else about them or their original audiences. The stories they told with their voices took precedence over anything they would tell us about themselves. And those stories all focused on a particular subject: a savior named Jesus.

Mark, who probably spoke first (or at least got written down first) was most likely Greek, and most likely speaking in or around Rome in the first century to a group of believers who were unfamiliar with Jesus’ Jewish roots. The stories he had heard and assembled about Jesus paint the picture of a servant Savior who is at once swift and forceful in overturning the powers of evil. For Mark, the impact of this Savior’s words is almost overshadowed by the number of miracles and healings he performs.

Then there is Matthew’s voice, which for a long time was thought to belong to one of this Jesus’ original Twelve followers. We figure Matthew was most likely a Jewish Christian who wrote in a locale much closer to where his subject actually lived. Matthew understood Jesus primarily as a teacher—a teacher, moreover, who was skilled in interpreting Jewish law and forming a community of followers. And so Matthew’s voice presents a Jesus who tells more parables, who gives clear instruction about forgiveness and church discipline and who likes to stress the moral dimensions of Jesus’ kingdom.

Luke is the softy of the bunch, choosing to stressing Jesus’ concern for the least, the lost, and the little. He’s the one who collects and records Jesus’ parables of the lost coin, the Good Samaritan, and the Prodigal Son…and what would Christianity be without those? Luke is the most educated of the voices, most likely a doctor who travelled with the apostle Paul around the Mediterranean for a while, and his sophisticated grammar and style show it.

And then there is John, the outlier. He is, by far, the most poetic of all the voices, accomplished in the use of metaphor and irony. Unlike the other three, John chooses to tell a few stories in depth rather than hashing out everything he ever heard about the man. For John, Jesus’ signs were of utmost importance. We typically call them miracles, but for John they were signs because they signal something about God’s glory that was being revealed in Jesus. John wrote for a congregation or a group of congregations who were likely Jewish but who had been ostracized from the religious community because of their wild claims about Jesus. John sometimes gets a bad rap because people find him a little “extra,” but somehow the whole picture wouldn’t be complete if his voice were missing.

All four had their special emphases to make, their theological points to drive home, their particular perspective. And all of them are telling the truth. Yet something profound happens to these four distinct voices when they get to the part of their story where Jesus enters Jerusalem just before the Passover. Differences in their perspectives begin to fade away and their voices start to unite. All at once, they start telling the same story with some of the same key details. Yes, there are some discrepancies in a few words now and then—signs of their distinct perspectives creep in here and there—and some of them record Jesus’ encounters with the temple authorities more fully than others, but, by and large, the four voices start to tell the same story. It’s like that old familiar bedtime story you read to your kids. You can’t change things. Every word has to be right, or they’ll call you on it.

Something happens—something momentous and powerful and unprecedented—surrounding this man Jesus from Nazareth as he comes from the backwater villages of Galilee into the fevered Passover celebrations of Jerusalem during the time of the Roman army’s occupation. Something is happening—something worth remembering correctly—as he borrows a room for one last meal with his disciples. Something significant is happening as he faces betrayal and denial from these same disciples and is handed over to his enemies. Something miraculous is happening as he is stripped and hung on the cross and treated like a nobody.

It is as if all four voices know that, regardless of what else they communicate about the man and his ministry, this part containing his last days is the most important. It is the crux of his mission. This part of the story will define him, more than any of his teachings, miracles, signs, or parables. Jesus of Nazareth, these voices mean to tell us, came in to the city highly regarded by his people as a new king but ended up getting crucified instead after a charade of a trial and being laid in a borrowed tomb. And somehow the news borne by these voices change the world and the destiny of all creation.

In our study of the Apostles’ Creed in confirmation class we usually put on our theologian hats for a while and took a look at what have come to be called “atonement theories.” It’s a bit of a fancy word. Maybe too fancy.  Atonement theories are essentially assessments of these events that seek to explain just why Jesus had to die and how his death makes us one with God.In short, who was this Jesus and why did his death matter?

Did Jesus need to die, for example, because someone needed to pay the price of human sin? That is one theory. Or did Jesus die because that is how God needed to conquer evil and darkness once and for all? That is another theory. Or perhaps Jesus died because God needed to give his people an example of how they are to love one another completely; that is, by laying down one’s life for another? We look at Scripture passages and hymn lyrics and popular songs that seemed to support any number of these theories for how Jesus’ death restored us to God. What we discover, however, is that there is no one right or wrong theory; they all contain some element of truth, and they all kind of overlap and blend together at some point. Maybe the meaning of Jesus’ death and resurrection is simply too profound to be wrapped up neatly in a few words, or contained in one voice.

What is interesting, though, is that those four gospel voices themselves never seem to be too concerned with exactly how Jesus’ death reconciles us with God. They simply get down to the facts of what happened on that fateful week and let the power of the story speak for itself. They do their best in communicating the chain of events that allow us to understand that in the person of Jesus God is somehow intersecting with this world in a way no one can fully comprehend. They do their best in lending their voice to a story that is so crucial to creation’s existence and future that even had they been silent, the stones themselves would have found a way to proclaim it.

For even though words to explain it often fail us, we know it is this story of Jesus in Jerusalem that lets us know how completely God loves us. We know that it is this story of Jesus at his Last Supper which compels us to serve our neighbors whether they live here in Crestview or in the ghettos of Gaza. We know it this story of Jesus in Gethsemane that reminds us it is not our will that will eventually have sway over our lives, but rather the will of the God who sends him. We know it is this story of Jesus before Pilate that frees us from the need to justify ourselves before God and compels us to speak up for those who are victims of an unfair justice system. We know it is this story of Jesus on the cross that allows us to look even into the tragedies of war and disease and poverty and speak a word of comfort and promise that God does not forsake his children even in the hour of death. We know it is this story of Jesus in his last days in Jerusalem that somehow wraps up all our shortcomings and presents them to God and offers us, in exchange, a new way of living that is filled with hope.

And so this morning we hear a rendition of those events, and you’ll be asked to lend your voice to the story. The particular version we recite does not belong to any one of those four voices; rather, it is a compilation of all of them together, like they are speaking in harmony. Specifically, note what your voice does as our worship plays out. Pay attention to the particular words that come out of your mouth, how they begin with praise but end with death threats.

And when today’s reading of that story is finished…when the last nail has been pounded through weakened flesh, when the last bystander has left the scene, when the taste of that wine and bread on your tongues has begun to fade, and when, on Sunday, the women hurry to the tomb with their embalming spices, the four ancient (yet modern) voices will want to know…what will we do with ours?

Will we join our voices and our lives with theirs in the urgency of proclaiming these amazing events and how they change the world? Or will we shut up and stand in silence and leave the stones to speak in our place?

The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.

a sermon for the third Sunday in Lent, Year B

Exodus 20:1-17 and John 2:13-22

Let us imagine, if we can, the situation of the Israelites as they camp out at the base of Mount Sinai as told by this morning’s Scripture from Exodus. They have just endured the trauma of the escape from Egypt and a three-month extended camping trip in the wilderness. They have left everything. Granted, they did not have a whole lot as slaves in Egypt; but nevertheless everything that they had known for several generations. Now they have next to nothing. Even the manna that they eat to survive, the bread-like substance that falls from the sky each day, can’t be saved from one day to the next.

They have also just cheated death. After an initial easy departure due to the havoc caused by the Passover on the Egyptian households, the Israelites ended up having to flee for their lives. The chariots and horses of Pharoah’s mighty army, symbols of how incredibly strong he was compared to them, had pressed down ruthlessly upon their little band of refugees as they ran across desert sand on sandalled feet. But Moses had stretched out his hands at the Red Sea and the waters mysteriously receded so they could walk through to safety.

And, perhaps most important, they are finally free— free from the backbreaking brickmaking work of their forced labor. Imagine what that feels like! They’re free from occupying their role as the lowest rung of the ladder in Egyptian society, free from their persistent haunting thoughts that God had forgotten all about them. But God had remembered them and had liberated them. Now no one was over them, no other people put them down.

So imagine all of this and then realize that they find themselves, once again, at the bottom of something. This time it’s the bottom of a huge, imposing mountain which they’re forbidden to go near or touch. It’s all wrapped in smoke and booms and thunders with God’s presence like the inner chamber of the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz. There they are…and then down comes their leader Moses with…a set of laws that they are supposed to follow?

Now just imagine that! You go from being at the bottom of society, subject to Pharoah’s whims and decrees, only to be handed a new set of laws and commandments three months into your freedom. I can’t help but think of the enslaved people of this country, who endured more than two centuries of forced menial labor, who only came to emancipation through a bloody Civil War, only to find themselves bound by Jim Crow laws and segregation and voter suppression schemes to keep them down. I imagine the Israelites were dumbfounded. Is this really what their new life of freedom and dignity is going to involve?

As it turns out, these laws are not supposed to do that at all. The Ten Commandments,  which form the core of the law that Moses delivers at Mt. Sinai become the way the Israelites’ freedom looks. This is not so much a handing down of rules, but the beginning of a new covenant, a renewed relationship between God and God’s people. With the ten commandments, or ten words, as they are more accurately called, God raises up God’s people to a beautiful way of living that will set them apart. Through their acceptance of them, the Israelites will become God’s treasured possession, like the most valuable jewel in a crown that God will wear. For with these Ten Words, God is tearing down all of the oppressive systems that the world devises, and is raising up a new covenant of respect and responsibility for all people, one where everyone is cared for and integrated in a productive society.

Other ancient cultures had codes and laws but what the Israelites received was different on a number of levels. One of those is that it lacks a set of clear consequences; that is, if you disobey these rules what will happen. These commandments exist unto themselves, and motivation for following them isn’t fear of what God will do if you don’t, which is often how I fear we mean them when we try to hang them on a courthouse wall. The motivation for following them is enjoying the gifts of the life they safeguard, in simply being the new community God is raising up.

In a way, it’s kind of like how we treat good manners. There is no specific punishment that will come to you if you have bad table manners. No one is going to reprimand you in public if you chew with your mouth open, or if you dive in before everyone’s served, or if you dominate conversation. But if you demonstrate politeness, if you pass food and not hog it, if you leave your napkin on your lap, then people start to feel safe and honored in your presence. The Commandments are much more serious than table manners, of course, but the concept is similar.

Martin Luther explains this expertly in his Small Catechism. He says the eighth commandment don’t just forbid us, for example, from saying false and hurtful things about our neighbor, but requires us to interpret our neighbor’s actions and words in the best possible light. It safeguards everyone’s reputation and dignity. The seventh commandment isn’t just about not taking what doesn’t belong to us, but doing everything in our power to help our neighbor keep her property and means of making a living. It safeguards fair trade and a healthy economy.

I particularly love the way one of our confirmands explained the fifth commandment on a test a few years ago: ” ‘You shall not kill,’ the 5th commandment,” is the hardest for me to follow,” he shared. “Almost every day I have an opportunity to give to someone’s life but I sit back and don’t do anything. It is hard in a school environment to stand up and support someone, and it is easier to put them down instead when you’re around your peers.”

With the Ten Words God tears down the hierarchical and oppressive systems of Pharoah and the other empires (and high school societies) and calls us to a higher ideal, his treasured life, and yet we still fall short. Even the good law becomes a trap, a tool that we twist into a device by which we think we can earn God’s favor. Rather than joyfully living into the law’s demands we let it become a checklist of do’s and don’ts that make some people feel in and others feel out.

With this in mind, it is not hard at all to understand Jesus’ actions as he enters the Temple in Jerusalem. What he sees there makes him sick. In all of the money changing tables and people selling animals for sacrifices he sees yet another system, another oppressive system that exploits people. The gift of a relationship with the living God has been twisted again to form a trap, to make people check boxes, to burden them with guilt.

This could be one reason why a growing number of people today identify as “spiritual but not religious.” There is even a large presence on social media of people who talk about and share stories about the abuses of their religions and how as adults they’ve become disillusioned with things they used to believe and be a part of. This trend has a name: it’s called deconstruction. Deconstruction is what happens when you start picking apart your faith and rearranging your beliefs and values. This morning we see that Jesus takes part in deconstruction himself.

There are even some aspects of his religious identity that make him uncomfortable. The temple in Jerusalem comes to signify all that; that is, all the parts of religion that ultimately oppress or exploit people and don’t free them for a life of love and mercy.

So imagine, then, how the religious leaders feel this morning when Jesus drives out the money changers and starts talking about deconstructing the temple! It sounds ludicrous, inconceivable! I remember when the county announced they’d tear down J.R. Tucker High School after they would build a new one on site within a year. It seemed a bit ambitious, but the dangers presented by the old building and the benefits of a new design and architecture would be worth it, and it worked!

For the religious leaders in Jesus’ time, tearing down the temple and rebuilding it in three days seems preposterous. But that’s not Jesus’ point. In critiquing what the temple’s religion has become, Jesus places himself as the new way to be in relationship with God. Jesus will be the presence of God on earth. Not a temple, not a set of laws. Not even a set of holy writings. Jesus and his self-giving love and pure forgiveness of others will embody God’s way for us. And when he is crucified, all our timeworn ways of trying to make ourselves holy and justify ourselves before God will be torn down. When his body is deconstructed on the cross, God himself will feel the brunt of all our exploitative religious systems and doctrines. God will dismantle our understandings of wisdom and power and replaces them with foolishness and weakness. Jesus conquers by losing and wins everything for God by handing himself over.

And therefore Jesus’ resurrection will open up for us a new life that is everlasting, validating his way of peace and justice for all people. When, through our faith, we live into these ways of Jesus,  when the Spirit of God leads us into greater self-giving, God will automatically help us, too, dismantle systems of oppression and hierarchy wherever we encounter them, inside ourselves and in the world.

This week I made a quick trip to my hometown to pay respects to a special Sunday School classmate who died this week at the age of 49. A child with special needs, as they say, Angie never really acquired much speech, and she related to people on a different kind of level, needing us to pay attention to her sign and body language. But God chose Angie to tear down some of my early biases about giftedness and human worth. Through the wisdom of God and her mother and the pastor, Angie was seated each week around the same Sunday School table as the rest of us, which was especially meaningful because during the week she was in a self-contained environment. When I walked into the funeral home, I was greeted by others from my old church who also hadn’t seen Angie in years, but who remembered her and had been impacted by her joy and presence.         God is always wanting God’s people to live as one, to flourish in bonds of mutual respect and love. It is God’s foolishness, and it is greater than our wisdom.

So if you happen to be deconstructing your faith these days, or if you feel abandoned or trapped and wonder where God might be…if you feel the weight of the world’s brokenness and longing, take heart in the God of the cross. And don’t just imagine yourself sought for and gathered up. Trust that you already are. Trust that you already are.

Thanks be to God!

The Reverend Phillip W. Martin, Jr.