Our Saviour s Lutheran Church Rev. Patricia Schutz John 13, Maundy Thursday Grace and peace from God the Father and our Savior Jesus Christ. At the center of our faith, the center of these three days known as the Triduum, is love. Love is the reason we are here tonight, love we don t have to fully understand, because it is a love which fully knows us, and that is enough. Tonight Love invites us to hear, see, touch, taste, receive love itself, and be reminded it is a love that decides everything, as Fr. Pedro Arrupe, a Jesuit priest wrote in his poem, Fall in Love. Nothing is more practical than finding God, than falling in Love in a quite absolute, final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you do with your evenings, how you spend your weekends, what you read, whom you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in Love, stay in love, and it will decide everything. Love is the good news tonight, love around a table, love on bended knee, love in hands that wash and caress the part of us we least want to be revealed, love
2 given to us to eat and drink and live and remember. Love betrayed. Love denied. Love greater than shame. Love that decides everything. God is this love, infinite love that fills the cosmos, intimate love that dared to limit itself within human flesh and blood, incomprehensible love that bled and died and shattered death forevermore. It is love that is power only because it cares nothing for power, love that says first is last, and last is first, lose your life to find your life, dying is rising love that tips the world upside down which is really right side up and are you dizzy yet, because there is more. More Love. God is love. On the night Jesus is betrayed, love brings Jesus to his knees, half naked before his disciples to do a servant s work; love takes in hand sore and bruised feet, and no doubt rough and callused hearts, and gives as gift this sacrament of washing, of loving beyond boundaries. Do you know what I have done to you, Jesus says to the disciples? So, if I your Lord and teacher have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another s feet. Here is the hardest part of the story, we think, to love the way Jesus loves, to love without boundaries. Jesus commands us to be his servant disciples, comfort the prickly people, love the unlovable, see the worst in people and still be compassionate. It s a tall order, and are we up for the job? However, there is something here that is harder still. On this night Jesus was betrayed we remember God s love is first of all about what God does for us in
3 Jesus, not what we do. The hardest word in this story is not what Jesus asked his disciples to do, but that before he asked anything of them, they had to just sit there and allow Jesus to wash their feet. They don t put up a fuss at Jesus command to wash one another s feet, to love one another; it s the washing Peter resists. Unless I wash you, you have no share with me. Jesus didn t wash the feet of one disciple, and then tell that one to wash the feet of the next. No. He knelt before them all, washed them all, so they would know that apart from Jesus, they had absolutely nothing to give. The hardest word in this story is that our self-reliance, our resourcefulness and ability to get the work of the church done especially when the going gets tough means nothing apart from the grace and love of God in Jesus Christ. Unless we allow Jesus to fill the neediest part of us, to bring into his healing light the things of which we are most ashamed, we have no share in Jesus. Only through receiving grace can we give grace. As preacher and theologian Thomas Long says, Unless we stretch our dirty feet toward the basin of Jesus grace and allow ourselves to receive from him, we have no gifts to give. God is love and how God desires to love us, to pour God s grace over our weariness. How God pines for us, for the world to fall in love with God in a quite absolute way, to let God quench our thirst and satisfy our hunger but God doesn t force love. God gives love freely, as gift. This is what grace means; it is ours to
4 receive, and when we do, we find out God s love, not ours, is the love that decides everything. Tonight love invites us to feast on a meal we cannot provide for ourselves, or own or possess, only receive by grace. On the night Jesus was betrayed, the bread Jesus broke and the wine Jesus poured and the words Jesus spoke became grace for his disciples. In this way he loved them: Eat. Drink This is my body; this is my blood, given for you. Jesus knew their hunger and fed them himself, and only then gave them a ministry to perform. Do this. Until they received what was given for them, what they alone could not provide, they had no share in Jesus. Tonight Jesus is present in this bread and this wine and feed us with himself. Tonight and every time we come to the Table, God gives us love to eat, love to drink, love to receive over and over again, a love that decides everything for us. Grace is why we celebrate this meal week after week. Only after God heals and satisfies our tattered. hungering hearts, does God break them open so we can love the world, the people, God so loves in Jesus. God is love. Not an easy love that chooses to love only the lovable. Not a cheap love that avoids conflict or is afraid to get hurt. God s love in Jesus is costly love, love that goes out of its way to love especially the people we find hardest to love, love willing to help carry the grief and loneliness of another, love willing to
5 slow down so no one gets left behind, love that speaks inconvenient truth, love that does not let hate have the last word, love that accepts the other as God created them, love that really does decides everything we do and say and are. God is love, love that has saved you and taken hold of you for good, love sealed on your forehead and in your heart. God is love, and in Jesus embraces you with love that breaks your heart, amazes you with joy and gratitude, makes you fall in love and stay in love and be the love this world so desperately needs. Nothing is more practical than finding God, than falling in Love in a quite absolute, final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you do with your evenings, how you spend your weekends, what you read, whom you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in Love, stay in love, and it will decide everything.