Consider Your Hands
Preaching on Maundy Thursday. Plus: liturgy and polarization
It’s Holy Week, when I feel some obligation to root around in the files to see what I’ve preached before. This is last year’s Maundy Thursday sermon. It was part of a four-sermon sequence that started with Palm/Passion Sunday focusing on the body, hands, side, and voice of Jesus. There was no manuscript, so this is a reconstruction from the video. Please pardon the grammatical liberties. I hope Christian readers find it edifying and useful.
The Hands of Jesus
Consider your hands: how do you feel about them? What have they done today? What tasks have they been put to? What have they held? Who, if anyone, have they touched and how? I once told a friend that I practice a soft-handed profession and he laughed at me a little bit louder than I was expecting because it wasn't meant to be a joke. it's just a fact. Easy as my life has been, I've known enough of manual labor in fields and in kitchens and in laundries to have some sense of what my hands have been spared. And if I am honest, I am a little bit embarrassed about that.
We place a lot of anxiety, a lot of emotional significance, on the work of our hands, especially I think for whatever reason if we are men. And there can even be strong cultural overtones and hostility that can develop based on what we do or what we think we do or don't do with our hands. And while I think that is very silly, and I don't think it makes any sense, I am not immune to the emotional pull. My hands have calluses but they are from playing a guitar. In the kitchens of the world they have gotten their share of cuts and burns but nothing that has left a permanent mark. Once upon a time they changed a lot of diapers and they wiped a lot of butts and they administered a lot of eye and eardrops and they suctioned out noses and they held children seemingly all the time and then those children went on to other homes or they got big. I couldn't do that anymore. So now my hands hold a pen when I am drafting a sermon or an article. They type on a keyboard when I have to send emails or work on projects. They hold a phone when I am sending or receiving messages, reading the newspaper, posting church event pictures on Facebook or holding my steering wheel.
It's a soft-handed job, it's a soft-handed life, and that's a good thing because my job is mostly about words. It's a little bit about writing words and it's a lot about speaking words. And that's fine because if there's anything in this life that I'm good at, it's probably talking in front of a congregation, talking in meetings to get decisions made, talking with staff to decide what kind of work we're going to do and how we're going to do it, talking with individuals who come to me because there is a moment in their life or there is a question in their faith that they want to understand more deeply. I usually feel like I have something useful to say. Maybe not the right answer, but a good enough answer. Maybe not the perfect question to ask but a meaningful question to ask.
But this is the truth: no matter how good you are at words, eventually you will run out of useful ones to say, and there will be nothing to do except to take the hand of the person you are talking to in yours and pray with them, or to place your hand on their forehead in a gesture of pardon or blessing, to moisten my thumb with oil and trace a cross on the forehead of one who has just been baptized or who is ill or who is about to die. Now these things are all a little awkward for me if I'm being honest. I am not the touchy-feely-est person in the world. I'm not averse to physical contact. It's just not where my mind goes if I have to solve a problem or do something useful. And so I am grateful that my job requires it of me. I am grateful that my job takes me to that moment where words run out. Because you experience the mysterious existence of another person by taking their hand in yours or by feeling their forehead under your hand in a way that you can never experience through what you see or what you hear.
On Sunday we heard the story of Jesus’s betrayal and arrest, his last night with his friends, his crucifixion and his burial. And if you were with us you heard me talk about the body, the human body, of Jesus. Asking you to contemplate for a few minutes the body that was rejected and accused and beaten and abandoned and denied, that was humiliated and stripped and crucified, the body that withered under hunger and thirst and that ultimately died with a howl of pain. But also to think about those around that body who furtively, secretly, carefully but courageously showed love for Jesus in his last hours.
Tonight, I want you to think specifically about his hands. What do his hands do in the stories that we have just heard? In the first letter of Paul to the church in Corinth, he hands on a tradition that he received which is that on the night of his arrest Jesus took bread into his hands and blessed it, broke it, and gave it to all of his disciples who were there and told them “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this forever in remembrance of me.”
Then in John's Gospel, we hear the story of, after that dinner, Jesus taking his place at the feet of his own disciples and tying a towel around his waist and taking their feet–their dirty and cracked and probably bunioned feet–in his hands and washing them, taking on the office of a servant or an enslaved person toward his own followers. In these moments Jesus has gone about as far as he is going to go with words. He will continue speaking, and in tomorrow's story you will hear some of what he says and they are important words. But when it comes to instructing his disciples, he has gone about as far as language is going to take him.
He has had opportunities, and he has taken opportunities, to say “I am going to die for the salvation of the world.” And he has said in different ways at different times what he tells them explicitly tonight, which is that “You shall love one another as I have loved you.” This is the talk, these are the words, this is what we would today in some churches call the teaching moment. This is the information download that the listeners are supposed to incorporate and believe and act on in their lives.
But the truth is we do not believe all of what we hear. We do not remember all of what we take in. So when words reach their end, the hands of Jesus take up the slack. Because we may or may not believe what someone tells us, but it is difficult to doubt what someone does for us, in front of us. That's why we have the Sacrament. That's why Jesus gives us his Testament, not words to to repeat alone but a thing to do every week, sometimes every day, where the feeble hands of a feeble human minister bless and break and share the bread that is Christ's body as if from his own hands.
That is why on this night we remember the meaning of his command that we are to love one another as he has loved us with the washing of feet, with that curiously difficult and intimate exchange. It's awkward. It was awkward from the beginning. Peter himself, in this moment, refuses. “Lord, you are never going to wash my feet.” His Lord and teacher and master will not take that menial role for Peter. He will not allow it because Peter prefers the dignity the self-respect of serving to the vulnerability of being served. But Jesus is unyielding. He says to Peter, “unless you let me wash you, you have no portion with me,” and so he does.
But it was awkward from the beginning and it has never stopped being awkward. I can still remember the first time I ever went to a Maundy Thursday service over twenty years ago. I was in college, and I went to church and followed along with what everybody was doing, and then it was time to go up and and have our feet washed. So I lined up with everyone else in the church and we went up, and I took off my shoes, and Pastor John Gorder came by and he he washed my feet. Now I'm not saying this was like he was giving pedicure. This was a fairly pro forma version of foot washing. And if you come up for your feet to be washed tonight that's what it's going to be. But he washed my foot, and he dried my foot, and then for a moment he held my foot in his hand. I can still feel what that slight pressure was like. It wasn't hard or anything. It was almost like he was shaking hands with my foot. And he made eye contact with me. He didn't say anything but he looked up at me and he smiled as if to say, “Yes I know it's weird but it's okay.”
Something about a moment like that can allow all of our alienation, all of our self-estrangement, all of that fear that we all carry around with ourselves–that we are liable to be rejected by anyone and everything at any given moment, that we are not enough, that we cannot chisel a meaning out of the mass of our lives, that on some essential level we are and always will be alone in the universe–that moment can pierce through. And all of that can pour out. “This is my body, given for you.” This is your body, given by and for God. That is the ministry of Jesus Christ among us: sometimes, much of the time, the words, yes, always the words, the words of Jesus are world-altering, life-changing, powerful, true, beautiful words. But even they can lose their meaning if we use them at the wrong time, or for the wrong purpose, or out of the wrong motives.
And when the words stop being useful, when the words run out, there are the hands of Jesus, speaking to us in a language too deep for speech and proclaiming his love in the form that we can receive it.
Consider your hands. Yes, they have work to do. You may think whatever you want about that work, but they are beautiful. They are powerful. They were made to bless. They were made to serve. Jesus Christ told us this. And then Jesus Christ showed us this. Amen.
Liturgy and Political Polarization
In January, I presented a talk to the Lutheran Ethicists Gathering on polarization and how it interacts with the worship of the church. A version of that talk appears in the current issue of the Journal of Lutheran Ethics:
Later on, as a young pastor, I became accustomed to seeing people on social media saying things like “If your preacher doesn’t address Issue or Event X on Sunday, stand up and walk out.” Before this phrase became a meme and then a joke among preachers, it exerted a kind of moral authority over me. I felt obligated to address big events at some point in worship. If I didn’t, it could be interpreted as indifference, cowardice, or tacit approval of whatever evil had occurred.
[10] This impulse to leave no tragedy or horror unaddressed within the confines of the Sunday liturgy reflects assumptions I never saw articulated: that the worship of the church was properly a commentary on current events; that liturgy and preaching formed people, either toward or away from engagement in political conflicts; that the priorities and rhetoric of the church are determined by and continuous with the priorities and rhetoric of news media, social media, and political controversies.
[11] And most importantly, this impulse reflects an assumption that the church is composed of citizens in the democratic sense. That is, that we are history’s agents, responsible for everything that does and does not happen in the political realm. The preacher, like the prophet Ezekiel, has the obligation to warn the people, so that whether they turn from their wickedness and live or remain obstinate and die, the preacher herself will be blameless.
The talk rests on a typology of liturgy as either a “transcript” of or a “template” for the experience of political conflict. As a hopeless generalist, I don’t have the tools to take the idea much further than I did here but I think it’s an idea that holds up in a general sort of way and may offer a scheme for thinking about the choices that churches and preachers have to make.
Wow! Yesterday Pastor Jeremy Ullrich at St John in Bartlett told us about the profanity of the cross… not because what we think of but because that is where the holy ripped apart the separation between the holy and profane, so God on the cross took on the profane. In the foot washing, the holy crossed over the profane, and washed, dried, and lovingly served the profane. A lot of imagery is going on right now. Thanks!