By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.
What is it that others would see in us that might make them point and say, ah, obviously Christians there? And does the world even recognize love for what it truly is?
For Christians, love is the mystery of salvation itself. Love is who God is as God reaches out to enfold us with grace, in compassion, beholding us – that is, seeing us with deeper-looking vision to see us for who we truly are in our loveliness and in our fears. Love is who God is as God beholds us in the truth of who we are and calls us over and over again to new life. And whether we know it or not, we are shaped by that activity of God on us, beholding us.
Saint Augustine of Hippo in North Africa once drew attention to the mystery of what we do in the eucharistic liturgy by enjoining his congregation to “Behold the mystery of your salvation laid out before you.” In everything that we witness and everything that we do, from the time as we gather and make preparations of the altar and the music and the bread and wine, in our receiving of the story of faith in the proclamation of Scripture, as we uphold each other, our leaders, and the suffering of the world in prayer, as we enter into the Great Thanksgiving along with the actual choirs of angels and all the saints who are around and with us, as we approach the Lord’s table and receive the bread and the wine, to the point where we are sent out to take God’s love out into the worlds of our daily lives… in all of this we encounter that mystery.
Behold that mystery, Augustine tells us. This is no passive encounter. Behold with deeper-probing senses what is happening, which is a bigger thing, in which we are actually participating within that mystery. You have a place, along with others, in that great mystery. Even when we are just in our places saying “amen” or mumbling through a hymn, these may appear to be small small things, but even our presence here whatever our level of faith and no faith, whatever our mood, whatever else is going on, we are participants in the great mystery of God’s salvation of the world, a mystery that begins and ends in love.
Augustine pointed to the eucharistic liturgy and to his congregation and said “behold the mystery of salvation laid out for you.” And he said more. “Behold what you are.”
You are part of this mystery of salvation. In your amen. In your presence. In your offering of faith however tentative and however full of questions and however faltering or however bold. Behold what you are: caught up in God’s love, a people involved in the mystery of salvation as God is working it own through love today. Behold what you are. A people gathered by God, not by a membership card that lets you in the door here. Behold what we all are: a people caught up in God’s own life of prayer in which Jesus is through the Holy Spirit always offering prayer to God on behalf of the world; behold that when as the praying people God has made us offer up to God the cares and concerns, the suffering of the world we are joining with Jesus within the very heart of the Holy Trinity in doing this. This is who we are, a praying people formed by God’s own heart, a people who tend to each other and to the needs of the world.
Tonight we enact a part of the mystery of salvation in ways that we normally don’t, and that is by washing each other’s feet.
When new drafts of the services of ordination go into trial use later this year, they will include the ritual presentation, along with a bible, of a towel and basin to be given to the newly ordained deacon as symbol of the authority of the one who came not to be served, but to serve. This is important not just for deacons, but for all of us. Deacons help us all to be reminded of our baptismal duty to care for the suffering, to alleviate hunger, and to tend to one another’s needs with deep care and concern. And when we don’t have a deacon within the community to be that week-by-week symbol, the annual marking of the symbolic washing of feet can be that reminder that we are called to be a diaconal community.
Foot washing is admittedly an odd thing in our culture and climate. Most of us – except some of our friends who are members of the St. John’s Kitchen community – do not walk long long distances in insufficient footwear and require the relief and care of a good washing at the end of the day. At its roots though is a very simple thing: tend to the needs of others with deep humility and without question, sometimes even outside of our own comfort zone. As we are beheld by God so too we are also called and equipped by grace to behold the reality of others’ lives with loving kindness, and to tend to their needs. Needs to be heard. Your need to be received as who you truly are, not for who I might already have made my mind up that you are. Needs to be understood. To have hurts tended. To be fed. To be cleaned.
To behold who we are in God is to behold the needs of others, knowing that God pulls us toward each other within a humility that does not approach human need with cynicism or fear of judgment, but which like Jesus takes in that human need with compassion.
Augustine looked at his congregation and called them to pay attention to what was happening in the eucharistic liturgy and said: “Behold the mystery of your salvation laid out before you. Behold what you are. Become what you receive.”
As often as we eat this bread and drink from this cup we proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes. This proclamation is something we are called to do with our lives. We are to become what we receive and what we receive is God’s love poured out for the whole world. We are to become what we receive and what we receive is Christ’s own body. We, together, here in this place, are that body of Christ. We receive the possibility of being who we are: the body of Christ in our homes and places of leisure and of work. We, the body of Christ at the corner of Duke and Water.
Here where people walk by on their way to work or wander because they have no work. Here where people enjoy meals with friends at the restaurants on King or line up for food in the upper parish hall. Here where people are hungry and confused and discarded. Here is where we are called to become what we have already been made by our baptism, the body of Christ, with whom we travel in an intense way these holy days remembering the body of the Jesus who walked this earth in his own body, a body that risked love above all threat, a body blamed and bullied and harassed and abused buy the world, a body abandoned by those who followed him, a body that suffered, a body that gave itself for the life of the world. A body that will die and will be raised to a new life beyond what we can possibly imagine.
To become what we receive is both to receive that gift and to work on always tending to that gift. To be the body of Christ is to be on a lifelong journey taking care of each other along the way. It is a journey in which each one of us will face deep losses and hard griefs, joys of new things being born through our creativity, pain that is inexplicable and delights that are surprising. Will we suffer. We will get grumpy. We will worry about the building. We will forget that we belong to God and through God belong with each other. We will fret about our future and find fun in our celebrations, sometimes with fancy hats. We will worry about the building. Did I say that already? We are on a long haul journey with each other. We may get short with each other. Jesus chose to wash his disciples’ feet knowing that he would not be with them for much longer and were likely to experience the challenging stuff of long haul life with each other. Like the disciples, we are human; we give in to needing to get our way, we can be burdened with insecurity and get competitive. We need to be reminded to wash each other’s feet with kindness, humility, and mercy.
We need to wash each other’s feet with the kindness that takes time really to listen to one another, the kindness that washes away the callousness that can come from being in too much of a hurry, and that refreshes us with the gifts that come when we dare to really get to know someone beneath what judgment I may have made of them.
We need to wash each other’s feet with the humility that knows that one of us is not more important than another, and to have that humility wash away the sometimes too-quick-to-judgment ways that we might have with each other, and refreshes us with the eyes of grace so that we can behold each other truly in the ways that God beholds us.
We need to wash each other’s feet with the mercy that levels us all to the place of being God’s children, and to have that mercy wash us of the ways the sometimes too-quick-to use our power to dismiss or undervalue others, and to have that mercy refresh us with the power of grace to build up each other with respect.
Behold the mystery of your salvation laid out before you: behold what you are, not just spectators but true participants in, this mystery of God’s love that brings healing to the world; become what you receive: the body of Christ poured out for the world. May we be so. Amen.
The Reverend Dr. Eileen Scully