A Maundy Thursday image

A few weeks ago I took this picture on the beach in Honolulu, a quick shot with my phone camera, late in the day. The younger woman was tying the older woman's shoe. It was an act of love and service on a beach that is largely filled with tourists on vacation and local people who come to surf or, often, just to watch the sunset. Though the picture is not literally a foot-washing, it is an icon of Holy Thursday (also known as Maundy Thursday).

I've also posted an old sermon about --what else?-- feet, for this holy day. And Jesus, of course. See here.

A sermon for Maundy Thursday (a.k.a. Holy Thursday)

 

Photo: Feet of the Campesino (Oaxaca, Mexico) by Ken Light.
**************
Here's an old thang. (Also found here.)

This sermon is from seven years ago.

I had preached a slightly different version of it in Berkeley two years before. (You can make foot fetish jokes with a Berkeley congregation but not with a Greensboro one ;-). Not sure yet about Boston, where I have not yet begun preaching. Or begun again, since I preached in this city during the 1980s and the first part of the 1990s.)

Maundy Thursday

St. Mary’s House (Episcopal/Anglican), Greensboro

April 13, 2006

Exodus 12:1-14a
1 Corinthians 11:23-26 (27-32)
Psalm 78:14-20, 23-25
John 13:1-15

In the name of the One
who longs for our friendship,
and of Christ Jesus,
who calls us friends,
and of their Spirit,
who makes holy friendship possible,
Amen.

Only in the Gospel of John
is the footwashing the focus of the Last Supper story.

In the other three gospels, Mark, Matthew, and Luke,
it is the sharing of bread and wine
as Jesus the Christ’s own life
that is at the center of the meal.

This evening we celebrate both:
with our bodies and hearts and minds,
with food and drink,
*****fruit of the earth and work of human hands
*****that become part of our own blood and bone;
with water,
*****without which nothing and no one on this planet could survive;
with touch,
*****without which we humans would wither from lack of love.

In our deeply mindful present
as we listen,
*****move,
*****touch,
*****receive,
*****offer

*****and share
we also commit
an act of memory
and an act of hope.

Feet!

Although Eucharist, the holy communion we share
with Christ and with each other
*****and with others throughout space and time
is once again the culmination of our celebration,
*****the last feast before the Good Friday fast
*****leading to Easter,
the foot-washing is at the heart of this celebration.

As the youngest child asks during the Passover Seder,
“Why is this night different from every other night?”
We may ask:
Why is this night different?
Why on this night wash and be washed?
Why feet?

I should have said
“be washed” and then “wash”
–for we who are Jesus’ friends
receive
from him
before we can give.

And Peter, that bumbling, energetic character who repeatedly doesn’t get it
*****and for whom we can thus have great affection,
objects strenuously to precisely this:
that the one who teaches and leads,
the one who is holiness itself,
Jesus, child of Holy Wisdom,
the main man,
washes Peter and his friends
and washes us,
his friends and followers.
So that then and only then
we might do likewise.

And so, as in the storied beginnings of Jesus’ life,
the last are first,
kings kneel
and the powers of the world
turn upside down.

This is our memory.
This is our vision.
This is our hope.

Tonight we celebrate the sacrament of friendship,
of power turned upside down
in Jesus’ land, small sliver of earth and shore
occupied by a foreign empire
and
on our piece of earth
today.

Tonight is the sacrament of friendship
in both the table and the touch.

Tonight the tired and the hidden are held
and bathed
and tenderly handled.

Feet.

We don’t talk about feet much
in church.
We don’t do much with feet in church.
Feet are too –well, pedestrian is the word that comes to mind,
the word whose root comes from the Latin word for foot,
a word meaning all at once “ordinary” and “everyday-ish” and “plain.”
Feet are basic.
Feet take us places
–when we are not in wheelchairs
or in our cars.
In the land of the automobile,
we don’t use them enough
for going places.
But if we are car-less
or homeless
we may use them too much.
In Boston, at least two of the major shelters for homeless persons,
one day shelter and one overnight shelter,
have foot clinics, because feet take a lot of stress
when you’re out there,
especially in winter.

Feet.
Sometimes we paint their toes.
If we’re lucky, we get them massaged.
Practitioners of shiatsu, acupressure, and other Asian healing arts tell us
that they contain points of connection to every place and organ in the body.
If you’re a moviegoer who likes French films,
you will remember a wonderful scene in the movie “Cousin, Cousine”
where the two main characters
have finally made love
and they are holed up in a hotel room together,
perfectly relaxed, and one of them holds the other’s feet
and very tenderly
clips her toenails.

Now,
mention feet in relation to church
and two realities are likely to come up:
intimacy
and awkwardness.

In Jesus’ day of dusty roads and sandals
there was no need to make a point about the importance of feet
to get around.
That’s what most people used,
and the quickest non-feet land transportation
was a donkey
–maybe a horse if you were a Roman soldier;
but that didn’t apply to most people.

In Jesus’ day,
there was also no need to make a point
about the relation of feet
to earth.
Jesus didn’t have to do this
because in the world in which he lived,
this connection to the land was taken for granted.

We, on the other hand, need a reminder.
So in addition to reminding you
that when we say God loves us
we mean all the way down to the tips of our smelly toes,
I want to invite you to think of feet in this way:
feet are what we use most often
to touch the earth.

They are our connection to the earth.

“Humility” – the name of that virtue we celebrate today
in the washing of the feet
comes from the word for “earth.”
*****– Think of the word “humus.”—
“Humble” really means “close to the earth.”

Can we become again people of earth?
Can we become the people of the land?

There is an interesting connection here.

Most of the people who followed Jesus
–though, mind you, he had city folks and artisans
in his circle as well–
were what the Bible calls the am ha’aretz,
the common people,
literally, the people of the land.

“The people of the land”
is also what indigenous peoples,
diverse as they are,
call themselves in many places around the globe.

Just two years ago I heard Mark MacDonald, the bishop of Alaska,

***[Note: Mark is now in a different bishop job but still working with Native peoples.]
talk about environmental rights and human rights.
He spoke about the Gwich’in people.
They are the indigenous people
who live up in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
in Alaska
–and many, many of them, by the way, are Episcopalians.

[I did an extemp sentence here reminding people that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is not “empty” – it has plants, it has caribou, and it has people, all interdependent.]

The Gwich’in have a word for what we term “subsistence,”
a term that for us has a somewhat negative or impoverished connotation,
as in “subsistence living” or “a subsistence economy.”
What we term “subsistence”
is in the Gwich’in language a word
that means, literally,
“God is taking good care of you.”

“God is taking good care of you.”

That is what you learn when you are people of the land.

This evening we celebrate what Jesus did the night before he died.

When you know you’re going to die,
you want to be with the people you love the most
and you concentrate every bit of wisdom in your body and soul
into a few words or gestures;
you compress them in time;
you leave them as a testament.

What Jesus did the night before he died
was to serve
through the washing of the feet
but also to bless
and thus to give thanks,
to receive
the bread,
the wine.
The Jewish blessing over food and wine, and anything else for that matter,
begins, “Blessed are you, Creator of the universe...”

Jesus acknowledged that the bread and the wine
don’t come from us:
they come from God
and from the earth
and from the labor of others.

And so do we.

In receiving the bread
we savor, we understand,
we remember
our relationship to creation, to our food, to our land.
We are here to receive and to taste
not to own or exploit.

And we are to receive each other
to cradle each other
to handle each other tenderly
at all times,
including when we are at our most awkward.

We learn this tonight
from Jesus
child of God
and child of earth.

We learn from Jesus
to be people who live
in the freedom of the living God.
For this is our God: the living God; the God of Jesus;
not a violent God; not a God who urges us to conquer;
not a God who urges us to acquire
not a God who urges us to consume.

A God who frees us to be
people who know
our relationship to God
and to earth
and to one another:

people of God
people of earth.

Joseph of Arimathea Speaks: A Meditation on the Fourteenth Station of the Cross

Joseph of Arimathea Speaks

a meditation on the fourteenth station of the cross

"Jesus is laid in the tomb."

St. Mary's House, Greensboro

Good Friday, 2012

I am Joseph. I asked for the body.

I could not let it lie and be desecrated.

Not on the Sabbath.

Not anytime.

I asked for the body.

I asked for it

from the Romans who occupy our land,

the torturers,

who rule us

and tax us

and make sure

that we are afraid,

even the rich citizens

like me.

I asked for it

from Pilate,

the governor,

who would rather see Jesus,

like the other crucified ones,

rot in the sun,

a reminder to all who pass by

–Sabbath or no Sabbath—

that this is what happens

to insurrectionists: to those who revolt.

I asked.

I, a member of the Council,

I asked for the body.

We know.
We all know.

After the stripping,

the shame,

the beating,

the pain,

the thirst,

the agony,

this is what happens:

the body rots in the sun;

the birds come;

and then, after a while,

sometimes a long while

the soldiers

or their slaves

throw the body in a common grave.

I could not let that happen.

I asked for the body.

I am a Jew.

To us death is the great equalizer.
So burial must happen to all

with equal respect

and to none

with more respect than others.

But there must be respect.

I acted fast.

I know why,

But I am not sure how.

I was in shock.

I did not witness the worst,

not like the women.
I still had a voice in my throat.

I asked for the body.

Often it is the women

who wash a body for burial,

in running water if there is any,

and if not, with water poured

from a jug,

making the body clean

after the often messy struggle toward death,

the last struggle.

But I did the washing. 

I did it fast.

I had help, of course.

I could never have done it alone.

I asked for the body.

I was the one who bought the linen,

the same garment I will wear,

the one my sons will buy for me,

later, if God grants me more years.

I bought it for this man younger than I.

I bought it

as I did years ago for my little girl

when she died of a fever,

long before her mother and I

had met Jesus.

I asked for the body

and I washed it

and I wrapped it.

I buried the body.

I buried his body

in my own tomb,

the tomb waiting for me.
It was the least I could do.

Now I am walking home,

numb.

Walking.

I am not even sure how I got this far on the road.

I had my wits about me, enough of them

to act, but I was acting

as if in a dream

or walking through water.

I only know

he is dead and I had to

I had to ask for the body.

The road is ahead of me

and I am walking.

About the rest of life

I do not know.

I do not know.

    

Though all four gospels record the presence and actions of Joseph of Arimathea, the Gospel according to Mark is the one on which I focused my meditation during the writing and research for this spoken-word piece.

(c) Jane Redmont 2012 

Last year's Good Friday meditation (also from Stations of the Cross at St. Mary's House [Episcopal], Greensboro) is here.

A fragment for Maundy Thursday (from a piece of last year's sermon)

 

How does Jesus love us?

He doesn’t, at this supper, say “worship me.”

How does Jesus show his love?

Remember, he says.

The meal, the washing of the feet, the commandment to love
(mitzvot)
are not separate from each other.

What will we remember about Jesus?

Who will help us to remember?

Who will urge us to remember
those with no names in the text
no names on immigration papers
no names and no faces
like so many of the people Jesus fed on the hillside?

What will those whom we leave behind when we die remember about us?
Our friends, our children and descendants if we have any, our co-workers, our communities:
what will the world remember about us?

And while we are still alive
in this brief, precious, and sometimes dangerous life,
what will friends and strangers know about us?

Will they know that we are friends of Jesus?

How will they know?

Illustration: Sadao Watanabe, The Last Supper

This is the night...

Lève-toi, réveille-toi d'entre les morts!

Click photo to enlarge and see detail.

See here and here for more from Kariye (Chora) in Istanbul.
Click the French line above for Resurrection chant from Taizé.

Good Friday: A Meditation on the Eleventh Station of the Cross

I am always moved and inspired by the Stations of the Cross at St. Mary's House. (Yes, Episcopalians have Stations of the Cross, though not everywhere.) A different person offers a meditation for each of the 14 stations, many spoken, some sung, one or two visual. So much wisdom, talent, heart, and faith for one small congregation.

Here is my meditation on the eleventh station, "Jesus Is Nailed to the Cross."

Jesus Is Nailed to the Cross

Were you there?

Are you there?

Will you be there?

Were you there ******** [italics indicate Jane singing a cappella]
when they crucified my Lord?
Were you there
when they crucified my Lord?
Oh, oh…
Sometimes
it causes me to tremble,
tremble, tremble…
Were you there
when they crucified my Lord?

These stories come from the witness of Kelsey McNicholas,
a student at Guilford College and a volunteer
with the humanitarian organization No More Deaths
which seeks out migrants in the desert
to give them water, food, medical care,
and presence.

When undocumented immigrants are caught
by the U.S. border patrol,
they are
detained.
Manuel González told Kelsey
that while in detention
on the U.S. side of the border,
our side,
he'd only been given peanut butter to eat.

Ricardo Emilio Sánchez,
walking beside Manuel and Kelsey,
chimed in
that he had been given a tiny cold hamburger
and a small juice
for the whole day.

During Kelsey’s time in Nogales, Mexico,
across the border from Tucson, Arizona,
other people who had recently been detained
on the other side,
our side,
and then deported back to the Mexican side,
told her
that they weren't allowed to sleep.
Guards would come in and blare music
to keep them from sleeping.

Women described being stripped
to their last layer of clothing
in a highly air conditioned room.

Men described
having seventy people crammed into one room,
so packed that three had to sleep in the bathroom,
preventing anyone from using the facilities for three days.

Were you there
when they nailed him to a tree?
Were you there
when they nailed him to a tree?
Oh, oh …
Sometimes
it causes me to tremble,
tremble, tremble…
Were you there
when they nailed him to a tree?

During the dangerous crossing
from Mexico to the U.S.
and on occasion
in the other direction,
women, children, and men
driven by economic necessity,
risk their lives
there, in the heat and the rocks.

Some die.

The bodies of those who died in the desert,
if they are not found soon enough,
disappear.
The desert heat and dryness
eat them away
and they are gone.
Flesh, bones.
Clothes.

Sometimes
after they die
or
if they are lucky,
after they are caught, arrested, and detained,
in the desert
a child’s shoe remains,
or a backpack,
or a small shrine to La Virgen de Guadalupe
in a hole in a rock.

The volunteers find them:
the shoe,
the backpack,
the shrine.

Sometimes, too, the border patrol discovers
these traces of human lives,
of faith,
fear,
the drive to survive.

Far away
from the hot desert
in which the migrants
walk in the
in-between place
between there and here
we are busy
making laws.

Were you there
when they pierced him in the side?
Were you there
when they pierced him in the side?
Oh, oh …
Sometimes
it causes me to tremble,
tremble, tremble…
Were you there
when they pierced him in the side?

Far away
from the hot desert of Arizona,
in the deserts of Australia
and Sudan
the droughts worsen.

In Alaska,
the caribou have changed their migration patterns
because the ice melts too soon.

In Japan,
some survivors of Hiroshima are still alive
while neighbors of Fukushima power plant wonder
whether they will become ill
next week
next month
or next year.

In Harlem and San Francisco.
Black and brown children,
God’s youngest
children,
are disproportionately represented
among children with asthma
wheezing and coughing in emergency rooms
with anxious parents at their side.

In fields and factories
on this continent north and south
workers labor amid chemicals
not fit for human consumption
so that we can have
our strawberries
and our t-shirts.

We have nailed the earth God made
to a cross of
heat and waste.

Were you there
when the sun refused to shine?
Were you there
when the sun refused to shine?
Oh, oh …
Sometimes
it causes me to tremble,
tremble, tremble…
Were you there
when the sun refused to shine?

By the cross of Jesus the Christ
the soldiers of the Empire
mock
and taunt
and violate
the precious body
of God.

They leave.

And behind them,
at the place of shame and death,
in the open torture chamber in the hot sun
only a few, few friends remain,
witnessing.

Mary of Magdala.
Mary the mother of Jesus.
One or two other women.
The beloved disciple,
whose name
we may or may not know.

Only their presence protests.

But they are present.

It is dangerous in the Roman Empire
even to stay and watch
the crucified.
Even more dangerous
to take the body down
and bury it with care
rather than letting birds, animals,
the hot sun,
destroy it
and its remains.

Were you there
when they laid him in the tomb?
Were you there
when they laid him in the tomb?
Oh, oh …
Sometimes
it causes me to tremble,
tremble, tremble…
Were you there
when they laid him in the tomb?


Were you there?

Are you there?

If we do not cry out
The stones will cry out.

But must we leave it to the stones?

Jane Carol Redmont
Good Friday 2011
St. Mary's House, Greensboro

Stations of the Cross of Globalization

My friend Luiz Coelho has made his Stations of the Cross of Globalization available as a free download. You can find the download link here with some information. Or go directly here.

The Stations were just selected as runner-up in the Edinburgh 2010 media competition. As Holy Week approaches, you may want to consider them for your devotions if you are a Christian.

Alleluia in blue

He Qi, Women Arriving at the Tomb

The "Harrowing of Hell" - Anastasis: Resurrection

A powerful fresco from one of my favorite churches (now a museum) in Istanbul. I particularly love the dynamic movement in the close-up below. Click to enlarge photos and see detail.

Christ is risen from the dead,

trampling down

death by death

and on those in the tombs

bestowing life,

bestowing life!

Photos:Dick Osseman

Not too solemn Holy Saturday foodie post

It's a quiet, rather than solemn, day here at Acts of Hope Central. +Maya Pavlova is having her mid-day sleep on her bedroom perch at the window, sacked out on her pillow. She got up to check on the kitchen when the fresh goat cheese emerged from the shopping bag, but is back in the Land of Nod.

This semester my school week goes nonstop (including evenings) from Sunday night to Wednesday evening, and I have Thursday for recovery and whatever writing I can muster and Friday/Saturday for writing, unless there are churchy activities. This week was different because of Pesach and Triduum, so this is my first day of solitude and quiet, though there was a fair amount of quiet yesterday because I attended two contemplative Good Friday services. They contained a lot of silence and barenness. I also had a few meetings with my senior-thesis-writing student whose thesis was due yesterday at the end of the work day. I have mentioned him on Facebook but perhaps not here. His thesis is on the eschatology (=views of "the end" -- death, the afterlife, the end of time) of bluegrass music in Southern Appalachia and it is quite interesting. He is from that region himself, so he is exploring his cultural roots as well as writing a scholarly analysis. We have just three thesis-writers this year in our department. It's not something we require, just an exercise in which a few of our top students engage. The other theses are about masks and their performance in Bali and Mahayana Buddhist meditation. My colleague who teaches courses on Buddhism and other Asian-originated religious and wisdom paths is the supervisor for those two. Now all of us on the department faculty have to read them! We have a week to do so. Then the students will make presentations based on the theses and we will celebrate their work (it's not really a defense strictly speaking, this is just an undergraduate thesis) next weekend.

So where's the food? Here: for the first time in months I went to the downtown farmers' market today. It's been a year without much money or time, and in winter there's not much growing here anyway, so I think it had been five months at least since I last went to this market. Today I had a little time and a little money, thanks be to Godde, so off I went, leaving Her Grace at home to her morning slumbers.

Note: +Maya Pavlova got up way before I did this a.m., though being a civilized feline bishop, she did not wake me up. She rose early because there is a lot of bird action outside these days and she wanted to watch the early Kitty TV show at the living-room window.

I returned from the market with two kinds of goat cheese, fresh eggs, a large green onion (with both the scallion green tips and the white bulb), mixed baby lettuces from the first salad crops, arugula from the same farm, some Middle Eastern spreads and dips (three of them including baba ghanoush and fool, the latter thick and cold rather than the warm soup version), milk, buttermilk, and butter from a regional dairy, apple butter, and best of all, a bunch of yellow tulips. There don't seem to be a lot of tulips here in the Southland and I loved yellow tulips especially, used to get lots of Dutch tulips in Boston when I was living there to brighten up the late winter and early spring. These tulips are from the same farm as the lettuce. I also got a bunch of small, tight flowers (pink and red and white) whose name I am forgetting. When +Maya got up to smell the goat cheese (one kind is the fresh spreadable sort and she loves fresh goat milk products) she also tried to eat those flowers and their leaves.

Baby goat from Goat Lady Dairy, the farm that makes our goat cheese.

So now I have had a little fruit juice, goat cheese and whole wheat matzoh, apple butter and egg matzah, and a hefty mug of fresh coffee with milk, and I am ready for a day of writing and housework in this mess I call home.

I am also going to finish reading the book on Dorothy Stang.

Nice article on WIDS in the student newspaper

One of our students interviewed me for The Guilfordian, our college newspaper, not long ago, and the article came out in this week's edition. It didn't seem right to put up a vanity post on Good Friday, so I waited till today. You can read the one-page printable version of the article here.

Good Friday: the life and death of Sister Dorothy Stang

Yesterday evening I began my Good Friday reading, Martyr of the Amazon: The Life of Sister Dorothy Stang, by Roseanne Murphy.

Somehow I didn't want to read about Jesus. I wanted to read about someone who was living Jesus.

Dorothy Stang, a Sister of Notre Dame de Namur, lived and worked with Brazilian peasants in the landless people's movement in the Amazon. She was killed there in 2005.

Apparently there is a new documentary on her. There was a segment about it recently on PBS's "Now" program. Even the New York Post has written about it.

Website for the documentary, "They Killed Sister Dorothy," is here, with beautiful images and music and a trailer and all kinds of information. Narration by (yes!) Martin Sheen.

Stang was from Ohio and the Dayton Daily News wrote a three-part series on her after her death.

* * * * *
In related news, the Episcopal Café has a series of Stations of the Cross up. The one from Central America (El Salvador) is haunting. (Do not look at it if you are a trauma survivor; it is made up of drawings of tortured men and women. It resides at La UCA - the Jesuit-run University of Central America.) Another one is for children. Yet another is a series from Kenya. (I'd posted an image from that one two years ago here.)

Last year I posted the Arcatao Stations of the Cross from El Salvador. (That's a different series from the one mentioned above.)

And the year before, more Latin American Stations --images by Nobel Peace laureate Adolfo Pérez Esquivel with words from Argentina-- and some Stations by a Tanzanian artist with words by a womanist theologian from the U.S. (The latter, in a book called Where You There? is a favorite of mine.)

A sermon for Maundy Thursday

Photo: Feet of the Campesino (Oaxaca, Mexico) by Ken Light.
**************

This sermon is from three years ago.

I had preached a slightly different version of it in Berkeley two years before. (You can make foot fetish jokes with a Berkeley congregation but not with a Greensboro one ;-))

Maundy Thursday

St. Mary’s House (Episcopal/Anglican), Greensboro

April 13, 2006

Exodus 12:1-14a
1 Corinthians 11:23-26 (27-32)
Psalm 78:14-20, 23-25
John 13:1-15


In the name of the One
who longs for our friendship,
and of Christ Jesus,
who calls us friends,
and of their Spirit,
who makes holy friendship possible,
Amen.

Only in the Gospel of John
is the footwashing the focus of the Last Supper story.

In the other three gospels, Mark, Matthew and Luke,
it is the sharing of bread and wine
as Jesus the Christ’s own life
that is at the center of the meal.

This evening we celebrate both:
with our bodies and hearts and minds,
with food and drink,
*****fruit of the earth and work of human hands
*****that become part of our own blood and bone;
with water,
*****without which nothing and no one on this planet could survive;
with touch,
*****without which we humans would wither from lack of love.

In our deeply mindful present
as we listen,
*****move,
*****touch,
*****receive,
*****offer

*****and share
we also commit
an act of memory
and an act of hope.

Feet!

Although Eucharist, the holy communion we share
with Christ and with each other
*****and with others throughout space and time
is once again the culmination of our celebration,
*****the last feast before the Good Friday fast
*****leading to Easter,
the foot-washing is at the heart of this celebration.

As the youngest child asks during the Passover Seder
*****(Remember, today is Passover),
“Why is this night different from every other night?”
We may ask:
Why is this night different?
Why on this night wash and be washed?
Why feet?

I should have said
“be washed” and then “wash”
–for we who are Jesus’ friends
receive
from him
before we can give.

And Peter, that bumbling, energetic character who repeatedly doesn’t get it
*****and for whom we can thus have great affection,
objects strenuously to precisely this:
that the one who teaches and leads,
the one who is holiness itself,
Jesus, child of Holy Wisdom,
the main man,
washes Peter and his friends
and washes us,
his friends and followers.
So that then and only then
we might do likewise.

And so, as in the storied beginnings of Jesus’ life,
the last are first,
kings kneel
and the powers of the world
turn upside down.

This is our memory.
This is our vision.
This is our hope.

Tonight we celebrate the sacrament of friendship,
of power turned upside down
in Jesus’ land, small sliver of earth and shore
occupied by a foreign empire
and
on our piece of earth
today.

Tonight is the sacrament of friendship
in both the table and the touch.

Tonight the tired and the hidden are held
and bathed
and tenderly handled.

Feet.

We don’t talk about feet much
in church.
We don’t do much with feet in church.
Feet are too –well, pedestrian is the word that comes to mind,
the word whose root comes from the Latin word for foot,
a word meaning all at once “ordinary” and “everyday-ish” and “plain.”
Feet are basic.
Feet take us places
–when we are not in wheelchairs
or in our cars.
In the land of the automobile,
we don’t use them enough
for going places.
But if we are car-less
or homeless
we may use them too much.
In Boston, at least two of the major shelters for homeless persons,
one day shelter and one overnight shelter,
have foot clinics, because feet take a lot of stress
when you’re out there,
especially in winter.

Feet.
Sometimes we paint their toes.
If we’re lucky, we get them massaged.
Practitioners of shiatsu, acupressure and other Asian healing arts tell us
that they contain points of connection to every place and organ in the body.
If you’re a moviegoer who likes French films,
you will remember a wonderful scene in the movie “Cousin, Cousine”
where the two main characters
have finally made love
and they are holed up in a hotel room together
perfectly relaxed, and one of them holds the other’s feet
and very tenderly
clips her toenails.

Now,
mention feet in relation to church
and two realities are likely to come up:
intimacy
and awkwardness.

In Jesus’ day of dusty roads and sandals
there was no need to make a point about the importance of feet
to get around.
That’s what most people used,
and the quickest non-feet land transportation
was a donkey
–maybe a horse if you were a Roman soldier;
but that didn’t apply to most people.

In Jesus’ day,
there was also no need to make a point
about the relation of feet
to earth.
Jesus didn’t have to do this
because in the world in which he lived,
this connection to the land was taken for granted.

We, on the other hand, need a reminder.
So in addition to reminding you
that when we say God loves us
we mean all the way down to the tips of our smelly toes,
I want to invite you to think of feet in this way:
feet are what we use most often
to touch the earth.

They are our connection to the earth.

“Humility” – the name of that virtue we celebrate today
in the washing of the feet
comes from the word for “earth.”
*****– Think of the word “humus.”—
“Humble” really means “close to the earth.”

Can we become again people of earth?
Can we become the people of the land?

There is an interesting connection here.

Most of the people who followed Jesus
–though, mind you, he had city folks and artisans
in his circle as well–
were what the Bible calls the am ha’aretz,
the common people,
literally, the people of the land.

“The people of the land”
is also what indigenous peoples,
diverse as they are,
call themselves in many places around the globe.

Just two years ago I heard Mark MacDonald, the bishop of Alaska,

***[2009 note: Mark is now in a different bishop job but still working with Native peoples]
talk about environmental rights and human rights.
He spoke about the Gwich’in people.
They are the indigenous people
who live up in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
in Alaska
–and many, many of them, by the way, are Episcopalians.
[I did an extemp sentence here reminding people that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is not “empty” – it has plants, it has caribou, and it has people, all interdependent.]
The Gwich’in have a word for what we term “subsistence,”
a term that for us has a somewhat negative or impoverished connotation,
as in “subsistence living” or “a subsistence economy.”
What we term “subsistence”
is in the Gwich’in language a word
that means, literally,
“God is taking good care of you.”

“God is taking good care of you.”

That is what you learn when you are people of the land.

This evening we celebrate what Jesus did the night before he died.

When you know you’re going to die,
you want to be with the people you love the most
and you concentrate every bit of wisdom in your body and soul
into a few words or gestures;
you compress them in time;
you leave them as a testament.

What Jesus did the night before he died
was to serve
through the washing of the feet
but also to bless
and thus to give thanks,
to receive
the bread,
the wine.
The Jewish blessing over food and wine, and anything else for that matter,
begins, “Blessed are you, Creator of the universe...”

Jesus acknowledged that the bread and the wine
don’t come from us:
they come from God
and from the earth
and from the labor of others.

And so do we.

In receiving the bread
we savor, we understand,
we remember
our relationship to creation, to our food, to our land.
We are here to receive and to taste
not to own or exploit.

And we are to receive each other
to cradle each other
to handle each other tenderly
at all times,
including when we are at our most awkward.

We learn this tonight
from Jesus
child of God
and child of earth.

We learn from Jesus
to be people who live
in the freedom of the living God.
For this is our God: the living God; the God of Jesus;
not a violent God; not a God who urges us to conquer;
not a God who urges us to acquire
not a God who urges us to consume.

A God who frees us to be
People who know
our relationship to God
and to earth
and to one another:

people of God
people of earth.