Christopher Thomas
Sermon for Maundy Thursday – 4/1/2021
Exodus 12: 1-4, 11-14
Psalm 116: 1, 10-17
1 Corinthians 11: 23-26
John 13: 1-17, 31-35
“I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
The Sacrament of Discomfort
Tomorrow will be your last day on earth, your final moments of human existence, and your exit is going to be messy and painful, fraught with deception and betrayal. How do you choose to spend your last evening?
The Very Rev. Mike Kinman, former Dean of Christ Church Cathedral in St. Louis calls it the “Sacrament of Discomfort.” Several years ago, I found myself in one of his workshops at which he discussed this phenomenon. The subject was race and reconciliation, and there were a lot of things that were hard to hear, hard to think about, and frankly down-right uncomfortable. Uncomfortable to the predominantly white, upper-class, point-of-privilege folks who sat in the room that day listening to his message.
Christ Church Cathedral is distinctly situated in downtown St. Louis, and like most large urban areas, deals with its own set of particular ministry circumstances. In the wake of the events surrounding the 2014 shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, a northern suburb of St. Louis, their congregation chose to become directly involved in the movement that has come to be known as “Black Lives Matter.”
Now their congregation is diverse, by most Episcopal Church standards. It’s a downtown congregation after all. But it is the Episcopal Church, and so even by those standards, it’s populated with people who speak predominantly from a point of privilege. Subjects of race and poverty, discrimination based upon the color of one’s skin or the amount of financial resource in one’s pocket, tend to make people uncomfortable. Urban ministry is usually messy and disturbing.
Dean Kinman invited us to what he calls the “Sacrament of Discomfort.” He asked that we show up and be present and stay with the discomfort that would necessarily follow not only a recount of the events of that day in Ferguson, but for what those events would call his church to in the days, weeks and months that followed. Listen, listen, and listen some more. We’re naturally creatures that seek to regain our homeostatic balance of comfort, but resist that urge to turn our hearts and minds from discomfort back to comfort.
As Dean Kinman recounted the falling of the young unarmed black man, Michael Brown, he continued to point out that Michael lay dead on the ground for 4 and a half hours. His mother was not allowed to attend to her son lying dead on the pavement. 4.5 hours. An oddly intimate moment between mother and son played out for the entire world to witness.
Discomforting? Anxiety-producing? Sit with it. Listen. Feel. Imagine. In these moments we so desperately want to look away, to flee. But don’t.
The Sacrament of Discomfort. Sacrament is all over what we hear and experience with this curious observance of Maundy Thursday as we peer in to that room where Jesus spent his last night of full humanity. Don’t turn away. Stay with your discomfort. Stay with Jesus and the disciples in those awkward, uncomfortable moments.
For what is sacrament? Sacraments are those things that point to and participate in the mystery of God’s radical self-engagement with the world and its manifestation as self-giving love. God engages with humanity, and the result is love. Sacraments are the visible, human signs of communion between God and the world through the presence of Christ and the empowerment of the Holy Spirit. Simply stated, sacrament is the place, that singular moment in time and space, when Earth and heaven come together for an awkward, unsettling, disturbing, and life-altering moment in which both are irrevocably transformed. God draws God’s people through time, transforming them into a sign and witness to God’s kingdom on Earth.
Sacrament is earthy and earthly, the rich fertilize of humanity. It’s easy for us to avoid the human nature of sacrament, because we want to move toward the sanitized sanctity of God’s grace. It’s that moment in time, though, when Earth and heaven collide, when God meets us in the messiness of life, and we are transformed.
There are many sacramental moments in Dean Kinman’s story of how his flock at Christ Church Cathedral directly engaged discomfort in the name of God’s abiding love. The congregation had been called upon to make up simple kits that were anecdotes to the tear gas that is regularly used to subdue protesters. Yes, this was something that his people could easily do to stand with and support the movement. So they gathered all their supplies and put together their teams to assemble these packages. And they did all this on the high altar in that historic Cathedral. They create these kits, bless them, and ship them right out from the altar to the world they so desperately struggle to change.
I’m sure there were some who were shocked and discomforted by all the messiness happening on the altar. For some reason, we view the altar as this sacrosanct place, not to be profaned. And it certainly is that. But for me that was one of the most moving moments of this presentation, seeing that table used for the crucial work of God. We work out the messiness of sacrament on that altar with, before, and around God made flesh in Jesus Christ, through the Holy Spirit, week after week.
Tonight is full of sacrament. There’s no way we can avoid it. From Exodus to John to Corinthians, the theme for the evening is sacrament. And it’s messy, and it’s earthy, and it’s earthly, and it’s heavenly.
Jesus sat with his discomfort the night before he died. In so many ways he modeled the Sacrament of Discomfort. He knew he would die a painful suffering death the following day; but that night before, he sat with, and stayed present to, those whom he loved so dearly. And he continued to model by his words and actions, what each of them, and those of us who would follow, should do in sacrament.
In a few moments, we will recreate Jesus’ sacramental act of foot washing.
Foot washing in Jesus’ time had very practical implications. The primary mode of transportation in those days was walking, and the roads and pathways were dirt; therefore guests arrived with filthily sandaled feet. Providing servants to wash the feet of arriving guests was an expected act of hospitality. Jesus, however, took something usual and expected, and turned it sacramental.
Jesus was their Teacher and Lord, and yet he insisted that he would take the role of servant and wash their feet. This was a concept that upended the normal paradigm, making it something uncomfortable, disturbing and different. It certainly was uncomfortable for Peter, who insisted that he would not allow Jesus to wash his feet. Jesus was clear about the outcome of Peter’s discomfort. “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.” You have no stake in the community. Your desire for your own comfort will keep you from partaking fully in the binding love of the community.
The sacramental act of foot washing that Jesus instituted that night represented many things. Not only was it radical in its hospitality, and symbolic of our central entry points to Christian community, baptism and Eucharist; it served as welcome into God’s house, both through service and hospitality. Through it Jesus manifests the unity and intimacy of God, Jesus, and the believer that marks full relationship with God. Community is necessarily created through this intimate, hospitable act.
Intimacy discomforts and disquiets. It makes us nervous. It pushes us out of our comfort zones. And Jesus calls us to press into that discomfort.
If you’ve participated in the foot washing process, as I hope and pray you all have, you know where the real discomfort lies. You have encountered it as have I. It’s not in the washing of others’ feet. For the most part, we Christians are good at pressing through the momentary discomfort of serving others. Strangely enough, the real point of pressure comes when we must take our own shoes and socks off and allow someone to wash our feet, to expose our own selves, our own humanity, make ourselves vulnerable to someone else, allowing someone else to minister to us, that we get really uncomfortable.
I would wager that is THE reason most people who don’t participate in foot washing don’t participate.
“It is so incredibly intimate, and you might actually see who I am, and I just can’t bear that.”
Yes, you can. Yes, you can. Yes, you can.
“Lord, are you going to wash my feet?”
“You will NEVER wash my feet!”
“Unless I wash your feet, you have no share with me.”
Yes, you can be vulnerable to Jesus Christ. Yes, you can be vulnerable to other human beings. Yes, it is uncomfortable. Yes, it is painful. Yes it is necessary.
The Sacrament of Discomfort.
“Life begins at the end of your comfort.”
Amen!
