The Reverend Dr. William L. Dols  
Maundy Thursday, April 12, 2001
Myers Park Baptist Church
Charlotte, North Carolina

The familiar words from Jesus about the bread being his body and the wine being his blood are missing in John's account of the Last Supper.  Instead Jesus gets up from the meal, takes off his outer robe, and ties a towel around himself.  The disciples must ponder what has come upon him -- confused about what he is doing.  Then to the amazement of some and consternation of others, Jesus pours water into a basin and begins to wash the disciples' feet.  He performs the onerous and demeaning task of slaves and menial servants when guests come into the house with feet dusty from the road and dirty from city streets.  He washes their feet and then wipes them dry with the towel tied around him.

Simon Peter is the only one who speaks up.  "Are you going to wash my feet?" he asks.  He tells Peter that he does not know what he is doing but that he will later.  "You will never wash my feet," Peter tells him.  Never.  Unless I do, Jesus says to his baffled and befuddled disciple, "you have no share in me."

No longer a Jesus presiding over a meal or teaching on a mountain or walking on water or stilling a storm or changing water into wine or touching with healing hands or being beseeched and beleaguered as Lord or Master or Rabbi or even Messiah.  Rather than a place of eminence or honor or dignity or exaltation or deification, instead kneeling before them with a towel tied around his waist and washing their dirty and probably smelly feet.

What Jesus is doing for his disciples, he tells Peter, is what makes them share him and become part of one another.  He tells them that he is setting an example for them and they should do for one another what he is doing for them.    "You are blessed," he tells them, "if you do."

In his final hours, as he prepares to leave them, Jesus washes their feet. 

Anne Tyler in "Breathing Lessons" tells of Ira and Maggie up early one Saturday morning to drive 90 miles north of their home in Baltimore to the funeral of a friend. They stop for coffee at a diner on Route 40 where Maggie, as usual, enters into a deep and meaningful relationship with a waitress named Mabel.  They are quickly sharing painful stories about mothering of teenage daughters.  Ira is thinking Maggie is acting
overemotional telling of their daughter Daisy.  He didn't say so, but he shifted in his seat; that was how she knew.  She ignored him.  "You know what she told me the other day?" she asked Mabel.  "I was testing out this tuna casserole.   I served it up for supper and I said, ‘Isn't it delicious?  Tell me honestly what you think.'  And Daisy said --"

Tears pricked her eyelids.  She took a deep breath.  "Daisy just sat there and studied me for the longest time," she said, "with this kind of ...fascinated expression on her face, and then she said, ‘Mom?  Was there a certain conscious point in your life when you decided to settle for being ordinary?'"  She meant to go on, but her lips were trembling.

For years I read those words as a spiteful daughter's cruel attack upon her mother.  They sound different to me these days.  I hear Daisy asking her mother, instead, if there might have been a conscious point in her life when she decided to say NO to expectations of family and world and even of herself to be exceptional, extraordinary and incomparable and rather than be a combination of Martha Stewart, Julia Roberts and Madeline Albright to choose to be an ordinary, common, tuna casserole human being, a broken down actor
like the rest of us.

Growing up I remember that one of the worst things you could say about someone was that they were common.  Ordinary.  Run of the mill.  Pedestrian. Average. And how so much of our energy is devoted over the years to proving to the world and ourselves that we are special, unique, superior, successful, awesome, distinguished, excellent and impressive, noble and notable.  Think about most of those Christmas letters!  And how we work so hard to live up to all those hopes and expectations — separating ourselves from the pack and breaking out of the herd and leaving behind the ordinary others.  Some of us kill ourselves trying.  Or spend our life climbing the ladder only to find out one day, perhaps too late, that it is leaning against the wrong wall.   Or, if we are desperate or poor or angry enough, we instead excel in dark deeds and notorious sin to prove that if we can't be the best than we'll be the worst.  But never ordinary.  Nobody sets out to be ordinary.  Nobody wants to be ordinary or live life with ordinary people.

"You will never wash my feet," Peter tells Jesus.  You of all people are not going to kneel before me with a towel and basin, like an ordinary servant, coming down off the holy pedestal or divine messianic throne we have put you on.  Nor am I, Peter implies, going to kneel down and wash anyone else's feet.  People like you and me don't do things like that.   

This Maundy Thursday sermon is not about believing but doing something.  It is not about theological truths or spiritual profundities.  It is not about venerating the cross.  It is not even so much about Jesus betrayed, arrested, crucified and dying.  It is, rather, about what Jesus told people like us to do if we are to share in him and be blessed by being him in our world.  On this night he does not tell the disciples to be baptized or go to church
every week or tithe or convert the nations or pray or be righteous or spiritual or religious or even right.  Washing feet.  That's what he leaves them with. Rather than heart, soul or psyche, faith or devotion or belief, prayers or creeds or catechism or rosary or building great cathedrals, it's about feet.  Not feet in the abstract or as poetic image.  Not feet on a
Michelangelo marble statue or in exotic fashion ads.  Your feet. My feet. Feet that tire and ache and over the years get ugly and even grotesque from carrying so much weight for so long so far.  Our feet with their calluses, cracks, corns and bunions.

As you go to bed this evening, remember John's description of this dark and ominous night for Jesus and his disciples.  Sit on the side of your bed, remember Jesus and consider your feet.  Hold them. If you have lotion or oil, anoint and caress them.
Our feet are perhaps the most ordinary and undramatic, least noble and most neglected part of our bodies, representing all the places we have been and all the tracks we would cover up. Love this night begins not at the altar or even the cross, but holding all of your life in your hands there at your bedside .  With your fingers touch and fondle and remember where these feet have carried you — down blind alleys and dead end streets and long detours, wrong turns and wanderings and getting lost -- as well as paths of joy.  
Embracing your feet embrace all, owning and honoring all of your ordinariness.  

Imagine Jesus with a towel around his waist, kneeling before you pouring water and reaching for not theirs but your feet. Jesus washing your feet.   And realizing that even should you awaken tomorrow knowing that you have betrayed, sold out, compromised, cheated, deserted, fallen on your face again, that you are nevertheless loved even if unlovable.  For this moment, with your feet in his hands, you need not hide or conceal or disguise or mask or veil or camouflage, cloak or dissemble, discount or disown the ordinary, imperfect and pedestrian child of God you are.

All you need do this night is to take off your shoes and, like Peter, marvel that your naked feet are where it starts.  If you have never done such a thing for your partner or lover or child or parent, try tonight doing what Jesus does.  If it is something you did as young and passionate lovers and have not done for a long time, do it again tonight.  If you are alone, risk doing such a loving thing for yourself — being tender, caring, present to yourself as if your life depends upon it.  Because, of course, it does.  Do it for yourself or another tonight and imagine how risking such intimacy and braving such affection with one another might change you as well as change the world.

If you can't do such a thing because it sounds silly or you are uneasy or awkward or embarrassed, when you turn out the light, go to sleep dreaming it.  Invite the angels of darkness to embrace you and invite Jesus to do what you cannot imagine anyone including yourself doing for you.  In the silence that is holy let your feet be taken, blessed, washed, anointed and kissed because you are loved that much by God.  Give thanks to the One to whom all hearts are open and from whom none of your secrets are hid and who aches for us to live such love with one another — beginning tonight with your feet.
      

Text: John 13: 1-15
Anne Tyler, "Breathing Lessons," New York: Knopf, 1988, p. 30.