Maundy Thursday 2007
Isaiah 53:1-6 and John 13:1-14

The worst is about to happen: Jesus’ arrest, his show trial, the desertion by his disciples, the death on a Roman cross. But now, around a table, here is an intimate scene of love.

Maundy Thursday. Maundy from the Latin which means "commandment." This night around a table Jesus gave us a new commandment: "Love one another."

"As I have loved you, love one another." This commandment sums up all the rest. Without it none of the rest matter. It is how people know we are Jesus’ disciples. "Greater love has no one than this," Jesus said. A friend laying down his life for a friend. This is the divine friendship giving everything it has to give.

This is the night Jesus washed his disciples’ feet. It’s a pretty astonishing reversal of roles. We want to love Jesus by washing his feet. He says, I want to love you by washing your feet. Here is Jesus kneeling to wash our feet; this is God bending low, a towel around her waist.

At table Jesus says words we call "words of institution," or "eucharistic words." This is how Luke records them:

There are uncountable ways to interpret these words, some interpretations becoming church doctrine so fixed and absolute that if you don’t believe them in the way that a certain church teaches it, you cannot partake of the table - - and your salvation may be in doubt.

Some say this bread and this cup become at the time of their consecration actually the body and the blood of Christ. For some this is the holiest things they can imagine. For others this is unimaginable.

We at Myers Park Baptist Church do not require a particular way of believing about the bread and wine in order for you to come to the table. We invite you to come with all the faith you have and receive what God, what Jesus have to offer you.

What is my own belief about the bread and wine? What is the faith I bring? That they are both symbol and sacrament for me: What do I mean?

By symbol I take Jesus’ words to mean this:

This bread which Jesus takes and blesses and breaks and gives to his disciples stands for his whole life given for you.

It stands for his whole life among us, his birth, his life in self-giving love, his teaching and compassion, his utter trust in God as his Abba, his washing of feet, his dying on the cross, his resurrection. This bread broken stands for his whole life, not just his body broken on a cross - - though it surely stands for that, too.

And this cup poured out stands for a new covenant with God, based not on how good we are but how good God is, not on my works but on God’s grace.

This new covenant is poured out as Jesus’ life was poured out; it is his blood transfused into our blood; it is a love poured out on a cross, and into our hearts.

It is thus a covenant of grace. As Buechner puts it:

There’s nothing you have to do.
There’s nothing you have to do.
There’s nothing you have to do.

So come, take this bread, drink this cup, and may God pour God’s own love and life into you. This is what sacrament means: That this is not just something we are doing. This is something God is doing. This is a meeting place with God. A thin place. God has called us here. God feeds us here. Our hands become God’s hands, our bread God’s bread, our cup God’s cup.

Come, take and eat, take and drink and taste the mercy of God.