One of my colleagues encouraged me to share some of the thoughts I offered last evening during our worship. What follows is a part of my meditation on the scriptures of Holy Thursday.

Have you ever been sitting with a
group of friends and begun asking those difficult to answer questions like “If
you were stranded on a desert island, and could have only one food…..or one
companion….what or who would it be?” Of even more difficult, “If you knew you
were going to die in a week or a month or even a year, what would you do?”
These kinds of hypothetical questions make for great conversation and sometimes
even some great soul searching.

Maundy Thursday.. Mandatum…..Latin
for commandment. We gather in worship, knowing the story of
Jesus so well……, knowing that in the next days
we will remember Jesus’ last days, his arrest, his execution, his death, and
yet waiting and watching for God’s commandment to us. As people who call themselves Christian, we can reflect on what Jesus’ life held,  knowing  that the true journey of Lent is in asking what
it is God might be asking of us. Like the disciples that gathered with Jesus
during those fateful days, those who could only imagine what their future held,
we came together around the life of someone who had performed miracles,healed the sick, multiplied loaves of bread, walked on water,made
the blind see, the deaf hear, the lame walk. And whether or not we see those
stories as metaphor or literal, we came together waiting and watching for a
sign of what it means to be the kin-dom of God in our time, in our day. Often
in this searching we can rely on deep theological insight, powerful
scholarship, informed exegesis of scripture, or doctrines and creeds that
declare who we are and what we profess to believe. This allows us, in some way,
to keep our distance from this story, this life that has shaped our own faith
life. This intellectual process, while good and important, allows us to keep
the experience of Holy Week in our head. It allows us in some way to not
remember where the Jesus life began….with the incarnation. The indwelling of
God.

 But on this night when Jesus
gathered with these people with whom he had lived and had come to love, his
message was not an intellectual message. It was not about what any of them
should believe or write or even preach. He did not even ask any them to write
down or commit to memory all he wanted them to remember. He did not ask them to
profess their belief or even to form a church.  Instead he showed them what they were to do.
As one whose life embodied God’s presence in the world, he did a very earthy
thing….he began to kneel on the ground and wash the feet of his friends.

 Every good teacher among us will
say that the surest way to teach a student something is not to talk about it
but to create an opportunity for the student to be active, to embody the
lesson.  Jesus, who knew that the days of
his life were coming to an end, took the opportunity to answer the question:
”If you knew you were going to die in a few days, what would you do?” As Jesus
gathered with this motley crew of sometimes passionate, often fool hardy and
lazy, but beloved characters, he took the opportunity to be what he was…..a
rabbi….a teacher. He claimed in that moment what it meant to be an incarnation
of God, fully in his earthly and earthy body. As he knelt before the dirty,
dusty, sandaled feet of his followers he took the water, as he might have done
in their baptism, and through the blessing of his presence, his prayer and his
touch, he reached out in his own vulnerability to theirs…….shoeless, fearful,
perhaps embarrassed to have their feet washed by the one they knew to be the
face of God in their midst.

 Can you imagine it? Their eyes cast
down, ashamed of their feet, full of callouses, blisters and broken nails. And
then the moment when the water and his touch refreshed their soles and brought
relaxation and comfort. As one after another they removed their sandals, even
wild and wanting Peter, came to rest at the tender touch of this earthy Jesus.
He knew them in this moment in a way he had not before. And they knew him in
ways that would change their lives forever…….not because of anything he said,
or what they believed, but through his act of humility and love.

 Which brings us back to Mandatum,
Maundy,……Commandment. The legacy of this day is that in Jesus’ doing, in his
act of washing the feet of his friends, he answers the question what he will do
when he knows he only has a few days to live. The legacy of this day is that it
calls us to be a ‘doing’ people not primarily a believing people. It is the
commandment of the one who practiced incarnation that we are to be about the
work of God in the fullness of our earthly, earthy bodies, not in spite of them
as we have often been taught,  but in the
flesh and through the flesh.

This is the gift and the commandment of Maundy Thursday.

"El Shaddai, El Shaddai, El Elyon na Adonai; age to age you're still the same by the power of the name. El Shaddai, El Shaddai, Erkahmka na Adonai; we will praise and lift you high, El Shaddai." ~Michael Card & John Thompson

While visiting Seattle and parts of Oregon over the last few days, we were given the gift of glimpsing spring. Primroses, daffodils, tulips and even magnolia trees were sending forth their blossoms of hope on a colorless world. As we flew back to Minnesota last night, we recognized the shift in how the Midwestern air felt and smelled. Though no color is yet visible, the promise of spring rode on the wind.

I am carrying in my memory the sight of mountain and ocean. As we hiked the Oregon coast, flanked by the power of rock and tree on our left and the movement of sea on our right. Out among the waves, giant sea stacks of rock, looking like prehistoric sea monsters, rose majestically along the ever-changing beach. People walking the beach were drawn to them, trying to make their way to the rock beacons, while all the time the sea pushed them back toward land.

As I walked the beach I was reminded of how many people talk of their own spiritual landscape, that place where they feel a deep sense of home, a sense of the Sacred. Many people will speak of a 'need' to get to the water. I often hear those who have a relationship with Lake Superior speak of 'just needing to get to the Lake' to sort out some problem, to get grounded. I have also heard people speak of needing the mountains, to feel held and surrounded by the power of rock, evergreen and earth that helps them claim their spiritual center.

Walking the Oregon beach, I was struck with having it all……water, wave, rock, earth, trees. The grounding of earth, the connection with water that makes up the majority of our bodies, all held by the power of mountain peaks.The scriptures are filled with images of water that nurtures and saves humanity. El Shaddai, a name used for God in the Hebrew scriptures, can mean both 'God of the mountain' and 'God of breast & womb'. Standing surrounded, held, by the power of these foundations of Creation, it would have been difficult to deny the presence of the Holy, of El Shaddai.

As we walk into the final days of this Holy Week, may we each be held by the spiritual landscape that nurtures, sustains and saves. May there be moments when we can find the spiritual landscape that we call home, whether literally or in our imagination. May we each be surrounded by the presence of El Shaddai, that One who is always making all things new.

"Dear Lord be good to me…. the sea is so wide and my boat is so small." ~Children's Defense Fund

I have spent the last several days in the Pacific Northwest as we visit colleges with our younger son. It is always wonderful to be able to travel time zones and enter into the ways and days of other parts of our beautiful country. I always recognize this as the privilege it is. You have the opportunity to see people going about their daily lives, going to work and school, doing their grocery shopping, taking in their mail, and know that, while you do the same in your part of the world, their experience is somewhat different given the climate, the culture, the landscape. Here in Washington and Oregon, everything seems to be colored by the mountains….seeing them, being surrounded by them, hoping to glimpse them through gray skies and the rain that falls frequently. We have been blessed by sun and green and the colors of spring flowers.

On our first morning in Seattle we awoke early with our bodies on Midwestern time. We got up and headed out to find a cup of coffee….a very easy task in Seattle…..and made our way to the water. Walking near Lake Union we came upon the Museum of Wooden Boats. Large tugboats and small, colorful rowboats lined the docks. We wandered about looking at the unique vessels that had been created by loving, creative hands.

 While looking at a canoe that had clearly been carved out of a large cedar tree and painted with Native symbols of fish and birds, a man walked up to us. He identified himself as the Artist-in-Residence of the Museum. He proceeded to tell us about how the boat had been carved by several generations together, school children and elders, parents and mentors, all carving and being instructed in the ancient craft of canoe building. He exuded wisdom and a sense of Spirit. He talked about how important it was to pass on to our young ones the gifts of the ancestors and to be present to the wisdom the young ones bring to us.

On the shore a young man arrived to begin a morning of carving with the artist. He headed to a shelter that held a work-in-progress of a very large canoe. As he and the young man explained to us the process of carving, of the large rocks that needed to be heated in very, hot fires that would be placed in saltwater inside the canoe which would bend the canoe in the proper way, we recognized that we had been given a great gift in happening upon this man.

And then he turned to us and asked if he could offer us his song. From my understanding of Native cultures I knew that we were being offered an even greater gift. We stood, rapt, as this tall, long-haired gentleman(and I use that in its truest sense) sang a song that welcomed the morning and thanked the Creator for the gifts of the day. He sang for the elders and for the youth and for the continuation of all. He sang for the tree that had given it very self for the boat and for the great circle of life of which we are all a part.

As we walked away from this experience, I knew that we had been offered a visitation. As we headed off into the adventure of launching our son in the next phase of his life, it seemed apt that this wise man had called us into the wider, greater circle and reminded us of our place in it. Yes, our boats are small but we row these seas with a vast array of companions, accompanied all the while by the Creator who birthed the sea on which we travel and holds each of us in tender care.

"When you eventually see through the veils to how things really are, you will keep saying again and again, "This is certainly not like we thought it was!" ~Rumi

Have you ever thought about how many things in life can be described by this statement of Rumi? How many times have you been surprised by a long awaited event or situation that is completely different than what you imagined it might be? A new job? An anticipated vacation? A budding relationship? Parenthood?

So many of life's comings and goings are so full of surprises we barely recognize what we planned for, hoped for. We see through many veils, don't we? I am constantly humbled by my dreadfully inadequate lens on the world. We each see with such particularity and yet so often approach situations and people with the notion that 'everyone sees it the way I do.'

I am thinking of those early disciples of Jesus again. Approaching what we in the Christian church call Holy Week, I am reminded of the false starts, the huge mistakes and smaller missteps, made by the the often over zealous friends and followers of Jesus. From our nearly 2000 year perspective, it is easy to think they had to see where this story was headed, the challenges, the tragedy, the triumph. But, of course, they did not. Their veil, their lens, was as equally flawed as our own.They could only see the world, and the Jesus they loved, with their own particularity. As the final days of his life played out, some remained steadfast, others fled, some must have been courageous and others filled with a desperate fear. It was 'not like they thought it was.'

And yet it seems that even the surprises and grief that came to them in those days lifted the veil and changed the lens of their walk in the world. As tragedy has the gift to do, their world was opened in ways beyond their imagining and they were bound together in a common cause, a common connection that has fed each of our Christian communities to this day. From this tiny little band of misfits in a remote and misunderstood part of the world, churches have been born, people have been transformed, communities have been nurtured.

If they knew, I am sure their words might be……"This is certainly not what we thought it was!"