In Jesus' Name We Pray ...

          On my first day of clinical pastoral education at the hospital, I remember being led, with shaking knees, onto the floor where I was to serve as chaplain. After glancing at the brand new badge hanging around my neck, the brisk and busy head nurse called out to the others around the nurses’ desk: “Hey, everybody, the new chaplain is here!” Instinctively, my eyes darted around the room …. A chaplain? Where?” And then it hit me, as my stomach flip-flopped and fell to my feet, “Oh, she means me. She thinks that I’m their chaplain. That would be funny, if it weren’t so frightening. I’m just a French teacher. What do I think that I am doing here?! How am I going to help these sick people?”

          Called by God to participate in God’s healing, restoring mission in the world, we often feel like I did at that nurses’ desk. “Who am I to speak and act for God? What authority do I have? What power? I am just little old me, out here trying to do the right thing.” In our lesson from Acts, Peter and John are accurately identified in v. 13 as “uneducated and ordinary men,” yet they have been sent by Jesus to bear witness and to heal. They have miraculously healed a lame man and then, faced with prison for their actions, they have spoken with great power and wisdom before all of the Jewish leaders. They don’t claim responsibility for the good deed that they have done, however. When challenged about how and why they are able to do such mighty acts, they answer that they are acting “in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth.”

          “In Jesus’ Name, we pray.” We say a version of this phrase all the time ourselves, don’t we, at the end of every prayer? As Christians, as “companions of Jesus,” we pray and we act in Jesus’ Name. But what does that really mean? Do we really mean it, when we say it? Don’t we sometimes forget that we are not acting in our own names or in the name of our favorite cause? I thought about the self-understanding of our mission trip group from St. Thomas and the Cathedral as we worked down in Alabama a few weeks ago. We helped people to establish themselves in safe homes in the midst of a dangerous world. We bought and planted them a flower garden. We took time on dull, repetitive tasks because we cared about the family who was to live in that house. We took our vacation time and drove long hours to do some good deeds. Some of us here today contributed generously from our bank accounts so that our parish could engage in this helpful work. But did we consciously do all of it “in Jesus’ Name?” Were we just “helping people,” or were we acting for Jesus, with the power and authority of Jesus? If I had asked our Youth, or even our adult volunteers, why we were down in Alabama building houses, I’m not so sure that they would have thought to say that they were acting “in the Name of Jesus Christ.” That sounds so un-Episcopalian, so full of certainty and evangelistic fervor. After all, we wonder, does it even matter in whose name we do it, as long as it gets done?

I think that some of us, while finding our motivation in a desire to love as Jesus loves, shy away from an overt “acting in Jesus’ Name” because of the intolerant attitude that this expression has fostered in certain Christian circles. In verse 12, Peter proclaims, “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved.” This verse has often been used, as one Christian blogger writes, “as a bludgeoning weapon of Christian dominion”[1] rather than as a powerful ground of self-understanding. In our prayers, he points out, we often use it as a meaningless kind of magical incantation, as if adding “in Jesus’ Name we pray” to our petitions will make our wishes come true. At the same time, the phrase is also used “as a slogan for intolerance regarding other religious paths.”

“This verse in Acts proves that there is salvation in no one else,” we often crow! “We have the monopoly on healing and reconciliation, and if you don’t come to God through our Jesus, then you will roast in hell.”

 Jesus’ Name, however, is not a crutch that we borrow or a ruler that we grab in order to measure others. It is, instead, a gift that we are given, a gift that grows out of our relationship with Jesus. Peter and John received the Holy Spirit from their risen companion Jesus at Pentecost and were thereby empowered to go out into the world to heal and to make whole. We receive the gift of the Holy Spirit at baptism, when we are “sealed with the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever.” We are baptized in Jesus’ Name. From then on, we are given new garments to wear; we are clothed and sent out into the world to bring healing and forgiveness of sins, just as he was. To act or to pray in Jesus’ Name is not a judgment on the identity of others; it is the recognition of the new identity that is given to each Christian in baptism.  As St. Paul wrote to the Galatians, for Christians, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. So I live in this earthly body by trusting in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”

When we act in Jesus’ name, writes Rowan Williams, we are “traveling in borrowed clothes under an assumed name, the name of Jesus … We may look ridiculous or pathetic in our borrowed finery, these ill-fitting trappings of a spiritual authority that belongs to Christ alone.”[2] We may feel like imposters, as ill-equipped to bear the Name as I felt to wear that chaplain’s badge on the first day of CPE. But God sends us out anyway, and the results of our labors—whether we deem ourselves successes or failures—rest in God’s Glory, and not in our own.

          I like William's "borrowed clothing" metaphor. When one is a petite woman, it is hard to fit into clothing made for big, tall men. Whenever I don borrowed vestments, I feel like I did when I was a little girl playing dress-up in my daddy’s jacket. My elderly mother spoke truth through her dementia when she announced, after seeing me parade down the aisle with a group of male colleagues, “Anne, you are just too short to be a priest!” My hands get lost in the satin folds of my chasuble; I trip over every stole I’ve ever owned; and the heavy folds of brocade bunch and slide around my neck. You all and the Vestry have been very kind in offering to alter my vestments here at St. Thomas … But perhaps it has been fitting that, at least for awhile,  my vestments don’t fit. It is perhaps good for me, and for all of us, to pull and tug at our spiritual garments while remembering that we are “imposters” in borrowed clothing, living under an assumed name, the Name of Jesus.

          On the mission trip, as we were working on the house one day, an ambulance, sirens blazing, pulled up to the house next door, and we watched as an elderly gentleman was taken out of the house on a stretcher. His family sat huddled on the porch, looking lost and dejected and hopeless, and we stopped our work to gawk at them. I said a silent prayer for the man and turned back to my painting, when one of the young people came up to me and asked with concern, “Shouldn’t we go over there to the house and offer to pray with the family?” My first thought was, “Oh no, they will think that we are one of those church groups who force their beliefs on others. Besides, they might yell at me and tell me to go away.” But watching the genuine love on the girl’s face, I was instantly ashamed of myself. With a shudder, I got my shy little priest’s body over to that porch and said a prayer with a grateful, if surprised, family, and it was a blessed moment of healing.

Peter, in his speech to the Jewish leaders, quotes Psalm 118, a verse that is the most often quoted verse of Hebrew Scripture in the New Testament[3]: “the stone that was rejected by the builders has become the cornerstone.” God takes the imperfect rejects ….the Prodigal Son, the crucified messiah, the unwed teenage girl from Nazareth, the stuttering Moses, the second-born sons, the sinful King David, the small parish, the much-too-shy priest, you and me …. and God makes them the centerpiece of God’s plan for the restoration of the world. There is salvation—healing—in no one else but broken little you and me, wrapped up in the Holy Spirit, dressed up in the robes of the Resurrected One, and bundled on out the door to heal and serve, not in our names, not in the name of the Church, not in the name of human rights or good behavior, but in the Name of Jesus Christ, in whom we live and move and have our being.

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[1] D. Mark Davis, “Left Behind and Loving It,” found at http://leftbehindandlovingit.blogspot.com/2012/04/most-misused-scripture-in-world.html.

[2] Rowan Williams, “True Deceivers,” in A Ray of Darkness, 162.

[3] http://cep.calvinseminary.edu/thisWeek/index.php

Touch and See: The Resurrection of the Body and the Life Everlasting

          “Why can’t we touch God?” one of the puzzled Preschoolers asked after my “resurrection lesson” in chapel this week. “And why can’t we see God?” piped up another one, with concern in his voice. While I muttered something about God being too marvelous and powerful to touch except in our hearts, I wished that I could have taken back my words after reading today’s Gospel lesson. “Touch me and see,” says the resurrected Jesus to the frightened and disbelieving disciples. The kids were definitely onto something with their questions.

          Of course, we adults have trouble with the resurrection, too. We have trouble believing it; we have trouble conceptualizing it; we have trouble describing it. You might think that our struggle with the resurrection is just a modern reaction, born of a scientific worldview and distance from the event itself. But look at the disciples: everyone from Mary Magdalene and the women at the tomb, to Thomas, to the disciples on the road to Emmaus, to the whole group gathered in today’s lesson … they are all afraid and disbelieving when confronted with their risen Lord. The ink that has been spilled and the theological arguments that have been fought over explaining the resurrection fill whole libraries, and still we doubt and scratch our heads. A ghost--we can deal with that. A spiritual, disembodied feeling in our hearts--we know about those. A resuscitated body, even that--we can understand medically. But a new kind of body—a body that can walk through walls, yet still eat fish—come on, you’ve got to be kidding me! Unlike my preschool friends, I’m much more comfortable with a God that I cannot see and touch, than I am with a God wrapped up in this strange, improbable kind of body.

It’s not just about Jesus, either, you know. When we say in the Creed each week that we believe in the “resurrection of the body and the life everlasting,” we are saying that we believe that our bodies will at some point rise again, that we too will join Jesus in this new kind of embodied life after death. The resurrection of the body is a central tenet of our Christian doctrine, yet it is one that we sensible, rational-minded Episcopalians keep tucked away in the shadows of implausibility. "Wouldn't a purely spiritual resurrection seem more logical--for us, as well as for Jesus?" we wonder. Don’t we read in the Bible itself that the desires of the flesh are occasions for sin? Aren’t our bodies what pull us away from God in the first place? Surely an unchangeable God wouldn’t have much use for our frail flesh? Doesn’t God love our spirits best, our clever minds and our loving hearts? Why not be done with bodies as soon as possible? With all of the half-naked bodies on billboards and the money spent on fashion and plastic surgery and the time spent at the gym, I know that we human beings are interested in grooming and “perfecting” our earthly bodies, but I’m not so sure that we believe that God loves them enough to give them everlasting life.

I remember that I didn’t have much use for my often sickly, always uncoordinated body, when I was younger. My arms were the puny ones that always collapsed in Red Rover; my feet were what tripped me up in dance class; and my lungs were what kept me home with asthma when I wanted to be out having fun. It was my mind that was my friend. It allowed me to escape my unreliable body in books and in the world of imagination. It was what brought me attention and approval at school. If I had to pick something to keep for eternity, it would be my disembodied mind or my ethereal yet loving soul. My body I could do without.

It wasn’t until I had children, I think, that I gained any appreciation at all for my body. The miracle of pregnancy and birth created in me a respect for what the body could do, for the way in which we are all so carefully and wondrously made. Indeed, when I think about Incarnation, about God “taking on flesh,” I think first of the baby Jesus. His silky smooth baby skin; his perfect little fingers and toes; his sweet baby smile …. If God is going to take up residence in some kind of body, the fresh, new, adorable body of a baby just might suffice. God entering the world, loving the world, through the miracle of birth at Christmas—I have no problem with that kind of Incarnation. But our Christian faith does not just stop with Christmas. Like our bodies, the body of the sweet little baby Jesus must ache and bleed, must suffer and die.

Therefore, Jesus returns to his disciples with his body, with the same frail, wounded body that had hung on the Cross. With a body that is hungry for some supper. With a wounded body that they are invited to see and to touch. This new, post-suffering, post-death body is also part of Incarnation. The triumphant God did not shed flesh as soon as He could. The triumphant Easter God did not come out of the tomb as a golden beam of light or a soft and loving breeze. The risen Christ came to the disciples, presenting them with his beaten-up body to touch, rather than filling their minds with some kind of spiritual enlightenment. Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “Touching the truth with our minds alone is not enough. We are made to touch it with our bodies. I think this is why Christian tradition clings to the reality of resurrection, even when no one can explain it to anyone else’s satisfaction … The resurrection of the dead is the radical insistence that matter matters to God.”[1]

Matter matters to God. This is the lesson that we are to draw from the stories about bodily resurrection. On this Earth Day, that is an important lesson for us to hear. Not only does God love and sustain the human bodies that God created, but God loves and sustains the whole earth, the sun, the moon, and the stars, as well. Theologian Sallie McFague rather controversially calls the creation, “God’s body.” For McFague, the whole creation is the sign of God that we can touch and see, and with the universe as a metaphor for God’s body, our care for creation takes on a whole new level of importance. If Christ appears to us eating fish and bearing wounds, sanctifying our hungers and our suffering and inviting our touch, can Christ also not hold out to us a hand scarred by mountaintop coal removal? Can he not ask us to touch him as we place our feet in the cool, clear waters of a sparkling stream or on the warm, soft ocean sands?

To our doubts about the loveliness of our bodies, to our doubts about God’s commitment to our world, to our doubts about the strength and durability of Incarnation, to our doubts about the truth of Resurrection, Jesus says, “touch me and see.” To our preschoolers I should have said what I say to you today: taste God in the crisp wafer and in the wine that burns as it runs down your throat. Touch God in the warm hand squeezing yours as you pray together. Feel God in the cool, moist earth that you turn with your trowel as you pull away the weeds. Bask in God as the sun shines warm upon your neck. Watch God as the warm, sudsy water washes away the dirt on that wall or pew. Hear God in the laughter that rings out across the fields. Smell God in the red rose’s perfume. Sure, God is more than sunshine and roses. But matter matters to God. All that pertains to bodies, matters to God. The resurrection of the body tells us that our salvation, our healing, our eternal life, is to be found there. Life is not just for the soul and faith is not just for the mind. Touch and see—and you will have the strength to testify.

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[1] Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World, 62.

"Say You're One of Them"

        Back in December, I was showing a parishioner and his son around our church, newly decorated for the upcoming Christmas Eve service. The little boy had not been to St. Thomas since his baptism as an infant, and he was looking eagerly at our lovely manger scene in front of the Altar. Trying to take advantage of a teachable moment, I asked the six-year-old if he knew why Mary and Joseph and the shepherds and all of the other Christmas story figures were in place, yet the manger was still empty. He shrugged, so I continued to explain that, since the Baby Jesus was born on Christmas Eve, we would wait until that service to place the Jesus figure in the manger. “He’s not born yet—that’s why he’s missing,” I smugly proclaimed. The little boy looked at me and frowned in perplexity. Hesitatingly, he looked up at his father and then skeptically back at me and said, “But I thought that Jesus already died …?!”

          Sometimes the circularity of our church calendar makes us feel as if we are hearing the same old story, again and again, especially at Christmas and Easter. Standing outside the stories, it can be hard to feign surprise at a birth that we know will happen and to mourn a death when we know that the resurrection is coming. That is why the Gospel of Mark, with its seemingly strange, abrupt ending, is so valuable to us. Scholars are fairly certain that Mark, the first Gospel to be written, originally ended with these verses that we hear [tonight] [today]. We are often shocked at this abrupt and gloomy ending. Where are the appearances of Jesus to his disciples? Where is the breakfast on the beach? Where is the scene in the garden, when Mary Magdalene recognizes her Lord? How can it be Easter with the women running off, afraid? This strange ending, however, is constructed to bring us back to the beginning of the Gospel, back to Galilee where it all started. It is constructed to bring the whole story full circle, this time with us, the reader, as one of the disciples in the story. One of my favorite works of fiction that I have read recently is Uwem Akpan’s book of short stories, Say You’re One of Them. Akpan tells gruesome and disturbing stories featuring children from various struggling African nations. The end of each story cuts off abruptly, with the fate of the children unresolved, refusing to tell us if the suffering children will face more horrors or if they will escape the conditions that seem to spell out their doom. “Say you’re one of them,” Akpan proposes with his endings and his title. “Even though you live in far-off, comfortable America, you share with them a common humanity. Say you’re one of them, and live their pain.”

Akpan, a Roman Catholic priest, must have studied Mark’s Gospel. For this approach is what Mark offers us this Easter: “Say you’re one of them,” he proposes. “Enter into the story. Go back to Galilee; listen to John the Baptist preach. Join on as a disciple. See the miracles. Listen to the teachings. Walk to Jerusalem with Jesus. Hear it all again, but this time, become part of the story. Now, what would you do? Say you’re one of the women at the tomb ….. Will you meet the Risen Lord … or not?”

          If I had agreed to sneak away to the tomb with Mary Magdalene, Mary, and Salome early on that Sunday morning, I would have been the most nervous of all of them. Sure, I want my teacher and friend to receive the ritual anointing. It is unthinkable just to have him stuffed in a tomb, unwashed and uncared for, and besides, I want to see him one last time. But at the same time, I am terrified of being caught by Roman soldiers and harassed … or worse. And then there is the problem of the stone. How are we four women going to be able to roll it away from the entrance? “What is the point of taking the risk to go down there if we can’t even get into the tomb?” I argue with Mary Magdalene, the impractical one. What are we going to do, just stand there and wish it away? Sometimes there are insurmountable obstacles in this world, for goodness’ sake. We can’t just do what we want to do; we can’t always even do what we need to do. I’m willing to go take a look, but I don’t expect this to work.

          And then, when I see that the huge stone has been moved, I am truly afraid. What if someone has stolen his body and is waiting in the bushes to get us? What if the Romans are playing some kind of trick on us? Stones like that don’t move by themselves. And when I see the strange young man in the tomb, then I really start to panic. Where is Jesus’ body? What have they done with him? I gather my robe close to run away back home, but Mary stops me. The blood is pounding so loudly in my ears that I can barely hear what the eerie man is saying. He wants us to tell the disciples that Jesus is where? In Galilee? And he is alive? Jesus wants to see us there? We’re just women—the others will laugh at us if we go back with a tale like this. They’ll never believe that we have been given such an important message to transmit. They’ll say that we were dreaming, and I will feel like a fool. I don’t like feeling like a fool. Besides, there’s no way that I am going to tell Peter anything. He denied Jesus not once but three times. He flat-out lied to the people in the courtyard. I heard all about it. After all of his bragging about how much he loved Jesus… I’m not telling him anything ever again.

And then the shame sets in. There’s no way that I am returning back home to Galilee right now. My family told me not to go off with Jesus in the first place, but I didn’t listen. I thought that he would save our nation or at least save me. Now that he has been crucified by the Romans, I realize that I should have known better. Roman power always wins. Why didn’t I listen? What am I supposed to say to my family, “Oh yes, Jesus died, but he’s waiting for us around here somewhere … somewhere? ….” I’ve already made so many mistakes. I just can’t let them see that I’ve made another one.

If I were one of those women, what would I do? I imagine that I would be sorely tempted to flee “in fear and consternation.” Fear is such a powerful force, and it often plays a dominant role in our actions and in our decisions. Several years ago, however, I read an innocent-sounding question that changed my life, a life often ruled by fear. Psychiatrist Rachel Remen, in her book My Grandfather’s Blessings, suggests that we ask, before every decision that we make, “What would I do if I were not afraid?” What would you do if you were not afraid of getting hurt—would you reach out in love? What would you do if you were not afraid of looking foolish—would you speak up for the right thing? What would you do if you were not afraid of dying—would you do that risky, life-giving thing that you have always dreamed of doing?

What would you do if you were not afraid …? That is an Easter question. For if Christ is risen—if death and sin are defeated, if God’s Love is what truly rules the world—then why do we need to be afraid? Say you were one of them, one of the women at the tomb, one of Jesus’ disciples, could you lay aside your fear, leaving it to writhe on the floor of the empty tomb, while you walk out into the sunshine? Imagine your feet, no longer weighed down with fear, carrying you without hesitation on God’s mission to places near and far. Imagine your hands, no longer trembling with fear, reaching out in love to your neighbor in need. Imagine your mouth, no longer locked in fear, giving testimony to the blessings that you have received from God. Imagine your mind, no longer closed off in fear, open to new ideas and new ways of seeing the world. Without your fear, you are free—free to return home to Galilee, where Jesus is waiting patiently for you to follow him. Jesus might be born each Christmas and die every Good Friday and rise again every Easter Day, but Jesus, the Risen Lord, also continues to abide, one step ahead of us, in Galilee. Will you follow him today, tomorrow, in each bold decision, in each loving step … or not?

Good Friday Homily: "Have You Preached to Those who Sleep?"

Earlier this week I was intrigued by the provocative question on another priest’s blog: “If the Cross is the answer, what is the question that it is answering?”[1] On Good Friday, the Cross is certainly the center of our attention. We open our hearts to it; we praise it; we bow before it; we weep over it. A brutal instrument of torture and death, more painful than a guillotine or an electric chair, the Cross has become for us a strange symbol of victory and healing. But we have an awfully hard time explaining, even on Good Friday, why Jesus had to die on it.

Over the centuries, Christians have struggled with various images that would help us to interpret Christ’s death on the Cross. Most of the images are helpful, at least to some extent, but none of them has ever been able to stand alone as the one true explanation. As we imagine Jesus hanging on the Cross, we often see him as suffering unjustly for Justice, by enduring the lashes that our sin inflicts on his innocent body, as we see all too graphically in the infamous Mel Gibson movie, “The Passion of the Christ.” We imagine a crucifix, with a pale and twisted Jesus upon it. His wounds seem to be painted a deep red that will never fade, dripping blood for eternity, his eyes cast down, alone in our rejection of him. He is the Suffering Servant, the lamb who was slain, the One who is given over to wrestle with death for the sake of us all. As our minds carve out the details of this crucifix, however, it is all too easy for Jesus’ suffering face to begin to resemble our own. When Jesus looks just like me, his voice starts to sound like my voice. The question that he answers, the question posed in his death, is then reduced to the question of my own favorite cause. The suffering of God on the cross can get lost as we contemplate the intricacies of our own pain, until we are testifying only to ourselves, to our own victimhood, to our own version of justice.

Another way to imagine Jesus on the Cross is to shut our eyes to the painful sight altogether and to envisage the clean, clear truth of the empty Cross, where the Cross answers only, “To whom is victory?” The straight, perpendicular lines of a shining golden Cross proclaim a Christ who bears witness to a cosmic Victory over Death and Sin. As we wait here in the heavy silence of Good Friday, it can be tempting to close our eyes prematurely to the darkness around us, to shut out the ugly pictures of crucifixion, and to dream only of Easter. We dream that we can rub the sticky fingerprints of humanity and history from the shiny metal of our empty cross; we try to make death a distant thing or sin a trivial thing, easily conquered by an all-powerful God, in whom everything is all worked out for us ahead of time. When we take Jesus off of the Cross too soon, however, we lose sight of the human face of Jesus, and we are left holding an empty Cross and searching the heavens for a God lost into the sky.

For me, the question that the Cross asks is neither one connected to my own personal cause nor relegated to some vague cosmic victory. In the Gospel of Peter, one of those strange Gospel texts that didn’t make it into the Bible, there is a peculiar resurrection story with a talking Cross as a character. According to this text, some Roman soldiers standing guard at Jesus’ tomb watch in amazement as two angelic figures come down from heaven, while the stone in front of the tomb rolls away on its own. The angels enter Jesus’ burial place and come out holding Jesus by the hand between them, their miraculous height reaching from the ground all the way up to heaven. Behind Jesus and the two angels, comes the Cross, following them out of the tomb. From heaven, God calls out, “Have you preached to those who sleep?” And the Cross answers, “Yes!”

“Have you preached to those who sleep?” Perhaps this is indeed the question that the Cross answers. For the author of the Gospel of Peter, of course, this question refers to the dead. “Have you descended to the dead to bring them the Good News of the victory?” the apocryphal Gospel’s author probably means. But I like to think of the question in its plainer sense. The Cross preaches to us who are sleeping like the disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane, oblivious to God’s presence among us, unmindful of the needs of our brothers and sisters, unaware of the glory of God that surrounds us. We have fallen asleep on our watch, and we are sleeping so soundly that it takes the profound shock of the Cross to wake us up. Jesus’ teachings, Jesus’ healing deeds … we tend to sleep through them with only a grimace or a twitch of acknowledgement. Yet the horror and absurdity of the Cross opens our eyes, opens them to look straight into the eyes of God, into suffering eyes that are imploring us to look at each other, to look at and to recognize our new mothers, sons, brothers, and sisters standing with us around that terrible Cross.

Imagine on the empty altar before us not a bloody crucifix or an empty golden monument, but a giant Cross of glass, a mysterious glass that reflects like a mirror the loving eyes of Jesus, surrounded by the reflection of a collage of human eyes of all shapes, colors, and sizes, eyes that are open and awake to life and death, awake to one another, awake to the love that God pours out into Creation. Open eyes that meet in the Cross. “Have you preached to those who sleep?” asks the voice from heaven. And the Cross answers, “Yes!”

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[1] Tony Jones, quoted by Nick Knisely in “Entangled States,” https://mail.google.com/mail/?shva=1#inbox/13664cf2f27964ef

Stripping Down to the Beauty of Holiness

        When I was a little girl, I loved to help my mother take the good china and silver carefully out of the sideboard for a dinner party. We would set the table, lovingly arranging each item in its place, as I learned the family history behind each cup and spoon. There is something about the beauty of lace and white linen, gleaming silver and delicate porcelain, that still conjures up in my mind the comforting and secure framework of customs and manners and a shared family story. I realized early on in my training as a priest that setting the table for the Eucharist summons similar feelings. The fair linen, the ornate silver chalice, the carefully choreographed and history-laden movements—they are all preparations for a feast draped in a rather elegant “beauty of holiness.” It seems fitting that we prepare God’s Table with the same care that we would our own festive meals, that we layer it with the meanings placed there by our forebears, that we “keep the Feast” in reflective beauty and holy gestures—even while we acknowledge that the silver and crystal on our Altar are surely a far cry from the rugged hand-hewn table and pottery of Jesus’ last Passover meal with his disciples.

          Tonight, however, we emphasize neither the setting of the beautiful Table nor the historical accuracy of its rituals, but the stripping away of it all. On this night when we read in our Gospel that Jesus removed his cloak to kneel down and wash the feet of his disciples, we too remove the cloak of our tradition in a ritual of loss. The Stripping of the Altar is one of the most moving parts of Holy Week for me, as we kneel in the dark and watch as our familiar symbols--all of the comforting, beautiful signs of Christ’s presence with us in the sanctuary—slip quietly away.  Instead of carefully building meaning, we are just as carefully defining what it is to lose meaning. We are left with the bleak, bare wood of the Altar, scrubbed clean, yet devastatingly empty, the space as lifeless as a vacant house after the moving van has driven away.

          When I moved my young children across the Atlantic from Germany to Louisville, my youngest son was only two years old. The day that the moving men came, he spent the entire day desperately attached to my leg, literally clinging to my skirts wherever I went, as possessions disappeared one by one into the big boxes. After the movers had gone, I finally had the presence of mind to ask my poor baby what was wrong. “I thought that the men were going to put me in the boxes, too,” he whimpered. We cannot live in this ever-changing world without knowing loss and the grief that accompanies it. We lose youth, relationships, jobs, possessions, homes, possibilities …. Novelist Isabel Allende writes, “I finally understood what life is about; it’s about losing everything … like the trees lose their leaves.”[1]  Tonight, the emptying Altar recalls our emptying lives, as we wonder if the meanings with which we navigate the world, and finally, our own vulnerable bodies, just might be the next things to get boxed-up and carted off, as well.

Theologian Richard Lischer writes that, in Jesus’ Passion and death, he teaches us not how to escape from the inevitable losses of our lives, but rather, he enacts for us the “art of losing.”[2]  Lischer explains that we human beings tend to let our losses shrink our world. They “deprive us of our ability to think and act beyond ourselves,” paring away our lives “to the exact size of [our] longing,” and leaving us frozen with grief, unable to love. Jesus, however, continues to live in love, despite what is ripped away from him in his Passion. In the loss of his friends through betrayal, arrest, and incomprehension … In the loss of his dignity through the humiliation and shame of his trial … In the loss of his life through death on the Cross … Jesus maintains his identity as God’s Son, calling out with his dying breath, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Expounds Lischer: “from the cross [Jesus] provides for his mother and forgives his tormentors. From the cross he draws a world of lost souls to himself.” Even at his moment of greatest loss, Jesus is working to bring others closer to God. On the night before he dies, he removes his cloak to wash the feet of his followers, stripping himself of all power and dignity, making himself like the lowliest of slaves. Then he offers them his very body and blood for food, and he gives them the new commandment to love one another, to love even as they grieve the loss of their teacher and Lord. Lischer points out that, in the midst of our losses, it is in reaching out to others that we can practice the true “art of losing” that Jesus teaches us. That is why it is so important that we wash one another’s feet before we watch the Altar being stripped bare. Every time we break through our loss to forgive a hurtful enemy, we are practicing Jesus’ kind of losing. Every time we use our lost leisure time to help someone who is more overwhelmed than we, we are practicing Jesus’ kind of losing. Every time we put aside our own pain to care for someone who is sicker and in more pain than we are, we are practicing Jesus’ kind of losing: we are living in the New Commandment to love.

Jesus strengthens us not just in the way that he lived but in the way that he died. His betrayal, his struggles in Gethsemane, his suffering … They are not mere opportunities for us to pity him or to blame ourselves for the death that he must die. The point of Holy Week is not to wallow in guilt and sadness. To live this week with Jesus in his Passion is instead to learn how God is present in suffering and loss, how a life centered in God can be filled with life-sustaining love even at the grave. The beauty of holiness is not just in the silver and linens and lace, but it is also in the lone candle still burning in the darkness when everything else has been stripped away—the lone candle next to Christ’s Body and Blood, given to fill us with life in the face of death, given to fill us with love that we in turn pour out into a dark world.

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[1] Quoted in Alan Jones, Living the Truth.

[2] Richard Lischer, “Stripped Bare,” in Christian Century (March 21, 2012), 11-12.