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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