Holy Ground
Sermon
Sermons on the Gospel Readings
Series III, Cycle C
Object:
The Bible -- under $10 if you do a little shopping.
Energy -- read under natural sunlight and your only cost is the overpriced floofy coffee you bought from that boutique coffee bar -- what? $5 or $6.
Reading John 13 and living like Jesus -- priceless!
Post-Civil-War America was a country anxious to read about how the other half lived. There was a great appetite for reading, and the many periodicals of the era filled their pages with breathless accounts of what other people were doing.
Phebe Gibbons was a well-known writer for women's magazines, and her series on The Plain People, describing groups such as the Amish and the Mennonites who even back in the nineteenth century were living differently than the rest of society, was very popular.
When Gibbons caught a train to Lancaster County in 1871 to visit a Dunker Love Feast she prepared herself to enter what she thought would be a strange world. As a reporter for a major magazine she intended to write about what would no doubt be a strange, perhaps even bizarre, practice by an obscure religious sect. She had heard only rumors about the foot washing and the large meal that accompanied communion for the group known as German Baptist Brethren, or Dunkers.
What she experienced was the equivalent of a three-day slumber party.
The Love Feast was quite different than other religious practices of the day. It stemmed from the peculiar theological synthesis of the Dunkers -- part Anabaptist, part Pietist, and fully determined to implement those ordinances that they found in scripture as the result of joint Bible study.
Their reading of John's version of the Last Supper mandated both a full meal and a footwashing service. John 13:14-15 indicated to the Dunkers that Jesus had commanded they wash each other's feet. Moreover, the meal, therefore, did not precede or follow worship. It was worship, and was as essential to communion as breaking the bread and drinking the cup. So Dunkers from all over the area would come together to eat good solid food, break bread, and attempt to follow Jesus as closely as they could.
However, Phebe Gibbons discovered that Lancaster Love Feast, beyond its obviously different theological underpinnings, was surprising for a number of other reasons. She thought of the Dunkers as a quiet, homogenous, Plain People.
The Love Feast was multicultural. She was astonished to discover folks named Murphy back when the Irish were nearly as reviled as blacks. It was filling. The food and coffee never stopped. It was multigenerational. Venerable patriarchs and matriarchs held court, to be sure, but children hollered during worship ("Want Pappy, want Pappy," one toddler complained while mom struggled with him), infants were breastfed, teens courted. Relatives, friends, and relative strangers mixed freely together as one family.
It was, in short, a feast based on love.
Gibbons was surprised to discover that even as an outsider she was drawn into everything -- endless cups of hot coffee and plates of sweet pie, as well as hearty meals, sermons in German and English, inspiring hymn singing, good fellowship, and a giggly sleepover in the church attic with the women -- the men were sleeping only a few feet away beyond a partition.
In some ways Gibbons description of a nineteenth-century Love Feast can seem just as exotic and strange to modern Christians as it did then. But there was one essential point that is easy to overlook. Easter may be a movable feast, but communion is planted firmly on holy ground. Take your shoes off.
But what sort of holy ground? How different from what the world calls holy ground. In this era of religious separatism, of fundamentalist fanatics willing to take someone's life to protect their turf, the breaking of the bread, the sharing of the cup, however you choose to perform it, is sacred yet totally safe.
The best thing of all is that we don't have to kill anybody to preserve our holy ground from infidels or interlopers. Just the opposite, this is a place where all people can come together, remove their shoes, and meet Jesus.
First-century Christians paid a great price for their separatism from the world. And around the world there are still places where Christianity is outlawed and believers pay a great price for their stand. Yet they did this willingly, risking limb and life while we who are free to worship sometimes can't even get out of our tracks on a Sunday morning to come praise the King of kings.
Why? Why would they risk all these things?
Like the credit card commercial, they can probably put a price on all the things they no longer have access to, but they've found their community to be priceless.
Priceless.
Jesus is calling us to something new, something shocking. And there's an urgency to it all. "Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end" (John 13:1).
Jesus loved them to the end. The Greek is eis telos, meaning "to the finish" and "to the full extent." Jesus loved them as much as he could as long as he could. This was demonstrated in the foot washing and in giving his life.
And loving them to the end, he was about to do something new -- he was going to wash their feet. This menial task was always performed either by oneself for oneself, or by a slave coerced to do this. People did not wash the feet of a social inferior. A teacher did not wash the feet of his disciples. It didn't happen.
Jesus did it, to show them that there is nothing we who are God's children will not do for each other, to demonstrate the love of God. Most of the disciples are too shocked to say anything, but Peter is having none of it. Nevertheless Jesus warns him that unless he lets Jesus continue he will have no part of him.
Afterward, Jesus took advantage of the teaching moment.
Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord -- and you are right, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.
-- John 13:12-15
New ground ... holy ground. But sometimes we just can't let go of the past. The children of Israel were leaving slavery behind but they took with them a longing for what had been, a romanticized version of a past that never existed. There was nothing good about slavery, yet time and again they would lose sight of that bleak existence and make it sound like nothing short of heaven.
Jesus lived the life of service and selflessness that he wants his disciples to share -- and it is in sharing it together that we enter into the priceless life. You can't buy this stuff. But you can get it.
Hospitality is at the heart of the footwashing in this story. Jesus appears as both servant and host. This hospitality is even shared with Judas who is undeserving. He will not be excused until later. He receives just as much attention from Jesus as the others. The passage tells us that Judas already has the devil in his heart. This betrayal is not only heinous, but takes place against a cosmic background. Huge forces are at play that are greater than anything we have ever experienced.
No one present, it seems, can fully understand the gravity of what is taking place. The Son of God, divinity in human form, is bending a knee in service to the created. This bending down, this girding around the waist, is uncomfortable. It shows us in miniature what it means for God to fit into a human-sized box.
It's impossible to fully understand. Jesus tells them that the Holy Spirit will give them understanding of the event later. But you don't have to understand how a dish was cooked to thank your host for what was served. Will you deny your host? Jesus wouldn't let Peter say, "No, please, no thank you." Don't turn your host down.
The biggest price we have paid to gather for this weeknight service is a little inconvenience. Perhaps we're taping a favorite show. Perhaps we have left a comfortable chair or forgone, at least for a few minutes, a bowl of ice cream. Most people are planning to go to Easter services, if they are going at all. They are considering what they will wear, how they will be seen, and what others will think. I'm sure the disciples wondered what others would think if they stumbled on the upper room and saw the great teacher Jesus washing the feet of his pupils.
We have received an invitation to intimacy with the eternal, a brand new relationship. God calls us into a new relationship and there's no telling what it means. Jesus offers himself in love on our behalf. There's no telling where this will end.
Nearly 2,000 years into the Christian experiment we seem to agree that communion remains essential. We disagree about how it is to be performed, with whom, when, and how often. We believe this is what Jesus told us to do, and that's good enough.
In a sense we're all correct. Anytime God's people come together to obey Jesus we are gathering on that holy ground.
Jesus turned the world upside down when he took on the role of a slave and washed the disciples' feet. The common meal of the early Christian church was just as revolutionary. The Roman empire was every bit as our age: rich and poor, slave and free, male and female, Jew and Gentile, Roman and Celt. The ancient church cultural, economic, ethnic, and gender lines.
An old Dunker woman named Julia Gilbert (1844-1934) put it best. A single woman crippled by a childhood disease in what was then a patriarchal church, she challenged the practice of the German Baptist Brethren of allowing men to break bread with each other while insisting sisters have the bread broken for them by an elder. Time and again she tried to get her church and district to send queries to the Dunker Annual Meeting where the elders debated practice and theology, but she went unheard for half a century. Finally, in 1910, she spoke on the floor of the annual meeting and explained why she wanted the practice changed. She said: "We want to be in touch with Jesus." She won the day.
We still want to be in touch with Jesus. We still want to be in that upper room. We want to be close to Jesus in his darkest hour. Come all ye faithful, come and adore. Amen.
Energy -- read under natural sunlight and your only cost is the overpriced floofy coffee you bought from that boutique coffee bar -- what? $5 or $6.
Reading John 13 and living like Jesus -- priceless!
Post-Civil-War America was a country anxious to read about how the other half lived. There was a great appetite for reading, and the many periodicals of the era filled their pages with breathless accounts of what other people were doing.
Phebe Gibbons was a well-known writer for women's magazines, and her series on The Plain People, describing groups such as the Amish and the Mennonites who even back in the nineteenth century were living differently than the rest of society, was very popular.
When Gibbons caught a train to Lancaster County in 1871 to visit a Dunker Love Feast she prepared herself to enter what she thought would be a strange world. As a reporter for a major magazine she intended to write about what would no doubt be a strange, perhaps even bizarre, practice by an obscure religious sect. She had heard only rumors about the foot washing and the large meal that accompanied communion for the group known as German Baptist Brethren, or Dunkers.
What she experienced was the equivalent of a three-day slumber party.
The Love Feast was quite different than other religious practices of the day. It stemmed from the peculiar theological synthesis of the Dunkers -- part Anabaptist, part Pietist, and fully determined to implement those ordinances that they found in scripture as the result of joint Bible study.
Their reading of John's version of the Last Supper mandated both a full meal and a footwashing service. John 13:14-15 indicated to the Dunkers that Jesus had commanded they wash each other's feet. Moreover, the meal, therefore, did not precede or follow worship. It was worship, and was as essential to communion as breaking the bread and drinking the cup. So Dunkers from all over the area would come together to eat good solid food, break bread, and attempt to follow Jesus as closely as they could.
However, Phebe Gibbons discovered that Lancaster Love Feast, beyond its obviously different theological underpinnings, was surprising for a number of other reasons. She thought of the Dunkers as a quiet, homogenous, Plain People.
The Love Feast was multicultural. She was astonished to discover folks named Murphy back when the Irish were nearly as reviled as blacks. It was filling. The food and coffee never stopped. It was multigenerational. Venerable patriarchs and matriarchs held court, to be sure, but children hollered during worship ("Want Pappy, want Pappy," one toddler complained while mom struggled with him), infants were breastfed, teens courted. Relatives, friends, and relative strangers mixed freely together as one family.
It was, in short, a feast based on love.
Gibbons was surprised to discover that even as an outsider she was drawn into everything -- endless cups of hot coffee and plates of sweet pie, as well as hearty meals, sermons in German and English, inspiring hymn singing, good fellowship, and a giggly sleepover in the church attic with the women -- the men were sleeping only a few feet away beyond a partition.
In some ways Gibbons description of a nineteenth-century Love Feast can seem just as exotic and strange to modern Christians as it did then. But there was one essential point that is easy to overlook. Easter may be a movable feast, but communion is planted firmly on holy ground. Take your shoes off.
But what sort of holy ground? How different from what the world calls holy ground. In this era of religious separatism, of fundamentalist fanatics willing to take someone's life to protect their turf, the breaking of the bread, the sharing of the cup, however you choose to perform it, is sacred yet totally safe.
The best thing of all is that we don't have to kill anybody to preserve our holy ground from infidels or interlopers. Just the opposite, this is a place where all people can come together, remove their shoes, and meet Jesus.
First-century Christians paid a great price for their separatism from the world. And around the world there are still places where Christianity is outlawed and believers pay a great price for their stand. Yet they did this willingly, risking limb and life while we who are free to worship sometimes can't even get out of our tracks on a Sunday morning to come praise the King of kings.
Why? Why would they risk all these things?
Like the credit card commercial, they can probably put a price on all the things they no longer have access to, but they've found their community to be priceless.
Priceless.
Jesus is calling us to something new, something shocking. And there's an urgency to it all. "Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end" (John 13:1).
Jesus loved them to the end. The Greek is eis telos, meaning "to the finish" and "to the full extent." Jesus loved them as much as he could as long as he could. This was demonstrated in the foot washing and in giving his life.
And loving them to the end, he was about to do something new -- he was going to wash their feet. This menial task was always performed either by oneself for oneself, or by a slave coerced to do this. People did not wash the feet of a social inferior. A teacher did not wash the feet of his disciples. It didn't happen.
Jesus did it, to show them that there is nothing we who are God's children will not do for each other, to demonstrate the love of God. Most of the disciples are too shocked to say anything, but Peter is having none of it. Nevertheless Jesus warns him that unless he lets Jesus continue he will have no part of him.
Afterward, Jesus took advantage of the teaching moment.
Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord -- and you are right, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.
-- John 13:12-15
New ground ... holy ground. But sometimes we just can't let go of the past. The children of Israel were leaving slavery behind but they took with them a longing for what had been, a romanticized version of a past that never existed. There was nothing good about slavery, yet time and again they would lose sight of that bleak existence and make it sound like nothing short of heaven.
Jesus lived the life of service and selflessness that he wants his disciples to share -- and it is in sharing it together that we enter into the priceless life. You can't buy this stuff. But you can get it.
Hospitality is at the heart of the footwashing in this story. Jesus appears as both servant and host. This hospitality is even shared with Judas who is undeserving. He will not be excused until later. He receives just as much attention from Jesus as the others. The passage tells us that Judas already has the devil in his heart. This betrayal is not only heinous, but takes place against a cosmic background. Huge forces are at play that are greater than anything we have ever experienced.
No one present, it seems, can fully understand the gravity of what is taking place. The Son of God, divinity in human form, is bending a knee in service to the created. This bending down, this girding around the waist, is uncomfortable. It shows us in miniature what it means for God to fit into a human-sized box.
It's impossible to fully understand. Jesus tells them that the Holy Spirit will give them understanding of the event later. But you don't have to understand how a dish was cooked to thank your host for what was served. Will you deny your host? Jesus wouldn't let Peter say, "No, please, no thank you." Don't turn your host down.
The biggest price we have paid to gather for this weeknight service is a little inconvenience. Perhaps we're taping a favorite show. Perhaps we have left a comfortable chair or forgone, at least for a few minutes, a bowl of ice cream. Most people are planning to go to Easter services, if they are going at all. They are considering what they will wear, how they will be seen, and what others will think. I'm sure the disciples wondered what others would think if they stumbled on the upper room and saw the great teacher Jesus washing the feet of his pupils.
We have received an invitation to intimacy with the eternal, a brand new relationship. God calls us into a new relationship and there's no telling what it means. Jesus offers himself in love on our behalf. There's no telling where this will end.
Nearly 2,000 years into the Christian experiment we seem to agree that communion remains essential. We disagree about how it is to be performed, with whom, when, and how often. We believe this is what Jesus told us to do, and that's good enough.
In a sense we're all correct. Anytime God's people come together to obey Jesus we are gathering on that holy ground.
Jesus turned the world upside down when he took on the role of a slave and washed the disciples' feet. The common meal of the early Christian church was just as revolutionary. The Roman empire was every bit as our age: rich and poor, slave and free, male and female, Jew and Gentile, Roman and Celt. The ancient church cultural, economic, ethnic, and gender lines.
An old Dunker woman named Julia Gilbert (1844-1934) put it best. A single woman crippled by a childhood disease in what was then a patriarchal church, she challenged the practice of the German Baptist Brethren of allowing men to break bread with each other while insisting sisters have the bread broken for them by an elder. Time and again she tried to get her church and district to send queries to the Dunker Annual Meeting where the elders debated practice and theology, but she went unheard for half a century. Finally, in 1910, she spoke on the floor of the annual meeting and explained why she wanted the practice changed. She said: "We want to be in touch with Jesus." She won the day.
We still want to be in touch with Jesus. We still want to be in that upper room. We want to be close to Jesus in his darkest hour. Come all ye faithful, come and adore. Amen.
