Author Archives: djgrieser

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About djgrieser

I have been Rector of Grace Episcopal Church in Madison, WI since 2009. I'm passionate about Jesus Christ and about connecting our faith and tradition with 21st century culture. I'm also very active in advocating for our homeless neighbors.

Maundy Thursday

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He Loved them to the end
April 9, 2009
St. James

Foot washing is not a longstanding tradition at St. James. I understand there was a time when Maundy Thursday services often included it, but that hadn’t been the case in recent years. Last year we re-introduced the tradition, and we are continuing it this year, and I suppose in future years as well.
I suspect that for many people, the very notion of washing someone else’s feet is offensive. It seems to shatter some basic barrier of decorum, good manners, or personal space. Some few of us, have perhaps had to take care of other people in such intimate ways—our children, of course, but also loved ones who are no longer able to take care of themselves. Usually though, people who earn their livings taking care of others’ physical needs, health care workers, or even day care workers are looked down, certainly in our society they receive less pay than people in other jobs.
Today is Maundy Thursday, the beginning of the great Triduum that culminates with the Easter Vigil. We are participating again in the ritual commemoration of the last days of Jesus’ life beginning with the last supper he had with his disciples. Tonight we remember the events of the Last Supper that Jesus shared with his disciples. The synoptic gospels tell the story of the institution of the Eucharist. In tonight’s reading from the Gospel of John, we hear of a very different event.
The beginning of chapter 13 of John’s gospel marks a significant shift in tone and message. In the first half of the gospel, Jesus comes into conflict again and again with his opponents. As that conflict increases, his words of judgment against his opponents and the unbelieving world become more and more harsh. Now however, the scene shifts and from this point on, except for his confrontation with the high priests and Pilate, Jesus will speak only with his disciples, and he will leave words of judgment behind.
Instead, the theme that takes center stage from here on out is love. The chapter begins with that remarkable comment by the gospel writer, “having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.” The Eucharistic Prayer we’ve been using this Lent quotes that verse before beginning the institution narrative. What’s remarkable about it is that it tells the reader something new, and something the gospel writer perhaps didn’t think was obvious—that Jesus loved his disciples. What comes next in the gospel of John, John’s version of the Last Supper, and indeed Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection in a way explain what the gospel writer meant by saying “having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. The culmination, the completion, fulfillment, even perfection of Christ’s love is shown for John in the events that unfold in the following chapters.

We will have more to say about the rest in the coming days, but now I want to focus our attention on that odd, offensive act of foot washing. Yes, it’s offensive. It offends our sense of propriety and our sense of personal space. It challenges taboos. But the gospel writer seems to have anticipated our discomfort with it, for he writes the disciples’ discomfort into the story. Peter’s problem with Jesus’ actions was that they seemed to subvert the teacher student, master-disciple relationship. Peter didn’t understand what Jesus was doing, and presumably the other disciples were no more perceptive.
Although we don’t call foot washing a sacrament, it is one. It is a sacrament of service, a sacrament of love. In the gospel of John, it serves to tell us something about the relationship between Jesus and his disciples; it is the way by which Jesus begins to demonstrate his love for those around him. By putting himself in the place of service, by kneeling, yes by abasing himself, Jesus was acting out servanthood. He was showing in this way the same love that would lead him finally to the cross.

The foot washing was not just a sacrament of Christ’s love for his friends. John means for it to be a sacrament of the love Jesus’ followers have for one another. Why do I call it a sacrament? If you are a cradle Episcopalian of a certain age, you may probably still be able to recite the words of the catechism: They are outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace. In this instance the gesture of washing feet is a sign of Christ’s love for us, and our love for one another.

We know that rituals are important things. As members of a liturgical tradition, we believe strongly that what we do in worship, not simply what we say or sing, but what our bodies do, all of that matters in worship. Whether we kneel or stand, genuflect, or bow, the very way we do things in worship is very important. That’s why there is so often intense conflict when we change things. The cry “but we’ve always done it that way” is not simply the cry of a hidebound traditionalist, although sometimes of course, it is. Very often it comes from a worthwhile concern that we may not be simply changing what we do, but ultimately we may change what we believe.

Foot washing then means a great deal, whether or not we participate in it. To see people, clergy, kneeling in front of other people, transgressing the customary boundaries of personal intimacy, and washing the feet of one another, speaks loudly.

Our gospel reading began with a reference to Jesus’ love for “his own.” It closes with another reference to love. After washing his disciples’ feet, Jesus tells them what it means: “I give you a new commandment that you love one another.” Of course it is probably the case that foot washing will never be observed among us as universally as the great sacraments of baptism and Eucharist, but it is vitally important that we internalize its meaning. Sacramental actions, rituals are among the ways that we move beyond saying something and begin to live it.

To love one another as Christ loved us and to serve one another bind us together as Jesus’ disciples. It is easy to pay lip service to both love and service—or outreach. We do that easily and readily at St. James. More difficult is to show, to demonstrate, to act out that love. Being here this evening, participating in the ritual itself, or watching as others do, challenges us to think of ways of making our love incarnate in the world. Somewhat later in John’s gospel, when Jesus again tells his disciples to love one another, he goes further, saying “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” The vision of love put forward in these chapters culminates tomorrow, on Good Friday. This evening, let us ponder and seek to embody, Christ’s commandment to love one another.

Tenebrae

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On Wednesday evening, after a year’s hiatus, we again celebrated Tenebrae at St. James. It is a service derived from traditional services of matins and lauds during the Triduum (Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday), and was set for Wednesday in Holy Week in order to keep the focus from Thursday to Saturday on the central services of those days.

As such, it seems somewhat incongruous. The primary action of the service is the gradual extinguishing of candles, so that at the end, there is only a single candle burning, the Christ candle. The service ends with a loud noise, signifying thunder or earthquake. Tenebrae seems to point towards the death and burial of Jesus, even though in the ritual time of the week, those events lie in the future.

While some of the service seems problematic, the psalms and readings are a powerful reminder of human suffering. Psalm 74 with its graphic description of the destruction of the temple, and the readings from the Lamentations of Jeremiah, bring to mind the suffering of the exiles in the sixth century BCE. The destruction of the Temple, and the Exile were indeed traumatic events that became an occasion for deep reflection on God and on faith in God.

When early Christians sought to interpret their own experience of suffering, it was natural that they would turn to their primary liturgical text—the Psalter, and reinterpret the Psalms to fit their own experience. Perhaps the most profound example of that is Psalm 22, which begins, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” It is the Psalm that is chanted during the Stripping of the Altar on Maundy Thursday, and again during the Good Friday liturgy.

Tenebrae is scary. It is psychologically disturbing, and occasionally seems manipulative. But chanting those Psalms and hearing the readings is also an opportunity to confront one’s deepest fears and deepest pain, and connect it with Christ’s suffering on the cross.

If you’ve never attended a Tenebrae service, there are online versions. Here’s one from the BBC.

Looking back on Lent

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This evening is our last Lenten Wednesday service. On Sunday, as you know Palm Sunday begins Holy Week. Next Wednesday at 7:00 pm, if you come you will participate in the ancient service of Tenebrae, a service of readings and Psalms that culminates in darkness. Next Thursday is Maundy Thursday, when we commemorate the Last Supper. Holy Week is the holiest week of the year, and Lent serves as a period of personal and communal preparation for the events that Holy Week remembers.

I don’t know about you, but I am already putting Lent behind me and beginning to focus on Holy Week—for a single important reason, that the staff and clergy of St. James have a great deal to do between now and next week to prepare for all of the services. But as I think about the logistics of Tenebrae, or Maundy Thursday, or Good Friday, as I help to make sure that there will be readers, and servants in worship for all of the services, as I think about the sermons that I will be preaching, I wonder about something else.

Am I spiritually prepared for what is coming? As we look back on the weeks since Ash Wednesday, when we came forward and had ashes put on our foreheads as the priest said, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return;” as we remember the priest’s admonition to a holy Lent, can we look back and say that we have had a holy Lent?

Some of us no doubt have had little trouble following our Lenten disciplines, but if you’re anything like me, these weeks have been filled with responsibilities large and small, all sorts of activities that have occasionally taken my mind and my soul far away from a focus on God.

Even the Collect for the Fifth Sunday in Lent, with its bidding “that, among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found;” seems to be somewhat retrospective, looking back at the past with less than complete certainty and asking God to give us the focus we need.

Easter will bring a dramatic change. At the Vigil next Saturday evening, we will hear and sing Alleluias for the first time since February. Our celebration of the resurrection will be full of joy and many of us will break their Lenten fast symbolically—I’m still trying to decide what kind of beer to have in the fridge for when I get home next Saturday evening. Joy will dominate throughout the great 50 days of Easter, but I wonder whether we will take the opportunity to look back at what we did and who we became during Lent.

Lent begins on Ash Wednesday with an Invitation to a Holy Lent; it might be appropriate to end it, not with a bang or clang of the bells, but with a look back–an assessment, evaluation, or memorial of a Holy Lent.

Marcus Borg's visit to Furman

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I’ve been familiar with Borg’s work for years. I followed the activity of the Jesus Seminar in the 1980’s and 1990’s and I assigned some of his books over the years to students. We’ve been reading The Last Week as a Lenten Book Study at St. James this year and it has inspired lively discussions.

I’ve also attended lots of scholarly lectures by big names over the years and I was expecting a retread, a boring reread of a lecture given hundreds of times before. But Prof. Borg was different. I had the opportunity to join him and other colleagues for lunch. He was engaging, interested in us, our ideas, and experiences, and shared some of his personal life with us.

He was the same way in the lecture. Indeed he did say little that I hadn’t heard before. What was remarkable was the way he treated us as an audience and a congregation. Beginning and closing with prayer, and sharing his faith and his experiences with us was profoundly moving. It was one of the most memorable evenings of my life.

Tonight I had a follow-up conversation with some Furman students at our Canterbury meeting. I’m not teaching Bible this year, for the first time since the mid-90s, and discussing the historical evidence for the resurrection, and how we might think about the resurrection differently, or metaphorically, as Borg urges, was great fun and challenging.

You’ve heard of Kosher salt …

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I came across this item a couple of days ago. Apparently, a conservative Christian who enjoyed watching cooking shows wondered why chefs always specified kosher salt in their recipes. He thought there ought to be an alternative. And he came up with one. The pathetic irony is that he apparently found an Episcopal priest to bless the salt–I hope he gets a percentage of the profits, too. There’s more about it here.

The Great Litany

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Yesterday, our services began with The Great Litany. It has been the custom at St. James, and is the custom in many Episcopal Churches to use The Great Litany on the First Sunday of Lent. It is the first piece of the liturgy translated and published in English, prepared by Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer in 1544 for use in all English churches at a time when England was at war with France and Scotland. He drew on Medieval litanies as well as on Luther’s litany from 1529 and a Greek Orthodox version. Litanies of this sort were commonly used during public processions from the earliest centuries of Christianity.

The language and the sentiments expressed in it may sometimes seem archaic or alien to us, but the Great Litany with its several sections is more than a catalog of our sins and supplications. It expresses our profound dependence on God for all that we are and reminds us that in the end, everything in our lives and the world lies in the providence of God.

It’s not without its humorous moments, however. The rubrics (instructions) in the Book of Common Prayer tell us that the Great Litany “may be said or sung, kneeling, standing, or in procession.” Whatever the case, when we come to the request that “… it may please thee to strengthen such as do stand, to comfort and help the weak-hearted, and to raise up those who fall,”  we are often praying for ourselves.

If you didn’t get enough of it yesterday, there are a number of online versions available, including this one, which comes from St. Barnabas Episcopal Church, Falmouth, MA.

Repentance and Forgiveness

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Ash Wednesday and the season of Lent are typically times of self-reflection and self-discipline. We are reminded on Ash Wednesday that “we are dust and to dust we will return.” In the Litany of Penitence that we say on Ash Wednesday, and in the Great Litany that we will say on the First Sunday of Lent, we confess many sins and say to God that we know we are sinful creatures.

It is easy to regard Lent as depressing or to think that it makes us dwell on our sins and shortcomings. There certainly is truth in that. But as I was reading the lessons at our early service yesterday, and as we recited the Psalm, I noticed a theme I had never noticed before. In the reading from Joel, the prophet says, “Return to the Lord, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.”

In the Psalm from yesterday, the Psalmist writes that “He forgives all your sins … He redeems your life from the grave.” Most beautifully, “For as the heavens are high above the earth, so is his mercy great upon those who fear him. As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our sins from us.”

Lent should be a time when we reflect on our sins and strive for amendment of life, but we should not lose sight of the equally important fact–that God is a loving and merciful God. Through our clear-eyed reflection on our sins, and on who we are, we can experience that love and forgiveness more deeply.

The Sacrament of Confession

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I’ve been thinking about the sacrament of Confession a great deal. In class last week, as I lectured on Erasmus and his edition of the Greek New Testament and Latin translation that was published in 1516, I told my students about his translation of Greek word metanoia in the Gospel of Matthew. The traditional Latin translation was “Do penance” which puts in Jesus’ mouth the commandment to Christians to make their confession to a priest. Erasmus translated it more literally as “change your mind” and insisted that the sense of the Greek word was “be penitent.”

Last week, The New York Times published an article on the return of indulgences. You can read it here. It was perfectly timed, because this week in class, we turned to Martin Luther, his quest for a merciful God, and his attack on indulgences. The very first of his 95 Theses reads almost as if Erasmus might have written it, “When Jesus said, ‘Repent,’ he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.”

In the Middle Ages, the Church expected that all Christians would make their confession once a year, in preparation for the annual reception of communion at Easter. Lent, which had its beginnings in the Early Church as a period of preparation for baptism, took on a deeply penitential emphasis. Preachers, especially the Franciscans, would encourage their listeners to examine themselves more deeply and systematically, to ensure that they made a full confession.

While most of the Protestant reformers believed Confession was a useful practice and sought to retain it, most laypeople resisted. It was kept in the Book of Common Prayer. The Exhortation that was to be said before the Eucharist made clear that if one was in sin, they were to make a confession before receiving communion.

When we think of Confession, most of us probably think of what we see in the movies, or what we remember of our Roman Catholic childhoods—confessional boxes, with a grate separating the priest from the confessant.

Confession is an opportunity to reflect on one’s life. It should not be seen as a potential guilt trip. Instead, preparing for confession involves taking a good hard look at oneself, without blinders or excuses and to recognize who we are and what we do. In the confession of sin during the Eucharist we ask forgiveness for “the things we have done and the things we have left undone.” Preparing for private confession allows us to think seriously about the ways in which we have not been the human being that God wants us to be and indeed the human being that we want to be.

Some of us have the the discipline to embark on this self-examination on our own, but the result may indeed be feelings of guilt, doubt, or despair. To speak with a priest about the results of one’s self-examination provides the occasion to hear again the words we know are true; that our sins are forgiven by the great mercy of God. It may be that hearing those words of absolution will take a heavy burden off the shoulders of one who has been worrying about their sins.

The Darwin Bicentennial

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Charles Darwin turned 200 years old this week, and later this year we will celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859. Those two anniversaries are appropriate occasions to reflect on the relationship between Religion and Science and especially on the implications of Evolution for Christian faith. There have been hundreds of articles written in the past few weeks to mark Darwin’s birthday, and on Sunday at St. James, we will focus on these issues in our adult forum.

Among the more interesting reflections published on the internet is an article that is based on an interview with Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefforts Schori, who is a trained scientist. You can read it here.

The Church of England has produced a useful website that outines Darwin’s relationship with Christianity (he studied theology for a time at Cambridge), and includes a number of articles on the historical context and on contemporary Christian understandings. It is here.

Here are a couple of more articles that some might find interesting: “Five things we can learn from Creationists” and “What does Darwin mean to you?”