John 13:1-17
Listening guide
“Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.” (verse 2)
(picture of foot washing)
“Now that I … have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet.” (verse 14)
“Teacher and Lord, that is what I am” (verse 13)
These are ____________ to ______________.
(communion hands)
Sermon
On the night he was betrayed, Jesus washed his disciples’ feet. I agree with people that it was a magnificent way for him to serve them. I’ve never been particularly interested in washing your feet. Or the feet of anyone else, for that matter.
That’s why we don’t do it. Not because I don’t want to serve you and serving the people of Otsego Plainwell. I do. I just don’t see the value in it. We don’t wash our feet when we come home. The only time I wash my feet is in the shower.
I want to serve people in appropriate ways. I’m always trying to figure out what that looks like based on people’s needs, the Bible, and the way people respond to me. In my mind, as a pastor, serving people in appropriate ways looks like:
· Listening and encouraging as we candidly discuss the sorrow and joy when a loved one dies
· Providing guidance for following Jesus at home, at work, or as a citizen
· Being a listener, a sounding board, and a little bit of an advisor when someone needs to discover their identity
· Giving hungry people food
· Installing ramps for people who need help getting in and out of their house
· Assuring guilty people they are forgiven
And the list would go on a lot from there. You can imagine that I am frustrated a lot because not only do people skip this kind of relationship with me. Often they even reject me. They refuse to allow me to serve them.
What I mean is, there certainly are plenty of times when I tell someone,
· “Let me know if I can do anything” and they ignore me.
· I say, “let’s get together and talk about this” and they never accept my invitation.
· Or I tell them “I’d love to go through this with you” and they never ask for advice
And the frustration is not just that, but often
· I express concern and people say get out of my life.
· I send positive encouragements like “hey, I’m cheering for you today” or “God bless you” and things like that, and they say, “what do you want”
What I want is to serve people appropriately. And I know I’m not alone. I know I’m not alone in wanting to make a difference in people’s lives.
That’s a very common theme. Many people want to make a difference.
Adventure
And that’s what Jesus wants us to get today.
Maundy Thursday is a big day. Jesus says, let’s take on some of your biggest problems – sin, death, and the devil. Here is why we’re doing this. Not so you can “make a difference in the world” as good as that might be. But to actually help people.
Let’s get some hands that help.
Development
This is the thing that Jesus got more than anyone else, I think. This event we call the foot washing … We have some problems timing it. I think a good time is right before the Last Supper. Jesus was quite busy.
He didn’t concern himself with the supper preparations. He wasn’t distracted by all the conflicts with the Jewish leaders. And he didn’t lash out at the man who was going to betray him. He focused on the people right in front of them. “Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.” (verse 2) I know that this gets mentioned constantly. I find this so impressive.
There is this story from Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov that illustrates it well. A wealthy woman asks an elderly monk how she can know if God exists. He tells her no explanation or argument can achieve this, only the practice of “active love”. She confesses that sometimes she dreams of a life of loving service to others. At such times she thinks perhaps she will become a nun, live in poverty, and serve the poor as humbly as possible. But then she imagines how ungrateful some of the people she would serve are likely to be. She imagines they would complain that the soup wasn’t hot enough or that the bread wasn’t fresh enough or that the bed was too hard. She admits that she couldn’t bear that much ingratitude. Her dreams about serving others vanish and she finds herself wondering if there is a God. The wise monk responds, “Love in practice is a hard and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.” (Pete Scazzero, Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, pg 165)
He could have said, one of them is betraying me. He could have thought one of them will deny me. They’ll all run away. Jesus was not distracted from serving the real people right in front of him.
(picture of foot washing)
He loved them up to the end of his life. He accomplished his goal of loving them. And now he was loving them to the purpose of their lives.
He got down on his hands and knees. He went around the table. He washed their feet. I think a lot of us know this. Washing someone’s feet at that time was something only slaves did. It was illegal for Jews and even slaves to do it. Yet Jesus Christ took the position of a slave below slaves and he turned to his friends and he said, this is what I’m all about. This is even what life’s all about.
Jesus wraps it up; “Now that I … have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet.” (verse 14)
I’m sure a lot of us are saying, is that what life is all about for all of us? Even for me? That’s a fair question.
Someone might say, I want to take care of my family. I don’t want to worry about serving. Someone else might say, I just want to do my job. I don’t want to worry about serving.
So to say, is all of life really about serving, that’s a good question. We don’t have time to answer it all.
Let me give you just one way to frame this. One way to think about this.
Let’s say you find a machine. It’s all full of lights and wheels and beeps, and they said, “Here, this is a present for you …” And it’s big. It’s very impressive. You’d say, “Well, it’s very busy, it’s very impressive, but what is it for?”
Let’s say a friend asked, “what’s it for?” And you said, “I don’t know. I wonder the same thing.” Then you would all say, “what good is it?”
What would you do? You'd have to ask the manufacturer. You’d have to ask the engineer. No matter what it does, how much it beeps and boops and everything else, you still have to ask the manufacturer. You have to do that, even if no one else wants the machine or knows what to do with it. That’s the only thing you can do.
What we've got here, we’ve got the manufacturer speaking. Jesus says, “you also should wash one another’s feet.” If you want to know what you’re supposed to do with life, this is it.
See friends, I can’t promise you that your friends, family, neighbors, and citizens will always know what you’re doing. They might look at you and say, that is the craziest machine I’ve ever seen. That guy beeps and boops and bleeps and doesn’t seem to do anything.
But they haven’t asked the manufacturer. You’ve been made by him!
What I think is so incredibly powerful about this entire event … Here we have Jesus. He is God so great that the highest heavens cannot contain him. He is the God to whom the entire universe is nothing more than a piece of belly button lint. He is the great “Teacher and Lord, that is what I am” (verse 13) He doesn’t belong on the floor.
No, as this story takes place, where he belongs is across town in the temple. Jesus should be in the temple that he cleared out a day or two ago. He should be washing his own hands in the great pool that sits next to the altar. Behind a thin curtain, he should be putting on, not a dirty towel, but the fine and ornate garments of the priest. He shouldn’t hear his disciples saying, don’t do that Jesus. He should hear all the Jewish people cheering him on and encouraging him. And he should be washing not feet, but the holy altar of God with the lamb that was sacrificed. That’s what he should be doing.
What’s going on here? The answer is that he is giving up that spot so that he can remake you.
He is the Lord who has become the slave to treat you as his lord. He is the king who has become the servant to treat you as his king. He is the priest who has become a pauper so you become a priest.
The maker of the universe has placed his hands on you in baptism, his Word, and in his Supper so that he make you into a marvelous machine for his purposes.
That way every time someone doesn’t want you and you wonder, what am I doing? Or someone ignores you and you say, what am I hear for. They reject you, someone ignores you, you can say, I’ve been made by his hands.
And you can go on and say, my hands to you are his hands. I’m offering his hands. These are hands to help.
Action
The Lord’s Supper can be the greatest place where we get hands to help. In 2015 there was a young lady who decided to attend a church service.
At the end of the sermon and prayers, the pastor announced they were going to have communion.
(picture of hands)
Instantly, the young lady panicked. She said, “my palms got sweaty and my brow furrowed as I thought to myself, what do I do?”
She had just come back to church after 14 years of pushing all religious beliefs behind her. She was filled with hurt.
Then the bread and wine came by. She had all kinds of questions, "why do I deserve this? Why should I be good enough to take part in this ceremony? I was a cast off, a sinner, and someone who abandoned religion long ago. …. I’m not good enough.” She said, I passed the bowl of bread and just looked at the seat in front of me. I knew I didn’t belong here in this moment. This was for people of faith, not for people who might want to look for faith and Jesus just because something is missing in his life, so he decides to go to Church once in a while and figure out what he wants to be and where he wants to go.
The girl was empty. She was a nobody and a nothing.
Then she felt something touch her hand. Her friend asked her for her hand and she did something I couldn’t believe, or would have ever expected. She split her bread in half, soaked it in wine… and then gently placed it in her hand. She said, “My mind tuned out everything around me, and I still, to this second as I write this, can’t recall what I thought."
That's the moment where God makes us. Hands that help remake us, empty, broken, destructive, sinful, hurting people and give us new hands.
We’re going to have communion in just a moment. Let’s prepare for that. May the hands that touch us in this sacred act be hands that help.
www.thisisvillagechurch.com/sermons-media/blog/communion-right-or-privilege/
Written February 11, 2015