Maundy Thursday – Peculiar Faith

Three Days and One Liturgy for a New World

It’s hard to know what difference it makes, if any. I fuss over sanctuary furniture and proofread too many liturgy leaflets while the world is literally on fire, wondering whether any of this really matters…and then, the three days.

The Christian religion in all its many forms and modes so often gets so terribly mired in institutional banalities, all the arcane terminology, the sheafs of coded language for the “insiders”—even I, with a doctoral degree in theology, have trouble sorting it all out…but then, the three days.

Even with all the complexity of doctrinal history, the multi-layered versions of rites and rubrics in countless prayer books, even in the midst of all that, three profoundly simple and deeply moving days reside right at the heart of Christian faith. We now call them Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Vigil of Easter (or Easter Day itself).

To be sure, these three liturgical days are just as complex and sometimes even more convoluted than anything else in our Christian traditions, but they do present what we might call a “divine starkness,” a laying bare of at least one singular kernel of divine reality: God’s own heart. (Graphic artist Martin French created the poster above for a modern dance company’s retelling of these three days—”triduum,” in Latin—for the sake of a more dynamic, we might say “grittier” narrative arc in which the flesh of God rises up from the truly human.)

I remember vividly the very first Holy Week I marked when I was still in college, which is now quite a long way back in that rear-view mirror. Those high-church, highly-stylized and complex liturgies quite literally changed my life: the ritualized gestures of that week invited me deeper into the rawness of human life and relationships, precisely where we encounter the embodied presence of God. Now, many years later, the planning and organizing and rehearsing that shape this one week feel both overwhelming and exhilarating all at once, which can still pose the question of why any of this might matter for a deeply wounded world.

So I pause just now to remind myself that performative perfection matters less than the textured hope this week might still offer. Surely with the world in disarray, the international order in tatters, Middle East oil fields ablaze, and climate chaos on track like a runaway train, surely now is the time when we need what Christians are on the brink of doing: gathering with companions to remember a final meal shared tenderly with friends, a torturous journey toward a cross of state execution, and the sweet hope that bubbles up like springs of water in a desert: not even a violent death can have the final word with the God of life.

Worship and prayer won’t “fix” things, but I do believe prayer matters—it releases energy and reshapes matter; liturgical prayer can form a people to do work they never imagined attempting; beautifully crafted prayer with multiple colors and sweet odors and lingering melodies can offer a beacon to the wider world, a cautionary light and a hopeful one, maybe even for a brand new and different kind of world.

In preparation for this very day, Maundy Thursday, I’ve been reflecting on a poem by Joy Harjo, the first Native American poet laureate of the United States, who writes about the kitchen table and how the world might end right there. All sorts of worlds come and go, and many of them right there, where we gather to eat.

Perhaps, if we learned better how to set a table with genuine hospitality and welcome, the world of hatred might end. Perhaps, if we stopped trying to monitor and regulate who gets to approach the table, the world of racial bias and gendered hostility might actually and finally end. Perhaps the Table we set in our sanctuaries can bring all sorts of worlds to their well-deserved ending—but what kind of world will come next?

“Last Supper–Passion of the Christ, a Gay Vision,” Doug Blanchard

We might hazard some guesses about the world still to rise up from those ashes, phoenix-like, but just as the risen Jesus was mostly unrecognizable by even his closest friends, the world yet to be born won’t fit in most of our present categories. But we can make room for the birthing—sweeping away all the lingering detritus of failed experiments and violent ruptures and reckless raiding of this precious Earth’s “resources.”

Three days.

My liturgy professor in seminary, Louis Weil, urged his students to think of the ritual observances of these three Holy Days as one continuous liturgy. It begins on Thursday evening, extends throughout the day on Friday, and over the course of a whole Saturday before we arrive to the moment when we declare once again that God’s love is strong, stronger than even death.

Three days.

There are so many ways to mark these holy days, from austere to elaborate. How we observe the one liturgy that stretches over these three days doesn’t matter nearly as much as the hope and intention we bring to them for a new world—for a world of healing, grace, and love. That intention itself in this holiest of weeks can shape how we live the rest of the year. And while I may not be sure of much, of this I’m certain: the wider world needs the shared witness of the Christian Church this week, our witness to the healing love and transformative grace of the Gospel of life.

Bury Your Theology

What is your theology?

People have asked me that question in various ways over the years, in many different communities, and for more than one reason. Eventually, I started responding with some version of “it depends”—on the daily news, my mood, or what the lectionary appoints from the Bible for the coming Sunday.

I don’t mean to be dismissive of the question, but I am increasingly skeptical of providing an adequate answer. Or rather, the kind of answer modern Western sensibilities recognize as sufficient. Holy Week quite naturally provokes the question in all sorts of ways, entangling so many of us not only in liturgical complexities but prickly and often unwieldy theologies.

I have always loved Holy Saturday for the respite it offers in this holiest of weeks, not only from liturgical fussing but also the theological wrangling that sends me grasping after theories to explain what cannot even be named. It has been occurring to me recently to take this quiet day as an opportunity to review the systems and doctrines I’ve inherited and studied, the theological ideas that have both vexed and inspired me, and then just bury it—all of it.

For reasons not entirely clear to me, for example, I live some of my days as a Johannine Christian, relishing the Beethoven-like thickness of the phrases in John’s account of the Gospel. Not only thick but also obtuse, such as the image of Jesus as both shepherd and sheep-gate (10:7-9; 10:11-14), or more unnervingly as a serpent on a cross (3:14).

On more spritely days, with energy running high and wanting just to get on with the work at hand, I embrace a more Markan Christianity. The shortest and bare-bones account of the Gospel rarely pauses for reflection—“immediately” is Mark’s favorite word, and he concludes his account with women running away in fear.

When my gay self feels a bit queer around the edges, I’m oddly grateful for Paul’s letter to the Romans where he describes God’s inclusion of Gentiles in the Church as an “unnatural act” (11:24). If God can act contrary to nature, then surely I can? Or maybe nature itself is just much queerer than most of us can imagine, as Paul himself describes a universe filled with earthly bodies and heavenly bodies and angelic glories, all of it contained in a bare seed that is sown in the earth (1 Cor. 15:35-41).

How tempting (nearly irresistibly so) to suppose that we must choose which of all the biblical options is the “correct” one. But when I do resist that urge and take this rich panoply of biblical tropes into the history of theology’s development, I find myself not unlike a fickle lover, enamored by Dionysian ecstatic mysticism in the morning and turning fondly toward Augustine’s self-excoriating disciplines by noon.

So much of this, I have come to realize, depends on exactly what kind of question I’m asking, which is often not entirely apparent. To the standard Evangelical question—are you saved?—I must at first respond, from what? And then eventually, for what? And of course, how? Holy Week gathers all these questions, and more, those countless and often repetitive inquires that have been building all year long and stacks them, one on top of the other, a virtual mosh pit of symbols and rites.

In a society of increasing isolation and fragmentation, and having recently lived through the severe touch deprivation of a global pandemic, having one’s feet tenderly touched and washed on Maundy Thursday can feel salvific. I pause there gratefully, but then realize that the Cross still matters to me, or perhaps that it should matter to me more “salvifically” than it usually does.

I recall Rowan Williams’ arresting insight about the cross in his interpretation of the resurrection narratives: “salvation comes from our victims.” I began to grasp his meaning far better by reading M. Shawn Copeland’s racial analysis of it and her heart-stopping image of what the Gospel demands from us. She interrupts my romanticized images of table fellowship with the Gospel call to orient ourselves “before the lynched Jesus, whose shadow falls across the table of our sacramental meal.”

That sentence cannot mean the same thing to me and in the same way it does to Black Americans in this white supremacist society. That’s why Copeland resists making the cross our saving symbol but insists that we cannot be saved without it, precisely because the whole arc of betrayal, suffering, death, and resurrection demands from all of us the kind of life that reflects the deepest possible arc of solidarity with the poor and outcast.

Old ways of living—the ways of violence and violation—those ways must die with Christ in order for any of us to be raised with Christ to new life. This, Copeland says, is the “divine praxis of solidarity” that offers a new way of being in relation to God, to others, to self— salvation, in other words.

All of this (and more) swirls around all the ritual complexities of the week we have just traveled together as Christians, and on this Holy Saturday I cannot help but consider whether theology itself needs to die with Christ as well.

As Meister Eckhart, the great Dominican mystic of the thirteenth century once uttered, “I pray God to rid me of God.” After all, even the word “God” can only point to what none of us can ever fully comprehend; and it can easily get in the way of actually encountering what it so feebly evokes.

I don’t mean our thinking and speaking make no difference, or that our theological ideas have no consequences. To the contrary, the stakes are high in what we say and do—bad theology kills (as the contemporary aphorism urges us to note); and this, too: good theology brings life.

Yes, and still, as John’s Jesus reminds us, “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” How could this not apply to our theologies as surely as it does to our own bodies?

So perhaps as gently and respectfully as we can, it’s time to bury our theology with all the nails that keep tidy systems pinned to institutional walls and let our wounds breathe some fresh air.

I need to bury much of my own theology, even the most cherished bits, the ones that “make sense” and feel cozy, those beloved propositions and religiously fine-tuned mechanisms; without my realizing it, they’re blocking my path.

Perhaps this could be a shared Holy Saturday exhortation: Bury your theology, and then let it rise with Jesus, unrecognizable but strangely alluring, oddly familiar but fresh and new.

A Broken Symbol for a Tattered World

I fell in love with the foot-washing ritual when I first saw it as an undergraduate (many years ago now). I then resisted it, and actually rejected it for quite a long time. In recent years, I have fallen back in love with it, have found myself re-enamored with its tender arc.

That’s a rather volatile history with a liturgical rite, but not terribly unusual for that particular rite. I’ve never met a liturgically-minded Christian who stays neutral about washing feet on Maundy Thursday. Some belong to the Necessity Camp (“I can’t imagine Holy Week without it”) while others roll their eyes at the mere thought of it (“oh please, no more manicure parades”).

My resistance to this rite over the years stemmed not so much from the awkward logistics of taking off shoes and socks, and the sudden exposure to public intimacy such a moment carries—religion, after all, shouldn’t always feel comfortable and cozy. My hesitation about the rite was instead rooted in how religious symbols function.

This topic is of course hotly debated among religion scholars, and there is certainly more than one way to conceive of how a religious symbol “works.” This holiest of weeks on the Christian calendar invites precisely this kind of reflection, a week brimming with a whole panoply of rich and interlocking symbols.

On Maundy Thursday, for example, we remember the final meal Jesus shared with his closest friends. The liturgy on this day qualifies as among the most complex of the entire Christian calendar: we remember not only the institution of the “Lord’s Supper,” or Holy Eucharist, we also remember the provocative and tender act Jesus offered in washing the feet of his friends—something a teacher or “master” should never do for disciples. We remember still more: the betrayal of Jesus by Judas, the poignant prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, and the arrest of Jesus in that garden by soldiers; the altar is stripped at the liturgy’s conclusion as a sign of desolation.

Sorting through that now-classic narrative and embodying its key moments in liturgical gestures illustrates especially well an approach to religious symbols that I find helpful. The most effective symbols draw from the common, ordinary stuff of life as a way to convey divine presence. In Christian theology, we might note that Jesus himself is this kind of symbol par excellence—a fully human life as the means to encounter God’s loving grace.

This approach to religious practice suggests why the Eucharist continues to be an effective symbol of the communion into which God invites us—we readily recognize what a shared meal is around a common table; no further explanation is needed about what a “meal” is or a “shared table.” And that right there is why I resisted the foot washing ritual for so many years: we don’t actually wash each other’s feet in our modern Western world.

The dusty roads of first-century Mediterranean societies populated by people with sandaled feet made foot-washing both an ordinary, quotidian practice and also one that made the social dynamics of cultural power more visible (whether because of rank or gender or both). We see a trace of those dynamics in the shock expressed by his disciples when Jesus started to wash their feet (Peter exclaims, “you will never wash my feet!”).

The astonishment Jesus provoked had mostly to do with the inversion of cultural power in his actions, which his disciples recognized immediately. No further explanation was needed about the kind of love Jesus wanted them to model; all he had to do was wash their feet.

For all these reasons, I consider the liturgical rite of foot washing a “broken symbol.” It rarely conveys what it was originally meant to inspire as the cultural chain of meaning-making has been cut over time (not least because of the invention of fully enclosed shoes!).

In recent years, however, I have wondered in some fresh ways whether the fumbling awkwardness of the rite and even its broken character as a religious symbol might be exactly what our fragmented world needs. Modern Western society may keep its feet covered but it still lives with the wounds of powerful social hierarchies. Race, gender, sexuality, class—all these and more fragment our world and sustain painful alienations and isolations.

Maybe what we need in our religious spaces is more awkwardness, not less. Maybe our liturgical rites and religious symbols ought to reflect more directly our fumbling attempts to figure out how to be human with each other and live more peaceably and sustainably on Earth. Maybe blundering our way through a cumbersome rite, the meaning of which seems fraught and obscure, can highlight the frayed seams of our social institutions in need of healing.

When a religious symbol just doesn’t seem to “work,” it might help us see and name how severely the world around us no longer works the way it should—if it ever really did.

We could start rather modestly: if we can practice at least a moment of bodily tenderness with each other (shyly, awkwardly, no manicures needed), even just briefly and simply through a religious symbol, we might stand a better chance of doing so in the public square.

Flawless religious practice isn’t possible or even desirable. Flawed religion, replete with broken symbols, can invite us into a space where healing can happen. And I think that’s one of the reasons why religion was invented in the first place.

Set the Table with Love

“My heart is moved by all I cannot save.”

That’s a line from a poem by Adrienne Rich and I’ve been thinking about it this week and for this Maundy Thursday night in particular as Christians gather at the table of remembrance, the Eucharistic table of both memory and hope.

As Christians hear the story of Passover from Exodus this night and Jews are this week observing it, my heart is moved by all those ancient Hebrews who never made it out of Egypt, who died enslaved before Moses was even born.

I’m thinking about all the Jews and communists and gypsies and gay men who never made it out of Buchenwald or Dachau or Auschwitz before those camps were liberated, and my heart is so moved.

After this past year of pandemic anxiety, surely all of our hearts are moved by all we cannot save—by the more than 550,000 who have died just in the United States alone before they could be vaccinated, all those who are now so terribly ill.

This is why religion still matters, just a few of the reasons, in an age when so many prefer to be “spiritual” instead. Religion helps us mark time and name sacred space, just as God commanded Moses and Aaron to do at the first Passover—“this month shall mark for you the beginning of months,” God says (Exodus 12:1-2).

We human beings need such marking and naming to orient ourselves to each other and to the world around us; so many of us have felt so adrift in these days and weeks and months (how long, really?) of this seemingly endless pandemic precisely because of having so few markers for time, so few places to go for space.

For Christians, tonight begins the great three days of Holy Week—the “triduum,” as it’s called in Latin—and our worship continues unabated from this night until Easter morning. Tonight begins one extended liturgical celebration stretching over three days.

There is no dismissal after the Maundy Thursday service, nor after the Good Friday service, because these services do not end; the ordinary passage of time is caught up and transformed by the shared observance of the mystery of our salvation—the Table, the Cross, the Empty Tomb, all of it as one single arc of divine grace.

Christians also heard from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians tonight in which he reminded them that what he received from the Lord about the Table is what he handed on to them (1 Cor. 11:12-26).

That phrase—“handed on”—is what tradition is, what memory means for religion, the handing on of that which binds us together here and now and also to those who came before us and to those who will come after us.

For the ancient Israelites and for Paul and for us, these vital reminders are rooted in the importance of memory itself.

The kind of memory we practice as religious people is not just the opposite of forgetting. The memory Christians practice at the Table is in response to the violence of fragmentation and division; it’s a re-membering of what has been dis-membered and torn apart—the kind of recalling that heals and makes whole.

This then is what Christians might embrace about religion itself on this holy night: marking time and naming space at the Table; receiving from those who came before us the love Jesus had for his friends and for us; handing on to those who will come after us that same love that we dare believe can reunite what has been torn apart, that can stitch us together into a single body with many members, that might actually offer healing to a world of violence.

I cannot imagine doing any of this on my own. I must, by some unimaginable grace, “cast my lot” with others, the ones who share food, dream of love, and leave no one behind.

This is why I cherish now those words from the poet Adrienne Rich. Here is what she wrote:

My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
so much has been destroyed.
I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,
with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.

As Christians at the Table, as Jews gathered for a meal, as the lonely, the broken, the castaway, and the frightened, may this Passover week and these tender services of the Christian Triduum bathe us in the love that will heal us.

All of us.

Together.

A Singular Arc of Solidarity

I understand the sequential logic – final meal, betrayal, arrest, trial, crucifixion, burial, resurrection. It follows a perfectly sensible order laid out in a ritual pattern over three days, each punctuated with distinct, poignant moments.

I understand all this but I don’t always experience Holy Week that way. I often find the moments bleeding into each other, I suppose quite literally. The chronology sometimes seems out of whack to me as I feel the final meal digesting quite early in the week, the suffering on a day when feet should be washed, and I see an odd light lingering about the old rugged cross. cross_light

I had similar trouble with distinct chronological moments during my mother’s final illness and her death last year. Next week will mark the first anniversary. Actually, in “liturgical time,” this week is that milestone, since she died during Holy Week.

I thought I could hear the music that would be played at her funeral before it was chosen, while she was still ill in the hospital. I’m nearly sure she laughed and teased me about Judah, the Australian Shepherd dog, while she was barely conscious in hospice care. I could see the shadow of death lengthen across her smile weeks before, but didn’t realize this until much later.

Perhaps most of us live with blurry edges around temporal sequences. I wonder if most of us just make up neat and tidy progressions to make it easier to tell others about what’s happening in our lives and in the world. I wonder if distinct moments in time are simply fictions, or at least their distinctness from all other moments probably is, a grand and pervasive illusion.

I find such queer uncertainty peculiar, yes, but not disconcerting – at least not in Holy Week. The oddities of these particular days trace but one, singular arc of divine solidarity. I mean, the Immanuel we celebrated at Christmas – “God with us” – really is, not occasionally or sequentially or intermittently but always and all the way down, as it were, with us.

That’s what I have trouble with. I have trouble accepting that the God who creates me also chooses to dwell in deep solidarity with me – in every respect, at every moment, under every condition, and for a future beyond my imagining…which may well have already happened.

I do have trouble accepting this, yet the more I do the less willing I am to put up with a world of violence and injustice and speech riddled with hate; to tolerate any city where anyone could be hungry or lonely or afraid; to countenance a neighborhood street where an old woman is too terrified to walk outside, or a dog runs loose and thirsty and panicked, or a child begs to play and no one listens.

I have trouble plunging full-hearted into the Triduum Sacrum – the three sacred days of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. I am afraid of what that singular arc will compel me to do and to be. I’m afraid I will no longer care about time and what it costs; afraid that I will let go of the future that has already happened so long ago; afraid that I will simply give myself over to a world in pain, throw myself into it with the wild abandon of trust, loving and hoping it toward the better.

This, surely, was the simultaneous terror and resolve of Jesus.

Lately, I have been appreciating how M. Shawn Copeland reflects on such things, and here, how she brings these three days into a singular focus of unraveling grace:

A Christian praxis of solidarity denotes the humble and complete orientation of ourselves before the lynched Jesus, whose shadow falls across the table of our sacramental meal. In his raised body, a compassionate God interrupts the structures of death and sin, of violation and oppression. A divine praxis of solidarity sets the dynamics of love against the dynamics of domination – recreating and regenerating the world, offering us a new way of being in relation to God, to others, to self.

I can detect no sensible sequence in her eloquence, no logical passing of one distinct moment to the next. I read only about such chronologies interrupted by the Presence, the One-With-Us, forever and not yet but still now and then, always.

I care about so much that actually matters very little. So each year I try to pause over the slivers and slices, the tiny glimpses that are so easily passed by and over, as if they could not possibly matter – the fragrance filling the room; the drop of a tear on the top of a foot; the brush of a hand against another reaching for bread; a smudge of wine on the lips, a brushing of vinegar; aromatic spices prepared by fingers shaking with grief; streaks of rosy sunlight at dawn.

bread_wine We need not braid such moments together, as if to construct something useful from fragments, something at last recognizable. The entire arc of solidarity resides in each moment, resides all the way down and rising up always as a singular offering: the Divine Companion.

Tina Turner and Maundy Thursday

“What’s love got to do with it?” Tina Turner sang that question in the 1980s. The peculiar faith of Christians offers an answer: everything.

Christianity began, not with an institution, or a doctrine, or a text, but with table fellowship. The many meals Jesus shared equally with the socially powerful and the least likely, the stories he told of wedding banquets and feasts, the tender washing of feet and the risky, self-offering of bodily vulnerability – all this and more set the Table around which the earliest Christians gathered. In short, love set the Table, and it turned the world upside down (Acts 17:6).

Since then, texts, doctrines, and institutions have (sometimes well and sometimes poorly) tried to pass on that social witness to radical love, and for a singular reason: Love changes everything.

Landmark legislation and milestone judicial rulings can change many things (from civil rights to environmental protections). Strategy sessions and protest rallies can change the course of social policies and labor practices. All of these make a difference for a better world but they can’t give what each of us truly wants and what the world really needs: Love.

The Apostle Paul apparently agreed. To the first century Christians in Corinth he wrote:

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing (1 Cor. 13:1-3).

More than most people today seem to realize, the history of Christian reflection and practice simmers with love’s peculiar, life-changing energy.

“Love bade me welcome,” wrote the Anglican poet George Herbert in the 17th century, just as Julian of Norwich, writing two centuries earlier, insisted that “Love was our Lord’s meaning…and in this love our life is everlasting.” Maximus the Confessor, writing still earlier, in the seventh century, went so far as to name that divine love “Eros.” If Eros is love, he wrote, then that love which unifies all things is God.

Encountering Love, receiving it, and bearing world-changing witness to it defines the essence of Christianity’s peculiar faith. And I too often and rather quickly forget this.

So tonight I join millions of Christians around the world and return to the Table of Love. Today is Maundy Thursday, the day to remember especially the final meal Jesus shared with his closest friends and the mandate (from which we get the word “Maundy”) he issued at that Table: Love one another as I have loved you (John 13:34).

I go to that Table not first because I need forgiveness (though I certainly do), or because of religious obligation (though it is that). I go because Love draws me there.

I may not fully believe it and I might go haltingly. I will likely go worrying that I’m not quite ready or that my thoughts aren’t focused clearly enough or that I myself am not nearly loving enough to receive love. Nonetheless, Love draws me.

A wise colleague once noted that “love changes us so that we can change the world.” What’s love got to do with it? Everything.