Washed feet, washing feet

Maundy Thursday, 2021
Delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY
Based on John 3:1-17, 31b-35

Maundy Thursday is one of those nights I wish we could experience more than once a year. The closeness I feel toward my friends in the parish, the fellowship, and the sharing of a meal has an appealing intimacy of a shared holy experience. Then again, if we did have Maundy Thursday more than once a year, it would lose some of the mystique and rarity that makes it stand out as a particularly holy day of the year. When I consider the story of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet and how we have memorialized it, there is a question in my mind about what we are doing here tonight. Is the service, specifically the foot washing, a ceremony, or a ritual?

A ritual is defined as a transformative event, such as the Eucharist where bread and wine become sacraments of the body and blood of Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit. Something changes during the service, and we too can be changed by some part of it. A ceremony, on the other hand, is a confirmation of something that has already happened. We speak of a wedding ceremony, where a relationship that has already begun is confirmed by the church as a marriage. It is often easy to confuse the two because we aren’t always aware of what happens during a service, and because we often experience these transformations and confirmations outside of the church. Think of the ritual of getting your driver’s license at age 16, or a high school or college graduation ceremony that confirms your education.

But the question remains, what are we doing here tonight? It may depend on why you are here, whether to be transformed by having your feet washed, or to confirm the significance of Jesus, or the significance of this day in Holy Week in your life. I think that for Jesus, it was a ceremony, confirming the love he already had for his disciples and demonstrating the humility needed to show that love. For his disciples, it was a ritual, where they were being transformed by Jesus’ love for them, though they did not understand it in that moment. Peter, for instance, rejects Jesus’ offer saying “You will never wash my feet.” Jesus replies that “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.” Peter does not understand that Jesus is talking about a change in attitude where Peter does not get to choose how and when that love is expressed, at his convenience. Jesus is calling Peter and us to be transformed by his act of humility to love one another always, instead of choosing who will and will not receive that love. Jesus’ washing feet was an act that we might call humiliating today because we tend to see it in terms of power and authority, and who will be at the receiving end of our power and authority.

Tonight, footwashing for me is a ceremony, a confirmation of a ritual I experienced  where I chose to willingly lay aside the freedom I had from privilege, social position, and my own will to do the will of God as an act of love. The ritual was performed at the Salvation Army on South Brook Street downtown during Stand Down 2019. It was an annual day-long event where homeless veterans are invited to get information on services available to them, and for a meal. I was working at the foot washing station at the end of a trail winding through tables and booths. We would invite homeless veterans to park their carts or bags or backpacks full of their only possessions and sit while we washed their feet, just like we do on this night. Some of them remembered and recited the passage from John we just read. Some broke down in tears. Some said nothing, too embarrassed by their feet. From everything that happened, from every person I met, I was transformed by humbling myself before them and washing the feet of homeless veterans, most of them black men.

When the day ended and we were cleaning up, I realized that I could no longer look down on the people whose feet I had washed because they were homeless, or dirty, or disheveled, or not like me. I had shown them love through compassion, and I could do it because I had placed myself lower than they and had lifted them up. I could no longer choose who I would show love to as I obeyed Jesus’ final command to love each other, because I had loved the least among us and made them first, even for a little while. In a paradoxical way, I had found freedom, because it was no longer up to me to decide who would benefit from my acts of love and why. My act of washing feet had been transformed into fulfilling Christ’s command, and to fulfill my baptismal vow of seeking and serving Christ in all persons, and respecting the dignity of every human being. I have since rediscovered that attitude of humility that I found washing feet in my pastoral care training at Baptist East Hospital. It doesn’t matter to me who I minister to, why they are in the hospital, what their past has been like, or what they will do when they are discharged. What matters is that in that moment of loving them by listening and caring and being with them, I am washing their feet.

So what is tonight? Are we ready for a ritual where we are transformed in how we see ourselves and others we come across, or are we participating as a confirmation that we will be transformed? Is the fellowship and shared holy experience we have tonight just for us, or is it to be shared with everyone? We are invited to a ritual tonight, one where we are confronted with a love that leads us to humble ourselves before others without fear, because it is a love that brings us that much closer to being Christ in the world. And by that love we are transformed from being people who have had their feet washed to people who wash the feet of others.