Maundy Thursday's Grace

I want to share with you three vignettes of my life that have all come together on this holy night of Maundy Thursday.

During my junior year in college, I lived in a co-ed French language and culture dorm. Men were on the first floor, and women, including the residential assistant, lived on the second floor. The RA was named Ruth, and her mother was Korean and Catholic, and her father was American and Jewish. Ruth and I got to know each other. She introduced me to kim chi, and I learned to read Korean script. On Sunday nights, we studied and did homework together for a class we were both taking, but it was always interrupted at the same time by a phone call from her boyfriend living in Puerto Rico. Ruth and I later had a falling out a little before her boyfriend visited around Easter that year, and we barely spoke to each other in the weeks after. One night just before finals week, one of the guys on my floor was outside, blind drunk. She came to me and said “I know you don’t like me, but I need help getting Bouché to his room.” I replied that my feelings toward her were irrelevant, and that if she needed my help, I would help. We both carried him into his room and put him on the floor where he would be safe, sleeping off his inebriation.

At Thanksgiving of the next year in college, my parents had moved from Louisville to the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and I hadn’t seen them in 6 months. I got a ride to Chicago and took the Amtrak Texas Eagle train to Fort Worth, a ride of almost 24 hours. I sat next to a young woman for the first part of the trip, and had a good conversation with her. She was outgoing, and interested in me and the things I said, and I enjoyed having someone to talk to. As afternoon turned into evening, I was getting hungry, and discovered that I had no cash with me. What little I had, I had spent on food in Chicago while waiting for my train to leave. The woman sitting with me went to get something to eat from the food service car, and brought back a hamburger. She offered it to me with a kindness that I haven’t forgotten in the decades since. She was black, and I am white, and in the time we spent on the train, we were just two of God’s children, sharing time, space, and a meal together.

For three years, pre-pandemic, I joined with volunteers and the Coalition For The Homeless to run a station at the end of a line of tables that offered services to homeless veterans. It was hosted by the Salvation Army, and we washed the feet of veterans as they came out of the gauntlet of offered services. Ostensibly, the reason for washing feet was to look for sores and wounds to be treated, and to give out socks. But the act of washing feet created another reason: to lift up these forgotten and marginalized men, and a few women, who served in our armed forces. Most of them were black, and as I washed dozens of feet or hauled wash basins to a bathroom to dump the dirty water, I was acutely aware of the racial aspect of what I was doing. I was a white man, humbly bending down to wash the battered feet of strangers that may not have been cleaned for days or weeks. Some men were silent, others wept, others struck up a conversation. A few recited the Gospel passage from John that we read every Maundy Thursday. In those moments with their feet in my hands, we were just two people, one caring for the other.

In each of these events in my life, there was a moment of grace, grace that comes from love, sometimes hard-won, that transcended differences. And those differences were many: personality, race, economic, and ethnic. Someone was in need, and someone else helped. The first two vignettes prepared me for the third, where I learned a vital part of my ministry: humility and service. Jesus showed humility to the Samaritan woman at the well and the Canaanite woman begging him to cure her daughter’s illness. Service is what I vowed at my ordination to seek Christ in others and to serve their needs, and as a deacon, to demonstrate what that looks like. On this night where Jesus washed the feet of his disciples, we remember that he showed humility, and how we are to wash the feet of others through God’s grace. It is that holy grace that rises above our differences to affirm that we are all God’s children, that there is a place for all of us in God’s Creation, and that we are all loved by God as we are. That grace is needed especially now as we are continually rocked by reminders of evil in the world through racism, blind violent rage, and hatred for merely existing. In a few moments we will wash each other’s feet to remember what Jesus did for his disciples. Let it be for us a start, a beginning of finding and holding on tight to that grace, and carrying it out to the world, where it is so desperately needed. Let us find that grace to serve the poor in spirit, those hungry for righteousness, the meek, the merciful, the peacemakers, and for the persecuted, whether they are brown, black, asian, or white. Let us love one another as Christ loved us.