On Maundy Thursday, as we set out on our intense holy week walk, the drama the gospels describe of Jesus’ last meal with his friends, his betrayal and death, and his astonishing resurrection. We walk along with impulsive, inconsistent Peter who can’t believe that Jesus would wash his feet and then wants to be washed all over, with Peter who professes love for Jesus and a desire to die with him and who then denies him three times, we walk with Judas who betrays him with a kiss for God only knows what reason – maybe something personal, maybe political, maybe just greed. We walk with Mary and the other women who loved Jesus, women Jesus welcomed as disciples even though their larger culture treated them as less than fully human, women who could stay with him as he died when the men scattered, thinking it too dangerous. We walk with Jesus as he argued with God, with Jesus as he endured mockery and abuse, with Jesus as he journeyed into the unknown that is the grave. We’ll walk with the women who came to the tomb early on the first day of the week and journey on rejoicing, proclaiming that God raised Jesus from death into life and with Jesus, because of Jesus, in Jesus God raises us, too. And at the start of that whole journey, is the meal, strength for the journey.
Before Moses and his people set off an their astonishing journey, from slavery into the land of promise, from captivity into freedom. It was a much longer journey than anyone expected, there were people who wanted to give up and turn back, who preferred familiar slavery to the necessary journey into freedom, people who stopped trusting in the God of Moses and turned to God’s of their own devising. But before that whole journey started, there was the feast, the passover lamb, roasted over the fire. The elaborate instructions we have in Exodus probably reflect that by the time God’s holy people got around to writing down the Exodus story, they already had begun to eat a passover meal in memory of the night before Moses led the people out, remembering the whole story as God’s holy people the Jews remember it now, with lamb and eggs and bitter herbs and sweet fruit, with wine and unleavened bread. God sent God’s people out with food for the journey and, as the psalm reminds us, God fed them along the way with manna, bread from heaven, strength for the journey.
I’ve just finished reading a book which is part memoir part religious social history. In it, Diana Butler Bass describes her journey through the second twenty years of her life by describing the Episcopal Churches she attended during those years, commenting on how they supported and nurtured her and on how she sees each of those churches as representing changes in church and society during the 80’s and 90’s. She concludes that the churches that seem to be thriving are those that focus on helping people to live out their faith in every aspect of their lives, churches which are intentional about their focus on the worship of God and on helping people to develop spiritual practices which nurture and guide them throughout their lives –rather than churches which try to offer something for everyone. She calls the book Strength for the Journey and she begins it with a story which summarizes those twenty years in her own life.
She grew up Methodist but had an evangelical conversion as part of a Bible Church in her teens. She went to a conservative Christian college but, with many of her classmates, she joined the Episcopal Church. With the absolute religious certainty of young adulthood, she kept to Episcopal Churches which were not too socially or theologically liberal. Right out of college, she was looking for a church in L.A . and attended All Saints’ Church in Pasadena, on the advice of a mentor. She absolutely hated it. She hated the sermon which was critical of U.S. policy in Central America, she felt anxious because she thought one of the chalice bearers might be gay but one of the things she found attractive about the Episcopal Church was the BCP and she figured that the eucharist, at least, would be the way she thought it ought to be. So the low point of the whole morning, for her, was when the chalice bearer lifted the cup to her lips and said, “the blood of Christ, strength for the journey.”
So she left that church, vowing never to return, and attended another. But nothing in her life turned out the way she expected. She married her college sweetheart and after years of struggle realized that the marriage had ended and they divorced. She entered a graduate program in Church History and found that the Christian tradition was far more rich and textured than she’d imagined. She taught in conservative Christian colleges and found herself in tension with them and lost a job because of it. She found her image of God changing from the demanding, judging God to whom she had submitted her life as a teenager to the God of love and mercy whom she discovered in various communities of faith in which she sojourned. She married again and had a child and left academe for writing and teaching in a congregation. And twenty years after her story began, she found herself again at All Saints Pasadena. She had changed, the world had changed, the church had changed and that congregation had changed. And when it was time for communion, she could hear the chalice bearer moving down the row saying “the blood of Christ, the cup of salvation.” And she remembered the day, twenty years before and was disappointed. But when the it was her turn, the chalice bearer said to her “The blood of Christ, strength for the journey” and she wept, thankful for her life’s pain and for its joys, for loss and change and growth, for the companionship of God’s people in her life’s journey.
We hear these stories every year, we break the bread and share the cup in memory of Jesus who is present in our midst when we gather around the table. We wash feet in memory of Jesus’ example of love and service. As our lives change, we hear new things, we resonate with different moments in the story. Who knows what you will hear, this year, what I will hear. Who knows how God will call us from captivity to freedom, from death to life. But we give thanks that we discover around the altar strength for the journey.
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