Welcoming all

We adore you O Christ and we bless you

because by your Holy Cross, you have redeemed the world.

And in the name of God, the father, son and holy spirit.

Amen.

By our wondering eyes, it did not always have to be like this.

Jesus was all powerful, was he not?

In John’s gospel especially, Jesus knows what is going to happen.

He knows he will be betrayed.

He knows by whom he will be betrayed.

And he knows he will depart from his disciples and where he was going, they could not follow.

And if he knew all of these things, why could he not stop them?

Rather, why did he not stop his betrayal?

His arrest?

His murder?

Why did he know and not save himself?

Perhaps it is impossible to know.

Perhaps we only understand what our actions might be in such a situation, that we would do whatever it took to save ourselves and our loved ones from harm, and because of those presumed motivations we cannot understand why Jesus, our savior did not prevent his own death.

And how the story would have changed had Jesus pushed his plate away, stood up at dinner, pointed at Judas and shouted, “j’accuse!”

I accuse you, Judas.

I accuse you, Judas, of betrayal.

Your plans to give me over to the authorities will go no further.

Or could he not have relieved Judas of his demon, of the infiltration of evil that infected his heart and led to Christ’s downfall?

He could have.

Yet he did not.

Judas went on to betray Jesus.

And Jesus.

Jesus went on to love.

Knowing of his own demise, knowing his death would fulfill the scriptures, knowing full well of the trauma that was to come, Jesus got up from the table.

He removed his outer robe.

We wrapped a towel around his waist and he began to wash his disciples feet.

He, the master, becomes the servant.

Now, it was common custom for a household to have water available for one to wash their feet in Jesus’ day.

The roads were dusty and sandals were worn.

So a guest arriving would find a bucket of water where they could wipe and wash off the dust from their travels.

Perhaps in a wealthier person’s home, a servant would wash the guest’s feet as a courtesy.

Certainly though, the host would never do the foot washing.

The master would never wash the servant’s feet.

And yet this is what Jesus was doing.

The teacher was washing the disciple’s feet, roles were being reversed.

And ultimately, Christ was instructing his disciples on how to continue after his death, after his resurrection, even after his ascension, to serve God’s people and to welcome God’s people.

It is as if he was saying Christ, as God, was not to be solely worshiped and Christians, as worshipers, were meant to serve not just God, but each other.

Christ was calling his disciples to a different kind of love, an equaling love where the stranger, the one in need, the servant, takes on the role of the master, rinsed of sin by their servant king.

And Christ is still calling his church to a similar form of love, that we who are here and have been here a long while, are to welcome the stranger, welcome them in such a way where we are not asking them to bend to our ways but for us to bend to their ways, as if a flower seeking new life in the light of a new sun.

For as the flower gains strength from the light, the sun nourishes each plant; we gain strength from bending towards those who hurt, who hunger, who seek solace from sin.

If we are to bend, we must bend toward each other to take on their burden, bend toward the other, to relieve them of their sin, offer absolution just as readily as the rains can fall and nourish our seedbeds.

We will find God in movement.

And it is in this way that we become community, a truly Christian community in which we serve each other without regard to title or position; we are all one in the eyes of God.

Now, I want you to notice too how Jesus is washing his disciples’ feet.

From our reading: “Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him. He came to Simon Peter…”

He came to Simon Peter, meaning, he was walking around the room from disciple to disciple to disciple washing their feet individually.

He would wash James’ feet, then dry them off, and pick up his basin and move on to the next disciple.

He was moving from disciple to disciple to disciple, Jesus was not sitting there with a tub of water expecting people to line up in front of him.

Again, this shows the servant nature of his ministry.

Do not wait for people to line up to be served.

Move toward them, find them, seek them out and share the word of God, heal the sick, lift up the poor.

The expectation though cannot be that we will sit with our individual wash basins in front of us and wait for people to appear.

Movement is involved; action is necessary.

And so we see what Christ is doing is an act of love and it is and active love; an example of love for all of us to follow.

And still there is more for the act of washing another’s feet is not one just of becoming the servant but of welcoming.

When we move to into a serving mode, we are also performing an act of welcoming.

In her book Radical Welcome, Stephanie Spellers writes,

The movement from inviting to inclusion to radical welcome is the move toward cultivating mutually transforming relationship. The terms and power have shifted. Both parties matter, and both are open to conversion.

Both are open to conversion by sharing our stories and traditions with those looking for something more, something different than the day to day routine that has carried them so far, but still there is wanting.

There is a wish to be changed by God and Jesus and the Spirit.

And when we welcome, when we love and serve others as Christ did, as the Disciples went on to do, we become transformed by those who are looking for transformation themselves.

It becomes symbiotic; we are fed by each other’s growth and ministry, we are transformed!

Transformed, as Spellers writes, by “hearing with new ears the wisdoms brothers or sisters bring from the margins, trying on new practices, engaging God from a different perspective, and expanding their sense of what is possible…”

For what is possible is all that God has to offer us and we find what is offered by serving God’s people, by welcoming God’s people, and being transformed by all of it.

He asked his disciples, “Do you know what I have done to you?”

He called his servants together, he ate with them, shared wine, and then he washed their feet.

He threw off his outer cloak of authority and wrapped  a towel around his waist.

In that room, no servant was greater than their master.

In this room, no one is greater than the other.

And in the world we are to serve, we will serve all.

So the radical act is not so much that he didn’t call out Judas in front of the rest of the eleven, the radical nature of the act is instead he continued to love, he continued to serve, he continued to teach, despite what was about to occur.

The radical act too, is that his actions set before the disciples and us instruction on how welcome others not even in that room though he knew the burden they would face having to witness the Passion just hours away.

For Jesus, “Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.”

And from that knowledge, of witnessing his acts of love and welcoming, we too can serve, and we too can welcome each other despite our differences, our biases, our imperfections, we too can love each other to the end.

Amen.