WHAT JESUS MEANT
John 13:1-10a, 31-35
Lately, it seems I've had occasion to chat with people who are struggling with faith. And if you're out there, among such people--maybe I could say, if you're out there among us--I want to say, "Welcome to the club" of people who for thousands of years have struggled with the claims that we make, together in this place every Sunday, about the gospel. Because it's difficult to believe the message that we proclaim. Maybe you come here and people ask, "How is it possible that you can believe that stuff?" In this age of science, in this age of secularism, how is it possible that we can believe in this strange message? It's hard. And we shouldn't pretend otherwise. We shouldn't pretend or try to make this message more reasonable. Thomas Jefferson eviscerated the scriptures of all that was sort of superstitious or surprising and gave us a sort of rationalistic gospel, but we must ask ourselves the question: is that really faith, if it's easy to believe? The whole point of faith is that it's hard to believe. And yet, we come here and we believe it, knowing that it's hard to believe.
That's my preamble this morning. Keep that in the back of your mind for a few moments. I think it does relate to what I want to say to you this morning. But I want to move to talking a moment about the sermon title. In this age of the internet, one in my profession has to be very careful about issues of plagiarism. I know that I would get nailed if I didn't say that the title--the brilliant title--for my sermon this morning was pinched from someone else. It's the title of a book that was written by Garry Wills, and what a brilliant title it is. I thought, "Oh, I'm going to steal that." As you know, we are notorious thieves in this business. It's an excellent book. I would actually highly recommend your reading it--it's inspired much of my sermon this morning. In that book written by Garry Wills, What Jesus Meant, he makes the claim that throughout the centuries people have sliced and diced the message of Jesus to fit into their own box. Human beings have co-opted the very strange, odd, hard-to-believe message of Jesus and used it for their own purposes. They have tamed and domesticated what is, in many ways, the plain message about what Jesus meant. He mentions in the book a phenomenon that is maybe not as prevalent today, but certainly was about ten years ago. Do you remember the one where people were wearing those bracelets, that say WWJD "What Would Jesus Do?" It's a laudable exercise to try to think about what Jesus would do, but if we're honest, often we do that exercise and it's really WWID "What Would I Do," and we'll use Jesus to back me up. Because the message of Jesus is strange. And if it doesn't disturb us, there's a problem.
Every Friday I gather with my friend Gordon Mikoski, who's a professor at Princeton Seminary, and two other guys, and we study the Bible. We do a lot of laughing and joking, and a little bit of Bible study and theological reflection. The other day we were talking about how, if we don't read the Bible--and I hope that we are reading the Bible, as Protestants that's what we do. (There's a plug for doing that in your own home--you can do that at home). If we're not reading the Bible, and finding a Jesus in those scriptures that is disturbing to us, and to our view of the world, we're not reading it carefully enough. We meet in the scriptures a strange Jesus--one who challenged the comfortable thinking of his own time. That's what got him killed. Religion killed Jesus. We can forget that, as we practice religion together. If you read Garry Wills' book--it's an interesting question to ask after, the question: would Jesus be a Christian? I find that a really challenging and interesting question. And as I ask it, I have to say, "I don't know." Would Jesus be like me? I don't know. In many ways, I don't think so.
So what did Jesus mean, in the five minutes or so I have left in this hour? I'm not going to pretend to tell you in an exhaustive way. Read Garry Wills' book, it's quite good. But one of the challenges, I think, for Jesus, or if we want to speak in a Trinitarian way, for God to express this message to human beings is the fact that we're so limited in expressing it to the feeble tools of human words--the very blunt instruments that we have at our disposal: words. Which, to use a phrase from my poet friend T.S. Elliot, "Strain, crack, and sometimes break under the burden." I love that line, as a preacher. It seems so close to home in doing this task. Words are not up to the task to express what is ineffable, and they're so prone to being misunderstood.
This past Wednesday, the Peacemaking Committee met. And we met for an hour and a half, and talked about one thing. I mean to say, it was a really good meeting--don't get me wrong--but we did one item on our agenda. It was about whether we should join Churches for Middle East Peace, whose speaker will be addressing us later today. It was an excellent discussion--it was a bit of a tennis match. We were talking about, if we take that action--if we support this organization that is advocating for a broad-based platform for creating peace among Israelis and Palestinians--what will that mean? Will that mean that we're favoring one side over the other? And one of the members of the committee said, "You know, the problem, I find in my own marriage with my spouse. I say something to my spouse. I say some words and I mean a certain thing, and my spouse hears them, but she has a completely different understanding from what I meant." Have you been there before? This is the problem with communicating, especially with words. They're so easily misunderstood and misrepresented. That's a problem for God, and for us.
So how did God deal with this problem? I want to suggest that there may be two ways that God somehow--with a really pretty brilliant strategy--overcame this limitation. First of all, if you read the gospels, whenever Jesus is asked a question, he doesn't come back with a systematic theology. He doesn't come back with an exhaustive three-point--five-point response. He tells a story most of the time. Jesus expressed his message in a story that usually challenged the questioner to answer his own question, with reference to the story. I think that's wonderful. We have to interpret the thing. But second and maybe most important--and here's really my point, a very simple point today--is that Jesus didn't just communicate in words. Or we should say, our God did not communicate to us only in words, but in a human life. Jesus is the message, not just his words. We don't have a word up here as a symbol, we have a cross. And we understand that on that cross a human being was executed, and rose again, to show us what God meant. We understand, as Gooitzen elucidated in his reflection about the Word of God that the Word of God is not this book. The Word of God is a human being, who lived about 2000 years ago, to whom the scriptures bear witness. It's his life that communicates the meaning.
Today this scripture--finally I'm getting to the text--I think, is a brilliant way of communicating what Jesus meant. This ritual that Jesus did among his disciples. It's almost as if, "They might mess up my words, but they're not going to forget this one." And so what he did was: he gathered among them, just before he was about to leave them, and he took off his robe--he was a little vulnerable with them, down to his civvies--and he washed their feet. It's brilliant because it's hard to misunderstand that ritual. It's easy to translate, too, in our own idiom--it's kind of gross to do that, even today. But for Jesus, a holy man in the Jewish tradition, so almost obsessed or concerned with purity, to make himself impure, and to do the job of a slave, by washing his disciples' feet? It's as if he's saying, "That's what I mean." Pretty hard to misunderstand. That's what we're meant to do, whatever that might be in our life together. St. Francis of Assisi is known for having said, "Preach the gospel everywhere, and use words only if you have to." And he went around kissing lepers. What would that mean for us? To live a life of self-donation, in which we get messy with the stuff of people's life? With the life of the world where we sling hash down in Trenton, or in our own Fellowship Hall in the name of Christ's love? What would that mean, to wash one another's feet? By the way, I'm a big fan of Peter Hazelrigg, because he was the leader of the men's retreat and I think our men don't fit, necessarily, the definition of "pious." They would probably agree with me. But on the men's retreat, Peter Hazelrigg got the men to do that ritual. It's so powerful, because you do that ritual--you don't have to think about it. You don't have to think about, "What do I believe? Do I believe in this stuff?" That's it. Do that. And maybe we'll understand what Jesus meant.
As we end today and go forth, I would ask that you might join in song, and I would love for everybody to do this ritual. Some people have wanted it to be a sacrament of the church. I kind of wish that that had been the case, too. Maybe it could go along with the sacrament of conflict resolution: we're not getting along, I'm washing your feet! Wouldn't that be great? I'm not going to make everybody do that today, but two of us are going to do that, while you sing our final hymn. Because I think I'd be hypocritical if I said all these words--and I've said too many today--and not done what Jesus did. At least, to suggest what it is that we all ought to try to do, through God's grace, in our own lives. As we wash each other's feet today, please remain seated and sing, and perhaps think about how God is calling us to wash each other's feet.
May 6, 2007
Jeff Vamos
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