Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church

Maundy Thursday 2008
The Rev. Melissa Skelton

Once I was reading one of those airline magazines while on a flight from Maine to San Francisco, and, to my surprise, came across an interesting article. It was written by a hiker and focused on using simple hiking practices as a way of dealing with unforeseen circumstances that might come up while traveling in unfamiliar places.

Among the bits of advice was one that caught my attention. It was this: if you get lost and confused while traveling in a foreign country, do what a seasoned hiker would do—don’t frantically try to find your way back what is familiar. Instead, find a spot, sit down and have something to eat. This will, the writer said, give you the strength needed to figure out what to do next in a situation in which you’ve become lost and confused.

All three of our readings for tonight are about meals eaten in the midst of loss and confusion. Our first reading describes the children of Israel’s meal that they are to eat hurriedly before leaving Egypt and slavery behind. Our Epistle is Paul’s account of Jesus’ institution of the Eucharist, his last meal with the disciples, the night we commemorate tonight. And our Gospel is John’s account of this same meal, but with a twist. In this account, Jesus breaks away from the table for a moment to wash the feet of the disciples, who continue to jockey for position, to make a point about how they are to treat each other after Jesus is gone.

Meals eaten in the midst of confusion and loss—the Israelites eating their meal not knowing what it would mean to flee their homes and their life in Egypt and the perplexed disciples who knew something bad was about to happen but who couldn’t fully comprehend Jesus’ words about the bread and the wine as body and blood any more than they could comprehend why he, their leader, was bending down before them washing their dusty feet.

It must have been enough to make them all lose their appetites—the uncertainty, the queasy feeling that life as they knew it, as confused as it already was, was about to take another turn that would mean a deeper dislocation from the familiar. It’s enough to make you lose your appetite.

Why is it, then, that at times like these Scripture depicts God urging us to come to the table and to eat a meal together? God, like some kind of obtrusive mother who when we’re feeling lost, body and soul sick, stands at our elbow urging us to put a little something in our mouths.

There are many answers to this, of course, some of them as old as cave men and women sitting around a fire consuming the tribe’s latest kill and in that act, giving thanks for their survival to the life of the animal or the life of the Great Spirit that the animal participated in. And so, yes, eating together is about reconstituting our tribe, the Christian tribe who are rooted in the Jewish tribe: reconstituting our tribal identity, our need of one another as we try to find our way during times of confusion and loss.

But there’s more. We also eat to remember. We eat to remember that we have eaten before—that at other times of confusion and loss, we have, by the grace of God been fed by the life of God in the world. We eat as a way to acknowledge that we have been and are still dependent on God’s graciousness for the basic sustenance of our lives.

And finally we eat in anticipation of a future life. We eat trusting and affirming, even when we’ve lost our appetites, that there will be a future for which we will need our strength. (It’s no accident that when people are about to die, they no longer want to eat.) Eating a meal in times of confusion and loss is about the affirmation that God is creating a path and that we need only do our part to accept the food that God is giving us now to find our way along that path.

And so a story for you that I believe captures something of the kinds of meals I’m talking about.

I remember the first meal my mother prepared for our family after our move in the 1960’s from Mountain Brook, Alabama to Atlanta, Georgia. We had moved to Atlanta in that my father had taken a new job there, but we’d also moved there because my parents had become increasingly disturbed about how living in Mountain Brook, the village we lived in just outside Birmingham, had affected us.

Mountain Brook was an affluent, village with the best schools in the state. This was why my parents had chosen it as our home. But it was also elitist and racist, something my parents could never feel comfortable with. While they did their best to counteract the racist messages we received there, they increasingly felt that we were absorbing a kind of “too-big-for-our-britches” attitude that my parents’ own humble family backgrounds just could not abide.

We moved in the middle of the summer, and it was a hot one. We moved into a new house that wasn’t complete—no air conditioning yet, walls still needing to be painted. It was wrenching for the four of us kids who had no idea who we were without our separate friends and the more rigid social system of Mountain Brook.

Our dad had gotten baseball tickets for an afternoon game and he had taken us to the game while our mother stayed home, saying that she needed to get more things put away and would throw together something for us to eat after the game. The game, which was supposed to be a treat, was a complete flop. We kids had never been to a professional baseball game before and so found the views dizzying and the smell of baseball game food nauseating and disorienting.

We arrived home in the early evening expecting sandwiches. But we found something quite different when we got there.

We found our wilted mother standing in an overheated kitchen in front of a table on which she had placed two lit candles. In the middle of the table was a pile of steaming pasta and a bowl of fragrant sweet, red tomato sauce. Next to it was one of those huge green cylinders of grated parmesan cheese and a large basket of toasted garlic bread. For us this was the dish of celebration, the dish of birthdays, holidays and special family events.

It was her way of saying, “Remember, family, we have had this meal that I have labored to give you, this meal of celebration, before. We are having it here too and will have it here again in this sweltering and seemingly hostile place of your loss and dislocation. Though you are beleaguered and overwhelmed, you are loved by me. Though you have been too-big-for-your-britches, you are loved by me. Eat. We will need to love one another here in this new place, where for now all we feel we have is each other. We will need to love one another.”