GOD'S ACTION AND OURS

Sermon by James W. Crawford

Maundy Thursday, April 4, 1996

I want to say just a word about what we do here tonight. It has to do with the action at this table. We come here to witness to God's action and to be reminded of our own.

I am reminded of this dual action because of a Kodak slide I ran across the other day. I took the slide back in 1961 when Linda and I traveled to the Holy Land on our honeymoon. We touched many of the bases in Israel and Jordan included in the great Biblical sagas surrounding the events of the Old and New Testaments. We tended to focus on the places most closely associated with Jesus. We walked the Via De La Rosa, we climbed down into the cave beneath the Church of the Nativity. We stood at the base of a garbage dump outside the city gate, as plausible a place as any for Calvary and the dirty work done there. We stood with others in a garden, facing a tomb built into the wall, and felt almost as if we stood beside Mary as she encountered the risen Christ there nearly two thousand years ago.

But the slide--the slide I came across showed a narrow little alley, maybe six feet wide, pressed upon each side by steeply fronted row-houses. The alley led directly to an open door at the base of one of those row-houses. Because in 1961 Jerusalem was a city divided, some of it in Jordan, some of it in Israel, in order to get to that open door we followed a guide on a twisting, turning route, designed to sustain the separation between Jordanian and Jew. We were warned about the possibility of snipers and we maintained a constant vigilance.

Now the door to that house led to a set of stairs to what was on our sacred itinerary: the upper room. And, as you can tell, I have never forgotten the circuitous route we took to that upper room. It delineated a division, a resentment, a virulent hatred and catastrophic chasm between ethnic cousins, a religious family of a single but now distant household, and a nationalism where blood and soil counted most.

Now, of course, in Jesus' time the division between Jew and Gentile, Arab and Jew, was no less a bloody problem than it was in 1961. And as we meet in 1996, the division and hatred continues to create horror stories: bombings, suicides, murder. Fear, repression and terror still saturate the streets, the neighborhoods--the city housing that upper room.

And what goes on in the neighborhood around Jerusalem's upper room is simply an illustration of the division afflicting our human family, whether it be in Israel or the Gaza Strip, in Sarajevo or Kabul, in Chechnya, Sri Lanka, or Kampuchia, whether it be the lines dividing the neighborhoods of our cities, the suburbs surrounding them, our churches and their thin little slices of American religious culture. Lines are drawn. The children of God are at arms length, if not at war with one another. The situation of the upper room, the one in Jerusalem--or wherever this sacrament is celebrated--the situation of the upper room is the same tonight as it was when Linda and I were there in 1961, or when Jesus celebrated the last supper some two millennia ago.

And friends, into the middle of this human violence and hatred God arrives. This is no divine observer, no god who sits somewhere out there, careless and abstractly apart from our plight. In Jesus, we confess our God becomes part of the human tragedy. This God enters our history, taking on all of its risks, getting immersed in the struggles, the crises, the troubles and the messiness we face. The Cross indicates, if nothing else, the vulnerability of God to the worst we human beings can dish out to one another.

But even more so, we confess during this passion week that our God participates in this life of ours, risking everything, life and death, because we are loved. The terrible conflicts we engage in with one another, the sadness we experience, whether it comes from our antagonism or from some natural imposition, AIDS or cancer, or some hideous, random accident as in the Balkans yesterday--amid any of this we confess One who stands with us, understanding, suffering and weeping with and for us as we negotiate this tightrope we call life. The Cross--this table--bears this truth to us.

And yes, at the Cross--at this table--we see vividly what love costs. It is not a matter of sweetness and light. It is not some saccharine, romantic and sentimental mood. Love and pain go together. Love and risk form an organic whole. Love and service bind with one another. Love and reconciliation, love and forgiveness we see imply wounds, broken hearts, a reaching out to bridge and dissolve chasms separating us with the danger of failure, humiliation, rejection. At this table when we break bread and pour wine we see love operates at the risk of life itself. Love finds itself willing to give up everything in order that we may be healed. It risks brokenness to heal brokenness. That is God's action.

And ours? Can our action be any different, really? As one very wise observer remarked, "The highest cannot be spoken, it can only be acted." And just as we see the love of God acted at this table so we see modeled the very style of our own discipleship. In this world where the human stresses surrounding that first upper room continue to subvert and break us apart, we dare not just speak the words of love, as important as speaking them can be--we need finally to act them out, to become incarnate like our God amid the divisions, the chasms, the brokenness of human life, whether it be in our families, our marriages, our neighborhoods, our city, our church, our world. It is not always easy. It can end up with our getting bloodied, with losing, with failure and rejection. And no doubt some of us in this room suffer broken hearts right now from risking love and losing.

Our hope lies not in our success, not in our finally mending what this side of heaven lies broken at our feet--though Love's miracle of forgiveness and healing may happen. No, thank God our hope lies finally in confidence that the God of love stands beside us, with us, underneath and over us as we step out to bring out of hostility a new community, out of coldness a new warmth, out of division a new unity, out of woundedness a fresh healing.

And so as we come to this upper room tonight, I bid you witness the breaking of the bread, the pouring of the wine. In this we see God's love through Jesus Christ in our world in action. And I guarantee if we follow this Christ, bodies broken, life poured out will inevitably shape our own discipleship. God be with each and all of you in this wondrous, this transforming, this faithful enterprise.