What is precious to us beyond measure?
The irony of being human is that what we treasure most we so often take for granted.
Is it the Church? Is the Church precious beyond measure?
Not the Church as in history and architecture and institution,
but Church as in people, the living body of believers who fumble about trying to follow Jesus together.
Is the community of the Church something that we treasure beyond measure? Take for granted? Take it or leave it?
We don’t usually ask ourselves things like that.
Jesus gives the New Commandment that we love one another as he loves us.
The example being his washing the disciple’s feet, a love that serves with tender devotion and humility.
We tend to lump this along with all the other words about love for neighbors and strangers and immigrants and whoever.
We miss something important when we lump them all together. Love is always specific. Love is never generalized or abstract.
This new commandment to love is for the disciples of Jesus to have tender love and devotion for each other. This isn’t about humanity in general. This isn’t about outreach or mission. This is about being the Church together.
In John’s Gospel these are parting words from Jesus. They carry tremendous weight.
The last word to his children.
We don’t have to spend too much time with John’s Gospel and John’s three letters to see and feel that these were written by and for a community of believers who had suffered painful divisions in their community.
They knew from experience how fragile, precious and rare the gift is of being in community in Jesus name. Grace Church has had similar experiences in living memory.
Perhaps they had taken that community for granted and regretted how it was now missing in their lives, they regret their complicity in its demise.
They send us a message, a gift, across time spoken from the tongue of Jesus to treasure the life of being Church together above all else, to love one another with tender reverence.
In John’s Gospel there is no institution of the Eucharist. The Eucharist is rather lived out repeatedly with references throughout the Gospel.
For John the final institution is foot washing, that is the sacrament of remembering Jesus.
Imagine a church designed around washing feet rather than a table or altar.
Where feet take the place of bread and wine.
And pitchers and basins of water take the place of chalice and paten.
What would that look like? The sacrament that almost was.
The washing of feet, the expression of the love command given by Jesus, an outward expression where we actually have to touch each other where we are the most vulnerable, and if you are like me, the most gnarly.
I always try to tidy up my feet for the foot washing liturgy here at Grace in Holy Week. Susan just laughs and says it’s a lost cause.
The sacramental presence of feet.
The real presence of Christ made known in hands touching feet, washing away the weariness of long days.
No surprise that the idea never really caught on!
The Church is entrusted with the treasure of the Gospel that is light and life for the world, and the Gospel begins at home.
That love begins at home in the body of believers.
Without that foot washing tender devotion the Church isn’t the Church and there is no Gospel to live out, no Gospel to share, no good news to proclaim.
The Church itself is the Gospel, and that community of love is light and salt and life to a world that has lost the love.
The Church is the proclamation of the Gospel.
Not the Church as in history and architecture and institution, but Church as in people, the living body of believers who fumble about trying to follow Jesus together.
Our love for one another, gnarly toes and all, is the message, the invitation and the medicine for what ails us. It is precious beyond measure.
A community defined not by like-mindedness or appearance but by love for one another gnarly toes and all.
Be that kind of Church.