EpiscopalCenter at Duke University

This past Monday, we waited anxiously to see if panicky financial markets would collapse after the Federal Reserve bailed out the investment bank Bear Stearns last Friday.

On Tuesday, 10,000 people gathered in the Dean Smith Center at the University of North Carolina because Eve Carson, their beloved student body president, was killed two weeks ago.

Wednesday, yesterday, marked the fifth year since we began waging war in Iraq.

And today is Maundy Thursday, the day named after the Latin word, mandatum,  or mandate, from Jesus’ commandment that we love one another.

“Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”

Given the unremittingly bleak news coming at us from every which way, it might seem naïve to gather as we have tonight to remember—to celebrate—that we are commanded to love.

A youth leader I know once launched a group of teens into an intense conversation about love by offering them a box of doughnuts. He had this wonderful, enthusiastic group of kids and he just knew if he brought in a box of doughnuts someone was bound to say, “I love doughnuts.” So he was ready. And sure enough, someone declared their love for doughnuts.

“Oh really?” he asked. “You love doughnuts?”

And the point he eventually led them to was that we talk about love casually, as if it were something warm and fuzzy and bland, as if it applied equally to doughnuts and people. As if the command to love one another were a cheery moral maxim, a kind of extended play version of ‘Be nice.’

The teens got it. They got that doughnut-love isn’t the real thing, that it doesn’t stand a chance of sustaining us in the midst of war, and death, and anxiety, and grief, or even over the long haul of everyday life.

What will? Because, God knows, it’s been a hard week and from the looks of it, there are more hard weeks to come.

The night Jesus gives his new commandment is the night before he’s going to be crucified. And Jesus knows that. He knows what’s coming. He knows that Judas, with whom he breaks bread, is about to betray him. He knows that Peter is about to deny him three times over. He knows that he is about to be beaten and humiliated and killed and he knows that when he dies his disciples will be as stricken and lost as motherless children.

And knowing that, he washes his disciples’ feet. All of them, even Judas’.

And because we want so badly to know what we’re supposed to do to be good Christians, we tend to get busy with footwashing, rushing off to make some heroic contribution to the world’s well-being. After all, that’s what Jesus said, “I’ve set you an example. Do what I’ve done to you.”

But in our hurry to be good servants, we may skip over the starting line, the most important part, the part that comes before Jesus does anything: “Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, rose from supper, laid aside his garments, and girded himself with a towel.”

For Jesus, who he is—Whose he is—comes before what he does.

I know a woman who is certain that each one of us deserves a home. So day after day, week after week, she goes out and talks to the people who live on the streets and in the woods, one person at a time. She asks them how they’re doing and she asks them if they know about the V.A. or about Medicaid. She asks them if they’d like help filling in forms. And on a lot of those days, most of these guys (and it is mostly guys) aren’t interested in hearing what she has to say.

This is not glamorous work. And if it feels heroic the first couple of days, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t 403 days later. In fact, for some of us it might even feel hopeless. But this woman keeps showing up, checking in, asking how folks are doing. And sometimes, it registers. A man who is used to seeing himself as an outsider or a hopeless case, suddenly sees himself the way she sees him, as a neighbor, as someone who’s ready to ‘come in’ as she puts it. And when that happens, she’s there and she’s ready to walk with him.

This is not a person given to grand statements. She is about as no-nonsense and down-to-earth as they come. I’ll sit there talking about building relationships and being present with our neighbors and on and on and when I’m done she’ll ask, “Can you drive Bob to the V.A.?”

And in her groundedness and her persistance, she is a witness to God’s power to sustain hope in the face of hopelessness, to His power to make possible what seems impossible.

I went to my office at the Episcopal Center on Tuesday. The Center was still closed for Spring Break over the weekend and Monday is my sabbath day, so I hadn’t been there since Friday. And when I got there, I discovered that in the three days I’d been away, spring had sprung: the edges of the crumbly brown path that leads around to the front door were outlined in green. Little daffodil shoots had sprung up in tidy, curving rows on either side of the mulch, bright green parabolas tracing a path from the sidewalk on around the corner of the building. It was so beautiful and so surprising, a small miracle, a gift in the midst of a hard day.

Love can be like that, a surprising witness to God’s light in present darkness. No one of us can fix what’s wrong with the world and make all the suffering go away, but we can offer ourselves to our neighbor. We can point beyond ourselves to God by our everyday practices of love. God will sustain us. That’s where we find our hope.

“Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” Because we come from God and are going to God, because we are God’s, we are commanded to love. Because Jesus loves us deeply and completely and unconditionally, we are free to love. In the midst of fear, and sorrow, and anxiety, and stress, on the eve of the darkest day in the Christian year, it is given to us to offer a transformative witness to God’s loving presence in this world.

“By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

We pray you, gracious God, let it be so. Amen.