Maundy Thursday 2014

Maundy Thursday 2014 One of the things that I cherish most about when my family of origin gathers together is the stories that we tell of our common history. My father, a gifted storyteller, often tells me stories of my grandfather and his life-long vocation as a Methodist minister. These parables are full of teachings and insights that my father often shares with me just when I need them. Other times, when the whole family gathers, we tell stories of our childhoods. We siblings gently poke fun at each other, and my father makes us all laugh until we cry. This is why we gather here tonight and over the next three days. It is to tell the stories of our family. It is to remember with joy and sadness the stories of our faith. It is to remember what our common values are and to recall the foundations of who we are as the family of God. Tonight, we remember our Jewish roots, how God saves us and claims us as God’s people in the Passover. Tonight, we remember the new commandment given to us by Jesus, to love (and serve) one another as he has loved (and served) us—a task that is often both deeply rewarding and difficultly daunting for siblings. Tonight we remember the meal that unites us over and over again as family; the meal that we share every week that lies at the heart of our family with the pattern that Jesus models for us: take, bless, break, and give. I received a gift this week in reading an interview between Krista Tippett, who is the facilitator for the American Public Media show—On Being and a woman named Avivah Zornberg, who is a modern day master of midrash—the ancient Jewish art of inquiry for discovering hidden meaning in and between the lines. Tippett interviews Zornberg about the hidden meanings in the Exodus story, part of which we hear tonight as a part of our Maundy Thursday observance. The Passover story is the heart of our Holy Week observance. It is why Jesus and his disciples are in Jerusalem. It is what they are gathered to celebrate on the night before he died. It is woven quietly and hopefully through Paul’s writing, which is our earliest description of the Last Supper. And it’s a horrible, brutal story! The story sets the stage for God’s murder of all the first born Egyptian children and results in Pharaoh essentially throwing the children of Israel out of Egypt. Pharaoh and God (and Moses) have been waging a war over the Children of Israel. But rather than making this a story of the Villain Pharaoh and the poor hapless children of Israel who must be saved by God, Zornberg opens it up and explains how in and through all of them (Pharaoh, Moses and the people), there is a resistance to God’s redemption. For all of them, there is a unwillingness to open themselves up to an alternative reality. Zornberg states, “I’d like to suggest that the whole story really is about the need for the people to be more than an object that has to be yanked out of Egypt. But for the people to become, to acquire the kind of life and openness and communicability that makes them want to emerge from that place of death which is Egypt.” As we walk into and through death over the course of these next three days, what might this interpretation of Exodus add to our own story? How might God be working to redeem us and how might we be working against that, resisting it? How might God be calling us out of our places of death and into a life of openness and communicability and relationship with God and each other?