“God in the Saving Moment”

Jesus is often portrayed as turning things upside down, a complete spiritual revolutionary.  In this morning’s gospel, Jesus criticizes the religious officials of his day for dressing in flowing robes and generally being pretentious.  I love it, and look at our flowing robes today—some might say we’re doing the same thing, here in St. Joseph’s.  Jesus condemns the religious hypocrisy of his day.  Then he contrasts this with the widow who gives everything that she has to the temple treasury.  This is the real example of God’s servant, one who gives everything right back to God.

Jesus isn’t actually turning things upside down.  But rather, things are turning, round, right side up.  In the way God imagines we can be.   The widow is right on.  What would it look like to turn things the correct way?  In your life.  How would you know when you got things just right? 

The first question I have is about where we’re going.  You know, this whole prep school thing, where does it really start and when does it end?  Why are you in such a hurry to be out of high school?  Or college?  When exactly is this golden time that we all seem to be expecting, just around the next corner?  At our formal dinners, we often hear how many days there are left for seniors.  If we lived our lives correctly, I think the seniors would be sad, and the third form would be overjoyed to hear about the plentiful days until their graduation.  Why is it so hard to live in the moment?  Oh wait, there’s it’s gone, the moment.  Did you live it fully?  I didn’t.       

There is a wonderful book about the power and potential that is in the moment called The Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle.  This short passage is about the mystery of our being that can be found when we stop rushing past our lives. 

            “Being is the eternal, ever-present One Life beyond the myriad forms of life that are subject to birth and death.  However, Being is not only beyond but also deep within every form as its innermost invisible and indestructible essence.  This means that it is accessible to you now as your own deepest self, your true nature.  But don’t seek to grasp it with your mind.  Don’t try to understand it.  You can only know it when your mind is still.  When you are present, when your attention is fully and intensely in the Now, Being can be felt, but it can never be understood mentally.  To regain awareness of Being and to abide in the state of ‘feeling-realization’ is enlightenment.”

Six years ago, I was giving the opening prayer, the benediction, at a dinner for my high school class in Turlock, California.  The Turlock Bulldogs, a big old fashioned public school in a small town with football as the crowning glory (and excellent water polo); it was a lifetime ago.  The occasion for the dinner was our twenty-fifth year since our graduation.  Looking around the room, I reflected on how we were all in a hurry to grow up.  Why were we like that?  Just like you.  Most of us would give quite a lot, maybe everything, to go backward in time; to simply be in the moment, a couple weeks before Thanksgiving break, in the splendor of our youth.  Like you are—just now.  Maybe, just maybe, I said, we could slow down tonight—and be completely present in the moment.  If we did that, if we could find a way, we would be more than young again.  We would find it, the source of everything.  Somehow I think that’s what God is all about, though I don’t think that’s the word we would use: to describe the wonder of just being. 

What does it mean to just be?  With no agenda.  Do we even know?     

In 2010, a documentary about education came out called The Race to Nowhere, directed by Vicki Abeles.  She came up with the idea for the documentary as she watched her high achieving daughter actually become physically sick from academic pressure.  It’s that real.  This movie is about highly motivated kids who are deeply unhappy, even when they get the results, like the right college admission, that they’re looking for.  These are not the slackers.  The documentary explores the lives and values of teenagers who want to be the very best, but the psychological cost of their striving is presented in this thoughtful and compassionate movie.  Whether you are a high honors student or not, you are all responding to pressure, be it academic, athletic, social, or extracurricular.  And the toxic cocktail of all of these things is the idea that your college admissions, or rejections, are your measurement of worth as a human being.  Why are we racing off to nowhere?  Human beings are crazy, totally insane.  Animals actually don’t have neuroses.  Unless they live with people.  Then they start to get a little crazy.  Just look at Richie.       

I have compassion for all of you racing off to nowhere: because I was once an insane little hamster on the crazy wheel myself.  I wasn’t always the Zen master of meditative basketball and sacred hoops, and now vision quest soccer with the lads from thirds.  Thirty-one years ago, I was the valedictorian in my class, out of some five hundred plus students.  Being the valedictorian was something I decided to be; it didn’t just happen.  I didn’t have the same problem with pressure in athletics because I never played, or rarely played, when the game was already decided.  Those coaches are all going to hell, by the way.  I’d be sent in with eighteen seconds left to play, so I tried to shoot as many times as possible before the horn sounded.  Run the offense?  I don’t think so.  Sometimes I tried to collect random fouls.  But, every night, I studied like a demon, with an agenda.  I had two objectives: one was to be the very best, to be #1, first in my class.  The second was my holy grail, my golden dream: to go to West Point. 

Then a terrible thing happened: I got everything I ever wanted.  Watch out when this happens to you.  I won the race to nowhere.  Yay. 

Now: West Point is a wonderful place if you like military perfection, people screaming at you, marching all the time, firing automatic weapons with hints of much larger ones to come, and the possibility of live combat some day (whether or not you agree with American foreign policy).  You on a conveyor belt to violence, and you don’t even know it.  Aside from being unable to take orders, smirking when people yelled at me, and hating regimentation, I loved it at West Point.  The uniforms were fantastic, and great with the ladies.  But I also had a very important and terrible realization.  I wasn’t there for me; I was there for my father.  I was living his dream, not mine, and I wasn’t going to get any closer to him by doing it.  I was living in an upside down world, and I wasn’t going to get the love I wanted by following his dream.  So I did something that was very painful—is painful to this very day, though it’s a deep and good pain because it came with self discovery.  My great decision: I dropped out of West Point, and the race to nowhere.  I went in search of my authentic self.  I quit something really big, and it hurt.  It hurt others; it hurt my father.  Oh, and by the way, nobody at the twenty-five year reunion seemed to remember, or care, that I was the valedictorian, or that I dropped out of West Point.  I felt exactly the same way.

When my dream of being a West Point graduate and an army officer died, a new dream was born—almost instantaneously.  It is often when you fail that you find the true terms of your success.  That new dream, a new story, would lead me to divinity school and the priesthood; and eventually to you, my home at Kent on the other side of the country from California, and not very far from old West Point, the proud citadel of my lost childhood. 

In my first year of divinity school, the dean of my seminary told us something strange and mysterious.  He said we should make all of our study into a form of prayer.  To make all of our study into a prayer.  This idea was the exact opposite of my pre-West Point self.  Everything then was an insane competition where a bad grade (like an A-) was an indication of my worth as a human being. 

Make your study into a form of prayer. 

How can you do this?   

Well, here’s a place to start in your thinking.  During my first year at Kent, a young man named Jon Geller was diagnosed with bone cancer.  He played center for Coach Marble on a team that eventually won the New England Championship.  But football was over for Jon in preseason; when his cancer was discovered after he broke his shoulder during practice.  Jon had to leave Kent to take a medical leave for chemotherapy treatments at home in Montreal.  Jon wasn’t facing college admissions stress anymore, or the nose guard across the line.  He was facing the ultimate test that we will all face.  And the gritty, determined young man fought his cancer, with every fiber of his being.  This is a happy story because Jon went into remission.  He returned to Kent; not to be a football player, but to be a student.  To be a human being.  To just be.  In the spring of his senior year, before graduation, Jon spoke in chapel about his journey, back to life as we know it.  You could have heard a pin drop in this chapel.  At the end of his chapel talk, he gave two Thanksgivings to God.  The first will surprise you.  Jon said he was grateful for being able to do homework again.  To read, to write, to think, to do math problems, to draw, to understand the world around him.  Jon had learned how to make studying into a form of prayer.  His second Thanksgiving was for friendship.  You never know how important your friends are until your life is on the line.  Being a friend is one of the most important human vocations.  Be kind to each other. 

Make your life into a prayer of gratitude, completely in the moment.  People will notice something different about you, almost instantly, a change in the air, a wonderful disturbance in the force.  This is called peace of mind, the change that comes over you when your authentic self is born.  It is God incarnate, but you probably won’t even need to use that word.  Being will be enough.  

Beyond even approaching your studies with a new heart, make your entire life into a form of prayer.  We were made for so much more than the life we’re living. 

Let’s give the new a chance to live.  To just be, in each of us.                          

             

The First Days Are the Hardest Days

There has been so much positive energy here at Kent to begin the year—from the bell-ringing welcome of Early Week to our first classes of the academic year leading up to formal dinner tonight.  Unfortunately, I’m going to take all of this positive energy and go in a totally disturbing direction.  I can’t help it.  Tonight I begin with a confession.  It’s a hard one to make, but here goes. 

            I watch a reality show called…Naked and Afraid.  I watch it often, sometimes one episode after another.   

How many of you have seen this show? 

I can hear Mr. Booth’s voice as I make my confession tonight.   

“What is this rubbish?”  Rubbish, it’s a good word.  He says this on the soccer field, maybe in the classroom too.

Well, this rubbish is now the top reality show on television, moving ahead of I Am Cait, which I’ve never seen.  Some day they will make a reality show about boarding school, and we’ll all be stars.  On a positive note, I do not watch American Ninja Warrior or Keeping Up With the Kardashians.  Even more disturbing than the Naked and Afraid show itself, as a presence and muse in my life, I sensed a chapel talk was coming out of my regular viewing this summer. 

Here’s how the show works; here’s what kind of rubbish it is.  One male and one female participant are dropped into a wilderness area.  They lose their clothes in exchange for just a simple satchel and one chosen item for survival.  Fire starters are a popular choice, along with the machete and hatchet.  In each episode, the pair is left to fend for their survival in the jungles of South America, Africa, or the tropics.  The camera crew gives aid only in situations of medical emergency, and a participant may tap out at any time.  After twenty-one days, the survivors have to make it to an extraction point where they are evacuated back to the normalcy that we take for granted.  If this isn’t enough for you, there is also Naked and Afraid XL, my favorite.  XL is a format which has twelve contestants who have to work together, or separately near each other, over a period of forty days (the same as Jesus in the wilderness).  Jesus and Naked and Afraid are now in the same sentence.  God help us all.    

Finding a water source, building your first shelter, making fire, finding fruit, eating insects, killing your first animal.  These are the challenges.  Maybe your challenges here at Kent are not so different.  Some of the participants cover themselves with mud to avoid the heat and sunburn of the environment.  They become mud people.  I might give this a try this year; we’ll see how things go.    

So everyone is just a little Naked and Afraid this week.  Homesickness is real for many students, and nearly everyone goes through it at some point.  Kent is a great place to be a student—and a teacher, but it’s never easy to be brand new.  All beginnings are hard, but that’s where the opportunities are to grow.  Being new at Kent can feel very awkward at times.  If you are a returning student, brimming with confidence and optimism, take the time to help the people around you.  If you see someone eating alone in the dining hall, take the opportunity to join him or her.       

Keep things simple at first, one step at a time, one day at a time.  Uncomplicate your lives and needs.  Like on the show, finding a good water source is the place to start; I like Dickinson second floor.  That’s a really nice drinking faucet; a long, steady stream.  And it’s cold.  The water horse—I think that’s what it’s called--on South Field is a drinking delight.  You have to put your whole head in the spray to find your chosen stream.  I think the football team has one of these on the north side of campus.  Oh here’s a good tip, don’t drink water from the river.  Maybe nobody told you in orientation, and it’s not in the handbook anywhere.  I looked.   

Be resilient in the weeks to come; don’t get too high or too low.  Something new will come out of the anxiety at the beginning of the year; maybe it already has.  Success in something will bring you out of your worries.  And then you deal with new challenges as your survival rating increases.      

By the second week, however, the situation with protein must be faced.  On the reality show, you’re going to have to kill an animal.  Personally, I would start with fishing the river.  Ok, this doesn’t really apply to us with a dining hall in our regular orbit.  However, we did have a student a few years ago named Hunter White who learned to live off the land as he found edible plants surrounding the campus.  I never saw him in the dining hall.  If you have an interest in this kind of crunchy lifestyle, you should talk with Mr. Klingebiel to find out what’s good to eat and what to avoid.  If you’re looking for extra protein in the wilderness of Kent, I suggest a visit to Chris the hot dog man who works near the Patco.  He has been working this corner for thirty-eight years, since he was twelve years old.  I recommend the kielbasa with onions.    

In the Matthew reading tonight, Jesus gives his primary teaching on anxiety.  This was two thousand years ago, but stress is nothing new for our species.  We’ve always faced it.  Jesus points out the harmony and beauty of nature, its essential goodness; if God so cares for the natural world, how much more does he care for us?  According to Jesus, the universe is rooting for you.  Nature is on your side.  Ok, that may be a little much to hear with the food chain and animals eating other animals—now that’s stressful.  But ours is a God who is always willing to help, a God who loves each of us unconditionally.  Prayer can definitely help your cause, and many of the participants in Naked and Afraid take time to pray.  Chapel at Kent is a time to catch your breath, to refuel, to pray, to imagine wholeness in what is broken right now.  At the most difficult points in my own life, I have always found new room for religious faith, that it may actually grow; that I have a belief in things unseen, and all I have to do is move forward faithfully for God’s love and care to be manifest in the most surprising ways.  And it is.  It’s never quite what I’m looking for.  It’s often something better.     

Getting along with others is crucial on the show; in the wild, it is everything.  You don’t have to like a person to get along with them.  And sometimes in the getting along, the liking comes.  Cooperation is in our DNA.  Seek the positives around you, and positive thinking will draw positive results over time.   

I wish all of you the best as you begin the year, clothed and optimistic.  I hope to see you moving forward on the savanna. 

Happy hunting.        

The Lasting Impression of the Spirit

            The gospel today is part of the final goodbye of Jesus in John’s gospel.  It is known as the farewell discourse.  This is the last impression that the disciples have of Jesus before his death.  Though he is soon to be leaving, he promises to be with the disciples in the Advocate, the Holy Spirit who comes in power in the lesson from the Acts of the Apostles on this day of Pentecost. 

            Goodbyes are in the air, in scripture and in our common life.  Today’s gospel is about the difficult and beautiful art of saying goodbye; of letting go and holding on all at the same time.  In his goodbye to the disciples, Jesus promises the Holy Spirit.  Jesus asks his followers, those who love him, to let go of him.  In letting go of him physically, they will hold on to the Holy Spirit, the new experience of God that arrives on Pentecost.  In the manifestation of the Spirit, Jesus will be with us until the end of the ages.

            The art of the goodbye—the letting go and the holding on—is very much part of our experience right now.  It is with us everyday, and there is a bittersweet element to the end of the year.  There are forms of farewell that are coming to us, in ways both small and large, just about every day now.  And there are big events coming with Tapping tomorrow and Rock Day for the class of 2016…oh, and don’t forget about Prom tonight.  Even as new life comes to us, there is the anticipation of the end—what the scenes will look like, and, perhaps more importantly, what they will feel like when they finally come.  The letting go and the holding on, the endings and the new beginnings, are mixed up together.

            Our present right now is a time of active contemplation of the person, the student, the kind of friend you have been this year.  It is also a time to remember the kind of person you want to become in the future.  For seniors, now is the time to consider the last impression you would like to leave in the community.  We are more used to thinking about first rather than last impressions.  Our first impressions of a person or a place are not always accurate.  But they can be corrected.  They can become more accurate over time and experience of another person.  But the last impression is harder to change, if not impossible.  This is why saying goodbye is a difficult art, and also one of the most important things that we do in our lives. 

            Several years ago, I came across a small story about the big difference between a first and a last impression.  It’s the story of Joshua Packwood who graduated as the valedictorian of Morehouse College, the famous all black college for men in Atlanta, Georgia.  Packwood excelled as a student and as class president.  He graduated with a perfect 4.0 GPA, and he was a finalist as a Rhodes Scholar.  After college he was snatched up by Goldman Sachs where he began work as an investment banker.  Packwood could have gone to Columbia, Stanford, or Yale.  But instead he chose all back Morehouse, and he had no regrets.  His future is brighter for going to the school where he thought he would learn the most, not the one that had the highest ranking in U.S. News and World Report, which isn’t a very good magazine by the way.  Packwood’s last impression of Morehouse was as a valued member of the college community, and he had the complete respect of students and faculty alike.  The last impression that Morehouse had of Packwood was as their class valedictorian and student speaker at their commencement ceremony.

            What makes this story unusual is that Joshua Packwood is white. 

            As a high school senior, Packwood went to a largely black high school in Grandview, Missouri, and his grades and SAT scores attracted some of the finest colleges in the nation, including Morehouse.  Morehouse called him on the phone a number of times, and they wanted to give him a full ride as a presidential scholar.  After several phone calls, Packwood realized that the admissions people at Morehouse assumed he was black.

            “Don’t let the white kids talk you down,” he was told on the phone.  Packwood became intrigued. 

            “You know I’m white, right?”

            There was silence on the other end of the line.  This was not the first impression that either party expected.  Instead of simply ending the conversation, a unique relationship began.  Packwood made the decision to be the only white student at Morehouse College.  Though there have been other white students in its long history, Packwood is the first to be the valedictorian.  Packwood’s first impressions were mixed, and so were the first impressions of his fellow students.  His black roommate, who was from a nearly all white school in Dallas, Texas, had chosen Morehouse to get the “black experience.”  Instead he found himself rooming with the only white kid in the entire school.  It wasn’t what he expected or wanted, and he was certainly disappointed.  But they bonded, and a lasting friendship formed between them. 

            What impressed the Morehouse community about Packwood was that he always found a way to be himself.  You know how hard it can be at Kent to always be yourself.  Packwood adapted to a foreign community, but he was only able to do it by being himself—by maintaining his individuality.  His peers wanted to know what he thought as a white person, in both academic and social circles, and Packwood provided his perspective honestly, with integrity.  He chose to leave his own comfort zone, and his many friends at Morehouse left theirs as well to embrace him, to invite him into the inner circle of the school.  He was the outsider who became part of a family.  Morehouse students appreciated the way he never “acted black.”  When students and his black professors asked him what he thought, he realized they did it because they really wanted to know.  Packwood didn’t become something he wasn’t in order to fit in.  He and the other Morehouse students did something far deeper.  Joshua Packwood chose to be an outsider, and by being and finding his true self, he was changed for the better.  It wasn’t easy at first, but the weird first impressions changed over time.  He learned about how to live in the world with people who are different from him.  Packwood didn’t choose the Ivy League for his college experience.  In his mind, he chose something far better.  He made the kind of impression on his college that will last for years to come, and he is proud to be a Morehouse man. 

            On this Pentecost Sunday, this is the kind of lasting impression the world needs right now.

            This morning I invite all of you to consider the lasting impression that you would like to leave at Kent this year, especially if you are graduating.  Whether you began your career at Kent as an insider or an outsider, you are now part of this place, and Kent is part of you.  And it will always be part of you. 

            Saying goodbye is an open invitation to all of us to be the person we can be at our best.

            With the last few weeks and days remaining in the year, the temptation before all of us is to just let the clock run out: to be safe in our familiar patterns and ruts; to hide our true selves until everyone is gone after Prize Day.  I have no doubt that it will be far more satisfying to you to finish all of your classes with a strong effort, with a second wind of engagement and discipline—to finish through the tape, and not quit before the race is over.

            But I am also a realist.  I would simply ask you to be intentional in everything you do in the next two weeks.  Even as you let go, I would ask you to hold on to what your teachers, parents, and friends have taught you about the kind of person you want to be.  If you can’t be diligent, at least be faithful.  If you can no longer turn on your mind, then turn on your heart.  Seize the passing moments in their fullness, and open yourself to the beauty and love that is all around you.  You can take risks to know and be known at your best.

            Be intentional in the days to come.  You will be rewarded for your diligence, your academic second wind, and the faithfulness of your heart, almost instantly.  And that ancient God that Jesus knew inside himself can be discovered anew, in the time of the Holy Spirit; that we may be in him, and he in us, a love that cannot fade away because God is at the turning center.  The memories we are making will blossom in the scenes to be born in our future; those small seeds are planted now.  If you plant them well, with the best intention of your hearts, they will blossom in the future.  They can grow into the largest of trees whose shade is sweet to others—whose branches stretch forward and upward always to the Spirit of God.  May God bless all of you.  May God bless this community in the lasting impression of our time together now.    

Jesus Dreams of Fish

Jesus dreams of fish.  I wrote that sentence over a week ago, as I prepared for this sermon, on the third Sunday of the Easter season.  I expected a sermon to follow this single sentence, but nothing came.  Yet I still felt that I was on the right track.  It was a revelation, but not yet a sermon.  Jesus dreams of fish.  This seems like a strange statement, but the fish would eventually become one of the symbols of this new religion.  Yet in all my years, I had never once considered that Jesus must have really loved fish.  Now I know.  First, he called to fishermen to be his disciples; that’s where this Jesus movement started in the first cause.  Then he helps them catch an enormous load of fish to prove his uncanny spiritual powers; he directs them to a “great shoal of fish” in Luke’s gospel, a catch that is almost bursting their nets with the great bounty.  And here, in today’s gospel, also from Luke, the resurrected Jesus asks for a piece of broiled fish as he visits his disciples in Jerusalem.  Something is up, with the fish.

Jesus dreams of fish.  Of all the things Jesus could say or do in his resurrected body, this simple request for food is more than a little odd.  On one level, Luke is certainly trying to prove that Jesus is not a ghost:  “They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost… ’Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh as you see that I have.’”  To prove it he starts eating.  But I think that something deeper is happening with Jesus munching on a piece of broiled fish, in front of his terrified disciples. 

The gospel accounts of Jesus’s resurrection appearances often mention fear.  The breakthrough of Easter joy includes fear—fear of the Romans, fear of the future, even fear of Jesus himself in his new body that is the same one that died.  Rising from the dead is a little disturbing—that kind of thing just doesn’t happen in our world.  Except that the disciples and gospel writers claim that it did.  This is their testimony.   

I think I understand this resurrection fear when I think about our experience of spring.  New life is a little scary; it’s overwhelming.  What do you do with it all?  I’m not ready to leave my old life behind.  I don’t have to tell you that the winter behind us was brutal, and yet somehow we survived.  Though we haven’t had any really warm weather, we know it’s coming.  We can feel it, in our bones, and in our paths across this beautiful campus surrounded by nature.  With the advent of spring, there is so much energy all around us.  The earth herself is singing with new possibility.  The animals can feel the new energy, probably better than we do.  Spring is a season of beauty and passion, and it’s easy to get off track, especially if you’re a senior.  With the beauty around us, I want to tell the seniors not to count down the days until graduation, but I know they won’t listen.  You’ll be surprised with the sadness that will come with the end of the year.  I encourage you to instead linger in these moments together, and to look for something deeper.        

All of us are experiencing new life, even if you don’t call it resurrection.  But new life needs to be grounded…grounded in something tangible, like a piece of fish.  As I thought about my mantra for this sermon—that Jesus dreams of fish, I was reminded of the movie called Jiro Dreams of Sushi.  The movie is a documentary about an eighty-five year old sushi chef who is still working, still working on his craft.  Jiro has been working every day for the last seventy-five years, finding his way in the restaurant industry after being abandoned by his parents.  His life’s work started as a means of survival, an escape from abject poverty, but it eventually became a vocation that shaped his life.  And, yes, he regularly dreams of sushi.  He has visions of fish.  Though perfection is unattainable, he strives every day to find it. 

Jiro Ono is one of the most famous sushi chefs in the world.  His small restaurant in Tokyo has three stars in the Michelin guide to restaurants.  Famous chefs love the restaurant named Sukiyabashi Jiro, which has only ten seats, and a bathroom outside the premises.  Jiro is more than a chef; he is an artist, a perfectionist, a Zen genius.  He does the same thing every day, in how he gets to work in the morning, and in what he does at work, but he seeks incremental improvements with every dish he touches, every fish he handles.  I know that he and Jesus would get along, if Jesus ever made it to Tokyo.  People get nervous when they eat at Jiro’s, even the food writers.  The power of his simple craft is daunting, his presence is so commanding, and reservations are needed a month in advance to get one of the coveted ten seats in front of the master. 

In the many scenes of Jiro making sushi in the film, there is an enormous simplicity in his preparation.  There are many studies of his hands working on the fish.  Just hands and fish.   It is a clear act of love, hinting at the mystery of life.  These are the hands of a high priest; you start to sense the incantation to our highest power.  The images are hypnotic enough, but the music by Phillip Glass weaves a kind of magical spell over all the food.  We leave the world of food preparation and enter the realm of religion.  It takes you to a place beyond hunger, and above simple eating.

It is an accurate statement that people who eat sushi prepared by Jiro experience something like our holy communion.  Some of his patrons claim that they can hear music as they eat, especially those who simply eat what Jiro prepares for them—they don’t even place an order.  Each ingredient has an ideal moment of deliciousness.  The early Church experienced the resurrected Jesus while eating, and that’s where our sacrament of communion originated, from this ritual fellowship.  Eventually Jesus would be found by his followers in the sacred food, in the bread and wine.  In some cases, the early followers of Jesus would eat a whole meal.  This was called an agape meal, a meal of love, which was far above our experience of romantic love; the meal celebrated the love that came from God, even unto sacrifice.  Our earliest Eucharistic prayer, written by a man named Hippolytus in the second century, included bread, wine, olives, and cheese.  Olives symbolized the sweetness of religious faith, while cheese encouraged a belief that was solid.  As a priest, I have performed the rite of Hippolytus with students from the University of Virginia, when I was the chaplain there.  The food would circle more than once as symbols of God’s promise and love that were bringing us closer to each other, and closer to God.  We got to know Jesus in the breaking of bread, but also in the sublime olives and tasty cheese.  Jesus understood that what you put in your body has a religious dimension.  He understood this from his Jewish religion, but the sacred meals of Jesus would be offered to all people, from the closest Jewish disciples to the new followers throughout the world.  Christianity.  It really all started with food.  Jesus dreams of fish.    

You can’t help but ask yourself while watching Jiro Dreams of Sushi: Is there anything in my life that is like Jiro’s love and passion for sushi?  Spring is about passion, but it needs to be grounded in discipline.  Your passion needs order.  In every scene with Jiro, there are wisdom lessons packed in, like fish in a crate.  Watching Jiro and listening to his words makes you want to pay deeper attention to your own life, and how to live more intentionally.  Life goes by pretty fast—and faster the older you get.  Yet it slows down in the moments when you find your true passion.  A true passion doesn’t pass the time; it fills the time with meaning.  The quality that you generate enters into the great mystery of God.    

Being willing to make yourself uncomfortable is a part of this search for a vocation.  Jiro continually makes himself uncomfortable, and he certainly makes the lives of his workers and apprentices difficult.  Though he is an expert, a virtuoso with sushi, he approaches everything as a beginner.  Always, he is a beginner.  Jiro is always pushing himself out of his comfort zone.  You are on a search, a quest for your own life philosophy, and it won’t be easy to find your holy grail, your life’s work.  When you find it, it’s like falling in love.  That is the only comparison that is just. 

I was so inspired by the movie and this sermon that I ordered out from a local restaurant.  This was a mistake.  The magic spell was broken.  But the magic will certainly come back during this Easter season, and spring, and our precious holiday tomorrow.

Jesus dreams of fish.  Jiro dreams of sushi.  I dream of yellowtail rolls and whitefish.  Lots of whitefish. 

Where will your dreams take you?  This is the season of finding out. 

And eating out. 

The Good Touch of Maundy Thursday

Welcome back from your break to spring at Kent.  Well, it’s supposed to be spring.  There is little evidence of the bright season, despite what the calendar tells us (spring is allegedly two weeks old).  But, more dependably, we can say that this is Holy Week, a time when Christians from all over the world are remembering and celebrating the events at the end of Jesus’s life.  Holy Week began last Sunday with Palm Sunday.  On this day, Jesus is hailed as a messianic king, with the crowd waving palms as he enters Jerusalem on a donkey.  If you attended a Palm Sunday service, you were given palms to commemorate this triumphant entry, just before Passover.  Palm Sunday is a day of seeming triumph, but everything is turned upside down by the end of the week.

So what happens tonight?  Instead of doing king-like things, Jesus instead washes the feet of his disciples.  Jesus knows he is going to die, and he decides to humble himself, in preparation for the cross.  Amazing things do happen this week, but not the ones people were looking for.  Jesus fails by the standards of the world.  How often do we miss the wonders of our own time because they’re not what we’re looking for?  I think there is a reason we tend to miss the important events of this week, and the way that they can transform us.  It is our tendency to avoid or to look away from the painful elements in our lives.  But avoidance of pain can create more pain, in ways both large and small.  In Holy Week, we embrace the painful end of the life of Jesus, and in doing so, we directly engage the broken parts of our own world.  And the broken parts in ourselves.  We go against our instincts, faithfully—and we move by faith into the darkness.    

So tonight we follow John’s gospel where, instead of celebrating the Last Supper as in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus washes the feet of his disciples.  This evening is called Maundy Thursday, from the Latin, because of the mandate Jesus gives us this evening: “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.  Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.  By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”    

Tonight Jesus transforms conventional concepts of power.  Powerful people, would be kings, are not supposed to wash people’s feet.  Jesus chooses the role of the servant, the lowest of the low.  Many of our concepts are shaken this week; here power and weakness are not what we think they are.  Jesus washes the feet of his disciples out of love.  Where power ends, love begins.  Perhaps being weak is not the opposite of being powerful, after all.  Love turns things upside down.  Consider all of the kings of history who are forgotten, yet there remains something still to be learned from a messiah who would suffer. 

Everything I’ve said so far is serious.  Holy Week is serious; it can hit you in a deep place.  But the truth is that tonight is the least stressful chapel of the year for me.  It’s a wonderful mess when we take Jesus at his word, and start washing each other’s feet.  Foot washing is kind of goofy; it’s funny; it’s more than a little weird; and it sometimes goes on for too long.  Our feet are mostly hidden in shoes, where we think they belong.  And it’s no longer normal to have your feet washed, as it was at the time of Jesus. 

Among the washers tonight, some program notes: Dr. Greene’s foot washing is notable because he adds a little foot massage.  And Father Schell is much more than a foot washer, he’s more like a weather system.  Watch his moves carefully, because it looks like rain. 

Foot washing is a new kind of language, one which you learn best through experience. 

            When I was in college, many years ago, I worked for two summers at an Easter Seals camp for the disabled in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California.  I worked as a counselor, and many of our campers had severe disabilities.  We provided care for the campers, meeting all of their daily needs.  It was hard work, full of multi-tasking.  Several weeks into my first summer, I learned that the campers were watching us very carefully, and placing us into one of two categories: good touch vs. bad touch.  You can easily imagine what these categories might signify.  Helping a person eat, dress, bathe, everything.  Do you do it with good touch or bad touch?  Do you treat them as a person or as an object?  Good touch, in all of its forms, was about honoring another person’s humanity—and seeing them as a human being of value. 

            The foot washing tonight is about honoring the humanity of the person right in front of you.

Things you don’t have to worry about while you’re getting your feet washed. 

College acceptance or rejection.  You start with value as a human being.  You don’t lose it or gain it based on what some college has to say about you.  We forget this so easily, but a simple ritual can bring it back.  If you got some rejections over the break, you can bounce back, right now, with a 2,000 year old foot splash.  It could be just what you need.   

You don’t need to worry about politics tonight, or where you’re from, or even what religion you are.  All are welcome. 

Pain and disappointment in your life are still here tonight, but they’re different.  Something has changed.  A door is opened.  Tonight is about how we treat each other; how we discover God--where God really is in our lives.  On his last mortal night on earth, Jesus chose a foot washing for his disciples.  So we move by faith into the darkness tonight, and Good Friday tomorrow.  Tonight we honor Jesus by accepting his mandate, and we honor each other and our common humanity with the good touch of Maundy Thursday. 

 “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.  Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.  By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”