These are Rituals that Shape Us

April 17, 2025 - Maundy Thursday

My friends, I speak to you tonight in the name of one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.

Tonight, I’m thinking a lot about rituals. The reason might be obvious, given our location, given the chairs to my left, given that it’s my first year leading our practice of them here with you at Epiphany. Tonight, in just a few minutes, actually, I’ll invite you to come forward for “The Foot-Washing,” as it’s called in your bulletins. Later in the service, we’ll have “The Stripping of the Altar,” another Christian ritual unique to Maundy Thursday, one where we remember the stripping of Jesus before his crucifixion, a story which we read last Sunday and which we’ll read again tomorrow on Good Friday. We have a silent procession after this service, a prayer vigil. We have the Holy Eucharist.

These rituals help give us meaning here in the church, more on that in a minute. But there are other rituals in our lives too, all with varying degrees of symbolic or religious meaning. Some of us recently filled out our annual March Madness brackets; that can be seen as a ritual. Others recently made their annual pilgrimage to warmer climates for the winter... maybe a bit of a stretch, more of a tradition, but that’s a ritual in some ways too. I remember a baseball player named Nomar Garciaparra who would always do the exact same routine with his batting gloves and his belt and his helmet, a ritual with superstitious meaning for him to be sure... more obviously, others make the sign of the cross, either on the athletic field or at various times in church services and elsewhere, often to remind themselves of their faith in God.

All of these rituals, some of them that we do so often we can do them unconsciously, well, they are actively shaping us. Philosopher and theologian James K.A. Smith writes a lot about this; one of my favorite books of his is “You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit.” In it, Smith accessibly presents the Augustinian concept that we are shaped by what we love far more than by what we think, and what we love is most easily shown by what we do, in action, in deed, rather than by what we say or profess. The rituals we perform, the ways we spend our time, these are not just an expression of who we are, but they are actively shaping and changing who we are as well. Both love and action... these are the parts of the Christian faith most clearly available to us here tonight.

In the lectionary texts for Maundy Thursday, we have stories that would become rituals for us thousands of years later. We begin in Exodus, where God institutes a covenant meal with God’s beloved people, Israel. The Passover meal is one of bloodshed of a spotless lamb, of unleavened bread and bitter herbs. There are specific instructions given to Moses and Aaron: they have to eat everything they prepare, they have directions on what to wear. It is a covenantal meal, a sacrament, a ritual, a sign and seal of God’s favor and grace for them, a sign of their devotion to and love for their God.

And of course, we have the Last Supper and the washing of the disciples’ feet in the Gospel text. We skip over the bread and wine piece in the Gospel of John, but it’s in the other three gospels as happening at the same time, and we have it in the 1 Corinthians reading that Karen read for us tonight as well. We have Passover, but it is being redefined by Jesus: this is their covenantal meal, but the new covenant is of his own flesh and his blood, the meal is the bread and the wine. They don’t understand exactly what he means in that part just yet, because he has not yet died and risen from the dead – this spotless lamb has yet to be sacrificed – but the foot washing piece is pretty clear. “If I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash another’s feet.” Like I said, it’s pretty clear. “Servants are not greater than their masters,” Jesus explains, and he says it with a clear action. In their culture, this was a crystal-clear way to show the sort of love he had for them, the sort of love he intends for us.

Jesus then gives them a commandment, straight and to the point: Love one another just as I have loved you... not as we might love ourselves, or as we might love our neighbor, but just as Jesus loves us. That love will be how people will know we are Jesus’s disciples... They will know we are Christians by our love. Not by words or by what we post on social media or by our book choices or how we vote or by what we preach in our sermons or even by what we say to ourselves in secret, but simply by loving as Jesus loved us. And how much Jesus loves us would be shown in full display, in his actions, in the events of tomorrow.

So, where is all this going? Where is the good news for us tonight, on this Maundy Thursday that will end in solemn silence heading into Good Friday? Every sermon needs to preach the good news of the gospel. Well, these rituals that have been enacted annually for centuries upon centuries by Christians of good faith, rituals enacted in order to shape Christians in the way of love, in the way of Christ... they are available to us here tonight, and they are available to us every Sunday morning too. Foot-washing can be a bit awkward – I’ve usually tried to avoid it myself throughout the years – because we don’t have the cultural connection the disciples had with this act. Some of us don’t want anyone touching our feet, and that’s okay, it is optional tonight. But it is still humbling, it is still equalizing, it is still an act of welcome and an act of service unlike any other we have in the church. It is a beautiful ritual. It’s is a meaningful and holy tradition.

And the other shaping, Christian ritual is one we are far more familiar with, that of the Holy Eucharist, of the bread and the wine shared at the Last Supper. The text Karen read from 1 Corinthians is familiar to us because we pray it every single Sunday in the Episcopal Church, just as they do in countless other Christian traditions. When we pray the Eucharistic Prayer and partake in Holy Communion, we remember this night, this holy and important Maundy Thursday, and we remember the charge Jesus gave his disciples before his death, the charge to love one another.

In this sacred mystery of the Eucharist, we “remember” in the common sense, recalling and reflecting on Jesus and his death and resurrection. But we also re-member (re dash member), we reenact this meal together around this table, we re-constitute the body of Christ together as we consume the spiritual food and sustenance that gives us a chance to continue in this work of loving as Jesus loved us. We cannot do this with him.

These lived experiences of Jesus’s closest disciples became stories passed around local first-century communities, which became feasts and practices and rituals of the body of believers by the time Paul was writing to the church in Corinth. And the good news for us tonight is that we get to live them out again this Holy Week in the year 2025, we get to remember and re-member the Last Supper and the Foot Washing. And then, in the next 72 hours, we’ll have the chance to continue to dive more deeply into our faith through the rituals our tradition has long practiced and continues to lay before us.

May these rituals continue to shape us here tonight and shape all of us who practice them into Christians, into those who would continue to choose to follow Jesus Christ in his radical, world-changing, foot-washing way of love.

Amen.