Stewardship, Part 3: “Gifts”
November 5, 2023 - All Saints’ Day
John 13:1-17
Pastor Mike
Every year on All Saints’ Day, we honor and learn from those who have walked the way of faith ahead of us and whose stories serve as examples of the many different ways our lives might be offered to Christ. When the stories are particularly powerful, when another person’s love and faithfulness grip our imagination and help us to grow, we call them saints. In the languages of the Old and New Testaments, the word for “saints” is the same as the word for “holy.” Chadoshim in Hebrew. Hagioi in Greek. Holy ones – that’s what saints are. If something is holy it is set apart for a special purpose. Saints are not perfect, because no one is perfect. No, what makes them remarkable is that they made of their lives a perfect offering. They set all that they had and all that they were at God’s disposal, consented to the Spirit, and served the poor and hurting of their time and place.
If we are lucky, we have rubbed shoulders with saints, have learned from and been loved by people whose faith and vitality were contagious. All of us can be touched by the saints whose lives transcended a particular time and place and whose stories have inspired Christians for generations –people like Benedict, Frances, Hildegard, Ignatius, the Wesley brothers, Dr. King, and Dorothy Day.
The saints help us walk the Way. They set examples that we can follow. And it is this language of example that brings us to our Gospel passage, this scene from John which captures Jesus’ most famous act of service and his most direct instructions about love. Jesus came to set his life before us as a perfect example. He was full of grace and truth, and manifested the pure love of God in human gestures and words and attitudes so that, through his Spirit, we could manifest it, too. After the foot washing Jesus tells the disciples, “I have set you an example, that you should do as I have done to you. …If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them” (vv. 15, 17). This is Christ’s gift to us. He has set us an example.
The piece of his example that we immediately leap to when reading this story is the foot washing itself. In Jesus’ time, most roads were just dirt roads and people wore sandals everywhere they went. Feet were considered the lowliest part of the body as they were constantly covered in dust and grime. Household servants or slaves were given the task of washing their master’s feet, or the feet of their master’s houseguests, whenever they entered the home. Foot washing was both commonplace and a matter of caste, of honor and shame.
In his disciples’ eyes, Jesus was a privileged person. He was a powerful teacher, healer, and wonder worker. They called him teacher and lord. If anyone was going to have his feet washed, it should be Jesus. Yet he stooped down and took the place of a slave. He committed a scandal. He totally inverted established social stratification and household hierarchy. This is why Peter protested so passionately. Jesus challenges the prevailing values of his world by taking a position the world considers shameful, fit only for those at the very bottom, and blessing from the bottom up. That is part of his example. “I have set you an example, that you should do as I have done to you.”
Even so, to leap there right away, right to the loving, scandalous act, is to miss something of great importance. Jesus’ loved and blessed out of his own spiritual abundance. He drew from an endless reservoir of divine favor. In one moment he could be the host, the next the servant, because classifications and ranking of that kind had been dissolved in the Father’s love. If we leap right to the act, the fruit, we miss the foundation which makes the act possible, the roots sunk down into God’s life. This is the first part of Jesus’ example: if we are to offer our lives as a gift to the world, we must first receive our lives as a gift from God.
Hear verses 3 & 4 of chapter 13 again: “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 and laid aside His garments, took a towel and girded Himself.”
Jesus knew that he had come from God, that God was his origin, his source, his native home.
Jesus knew that he was returning to God, that God was his destination, his goal, his true end.
And Jesus knew, in that moment at sitting at the table with this friends, that God the Father had put all things into his hands.
Jesus knew that he belonged to God through and through. God was his beginning, middle, and end. That deep assurance opened his life and he was able to receive all things – all wisdom, all love, all authority. He held it. It was at his disposal. And what did he do with it? He washed feet. He brought dignity and glory to the lowest, most menial position. And he did it without embarrassment, self-consciousness, guilt, or pride because he had located his worth and identity in a source beyond the temporal social classifications of his culture.
What does it mean to believe that God is your source?
It means trusting that you are “fearfully and wonderfully made,” that God has knit you together in secret. If you know that you have come from God, then you know God wants you in this life, that God has formed you in his image and spoken a word of original goodness over you. No one else, nothing else, no story, no wound, no scathing word you might level at yourself, has a prior claim on you than God’s word. God knows your true name. God has loved you from the start.
What does it mean to believe that God is your end, that you are returning to God?
It means trusting that God has prepared plans for you, and good works for you to do. If God is the direction you are moving, then there is a purposefulness and meaningfulness to your life. God has not brought you into this life, into this wilderness, so that you might perish. God is with you until the end. God sees the end and provides for you. And when you come to the end of your understanding, the end of your strength, even the end of your lives, God is the one who receives us in death and beyond death, and weaves the thread of our story into the great tapestry of God’s story.
When we trust that we are God’s from beginning to end, when we know that from all eternity and to all eternity, God’s word over and in us is Love, we no longer have to cling to our lives as if they are our possession, as if we have to wrangle them into some semblance of respectability or worthiness in the lives of others, as if our worth depends on us. When God tells us who we are, we can open our hands and have all necessary things. We can give our lives to others. “We love because he first loved us.”
Every one of us must face and work through whatever woundedness or inner darkness sabotages our sense of having love as our origin and love as our end. There are often things said or not said, done or not done, to us as children which make it difficult to trust that love is our native home. Sometimes, as we grow, we don’t fit the molds the world supplies, we are misunderstood or mistreated by those closest to us, we make mistakes and write inner stories about our unworthiness. We become attached to things – habits and relationships, possessions and pursuits – that shore up our self-esteem, keep our depression at bay, and distract us from underlying pain.
We can never offer ourselves as a gift to others if we do not first possess ourselves, and we cannot possess ourselves if we look anywhere other than God for the key to our identity. You are God’s Beloved. Christ will come to meet you at your very lowest point – in the depths of your shame and self-talk, your spiritual or material poverty, and will take hold of you, will lovingly wash you. We must, like Peter, relent and allow Jesus to meet us at the bottom. Only by passing through our blockages can we feel that life is a gift that we have received and now want to give.
The saints are saints because God loves them. And God loves you, too.
In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Amen.