It’s Maundy Thursday. The night of Holy Week in which many Christians commemorate the Last Supper of Jesus and his disciples. Churches all over the world are serving up the bread and the wine, many as I write this.
Once the church I grew up in started making it part of the Holy Week tradition, the Maundy Thursday service became my favorite service of the year. But it’s been a long time since I’ve been to one. My last church never observed Holy Week. And, well, toddler life prevents a lot of things from happening in the evening hours.
And for as long as it has been since I’ve been to a Maundy Thursday service, it’s been even longer since I have craved Jesus. It’s been even longer since I have had a sense of God at work in this world. There is entirely too much broken. Latent racism and intolerance has once again become overt in this election year. The wounds of a dictatorship and exile were opened once again when our president stepped foot onto Cuban soil and a baseball game was one of the celebrated highlights of the tour. Another set of suicide bombings in Europe has reminded us that extremism looms large–and has for a long time in some parts of the world but hit our Western doorstep again, prompting us to lower our flags to half staff. The legislature in my home state rushed into an emergency session to pass one of the most discriminating pieces of legislation arguably since the Jim Crow era.
And that’s just this week.
As I stand here and stir the pot that contains my dinner, my husband is stirring the pot alongside a friend and many others at a protest against HB2. Many of my friends are commemorating the subversive, pot stirring movement of Jesus. I’m performing the mundane tasks of the daily routine, all the while craving the body and the blood….the bread and the wine…the unmistakable presence of love and acceptance in our world.
Because that’s what Holy Week is about. Love. Sacrifice. Welcome. Hospitality. A way in for all. A command to love and care for one another just as Jesus did for us.
Rhymes with Bucket 