Sermon for Maundy Thursday 2020

Sermon begins at 14:18

So here we coming to you once again from our dining room. Now I have said mass in all sorts of places, and I have said mass in homes and on dining room tables, but I never imagined that I would be observing Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter, the holiest observances of the Christian year, from a chapel slash makeshift TV studio in my house.

There hasn’t been much to laugh about these past few weeks, but whenever I stand here to preach, I can’t help but be slightly amused that my choir and congregation have been replaced by a china cabinet. I think we’ve done a fairly good job of turning a dining room into an attractive, respectful and even prayerful space, but the marks of ordinary, everyday life or all over this place and I’m very aware of it.

Some of my grandmother’s dishes are in this cabinet. There is a teddy bear here that belonged to my other grandmother. This candelabra over here in the corner was a graduation present. There is a painting over there behind the camera that my mother painted. Family history and everyday life are all over this room.

There are also some funny things you can’t see. For instance, I’m standing on a cutting board. It’s not because I need the height, it’s because this floorboard over here in the corner is creaky and this was the best solution I could find to keep it from being a distraction.

I tried to bring some of the beautiful sacred items from our church here to lend some dignity to this chapel. I always want worship to be as beautiful as it possibly can be, but if you look under the surface what you will find is completely ordinary. Underneath the fair linen here on the altar is a consecrated altar stone, we are lucky to have an extra moveable one at Ascension. It is a square piece of marble that has been specially blessed to be a place where the sacrifice of the mass is said, but underneath that is a plastic card table.

Of course, the card table wasn’t quite tall enough for the frontal to hang right, so I had to prop up each leg on a paint can. That helped, but it still wasn’t tall enough, so I had to sit each paint can on old VHS tapes of Brideshead revisited. Finally that got the height just right. So with the exception of that altar stone, the most holy ritual of our religion, the rite in which we believe God offers his life to us under the forms of bread and wine, that is about to happen and has been happening on top of a bunch of stuff I found in the basement.

Just a bunch of common, everyday things, and yet with a little faith on our part and hopefully with a lot of blessing and grace on God’s part, they become something more than common. They become holy.

It occurred to me that on this night of all nights, Maundy Thursday, the night when we remember Our Lord’s last supper, his last Passover meal and the institution of the sacrament of his body and blood, on this night it isn’t just funny that we’re saying mass in our dining room. It’s actually fitting. Because a dining room is where this story begins. Up here above this china cabinet is a picture of the Last Supper. It’s a copy of DaVinci’s last supper and it belongs to Keith. And while I doubt that the Last Supper of Jesus looked exactly like that, still it gets the point across. Jesus is offering his disciples his body and blood, he is offering them his life….at a very ordinary dining table. And what he is using are the most ordinary elements: bread and wine. He takes the most common thing in the world and turns it into the most precious. All this time, every meal we have had in here, Jesus has been quietly up here presiding over it. But it’s a reminder that the most sacred meal in the history of the earth happened in a very ordinary dining room, with some very ordinary people, eating very ordinary things.

But look at what God can do with ordinary things. Not only does he transform bread and wine into his body and blood, but he transforms us who receive it into something else too. When we participate in the holy sacrifice of the mass we become more than what we already are. God takes very ordinary human beings and he transforms them into a new family. God takes rebellious, sinful people and he invites them into his life. God takes people of every imaginable difference and he pulls them together to the same table, feeds them with the same food and says “ok, you are a family now.” If you think of all the altars in all the churches throughout the world, some of them are unimaginably grand and some are just a few pieces of wood slapped together, but they all look back to that very ordinary table in the upper room in Jerusalem.

Meals are very ordinary things, we eat all the time and think nothing of it, but meals are also holy moments of connection. We are connected to the food which gives us life and joy; we are connected to each other in ways that give us identity and teach us love. The most ordinary thing we do is also one of the most sacred things we do, and God knows that. I think that as extraordinary as God is, maybe God wants us to see him and find him in ordinary things. Maybe that is why two of the most sacred rituals in all of scripture happen in dining rooms.

In our passage from Exodus, the Passover meal, that sacred meal when the children of Israel were huddled inside their homes eating the lamb. It wasn’t just a one-time thing. God commanded the Israelites to observe it as a perpetual ordinance. God didn’t want his children to ever forget his saving love for them and the way he tells them to memorialize that saving moment in history, was through a meal.

And many years later it was during one of those very meals when Our Lord demonstrated his saving love to his people once more, and once more he tells them to remember that moment, in a meal.

A very ordinary meal in a very ordinary place, becomes the most sacred thing on earth.

I know that many of you are longing to receive communion again. If you are someone who comes to the altar on a regular basis it can be very difficult to be kept away from the body and blood of our Lord. I know that many of you are longing to receive Christ sacramentally again, and you know what, that’s a good thing, because it means you understand how important this is. And when this is all past you will get to receive again and what a glorious day that will be, but until that day comes maybe it will help us to remember that this most holy extraordinary meal began as a very ordinary one. The most high God broke into our lives in the most common way in an ordinary dining room with plain old bread and wine. Maybe we can’t all receive the Holy Eucharist in our churches right now, but what other ordinary things might God be laying his hands on in our lives? In what other ways might God be taking things that are common or ugly or plain or broken and transforming them into something Holy? Maybe you can’t go and see Jesus in the church right now, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t coming to see you. Maybe you can’t come to receive him at the altar tonight, but that doesn’t mean that Christ isn’t offering his life to you in other ways through other ordinary things. Maybe you can’t go into God’s house right now, but that doesn’t mean that he can’t come into yours.

You know the Psalmist says it best today. (the Psalmist often says it best actually) The Psalmist says that when the Children of Israel were in the desert they railed against God and said “Can God set a table in the wilderness?”

And of course, God showed them that he can set a table anywhere he darned well pleases.