Sermon for Maundy Thursday: "Unsurrendering Love"

Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hanged for treason by the order of Adolf Hitler at Flossenburg Concentration Camp on 9 April 1945 - eighty years ago last week.  I have been continually challenged and comforted by Bonhoeffer’s writings and the stories of his life, most notably his choice in 1939 to return to Germany and continue his work in the Confessing Church, resisting both the Nazi Party and the majority of German Christians who had fallen in line with the government.  He had the option to remain in the United States, but Bonhoeffer insisted, “I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people.”  Within months Bonhoeffer was a co-consiprator against Hitler, working to smuggle Germany Jews out of the country, using his ecumenical contacts to try and alert the Allies to the presence of an active resistance within Nazi Germany, and providing counsel to the people who were involved in several plots against Hitler from within the military intelligence community.  Bonhoeffer was arrested in April 1943; after a lengthy period of imprisonment and interrogation,  Bonhoeffer and others were sent to Buchenwald Concentration Camp, then to Flossenburg, where they were executed.    

In a July 1944 letter from Tegel Prison in Berlin to his friend Eberhard Bethge, Bonhoeffer wrote something I want to tie to the gospel reading for this service:

“Christians... have no last line of escape available from earthly tasks and difficulties into the eternal, but, like Christ himself, they must drink the earthly cup to the dregs, and only in their doing so is the crucified and risen Lord with them, and they crucified and risen with Christ.  This world must not be prematurely written off...”

“Like Christ himself, [Christians] must drink the earthly cup to the dregs.”  In the Gospel of John it is written, “Having loved his own who were in the world, [Jesus] loved them to the end.”  This commitment to see things through “to the end” is, I believe, the essence of what gathers us here tonight.  

Tonight is Maundy Thursday.  “Maundy” comes from the Latin mandatum, “commandment.”  We call it “Maundy Thursday” because of what Jesus said to and did for his disciples on his last night together with them.  He kneeled and washed their feet, a chore generally regarded as beneath even the lowliest servants.  He broke bread with his friends, even though one of them would leave the meal to betray Jesus to the authorities who wished him dead.  He commanded them:  “love one another as I have loved you.”  Then Jesus continued to love his disciples to the very end of his life; abandoned, rejected, scorned, humiliated, flogged, crucified and executed.  These are the deeds of the One who loves his followers to the dregs, to the very end, to the bottom of the bitter cup.  

This is not an easy thing for us to gather and remember.  It is a far cry from Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem that we celebrated on Sunday.  Even the crucifixion is easier to handle if it’s interpreted in a certain way.  I remember a shirt I used to wear that had a picture of Jesus doing a push-up with the cross on his back with a “Lord’s Gym” logo underneath.  The idea, of course, was that Jesus took on the cross the way the Cornhuskers take on the Hawkeyes, or Reál Madrid takes on Barcelona:  the ultimate rivalry, the grudge match, the game in which the good guys must emerge triumphant. 

No one comes out triumphant on Maundy Thursday.  Judas left to betray Jesus to the authorities. Peter and the rest of the disciples fell asleep while Jesus prayed and ran when Jesus was arrested.  And Jesus?  He surrendered.  Utterly.  No resistance, no protest of innocence.  Jesus let himself be taken into the hands of authorities who would rather see him dead than hear any more about the relentless, unconditional love and mercy he had been preaching.  

There’s only one thing Jesus did not surrender on his last night with his disciples:  his love.  The gospel of John tells us, “Having loved his own who were in the world, Jesus loved them to the end.”  
He surrendered his privilege when he knelt and washed his disciples’ feet.  
He surrendered his trust when Judas betrayed him with a kiss. 
He surrendered his dignity when the priests and authorities questioned and tortured him.   
He surrendered his power and his authority when he was paraded through the streets and crucified, an execution meant for the deadliest enemies of the state.  
But Jesus would not surrender his love for his disciples, then or now. 

This is what it means to “love to the end.”  This is what makes Jesus’ commandment a “new” commandment.  There was nothing new about the commandment to “love one another”— that had been one of the two great commandments since the time of the Exodus.  What makes Jesus’ commandment “new” is Jesus’ living example of the lengths to which that love will go.  God will give up everything else in God’s unsurrendering love for sinners.  This is not the sort of love you find in a Hallmark Christmas movie or a Harlequin romance novel - that’s the sort of love the Greeks called eros, and while there’s nothing at all wrong to have that kind of love, it’s not the word that’s used here. The Greek word used in this chapter of John is agape. Its Hebrew equivalent is chesed. It’s the sort of love that sacrifices for the sake of the beloved. In the Psalms we translate it as “lovingkindness” or “steadfast love,” and above all else, it does. not. surrender.  Ever.  This love drinks the earthly cup to the dregs.  This love goes all the way to the end.

This message of love hasn't been getting a lot of air time recently in this part of the world.  You and I both know that there are a lot of people right now who insist that there are limits and conditions to God's love, and that there are limits and conditions on how God's church should be living out that love in this part of the world.  Allow me to make this as clear as I possibly can:  those. people. are. wrong. The God we worship loves you without limit, without condition.  The God we worship will love you all the way to the end.  The gospel is clear:  in a world that has always been far too worried about what separates us and makes us different, the unsurrendering love of God is the thing that unites us in love and makes us siblings in this family God has called together from all across the world.  

The first letter of John says, “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.”  Take this time tonight and consider what it means to be God’s beloved. You, tonight, as you are in this moment, are the intended recipient of God’s unsurrendering love.  The cross is the final proof of God’s relentless, unsurrendering love.  The gospel says “Having loved his own who were in the world, Jesus loved them to the end.”  You are his own, brought into the body of Christ through your baptism in his name.  You are his own in the world, tonight, remembering the night long ago when Jesus gave us this meal by which we remember his love for us, and in which we are made part of the story ourselves.  Now, friends, know this – to the very last end of all that was, is, or ever will be, you are the object of God’s unsurrendering love.  Believe in that love – live in that love – serve in that love, now and forever.  Amen.

Cultivating Love through Response

We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love…So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another…Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear…Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.

—Ephesians 4.14-16, 25, 29, 31-32—

A few years ago, when my wife Kristin and I were serving a congregation in Iowa, we became friends with John Sheahan, the local middle school principal. John was a member of the other ELCA congregation in our school district, and our churches cooperated on a number of different ministries, including a shared youth ministry program. When John retired from the middle school, he discerned a call into ministry and entered the TEEM program at Wartburg Seminary. I was blessed to serve as a clergy mentor to John during his time at Wartburg; I say “blessed” because I learned as much or more from John as he did from me.

On Prophetic Preaching: A Statement

“As a prophetic presence, this church has the obligation to name and denounce the idols before which people bow, to identify the power of sin present in social structures, and to advocate in hope with poor and powerless people. When religious or secular structures, ideologies, or authorities claim to be absolute, this church says, ‘We must obey God rather than any human authority’ (Acts 5:29). With Martin Luther, this church understands that to rebuke those in authority through God’s Word spoken publicly, boldly and honestly is not seditious but “a praiseworthy, noble, and particularly great service to God.’”

So says Church in Society: A Lutheran Perspective, the first ELCA Social Statement, passed in 1991. Our confessional witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ has always included a political dimension. The Reformation would have been very different if Luther had not been protected by a politician, Elector Frederick the Wise, following his refusal to recant at the Diet of Worms. Luther regularly exhorted the nobility of his day to provide for the people entrusted to their care, regularly providing private counsel and public statements on the issues of his day. The church and the state being accountable to each other and to God from their respective realms of authority has been a mainstay of Lutheran theology and practice for over 500 years. 

Many people have said a lot of things about Bishop Mariann Budde’s sermon yesterday at the National Cathedral. While Bishop Budde is not sworn to the same confessional teachings as I am, being a minister of the Anglican communion, I found her words to be exactly the thing to which the ELCA committed itself over 30 years ago: a bold, honest, public rebuke of those in authority, an act of advocacy on behalf of those who have neither the power nor the means to offer that word themselves. I applaud her courage and I gladly join her in exhorting those in authority, regardless of their party, faith, or any other affiliation, to realize that their words, principles, and policies will affect more than their supporters, and that they have a duty and responsibility to all of the children of God that have been entrusted to their care.