Rev. Kevin M. Pleas

John 13:1, 2b-17, First Corinthians 13:13 February 15, 2009

After he had washed their feet, had put on his robe, and had returned to the table, he said to them, "Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord - and you are right, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet.

And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

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Rev. Kathryn Timpany, senior pastor of First Congregational UCC of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, shared some interesting thoughts with her church around Valentine's Day a couple of years ago. The opening of her sermon went like this:

To compensate for the fact that it can kill you with its cold shoulder, winter gets to be beautiful. When moisture falls, it is thick and white, and when the wind asks it to dance, the result is art. Shapes and shadows appear where once there was only air ... Perhaps this is why Valentine's Day falls deep in the heart of winter. Yes, the days are getting longer - there is hope! - but do not think you are done with [the] aching and worry [of winter.] ... You need a little art in the middle of [it.] You need a little love, and love is what you get on this most Hallmark of Holidays. Love, pink love.

She has a point. Valentine's Day always does fall in what we sometimes call the "dead" of winter. Most of the people I've come to know up here in Maine have at least some appreciation for all four of the seasons. Still, in these cold winter days there's nothing at all wrong with paying little attention to the warmth of love.

Love is, after all, something we all need; something we don't tend to do very well without. An old story tells of an Iowa farmer who had been married for 20 years. During that time his wife often complained that he did not tell her that he loved her, which irritated him no end. One Sunday at dinner after church his wife again complained. He drew himself up from the table, stood erect and declared: "my dear, when I married you 20 years ago I told you that I loved you; if it changes, I will let you know."

When I was teenager, my older brother Mike had a sign on his bedroom wall that said, "Love is not a promise for the future, it is a reassurance for the present." There's a lot of truth in that. Most of us would hardly feel well loved if the people in our lives only got around to telling us once every 20 years or so. We need more reassurance than that. We need to know we're cared for on a more regular basis. Let's say we changed this story so that it was about food instead of love. The wife was starving and constantly begging her husband to feed her. But he just gets huffy and says "look, I fed you 20 years ago so stop complaining." Obviously, we can go a lot longer without spiritual and emotional food than we can without physical food. But in either case, we will eventually starve if we don't get what we need.

Where love is concerned though, getting what we need isn't always easy. I wonder what we'd think about human love if we came to this country from another planet. We'd listen to the commercials and the songs on the radio. We'd read the most popular books or watch almost any television show. We'd likely get the impression there is an abundance of love in this country. After all it seems to be everywhere. Actually though, what is everywhere is not so much love as it is talk about love, fantasy about love, hunger for love. The actual experience of love is far less common. Going back to that person who was starving, it wouldn't surprise anyone to hear that all he or she could think about was food. In food's absence, we become fixated on eating. And by the same token, if we seem to be fixated on love it isn't necessarily because there is an abundance. More likely, it's because love is the one thing that "there's just too little of."

Still, it's not like there isn't any love around. One of the great things about my job is that I regularly get to work with couples who want me to marry them. All of those people are in love; head over heels. But the love of young, though it may be our best fantasy, isn't the only way love comes to us. Not by a long shot. In the prologue to the book "Leadership Jazz," Max DePree shares a wonderful and very personal story. He writes:

Esther, my wife, and I have a granddaughter named Zoe, the Greek word for life. She was born prematurely and weighed 1 pound, 7 ounces, so small that my wedding ring could slide up her arm to her shoulder. The neonatologist who first examined her told us that she had only a 5 to 10 percent chance of living three days. When Esther and I scrubbed up for our first visit and saw Zoe in her isolette in the neonatal intensive care unit, she had two IVs in her navel, one in her foot, a monitor on each side of her chest, and [both] a respirator tube and a feeding tube in her mouth.

To complicate matters, Zoe's biological father had jumped ship the month before Zoe was born. Realizing this, a wise and caring nurse named Ruth gave me my instructions. "For the next several months at least, [she said] you're her surrogate father. I want you to come to the hospital every day to visit Zoe, and when you come, I want you to rub her body and her legs and arms with the tip of your finger. While you're caressing her, you should tell her over and over how much you love her, because she has to be able to connect your voice to your touch."

Because of the love she received, both in his voice and his touch, Zoe beat the odds and lived. DePree later realized that his relationship with God followed much the same pattern. "God knew that we also need both his voice and his touch. So he gave us not only the words of Scripture, but also the actual physical presence of his son Jesus."

From our Christian point of view, no one has ever had more to teach us about love than Jesus. This morning's passage, about Jesus washing the feet of his disciples, strikes me as one of the most beautiful in all the Gospels. "Having loved his own, who were in the world," it says, "he loved them to the end." The way he showed his love for them was by washing their feet. The passage seems beautiful to me because it so wonderfully captures the example Jesus was trying to set for us. "Do you know what I have done to you?" he asked them. What he'd done was graphically demonstrate the compassion and humility with which they were to treat one another, and with which they were to proclaim the Gospel to all the world. We claim Jesus as the son of God. He is the most exalted person in human history as far as our faith is concerned. He is "The gift of the father's unfailing grace, the ground of our hope, and the promise of our deliverance from sin and death," according to the Methodist statement of faith I grew up with. And yet he humbled himself before his closest disciples in a way that is actually far more dramatic than we usually realize.

Morton Kelsey, talking about this passage, says that in Jesus' time, "the foot was considered one of the most disgraceful parts of the human body. Among modern Middle Eastern peasants it is still impolite to speak of the foot without saying excuse me. The feet of those who walked through the streets of Jerusalem were stained with sewage ... only the lowliest servant or slave was given the task of washing the feet of the household or of guests." In our more hygienic times, we don't have quite the same reaction to feet as they did. But we're still a bit embarrassed about them aren't we. I remember an old commercial for Dr. Scholl's charcoal shoe inserts. It featured a pair of shoes with skunks crawling around in them. That's a pretty clear message.

In my ministry I've had a couple of chances to perform foot washing ceremonies with the youth groups I've led. My first happened at a junior high retreat while I was still a student in seminary. After showing a film of the last days of Jesus' life, we all gathered outside in a little portico off the main building. Without warning them in advance, and without speaking, I removed my own shoes and made it clear they should do the same. Then I moved around the circle from person to person, washing and drying one pair of sweaty feet after another. When I was finished, a couple of the kids spontaneously did the same for me. Then we all sat in silence together. I have no idea how the kids responded to that service, or what they remember. But I remember it as one of the more powerful experiences of my entire ministry.

A few years later, I was talking about this experience with my ministers group out in Illinois. The local Baptist minister told me in their church foot washing was a yearly practice; a service he led for his church every year during Lent. Somewhere along the way he became frustrated that all his church members who came to the service made a practice every year of carefully washing their feet ahead of time. He said he thought that by doing that they were missing the whole spirit of the thing. So one year, he decided to try doing it when they were so prepared. A large number of his members, he explained, took an active role in the local church softball league. One day, immediately following a long afternoon of softball, on a hot day in the middle of the Midwestern summer, he gathered his flock in a circle right there on the grass and washed all their feet. I could just picture them all cringing in embarrassment, but I'm sure Jesus was smiling. That's what he did. Washing his disciple's feet wasn't merely a symbolic gesture; it was the performance of a filthy task as an act of deep humility and a demonstration of compassionate love.

We make far too much of the feelings of love and far too little of the ongoing, sometimes tedious, sometimes exhausting commitment of love. And this is true even in our romantic relationships. C.S. Lewis once said: "Being in love is a good thing, but it is not the best thing ... Love ... is a deep unity maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habits reinforced by the grace which both partners ask and receive from God.... On this love the engine of marriage is run; being in love was [merely] the explosion that started it." (Italics mine)

Along the same lines, Stephen Covey, in his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, tells this story:

At one seminar where I was speaking ... a man came up and said, "Stephen, I like what you're saying. But every situation is so different. Look at my marriage. I'm really worried. My wife and I just don't have the same feelings for each other we used to have. I guess I just don't love her anymore and she doesn't love me. What can I do?"

"The feeling isn't there anymore?" I asked.

"That's right," he reaffirmed. "And we have three children we're really concerned about. What do you suggest?"

"Love her," I replied.

"I told you, the feeling just isn't there anymore."

"Love her."

"You don't understand. The feeling of love just isn't there."

"Then love her. If the feeling isn't there, that's a good reason to love her."

"But how do you love when you don't love?"

"My friend, love is a verb. Love - the feeling - is a fruit of love, the verb. So love her. Serve her. Sacrifice. Listen to her. Empathize. Appreciate. Affirm her. Are you willing to do that?"

Now make no mistake, that's a hard thing Covey asked that man to do; loving someone when you don't feel like it can be a bear. But then again, where on earth did we get the idea that love was supposed to be easy? Love is a verb. What a great message! On this most recent and hopefully every future Valentines Day, amid our celebration of love's romance, may we not forget the greater love of self-sacrifice: the love that tenderly rubs a premature chest as a surrogate father, the love that isn't ashamed to lower itself to washing feet, the love that continues to love even when the "the feelin's gone." This is the love that bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things and endures all things. This is the love that is, "the greatest of these."

Amen.