The Rev. Dr. Richard Valantasis, director of the Anglican Studies program at the Candler School of Theology at Emory, was the guest preacher for Holy Trinity's Maundy Thursday service.

This Holy Days of the Three-days of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday until Easter seem to challenge us.  We who participate enter a different world–one in which the One whom we love and devote our lives to, Jesus the Lord, is betrayed, suffers, is tried as a criminal, crucified, rests in the tomb, and then comes back to us resurrected and full of life.  All the while, our daily lives unfold.  In the evening we enter the great mysteries of our faith, but during the day, we go to meetings, take the kids to after-school projects, cook dinner, shop, watch television, take showers, wash clothes, and do all the things that life in the mundane world demand of us.  It's as though we live in two worlds, and this Holy Three days seems to underscore that there are indeed two worlds in which we live–the one of the mundane, worldly business and work world, and the other the world of mystery, of unfolding divine grace, of God breaking into the folds of our lives and making us think about another realm of existence.  In a sense, that is precisely why we celebrate these days–to remind us that the world in which we live is that other world of God as well as the day to day world of our business.

But which of these worlds is the real world?  That's the question we face.  Do we consider the work world of daily living "the reality," the true reality, and the world of God's inbreaking and ever-present energies as the add-on, the supplement, the neutritional additive, to the real world?  Or is the real world that world created by God, infused with divine energy, and radiant with divine love and yearning?  Which world is the true world?  Where do we choose to live?  Our Lenten time, now ended with these three days, has forced us to think about this question, and it's time for us to come to some conclusion?  Which world is the real world?  Which world demands our attention?  Which world drives our energies?  The time has come for commitment.

In my first parish, now nearly 33 years ago, there was a woman named Anne.  I was a young priest of about 25 years of age in my first parish, newly ordained.  The parish was an aging parish, and it had been in an interim situation for nearly two years before I was called as Rector.  The elders of the parish waited until there was a rector in place to die.  One by one over the first year, I found myself burying the elders.  It seemed that almost weekly we were doing the liturgy for the dead and celebrating the Eucharist at their burial.  Anne was a stay-at-home mom who was available to serve as lay reader and Eucharistic minister at the funerals, so we became a team in this ministry.

So Anne heard me preach weekly about the resurrection of the dead, the life of faith lived out in the community of the Body of Christ over which death had no dominion, the continuing presence of the departed (or as I prefer, those who have reposed in the Lord) in the community's Eucharistic celebration, the continuing life in Christ offered to those who have reposed, and the need for translating the grief of the loss into a Eucharistic prayer celebrating the presence of the reposed in the Body of Christ.  It was a powerful time of preaching for me, and I learned much as a young priest by doing so many burials.  So did Anne.

Many years later, I received a telephone call from her.  Anne was in the hospital.  For many years after I left the parish and moved on, she had been battling leukemia.  She had undergone many treatments, painful treatments, and they had limited success.  Her doctor had told her in this stay, that there was nothing more they could do.  She was going to die.  So she called me on the telephone and asked, "Richard, do you still believe everything you used to say at those many funerals we did so long ago?"  I said, "I most certainly do, and more?"  She responded, "So when we die, we stay part of the Body of Christ and we can connect the living and the dead when we come together in the Eucharist?"  I replied, "Most definitely."  So she explained her medical situation and asked if I would come help her and her family transition into the new life in her dying.  So I went to the hospital that afternoon.  Anne's husband and daughters and their spouses were there.  Both Anne and I talked about the theology of the Eucharist, of death and resurrection in Christ, of the continuing presence of the reposed in the Lord in the Body of Christ, and of the life offered to us in the Eucharist while still living.  Her family, in their grief at the death sentence given their mom and wife, seemed shell-shocked.  It was too much.  But we celebrated the Eucharist, and we all received communion together, and we began to live the Eucharistic life as a place of presence, of real presence, not only of Jesus, but of all the Body of Christ, living and reposed.

A few months passed, while Anne went home.  No more treatments were ordered.  Anne returned to the hospital, very weak, and it was clear that her body was dying.  She called again, we gathered yet again for a Eucharist, and we began the long and arduous watch with her as she began her painful departure from this life and into her life of repose.  It took weeks, and it was difficult.  

One evening, I got a telephone call from the nurses that Anne had begun her stoke breathing, and that she was losing consciousness.  We planned to meet early in the morning for a Eucharist.  Her daughters and husband who were with her attended her as she began to slip away.  In the morning, when I arrived, Anne was propped up in her bed.  Her eyes were already indicating that she was barely holding on to her body, but she was there.  We began the Eucharist, read the lessons, read a psalm, I preached a short homily, we prayed the Great Thanksgiving, and I began to distribute the Bread and Wine, the Body and Blood of Jesus, to Anne, but she wanted her husband, daughter, and brother (who had just arrived from out of town) to receive first.  Then, when I took the Body of Christ to Anne and put it in her mouth, she ate the bread, closed her eyes and reposed in the Lord.  We began to pray the Litany for the Dying, and commended her soul.  Anne reposed with Christ with the Body of Christ on her lips, and the Body of Christ surrounding her, and the Body of Christ the place where she would be able, as she told her family, to see her again whenever they wanted to.  

Anne had the question on her heart about what the real world was.  She struggled for years against the sense that the busy day to day world was real, and that her faith was something set apart, something different, an addition.  With her impending death, she began to reverse that.  She came back to the sense that the real world was the world in which the divine energy kept everything living, and in which God was a visible and acting agent, and in which the mystery of the faith was something real, tangible, and worthy of placing her life.  She was not depressed that she had wasted her life in the illusory world of day to day living, but she realized that the day to day world was indeed the illusion.  Jesus, the living Jesus, whose Body of Christ is the community of the faithful, was the reality, the true reality, that gave meaning to her life.  Jesus, the Body of Christ, was the true reality.

The Eucharist that we celebrate tonight is the reality.  We may run away from it.  We may spend a life-time ignoring it.  We may not understand it.  But it is the reality, the place where God transforms what seems and endless series of daily activities into the stuff of divine revelation.  It is the place where we hear our ancestors in the faith speak to us in the Scriptures, where we struggle through the sermon to hear a fresh word of God, where we train our eyes to look at the world from within the Body of Christ in our intercessions, where we investigate our hindrances to living in the true reality in confession, where we make peace with our enemies, and in the end where we offer our labors and efforts, even the mundane workaday world in which we live, to God as simple bread and wine.  The Eucharist is the place of that struggle, of that work.  It is no mere ritual.  It is the reality being performed in our midst, the reality of the mysterious presence of the Body of Christ working in, around, and through us.      

So our offering of bread and wine, our workaday worlds, become the occasion for the telling of God's story, the whole history of salvation beginning from creation and ending with your life, right now.  The priest prays this prayer for you, gathering up all the history of revelation, and weaving into it your life, your struggles, your griefs, your joys, and offers thanks over it, invoking the Holy Spirit to make all of it, every little part of it, every offering, invoking the Holy Spirit to make it the very Body and Blood of Christ.  Your offering, your prayers, your confession, your peace, all of your life comes to this altar and becomes Christ's Body, the presence of Jesus.  It is transformed.  It is sanctified.  It is renewed.  It is made a medicine of immortality.  Anne had experienced this.  I had.  We all can.  It is our birthright as Christians.
    
Tonight we begin that Eucharist with a foot-washing.  It is an important clue as to how we can come to see the real world of God made present in our midst.  We expose ourselves, our vulnerabilities, our weakness, our dirt, in exposing our feet to someone to cleanse.  We begin by acknowleding that we are part of a body, dirty feet and all, and we ask our brother or sister to wash our feet, to become part of our day to day world.  And at the same time we submit to the ministration of those around us.  We allow our feet to be washed.  In doing this we begin to break down the barriers of individualism, of isolation, of guarded relationships, and open ourselves to the reality that God is bigger than our categories, and that our participation in the Body of Christ demands a different way of relating to others, a different way of being in community, a different way of understanding our selves and our lives, yes even our illusory life of day to day living.  And once we have exposed ourselves, and allowed ministry to happen to us, the door is opened for the living Christ to become visible in your midst.  The mystery of the revelation of the real presence of Christ begins to be something seen, something tangible, something tactile, something real.  For in the end, it is Christ who washes your feet, and it is Christ's feet that you wash, for you are the Body of Christ, you are the members of God living forever, you are the agent of Christ in the world, you are part of God.  God washing.  God being washed.  God's reality being made visible in broken bread and shared cup.  You are the Body of Christ, the living and real presence of God in the world.  And that is real.  Very real.

So as we come closer to these mysteries, understand that you are coming to the heart of the mystery unfolding in your midst.  Train your eyes to see, and your ears to hear, and your lips to taste the really real, the truth, the reality of God with us.  For this is the reality that is placed before us, one that shows up illusion for what it is, and brings us at the same time into the eternal, mysterious, and ever-present and acting life of a God whose life supports us for ever.

The Reverend Dr. Richard Valantasis
Professor of Ascetical Theology and Christian Practice
Director of the Anglican Studies Program
Candler School of Theology, Emory University