SERMON FOR Maundy Thursday, APRIL 9, 2020

          I have missed you all so much this past month. But I am miserable without you this week, this Holy Week. The liturgies of Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday and Good Friday have had power for me like no other since my childhood. Then I was with my family among the saints of St. Martin’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, sitting next to my fidgeting grandmother, watching my father’s solemn face, verging on tears when my community sang the exquisite hymns that one time in the year. In the decades since I have gone with friends to worship among familiar faces, and sometimes on my own to congregations where I was unknown but not a stranger, joined as we were in the mystery of our Lord’s passion. I never imagined Holy Week in isolation, hearing the story of the night in which Jesus was betrayed, standing before his cross, alone.

          But here I am, me and my cameraman. “I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille.” Now it’s time for another hymn. I told my brother, and I’m dating myself here, I feel like Norma Zimmer of blessed memory, the Champagne Lady on the Lawrence Welk Show, who periodically took the stage to warble a hymn for the viewing audience. The experience of the last several weeks has brought home to me in a new way the importance of the corpus in corporate worship. A talking head is nothing like the gathered body of Christ.

          My sister-in-law sent me a picture of Leonardo DaVinci’s mural of the Last Supper, reconfigured as a Zoom broadcast. There Jesus sits, all by his lonesome at the big table, with pictures of the disciples in individual squares ranged across the top of the the screen. Just imagine, whenever one of them speaks in today’s Gospel, their box would become full screen. “And they became greatly distressed and began to say to him one after another, “Surely not I, Lord?” Poof, Jesus disappears and Peter pops in, to be replaced in turn by Andrew and James and John and so on. Jesus fills the screen once again as he answers them,”The one who has dipped his hand into the bowl with me will betray me. The Son of Man goes as it is written of him, but woe to the one by whom the Son of Man is betrayed! It would have been better for that one not to have been born.” Then Judas briefly eclipses the Lord as he dares to speak, “Surely not I, Rabbi?” And boom, Jesus gets the last word and the Active Speaker full screen, “You have said so.”

          But when it comes time to bless the bread and the wine, to give them to the disciples to share with one another and with him, the Lord confounds our telecommunication capabilities The sacrament is not amenable to remote conferencing. We can’t share the Lord’s Supper virtually; to do that would dilute the sacrament’s meaning and fall far short of its purpose. Sacraments are very specific means of grace. Both baptism and communion involve material elements and require physical bodies present and accounted for to use, receive, and share the water, bread and wine.

          In the case of communion, it is not about us individually getting our personal dose of the good stuff, a shot of grace as an antidote to sin. It is about Christ coming among us as we are gathered in his name in one place, to nourish us with his body and blood, and, as we stand side-by-side, beholding one another face-to-face, body touching body, to make us the body of Christ through that shared meal. Of course we miss it, and no remote synchronized self-serve imitation can take its place.

          I rest in these verses from the Book of Lamentations: “The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul that seeks him. It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord” (Lamentations 3:25-26). We will wait, some weeks not so quietly or patiently, but with confidence. “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. ‘The Lord is my portion,’ says my soul, ‘therefore I will hope in him.’” (Lamentations 3:22-24). We will celebrate the Supper again in this place, side-by-side, face-to-face, body touching body.

          The Lord’s Supper is a very specific means of grace, but it is not the only means of grace. We will not go away empty tonight. The bread and wine convey the Lord’s love to us in a tangible way, but the Word that proclaims that love, that Word has not been silenced. “This is my body given for you,” given over into the power of his enemies by the treachery of a disciple, given over to execution, his blood poured out on the cross for you and for all people for the forgiveness of sin. St. Augustine wrote, “Eat not with your teeth but with your heart. Believe, and you have eaten . . . .” For us, my sisters and brothers, the promise is for us. Fill your hungry hearts with it this night. Amen.

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