My God, My God why have you forsaken me?

“My God, My God, why have you forsaken me …”  Psalm 22:1 (used by Christ on the Cross)

I am always struck by the conclusion of the Maundy Thursday service each year.  In most liturgical traditions (Catholic, Episcopalian, Lutheran, etc.), the service concludes with a ritual stripping of the Altar.  People from the mass of the congregation come forward and pick, piece, by piece, a removal of each vestment, each vessel, and each item from the place where the high point of the mass/service is celebrated in the Eucharist.  Fresh with the inborn remembrance of the self sacrifice and giving of his utter self, we see the table removed of all adornment, all purpose, and laid bare, naked, and devoid of any useful purpose.

Just before my participation in the service at Hope Lutheran here in Annandale, VA, I read an article posted by a friend on Facebook about how Pope Fancis broke with tradition and not only washed the feet of a woman, but went so far as to wash the feet of two of them; one of which was Roman Catholic, but the other a Serbian Muslim.  I can only say as I said yesterday, “this is awesome on so many levels!”  In his short pontificate, from my humble place, Francis has managed to preach louder than his predecessor about the core message of the Gospel in the small gestures and physical acts without even penning an encyclical.  I pray that he continues in this, and continue to be a model of true Christianity that is all about the downtrodden, the separated, and the socially forgotten or shamed.  As a Lutheran, I have always prayed that the Church be one and is one, not through force of will, or arms, or doctrinal convergence, but by our witness to the world of how we love one another and our neighbor, after all, this was Christ’s new commandment cited in last night’s service, “… love one another as I have loved you.”  John 15:2.

So in relaying these two things, what am I getting at?  What is so striking is the absence of hubris, absence of selfishness, the absence of power in both the naked altar and the unbound gift.  I commit to you that I am a sinner, and I fall short of the witness that both Christ and, to a lesser extent, Francis have embodied.  I am selfish, and I am centered too much on my material satisfactions.  My sin and our sin together is thinking that success is to be an achievement that we earn and can acquire.  US culture, capitalistic, and contractual, and commercial, while an engine for good (and often providing good to the rest of the world) can just as often pull us into the sin of greatness, and power, and earthly rationalism in every measure.  I am not trying to say we become the pauper of the world, or give up our capabilities as a nation, but it needs to give us pause to think on the power of laying ourselves bare and giving to the unworthy.  What made and continues to make us great as a nation is not our strength of arms to destroy, but instead the strength of arms to build up.  To me this is the difference between bombing Khartoum and deploying to Haiti.  While the first was necessary to cripple Al Queada, the second won us more than any pyrrhic victory in combat.  To me we can’t give up the altar of freedom and goodness and protection; it is ours to sacrifice on as the world’s greatest power and nation.  But, it is the need to sacrifice that we forget, and we, especially as individual affluent Americans, have become comfortable in paying others to do.

We all need to get back to the place the Psalmist was at, trusting in goodness but suffering the pains to unworthily receive it.  This isn’t masochistic, it is the burden of true greatness and the oxymoronic path that leads to even more than we can imagine.