Dear Friends,

We Christians are moving into Holy Week, and the following piece on Holy Thursday is from a posting some years ago.  The message is the same.  The Gospel source is the same.  We're different.  Our world is different.  But Christ is the same, the same Christ we met in the stories of our childhood, the Christ of our delightful, sometimes confusing teen years, the Christ of our adult lives.

Let us pray for one another, meeting in Cyberspace, a church without walls, a congregation without faces, but with hearts united in the Upper Room, the Garden, Calvary and an empty tomb.  We are family.

Happy, Glorious Easter to you and yours!

Coming Home to the Upper Room

Holy Thursday - a time to come home, home to the Upper Room. Sounds simple. But it's not, is it?

We're so accustomed to planning our own itineraries, and yet, we're not always sure just how to make this holy journey, or, even who has the right to be at the destination. Therefore, we would do well to be silent and listen to the Christ for directions.

What do we find him doing? Precisely what he's always done, calling people home, telling them about peace-making and taking the last place, seeing that everyone gets invited to the supper.

This motley group includes the bewildered millions of Latin Americans and the thousands of Hispanics in this country who have converted to Protestantism because they are sheep without shepherds, and Jesus warned us about what happens in such cases. We just haven't been listening.

This evening, we also extend hands of friendship toward the over 100,000 priests who are no longer actively ministering. That's what the statistics say. We know better.

These priests, ignored by the institutional church, are serving the poor, visiting the sick and the imprisoned. Over 300 have become Episcopal priests in order to use their gifts as their consciences dictate, along with those who have chosen to join the Lutheran Church.

Then, there are the men and women whom no one counts, because they've disappeared from parish rosters. "Left the church," some say. No. Not really. One by one, they journey homeward - our nameless, walking wounded. While they may feel rejected by the institutional church, they continue to search for her soul, the Christ.

Into this group of Catholic Christians, we move and find not a stranger among them, for their stories are our stories - ours, theirs.

Sufficient drama is here to match anything Hollywood might think up - love affairs with God and his people. The Shepherd seeking his sheep, no matter how confused or how far astray they have wandered.

Isn't it heartbreaking that on this Holy Thursday we are so divided about who will minister the Eucharist that we are losing sight of Christ and his gift?

We're getting everything backwards in the name of preserving the faith. Is it faith we're about preserving or power and money?

We don't understand the kind of love Jesus showed in the Eucharist, seeking only to give, not demanding that the recipients be worthy, only that they be needy and confess to their poverty.

Lest we still don't get the picture of what love is about, we watch as he rises, takes a basin of water and a towel to wash the feet of those present, giving us an example of how we are to treat one another.

When Jesus had healed hearts with the Eucharist and had taught about service as an expression of love, he sang a hymn with the disciples, a final communal act of solidarity in worship. The sentiment didn't last long, not much longer than the walk across the Kidron bridge into the Garden of Olives, where Jesus knelt in prayer - alone, frightened, laden down, abandoned by those who owed him the most.

"Could you not watch one hour with me?"

We may be little people, but we can watch, we can sympathize with Christ, we can walk with him from the Garden to the trial and along the road to Calvary.

With Mary, Mary Magdalen and John, we can stand at the foot of the cross until the end, then return to our homes to await Easter's dawn. And in the waiting, we can pray for the courage, that passion in the heart, that will enable us to follow in the footsteps of the Master, whose love has brought us home to him and to one another.

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