Maundy Thursday

04/23/25 • -1 min

Sermons – St. Brendan's Anglican Church

Rev. Dr. Les Martin

Washing of the Apostles’ Feet by Master of the Housebook (1475 and 1500)

Maundy Thursday
Rev. Dr. Les Martin
Do you understand what I have done for you?
John 13:12b

In the Name of the Living God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

In Judaism, during the Passover Seder, there’s a section at the beginning known as The Four Questions. The most famous one being the one asked by the youngest child who is able: “Why is this night different from all other nights?” The four questions all have to do with the meal, at least on the surface. However, the answers point to how the meal brings to mind the time of the Exodus.

Holy Week is our Exodus. The Triduum (trid-you-um) or three great nights of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter, our Passover. It’s fitting, therefore for us to have a question of our own. Jesus asks, “Do you understand what I have done for you?” We might also ask it this way: what do we receive tonight?

When Jesus gave the cup to his disciples, he said to them “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.” Our liturgy, drawing from a different text says, “ Drink this, all of you; for this is my Blood of the New Covenant, which is shed for you, and for many, for the forgiveness of sins: Whenever you drink it, do this in remembrance of me.” The thing that is important for our purposes tonight is that word “covenant.” In Greek, it is diatheke, and if you look it up, the definition is perhaps more precise. It is a certain kind of covenant- one declaring a person’s wishes regarding the disposal of their property when they die. Like a Last Will and Testament. This is why the old King James Version says “This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you.”

Now, if this meal is Jesus’ Last Will and Testament, what do we receive? An inheritance- and what an inheritance it is. He bequeaths to us his life, his perfect submission to the Law, and his merits, for we are accounted as adopted daughters and sons.

The story is told of Paul Brand, a missionary doctor in India. When an epidemic of measles spread through the town where he lived, his daughter came down with a very bad case of it. Since he had no vaccine to treat her, Brand located a person who had recently recovered from measles. He drew blood from them and injected the plasma from their blood into his daughter. She was healed with blood that was borrowed from a person who had overcome the measles. We, too, are healed with borrowed blood. As Lutheran theologian and Pastor John Kleinig writes:

Full remission! That’s what Jesus provides for us by the blood he shed for us and now offers us in his Supper. He grants us full remission from the spiritual sickness of sin, the malignant cancer that infects us in our souls and bodies, for which there is no natural treatment or human remedy. The wages of sin—its outcome and cost—is always death (Rom 6:23). Jesus reverses this by giving us his blood to drink in his Supper. Through it we have the eternal remission of all our sin.

Free to live without condemnation, guilt or fear. That would be food enough. Yet, in this meal, we receive even more. In our Epistle tonight Paul asks us pointedly, “The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?” (1 Corinthians 10:16) It is not just that this meal grants us the inheritance of our remission from sins, it brings us into communion- a common union- with our Lord.

“Just as by melting two candles together you get one piece of wax,” St Cyril of Jerusalem writes, “ so, I think, one who receives the flesh and blood of Jesus is fused together with him. And the soul finds that he is in Christ and Christ is in him.”

In our eucharistic liturgy we pray for God to use the sacrament in this way, praying that we may “be made one body with him, that he may dwell in us and we in him.” God answers that prayer. As we take the Sacrament , what we eat is what we become- and that changes us gradually, from the inside out. We become more and more spiritually alive as we feed on Jesus. We draw our life from him as we remain in him and he remains in us. By the means of the bread and the wine we consume, we become his body. We grow up into him who is our head.

At the end of the dinner, Jesus washes the disciples’ feet. He does this, per his own words, as a teacher- showing us just what kind of a body we are now. We receive clarity as to the nature of our identity as the Body of Christ. It involves giving ourselves away in love, just as our benefactor and our head, Jesus did.

After washing the feet of his disciples, Jesus says “I have given you an example – you should do just as I have done for you.”(John 13:15) Later, after the meal, he will be even more direct, saying:

I give you a new commandment: love one another; as I have loved you, so you are to love one another. If there ...

Rev. Dr. Les Martin

Washing of the Apostles’ Feet by Master of the Housebook (1475 and 1500)

Maundy Thursday
Rev. Dr. Les Martin
Do you understand what I have done for you?
John 13:12b

In the Name of the Living God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

I give you a new commandment: love one another; as I have loved you, so you are to love one another. If there ...

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Palm Sunday – The Fulfillment

Rev. Dr. Les Martin

Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem by Jean-Hippolyte Flandrina (1842-1848)

Palm Sunday 2025
Rev. Dr. Les Martin
Luke 23:1-49

Types and shadows have their ending, for the newer rite is here
– Tantum Ergo Sacramentum, St Thomas Aquinas

In the Name of the Living God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

It was the week before Passover, and so the Jewish people were making their pilgrimage to Jerusalem. During the time of the Temple, the focus of the Passover festival was the sacrifice of the Paschal lamb, eaten during the Passover Seder. Every family large enough to completely consume a young lamb or wild goat was required to offer one for sacrifice at the Temple and eat it that night in the ritual meal which looks back to the Exodus. It is, in a real sense, the story that makes the people Israel. It is both the occasion of their creation and their deliverance. The Passover remembers this. It is the reason behind the procession of the people to Jerusalem.

Another procession is coming to the city as well. Too many of the restive Jewish people in one place often led to riots, and to political instability, and so Pontius Pilate is coming up from Caesarea Maritania. The soldiers of Imperial Rome are coming up with all of their Roman standards and weapons and might to just let everybody in Israel know that whatever their God did in the past, that was then and this is now. Rome is in charge- don’t mess with us.

And then there is Jesus. He, too, is going up to Jerusalem. He is perhaps unconcerned with the festival- and with Rome- for his time has come. On the Mount of Transfiguration, he had spoken with Moses and Elijah about “ton exodon” – his exodus. The point of their discussion is now made clear: though Moses led a great exodus of the children of Israel out of sin and bondage, out of the house of slavery in Egypt, Jesus will lead a greater exodus in Jerusalem by means of the new covenant sealed by his blood. This exodus will liberate from sin and misery and death. This will be the climax of his vocation. Jesus knows well enough what lays ahead, and he has set his face towards Jersualem, to go and meet it head on. His announcement of the coming kingdom must now be embodied in his very flesh. The living God is at work to heal and save, and the forces of evil and death are also gathering in Jerusalem to oppose him, like Pharaoh and the armies of Egypt trying to prevent the Israelites from leaving. But this was to be the moment of God’s new Exodus, God’s great Passover, and nothing could stop Jesus from going ahead to celebrate it.

When he gets near Bethany, which is a little village about two miles from Jerusalem, Jesus climbs upon the mount his disciples have brought him. Unlike Pilate, he rides no high horse, just a lowly colt. There are branches of leaves instead of swords. Strewn garments instead of shields. He chooses to enter a deadly situation without force or protection. He gives himself freely and without reservation. Though he is God, he empties himself, taking the form of a servant. This is a prophetic act, a sign of God’s vulnerable love, which risks everything and promises to gain all. In Jesus, God will create peace. The true might in the story lies not in the armies of Caesar, but with the simple Son of Man. Political and military might will ultimately fail. True holiness lies no longer in the Law, true sacrifice will no longer take place in the Temple, rather this itinerant rabbi is the center-point of both: the last remnant of Israel becoming the means by which the whole world shall be saved. In Holy Week, we move beyond the promises, types, and shadows of the Old Testament, and are now instead in the fulfillment and substance of the New Testament. In Christ, God is reconciling the world to himself. Jesus is making all things new. Now, mix Empire with religion, populism, and fallen human will, and you have a volatile situation. A showdown is, by this point, inevitable. The powers that be will not give in without a fight. Making all things new will prove costly to God.

The week is busy. Pilate and his legions are trying to keep a lid on things. The Jews are busy with their preparations for remembrance: Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday would have been consumed with finding accommodation, familial reunions and above all with selecting, procuring and preparing the sacrificial lambs.

Jesus is busy, too. However, he is consumed, not so much with preparations for remembrance as with what is to come. He cleanses the Temple first off- and this is not simply mounting an angry protest about the commercialization of Temple business. Jeremiah and others have proclaimed that if the Temple becomes a hide-out for brigands, either literally or metaphorically, it will come under God’s judgment. Jesus the prophet now renders that judgment. His teaching and arguments with both the Temple hierarchy a...

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Good Friday

Rev. Lindsay Mizell

Christ on the Cross with Mary and St John by Rogier Van Der Weyden
(1457-1464)

Good Friday 2025
Rev. Lindsay Mizell

I’m Lindsay Mizell and the pastor at Vineyard Springbrook and since the beginning of Saint Brendan’s, you all have invited us to be part of your Good Friday and we’re grateful for your patience with us when we don’t know your rhythms and customs is kind and gracious.

Father Doug and Peter and Ash and I all are in book club. Not the same book club. They have a book club that is of elite intelligence, and I have a book club that tells too many jokes. But luckily, we’re on the other side of a wall and we can hear Doug laughing the whole time, which is the gift of every Thursday morning to all of us.

A year or two ago, in my book club, we read a book that that no one really liked and was my favorite one that we’ve ever read. We came every week, and everyone hated it. I came every week so excited because I loved it so much. The book is called “The Sound of Life’s Unspeakable Beauty.” It had me at the title. The book it was written by a German luthier, so a violin maker.

The book is about the progress of of him making a violin and then he talks about the things of God all throughout it. We begin the book and he’s in the woods. He’s in a forest picking out the perfect tree that he’ll cut down the tree that would become this violin. And he’s he’s a master luthier. People are waiting years and years and years, the best violinists in the world; waiting on these instruments. We find him in the middle of the forest, and he’s cutting down this tree and we follow him through the whole process. Finally, we get to this finished violin being played by a master. And all the while as he’s telling us the process, he’s riding about his thoughts on God and life and how these things intersect.

It becomes this lovely journey through a man’s creation and also his theology. I think about this book all the time, like constantly, it is it is my Roman Empire. There is a time, though, when he gets the point where the violin is made, but before it’s made it, it’s only made for him for a little while. He calls it the closed sound of the violin. During this time, he’s the only one to hear it sound. And in the chapter when he’s talking about this this close sound, this this precious moment with this violin, just he and it, he speaks about suffering and God.

He begins his chapter like this, “I once heard a wise Jewish saying that God has two chambers in his heart an outer and an inner. In the inner chamber, he hides his pain and weeping. Sometimes God lets us glimpse his inner heart, but he shrouds it in metaphors so that we can bear it. Sometimes God lets us glimpse his inner heart, but he shrouds it in metaphors so that we can bear it.”

I’ve certainly found this to be true of God that when God allows me a glimpse into his inner heart, into his pain and into his suffering, he covers it with image and metaphor so that I can bear it. I meet with a spiritual director and and he says often that if we were to allow ourselves to see the world as God does, to see the world through God’s eyes, then we would spend much time with every life breaking our heart, including our own. In most of my life, I only see God’s inner chamber of grief and loss through image and metaphor.

It’s in the loss that exists in creation when leaves fall off of trees, trees losing their leaves, waves, ocean waves when they come in and then they take everything they can out with them and and go away. The sun disappearing into the horizon. The groan of creation is very hard to miss and it points beyond itself to that inner chamber of God’s heart. I see it covered through songs and books and movies and art images that point beyond themselves to the inner chamber of God’s own heart.

In more tangible metaphors, like lost jobs and lost love and lost keys, which happens far too often in my own life, these real things, these real moments, and yet they point beyond themselves into that inner chamber of God. Much of my life with God and my own prayer practice lives in image and metaphor. It’s one of the ways that God operates through the entirety of the scripture. He’s often described as like a fire, or like a light, water, a rock, a tower, a breath, a mother bird, a mother bear. It makes me think of how when God comes to Moses, he comes in a cloud or in our Old Testament lesson that Peter read to us earlier an angel who speaks on behalf of God sharing his heart.

We humans require a shrouding or a covering, an image or metaphor clouds or angels, because the fullness of God’s presence is beyond what we can bear. If I’m honest with you, I think I can bear it. I think I can handle it. If I picture myself on Mount Sinai, God is coming down to give me, God is giving me the law. I just I don’t think I would need a cloud for him. I don’t think I would need a fire or ...