On Mission: I ❤️ The Church

The missions team, and this morning I want to turn our attention, if you would with me, to John chapter 13. We're going to read verses one through 17. The topic for me this morning, as we finish out our series on the mission of our church, is really this question: Do you love the church? Do you love the church?

So we're going to read together John 13:1-17. It's our custom to read God's word aloud together. Would you join your voices with mine?

Before the Passover festival, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. Now, when it was time for supper, the devil had already put it into the heart of Judas, Simon Iscariot's son, to betray him. Jesus knew that the Father had given everything into his hands, that he had come from God, and that he was going back to God. So he got up from supper, laid aside his outer clothing, took a towel, and tied it around himself. Next, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples' feet and to dry them with a towel tied around him.

He came to Simon Peter, who asked him, "Lord, are you going to wash my feet?" Jesus answered him, "What I'm doing, you don't realize now, but afterward, you will understand." "You will never wash my feet," Peter said. Jesus replied, "If I don't wash you, you have no part with me." Simon Peter said to him, "Lord, not only my feet, but also my hands and my head." "One who has bathed," Jesus told him, "doesn't need to wash anything except his feet, but he is completely clean. You are clean, but not all of you."

When Jesus had washed their feet and put on his outer clothing, he reclined again and said to them, "Do you know what I have done for you? You call me teacher and lord, and you are speaking rightly, since that is what I am. So if I, your lord and teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet. For I have given you an example that you also should do just as I have done for you. Truly, I tell you, a servant is not greater than his master, and a messenger is not greater than the one who sent him. If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them."

— John 13:1-17

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Ever heard of the TV show Dirty Jobs? It ran from 2003, sort of off and on through the present. It stars Mike Rowe, who's the host of the show, and it's a pretty simple premise. It involves no casts, no sets. Mike Rowe just goes from place to place and interviews people and walks alongside them, doing some of the worst jobs in America and highlighting the hazards and the disgusting nature of these jobs.

So he's featured jobs like this: feral cat fixer, maggot farmer, biochar maker, pile jacker, and deer urine farmer. Yes, you heard me right—deer urine farmer. And the whole show is about what's disgusting. Apparently Americans love to watch things that are disgusting. We just do.

If you go back in history and look at the most disgusting jobs in history, one of the front runners has to be this one particular job that Henry VII of England created in his court. He's the founder of the Tudor dynasty, and Henry the Seventh had a position in his court called groom of the stool, which is what you think it is. This person's job was helping the king with all of his toileting business and supplying water and a basin and a towel. It was apparently a very well sought-after position because you got to have influence—you got intimate alone time with the king to talk to him about decisions he was making in court.

Why the disgusting sermon opener today? I want to start this way because in order to really enter into this passage, we have to lower ourselves to be where we find Jesus in this passage. It's very common for churches, and if you've grown up in the church, to hear about foot washing, maybe even experience it, and it loses its shock value to us. It doesn't feel the same as the groom of the stool. And yet that's precisely what Jesus is entering into in this passage.

So today we're going to look at this under these headings: the one who loves, the ones he loves, and how we love.

I want you to picture this scene. Here's how this looked. They would have been at a very low table—like 18 to 24 inches off the ground—with cushions spread around the table in the shape of probably a big U. The way that you would eat at this meal is that you would be laying down on your side, propped up on your left elbow, eating with your right hand, and your feet would be way out away from you. In the first century, you wanted your feet and everybody else's feet to be way away from the table.

And here's what Jesus does. Jesus gets up quietly, takes off his clothes.

So there in his underwear, takes a gigantic piece of linen and ties it in a knot around his waist. And we know from archaeology what this looked like. These giant linen cloths would have had huge parts hanging off and really long. That's the part you use to dry. Takes a basin and for probably a half hour, he would go from person to person around the edge of that table, washing the feet and drying the feet.

Now, of course, that's awkward. I mean, many of us don't like people to touch our feet. Many of us don't like to touch other people's feet. For example, Esau McAuley is an Anglican priest and also a writer for the New York Times describes growing up in a church tradition where this was part of the every week practice. And this is what he said:

I can say with confidence, I have washed more feet than any Anglican priest I know. This is not because my previous parishes enthusiastically embraced Maundy Thursday. Nope. I make this claim because I was raised in the primitive Baptist tradition. And that tradition, once per month as part of our celebration of the Lord's Supper, we washed each other's feet. I'm not speaking about pastors washing somebody's feet. I'm talking about everybody, the whole church joined in this work. Well, at least the ones who stayed after the main service to share in the quote, supper and foot washing as we used to call it.

Service was quite simple. They divided the church, men on the left, women on the right, then out came bowl after bowl of water and enough towels to supply a rather successful pool party. Now the rookies didn't pay attention to where they sat. They didn't heed rule number one of foot washing. You were required to wash the feet of the person sitting next to you. Sitting next to one of the more mature members of the church was somewhat of an adventure because Alabama summers can be quite warm and those church socks were not designed to reduce sweat.

But we young folks had an unspoken code. On foot washing Sunday, we stuck together making sure that our feet and our socks were pristine. We also did not require excessive diligence in the foot washing department. A quick splash and a rub were sufficient. Nonetheless, I sat there month after month, year after year, washing the feet of the young and old.

Now what he's highlighting is the awkward of this, right? The awkward. And we can enter into that a little bit. But what I want to highlight as well is the disgusting. I want to remind you this is the first century. In Jerusalem, there is not public sanitation that we know. It hadn't been built up by the Romans yet in Jerusalem at this time. So the streets are filled with excrement of animals and also of humans. That's where all that was thrown out into the street. Most people were barefoot. They walked everywhere they went and they brought that into their homes. And so when everyone reclined at table, this is why you wanted everyone's feet as far away from the table as is possible.

Now I was trying really hard to rack my brain of a modern example that even comes close to this. And the only thing I can come up with is my wife's experience growing up. She grew up in a house where her dad was a physician and regularly went to the hospital. And he had one pair of hospital shoes and warned his kids about those shoes. You do not touch the hospital shoes. You don't brush past the hospital shoes. The hospital shoes are contaminated.

And yet like Esau McAuley's experience, as awkward as that is, Susan's experience as contaminated as that is, does nothing to touch what's going on in this passage. It really doesn't touch this because I want you to remember who is washing the disciples' feet. It's their rabbi. Jesus was a rabbi who had 12 disciples. Now we use the term disciple sometimes in the church and we don't think about what that means. It's a very technical term in the first century. If you were a disciple of a rabbi, you follow, you left everything behind and you followed the teacher around everywhere they went. This was a twenty four seven, three sixty five thing. You didn't—it's like being in the military now. You're not sort of in the military, are you? No, you can't sort of be in the military. You couldn't sort of be a disciple. This is an all of life thing to follow this person.

And this is a story about a rabbi washing the disciples' feet. This is crossing so many lines in their culture. This is unthinkable.

He says, do you know who I am? You called me teacher and Lord, and that is right.

He's acknowledging this position and exactly what he's doing. How much he's violating this. And maybe some of you have been to a Maundy Thursday service. Maybe in some youth group, you wash each other's feet. We have no idea what this is like. Because in the first century in Israel, Jews wouldn't even let Jewish slaves wash someone's feet. It was beneath a Jewish person in any status, even in the lowest status.

They would let Gentiles, pagans wash someone's feet, but never a Jew and never a rabbi. Never. There's one scholar who says this: there's no source known of a superior washing the feet of an inferior in the Roman world. No record of it. And here's Rabbi Jesus, who you better believe caused quite a stir. For half an hour, he's in his underwear, walking around washing from foot to foot to foot. You better believe nobody was talking. Nobody's able to just go on normally. This is anything but normal.

But we can understand one of the disciples here because we know something about Jesus they didn't even really fully grasp at this point. Who is this washing the disciples' feet? This is God incarnate. This is the holy one of Israel. This is the one of whom in Isaiah, the Seraphim—these angelic beings—are flying around the throne saying, "Holy, holy, holy" of this one. That's who's washing the disciples' feet.

And John writes of this:

In His hands are all things. — John 13

Jesus knew the Father had given everything into his hands. He had come from God. He was going back to God. John's like, just in case you're not sure what I'm talking about: if you ever want to know what God is like, this is it. And particularly if you want to know what God is like toward you, this is it.

If you have seen me, you've seen the Father. — John 14

You know what God is like. This is what God is like, and this is what God is like toward you.

Dane Ortlund in his book Gentle and Lowly describes this. He says God doesn't handle us roughly. He doesn't scowl. He doesn't scold. He doesn't lash out, maybe the way your parents lashed out at you. All this restraint on his part is not because he has some kind of deluded or forgetful orientation toward you and your sinfulness. He knows us far more deeply than we even know ourselves. We're aware of just the tip of the iceberg of our own depravity, our own brokenness, even in our most searching moments of self-knowledge. But his restraint simply flows from his tender heart toward his people.

The Bible is not just telling us that instead of scolding us, somehow Jesus loves us. It tells us the kind of love he has toward us. Rather than dispensing grace from on high up in heaven, he gets down with us. He puts his arm around us. He deals gently with us in the way that's just what we need. This is the way of God toward us. This is the way God loves.

And not in some general sense. I can say this with every ounce of certainty I have in my body this morning: this is how God is toward every person in this room. This is the posture of God toward you. I know it's hard for us to believe this. Some of us believe God can barely stand to be around us—God is so disappointed. But this is the heart of God. If that's how he loves, look at the ones he loves. Who does he love in this way? He loves his enemies.

Jesus Loves His Enemies

John makes a point to make sure that we know who's at the table. When he makes a point in verse one, he says:

Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. — John 13:1

And then verse two: who's at the table? Judas. Judas is at the table. We know Jesus is fully aware of Judas' impending betrayal, and yet what does he do? He washes Judas' feet. He models his love for an enemy.

Now, I think it's easy if you've grown up in the church, if you've heard the Bible all your life, to sort of cartoonify the Bible. You picture Judas like he had this really sinister looking mustache and maybe a black fedora. He wore a black coat. He looked shifty and had pointy eyebrows. But let me tell you something: nobody guessed this was about Judas. Nobody was like, "Oh, of course. Yeah, we knew that guy." No, this is one of their friends. This is one of the people who had gone from village to village ministering the gospel. This is one of the people who had cast out demons, one of the people gifted for ministry.

So it's not like when Jesus says, "Hey, I know one of you is going to betray me" at the Last Supper, that they're like, "Oh yeah, give us three guesses and we can discount two because we already know." No, nobody's looking around like, "Oh, it's the guy with the pointy mustache."

I want to remind you of this. We need to remember this: who does Jesus wash the feet of? His enemies. Second, he washes the feet of his betrayer. Here's Peter, who's like, "Jesus, don't wash my feet." And yet we know that very night, what is Peter going to do? He's going to betray everything he's ever known with Jesus. Again, this is who Jesus loves.

This is who Jesus loves. We need to remember this. Jesus doesn't just love good people. Jesus doesn't love just people whose lives are kind of cleaned up, who fit the mold of nice guests to have over for dinner. Jesus washes the feet of these kind of people like us. I mean, if you're here this morning and you feel like you barely belong—like, I don't even know if I can stick my head in a church—take heart. This is the kind of people Jesus washes their feet.

And finally, this is the big category. He washes the feet of people who need cleansing, and that's everybody, right? Everybody.

We can tell that Jesus got their attention, right? This act obviously makes the disciples really uncomfortable, so much so that when he gets to Peter, Peter protests. He's like, "You're going to wash my feet?" And Jesus says, "Unless I wash your feet, you won't have any part of me." Peter protests—he literally says in Greek, "You're not, not, not going to wash my feet." Three times in the Greek. "No, no, no, no, no. Jesus, this is beneath you, and this is offensive to me."

Can you identify with that? It's hard for many of us to receive from another person. A lot of you, when somebody invites you over for dinner, you turn around and have to say, "Oh, we'll have you back," because we can't receive anything. We wouldn't want the church to provide meals for you when you're sick because of course, we don't want to impinge upon anybody else, infringe on anybody else, trouble anybody. This is a picture of us and where we struggle to receive. That's where Peter is in this moment.

Jesus is giving his last and his greatest teaching in this moment. He says, "You don't understand what I'm doing now, but soon you will understand it."

His washing their feet—I want you to think about this—is just a preview of what's about to happen. At that meal, Jesus takes off his outer garment as it would be removed forcibly from him a few hours later. Jesus humbles himself. It's humiliating to be standing there in his underwear as he would be humiliated just a few hours later. He takes water and pours it into a basin and washes them, just as his blood will flow out of his veins to pay for the sins of the world.

And instead of just washing off dirt and excrement off their feet, we know this is what he came to wash. He came to wash away our sins. This is just a preview of what he's about to do.

So when the disciples ask, "Do you understand what I'm doing for you?" they're like, "No." And it's the same question for us this morning. It's the same question I want you to wrestle with: Do you understand what Jesus has done for you? Do you understand the heart of God toward you? Is this how you view God—his joy at cleansing you, serving you? Do you get it, or are you like Peter? "Jesus, you're not, not, not gonna do this to me."

Will You Let Jesus Touch You?

Look church, I gotta go from preaching to meddling a little bit this morning. Because every time we gather, I know I stand in front of a room that's filled with a world of hurt in it. I know that I don't have to guess.

So here's my question for you this morning: Will you let Jesus touch you? Will you let Jesus touch you in the places of your shame? Will you let Jesus touch you in the places of your guilt? Will you let Jesus touch you in the places where you're hurting? He wants to restore. He wants to cleanse. He wants to give dignity to where that's been taken away. He wants to come near, but you have to let Jesus touch you. You have to let him near.

Will you let Jesus near you? My great hope for this congregation is not what I'm going to bring, but this is who our savior is. It's what he wants to do among us. Will you let him?

The way we answer that question—Do you understand what Jesus has done for you?—the way we answer that question is by how we love others. I missed the punch of the last part of the passage, right? That last verse, right?

If I, your Lord and teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet. You're blessed if you do these things. — John 13

So how do we love? How do we love?

The final push of the passage is: If you know these things, you're blessed if you do them. Now, this is not one of those passages in the Bible where we're like, "I'm not sure what Jesus is telling us here." There's no debate about this passage. Nobody is like, "Gosh, I don't know what to do. This is a real head scratcher, Jesus. What are you teaching?" Nobody debates this one.

You know, I wish it read, "If you know these things, blessed are you if you know them." Don't you wish Jesus was saying that? "Hey, you're like, yeah, I know we should probably do this." But no, he says:

If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them. — John 13

You know, this is talking about relationships between Christians. Can I be really honest?

I mean, it's church. I don't know if I can do that or not. It's really hard to love other Christians, isn't it? I mean, if I went to North Hills Mall this afternoon and I had a little clipboard, I was running around, did a little survey and I said, "Do you like Jesus? Do you think Jesus was good?" Most people in Raleigh would say, "Yeah, even if I don't believe He's God, I believe He's good. He seems like a good teacher, had a good way of life."

A lot of people are like, "Yeah." If I said, "Okay, next question. Do you like this book?" Maybe some fewer people would be like, "Yeah, I like that book." Some people are like, "I don't know," but a lot of people like, "Yeah, this is full of some good ideas." If I said, "Hey, do you like theology?" Now that would shrink the pool a little bit. In our church, a lot of nerds, right? So you all love theology, many of you, but it would shrink the pool.

But if I said this: "Do you like other Christians? Are you chuckling? Because you know, this is what's hard—to love other Christians. Why is loving so hard? Why is serving so hard?

Well, I got three problems that are mine, and you can see if they fit you.

Three Problems

Problem number one: People are annoying. C.S. Lewis best captures this in his book, The Screwtape Letters. It's a fictional story where one older demon is telling another younger demon how to mess with the church, how to really mess with Christians. He's giving advice to this younger demon about his patient going to church. And this is what he says:

One of our greatest allies at present is the church itself. When your patient gets to the pew and looks around and sees the selection of neighbors around him that he tries to avoid during the week, make his mind flip to and throw between the phrase "body of Christ" and the actual people sitting around them. Especially if those people sing out of tune, have squeaky shoes, have double chins, wear weird clothes. The patient will quite easily believe that their religion must be ridiculous.

I have a friend who used to say, "You know how Jesus said, 'Come to me all you who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest'? I think Jesus—I think they wrote that one down wrong. I think it was, 'Come to me all you who are socially awkward,'" because that's what the church is. Like if you come in this place, you're like, "I would never be friends with these people." Probably in the right place. And that's the church.

Problem number two: I feel like my love or interest in others is a scarce resource like plutonium. In other words, if I meet someone and I'm kind to them and friendly, that's one thing. But if they go the extra step of actually wanting to be friends, that feels like they're asking me to open up a vein and bleed out for them. You might feel this way. Like, "I can be kind. I'll be friendly, but be your friend?" So you might feel, "Okay, just okay, I guess I'm just alone up here. I'm just by myself, right?"

Problem three: You're going to come in, and many of you have had a doozy of a week. And you're like, "I have to manage 50 people and you want me to come work with two-year-olds? Like, done." Some of you feel that way. I'm fried.

But here's the ironic answer to all of those objections. The ironic answer to all those objections is this one thing: loving, serving, loving the body. This is what we most need and we most do not want to do. The thing that is going to change this world—this is what Jesus tells us—is not podcasts or conferences or good-looking pastors, right? It's the way we love each other. The way we serve one another.

Do you know there's one word that is used in lots of churches that never appears in your New Testament? There's one word that never appears in all of the New Testament, but churches love to use this word, and it's not a Bible word. It's the word volunteer. Volunteer is not in your New Testament. The word serve, serving, servant—that's all over your New Testament. Volunteering, that's for the YMCA.

What we do here, and I want to retire the word volunteer permanently—can we agree to do that from our vocabulary? Because Jesus doesn't call His disciples to volunteer. He calls them to come and die, come and serve. Come and serve one another.

So can I remind you what we believe about serving? This is really, really simple, but I just want to remind you of some things you already know. We serve one another because Jesus is worthy of all of our serving. He's our King, and He's worthy of all of our money and all of our Sunday mornings and our Thursday nights and all of our free time. He's worthy of all of it.

And here's the thing: when we give our things to Jesus, we give Him our time, we open up ourselves, we open up our talents, we open up our energy. Jesus has this way of taking our things that we offer Him and making them better and more beautiful. Just like when the little boy gives Him his fish and his bread and He multiplies it.

We serve God second when we serve one another. Jesus clearly tells us that what we do for the least, we do unto Him.

When you offer a child a cup of cold water in my name, you will not lose your reward. — Jesus

Third, we serve because we've been so served by Jesus. If we can see this picture of Jesus with the basin and towel, how can we be people who are too proud to serve? How can we be people who will not humble ourselves and serve?

And finally, we serve because our hearts need to serve. The very thing we think will kill us is the very thing we need. The human heart shrinks down to the size of self when it's not used. Hearts have a way of being able to expand and shrink, just like the Grinch. Remember the Grinch? The Grinch finally realizes what Christmas is about. He turns the sleigh around and goes back down and his heart grew how many times that day? Three times. You all know this story, right? Three times that day. Our hearts are in danger of shrinking down to the size of self.

Moving Forward as a Church

The church, our church, is on the verge of a shift in Sunday morning. Seventy days from today, we're moving to a new facility. We're moving to Oberlin Middle School. We have lots of reasons for doing this. We'd like all of us to be in one service—that's impossible in this building. We don't have any room for Sunday school for kids and adults. We can't pull it off here. We tried to figure that out. We can't figure it out.

But what's really important to us is the opportunity for us to serve together, to use our gifts and abilities, to have an opportunity to come alongside one another and remember what it means to serve the body of Christ. This is going to open up all kinds of opportunities: opportunities to teach kids, opportunities to set up and unload crates and set them up in a classroom, opportunities to be part of the safety team that walks around the hallways and makes sure everything's right, opportunities to be a greeter who goes out and hands out umbrellas on days it's raining and welcomes people into our building. We welcome people because we've been welcomed by Christ. There are so many great opportunities.

I don't want to, and we don't want to, guilt anybody to serve. We don't want to manipulate or cajole. We don't want to beg. I don't think that's right. This is not a have to. This is a get to moment in our church. So we're going to open up all kinds of ways to serve.

My question is: Will you follow your Savior? Will you pick up the basin and towel? I want to ask you this morning, what is God calling you to do? Not what do you want to do—what is God calling you to do? Can you hear His voice? Can you discern that the Savior is giving you an opportunity to respond?

We're going to hand out a couple of clipboards. I'm not asking for anybody to volunteer right now. You'll take them and pass them back. I'm asking if you will serve.

The Cost of True Service

Let me close with this. Esau McAuley is a writer for the New York Times and also an Anglican priest. He said this from his article:

To be honest, I never learned to enjoy the foot washing service. I am no longer sure that I was even supposed to enjoy the foot washing service because service and mutual love are hard work. Sometimes it involves the unpleasant labor of grabbing sweaty feet and saying, "You are loved and valued by me, but more importantly by God."

He says this is gospel work. It's not fun, but it's good.

He writes: "It was not until I joined the Episcopal Church in my 20s that I found out that most Christians only wash feet once per year, and that was often by a priest. I initially liked the Episcopal version much better. After all, who couldn't wash feet once per year? Plus most members were too shy to come forward and have their feet washed. So there was a sense in which the clergy were willing to humble themselves, but their congregation thought that such humility was not required. It was the best of both worlds.

"Soon my experience as a Baptist betrayed me, though. I knew that allowing someone to serve you requires a humility and vulnerability that most of us would like to avoid. We avoid that vulnerability by making the same deal that I made with my friends when we were kids in the pews. If you put on your best socks on foot washing Sunday, I will do the same. If you pretend that you don't need my help, I'll pretend I don't need yours. We can fake it together.

"But this is a lie. Jesus knew it and so do we. We need each other's love and service."

We need help and not just like some kind of liturgically enacted help. We need tangible love. We needed it to come first from Jesus who loved us to the end. We need it because before Jesus came, everything was not okay. We had failed, we had sinned, but he can make all things new. Then we need that same love to be made real in our mutual concern for one another.

Here's the kick part of this. We've been given a command from Jesus, a mandate that we love one another with everything we have. Whether we remember that command ritually by washing one another's feet or annually is really not the point. What matters is that we genuinely love and serve each other as Christ has served us. This is hard work, but it's good.

Therefore, give me your feet and I'll give you mine that together we might see the face of God.

Prayer

Father, we thank you for this passage. We thank you for your word. There's nothing like your word. Lord, your word always reveals to us our great need and Christ's great provision. And Lord, we pray today to have eyes and ears and hands that respond to what you're telling us. You're calling on us.

Father, we thank you, Lord, that the Lord Jesus came and humbled himself and provided that true cleansing that we need above all else. And we thank you too that he calls us into a family, into a spiritual family, the body of Christ. Help us, Father, to follow you, to imitate you, to love as you loved. We pray this in Christ's name. Amen.

Let's respond to God's word together in song. Would you stand with me?