Awakened by God

"Why did Jesus spend his last night on earth teaching his disciples to wash feet and share supper?" (taken from An Altar in the World, Barbara Brown Taylor).

Taylor answers her question with, . . . "he gave them . . . specific ways of being together in their bodies . . . that would go on teaching them what they needed to know when he was no longer around to teach them himself." (p. 43)

How long I wandered this earth seeing it as trees and grass and buildings and people and all of the objects that make up our physical world. How long I lived among other people, learning what was written in books and what was told to me, rules, expectations, even stories of beauty and kindness and justice. But like the physical world, they simply existed, there for me to appreciate or not.

Like the two men traveling to Emmaus, I was blind to the real world that existed in, with, and under the physical world. I saw trees, but failed to see God's presence in them. I saw marvelous, towering buildings and lowly shacks that appeared unable to adequately house a human being, but I didn't see the hand of God at work in either of them. I saw people. I even loved people, at least some of them, but I when I looked at their faces, I saw analysis and judgement, not God.

After 55 years of seeing a world built of products such as cardboard and concrete and viewing faces as cells that were either poorly or exquisitely formed, a Pastor's invitation to the communion table shed for me a light as glorious as the one I imagined accompanied Jesus' ascension. In the story, two men on the road to Emmaus are joined by a stranger who seems unaware of the recent death of Jesus, but is able to recount the Bible's stories of all that led to that event. At Emmaus, they invite the stranger to share their bread before he travels on. At the moment when Jesus breaks the bread, the men awaken to the joyous reality that this stranger is Jesus.

This meeting of Jesus, the stranger, and the two from Emmaus was no accident: It was a lesson for all of us that Jesus, even when we don't recognize him, is here with us. He is here in the breaking of bread, in the building of towering concrete office buildings and in the building of cardboard shelters for people without homes. He is here in the trees majestically swaying above our heads, and in the homely weed trying to grow through a small hole along the dirty asphalt highway. He is here when our bodies are young and strong and healthy and when our bodies are deformed, diseased or withering. He is the baby born in a cave housing livestock, and he is every face we meet along our "roads to Emmaus."

We can't draw a line between what exists or lives on this earth and God, because God is here, everywhere, in all things and in all people. Asleep, we fail to see Him. Awakened by God, listening TO God, hearing with heart and soul, we see God everywhere. And seeing God in everything and in everyone is how we apply Jesus' final lesson to the disciples: Go out in God's world and break bread with each other knowing Jesus is sharing it too. Reach out and wash each other's feet as if you are washing the feet of Jesus, because you are.