Theme: Easter
Maundy Thursday Reflection
The Rev. Craig M. Nowak
April 2, 2015
“Do this in remembrance of me.” Tonight on this Maundy Thursday, many of our Christian friends and some of our fellow Unitarian Universalists will gather for a service of communion… a time to remember and to give thanks…to recall the past that we might live fully in the present with gratitude.
The Unitarian Universalist communion services I have led commemorate what the Christian tradition refers to as the last supper…the last meal the radical, socially and politically inconvenient itinerate preacher and truth teller called Jesus of Nazareth shared with his closest friends and followers. As contemporary Unitarian Universalists, we recognize and give thanks for the Christian roots of our faith and our Unitarian and Universalist forbears who sought to understand and make manifest in this world the teachings of Jesus rather than to craft and conform to a doctrine about Jesus.
At this time of year we are reminded that Jesus held up a vision of, and lived into existence, a life blessed by hospitality, abundance, love, compassion, mercy, and justice for all people…a way of living he called the “kingdom of God.” …a life worth living; a way of life foreign to the ways of the world of his time…and that of our own.
Indeed, Jesus taught and lived what it means to be fully human and in doing so realized the Holy within and for this he was condemned to death and crucified.
Just as the life of Jesus reminds us that to be a person of faith is to defy the power of death…by countering fear with hospitality; greed with abundance; apathy with love; cruelty with compassion; oppression with mercy; and privilege with justice, his death reminds us that to be a person of faith is also to risk the breath of life in pursuit of a life worth living.
And so whether we break bread and share the fruit of the vine together this evening or not, let us at least take pause in remembrance of, and thanksgiving for, the life and teachings of Jesus.
Our remembrance and gratitude of course means very little if we do not also commit ourselves to live more fully the life and teachings we profess to honor. This is our challenge and our charge as individuals and as a community... and the time to begin in now.
And so let us promise to one another and to ourselves that we will seek in body and spirit, word and deed, to awaken to our own profound humanity and that of others that we might meet the Holy in each other’s eyes, and in so doing, humanity will finally cease to be its own brutal executioner.
Amen
