BY DR. KENNY CAMACHO / SERMON DELIVERED 11 FEBRUARY 2024 FOR REVOLUTION CHURCH
I want to start today with a question: do you remember the movie Memento? If you do, I have some bad news: that movie is 24 years old! So, if you don’t remember it, let me say, first, that I congratulate you on being young… and, second, that it’s probably worth your time. Memento was a bit of a sensation in the year 2000 because it did something interesting with its structure: it was a story about a man with short-term memory loss on a quest for revenge, and in order to communicate the main character’s experience of constantly waking up with no memory of what had just happened to him, the movie played out backwards. The first scene you see is the ending… but you don’t know how we got there or why. And then the second scene starts a few minutes before the first scene, and catches us up. And then the next scene does the same thing, and catches us up to the second scene. It’s a trip! But underneath this gimmick is an idea that’s actually pretty interesting to consider more broadly: can we ever really understand the path we’re on before we know where it ultimately leads?
I bring this up today because we’re beginning a series on the Gospel of John, which will be our focal book for this year. By the time we get to December, we will have spent some 11 Sundays reading through this account of Jesus’s life! But instead of beginning, well, at the beginning, we’re going to take a Memento approach and start towards the end. Our hope is that this strategy brings deeper resonance to what we’re learning, and we also hope it honors something unique about John’s gospel, which is that more than any other account of Jesus’s life, John’s story wants us to see Jesus as the key to understanding his Father. God is the goal here, God is the “ending,” and not just in the sense that John wants us to learn more about him… but in the sense that John believes, deeply and profoundly, that illuminating the way to God is what Jesus is here for.
So, how do we begin?
Like the movie Memento, we’re not literally going to read the book backwards. Instead, we have picked a point that separates the last act of the narrative from what came before, and we’re going to start our study there. In this case, that division point can be found in chapter 13, when Jesus sits down for his last meal with his closest friends, who we refer to as his disciples. After this dinner, Jesus will be arrested. After he is arrested, Jesus will be executed. And three days after he is executed, Jesus will rise from the dead. But the opening of this final chapter happens at dinner. Here’s what John says:
Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. The devil had already decided that Judas son of Simon Iscariot would betray Jesus. And during supper Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands and that he had come from God and was going to God, got up from supper, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him.
John 13:1-5
In an email this week, Paul McGrew, who is on our Preaching Team, called these verses “immensely beautiful”… and they are. Let’s take a closer look.
The key to understanding this scene is in that first verse: “Jesus knew that his hour had come.” At this point in John’s gospel, Jesus has spent three full years traveling through Israel teaching, healing, and modeling the character of God for people. But in all that time, it has been difficult–if not impossible–for people to see him as anything more than a great prophet. In the people’s imagination, God has always been, well, God: he is a great Force, a great Advocate, who preserves the life of Israel and also enforces heavenly Justice. He has laid out instructions in the Law, and he is unwavering in his execution of it. Yes, the people have seen God’s patience throughout Israel’s story, as well as his forgiveness. But his nearness has always been complicated for them: God is not touchable and visible; his presence is dangerous and sealed away from them in the smoke and fire of Exodus, in the hidden recesses of the Tabernacle, in the Holy of Holies in the Jerusalem Temple. He sees all and can affect all, but woe to those who are unclean when they face him.
I want you to hold onto that last part: woe to those who are unclean when they face him. If the Israelites know nothing else about God, they know this! Sin is abominable in God’s sight, and he cannot and will not abide it. To flout your wickedness under the sun is to invite your own destruction. Think of that joke people sometimes make when they hear a friend say something boastful or blasphemous: “you better watch for lightning!” The “lightning strike God” is the God Israel knows… and they fear him.
But Jesus’s purpose is greater than the purpose of a prophet who comes to remind people to be rightly afraid–he’s here to reveal something about God that the old systems of reverence overlook. The trouble, however, is that the only way to do this is to walk a path that will, unavoidably, make his friends afraid. So, with the hour approaching when he knows he will have to leave them–when he will have to die–he does something pointedly and intentionally to change the dynamic that scares them. Woe to those who are unclean when they face God! And so, what does Jesus do?
during supper Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands and that he had come from God and was going to God, got up from supper, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet
John 13:3-5
The disciples are, literally, unclean. They are facing the one into whom God has poured all of himself. But instead of punishing them, he gets up from the table, ties a towel around his waist, and makes them clean. They don’t understand… because the hour that is near has not yet come. They don’t understand… because their focus is still on trying to impress God enough to be worthy of his blessing. They don’t understand… because Jesus is their master and not their servant.
But we can understand, because we’ve already seen the ending: the God Jesus reveals loves first. Cleanliness is a gift he bestows to those who submit to being served by him… not a performance we enact so we can earn a “gold star.”
Of course, “gold stars” are still all the disciples can imagine! And so, when Jesus comes to his friend Peter, Peter says to him:
“Lord, are you going to wash my feet?” Jesus answered, “You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand.” Peter said to him, “You will never wash my feet.” Jesus answered, “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.” [So] Simon Peter said to him, “Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!”
John 13:6-9
As always in the gospels, it’s easy to laugh at Peter: he so desperately wants to be good. But there’s something beautiful under the surface here, too. At first, he fears this is a test and does his best to pass it: my master shouldn’t be treated as my servant! But when Jesus lays out the stakes–being served by God is a necessary thing to accept if you want to be with God–look at what Peter inadvertently asks for: it’s a description of baptism! He wants his whole body, his whole self, to be made clean.
For many Christians, baptism is a choice we make at the beginning of our faith journey that we frame as a matter of repentance: we acknowledge that we are sinners, and we submit the rest of our lives–imperfectly, inconsistently, but hopefully–to the leadership of Jesus. That’s all true! But this scene adds another piece to that puzzle, because being baptized is also about allowing Jesus to serve us. It’s an acknowledgement and acceptance of this upside-down God we worship who desires our obedience not because we fear his power but because we trust his love. He wants to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. He wants to serve us so we can learn, from experience, how beautiful it is to be a servant.
This leads, then, to the last discovery we can make in this beautiful passage: we don’t need to be afraid, we’re submitting to love over judgment, and it’s a blessing to serve others. Let’s read the rest:
After he had washed their feet, had put on his robe, and had reclined again, he said to them, “Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord, and you are right, for 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 set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you. Very truly, I tell you, slaves are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them. If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them.”
John 13:12-17
This is the only commandment Jesus gives in the gospel of John: “you also ought to wash one another’s feet.” And, just like the commandments in the Old Testament once passed down through Moses, it comes with a promise: “you are blessed if you do.” I think that most of us do pretty well with the first part of this! We understand instructions, and if you’re showing up at a church on a Sunday morning, you’ve already made at least some amount of peace with the idea that, if there is a God, he might have some expectations for you. You’re likely here, on some level, because you’re curious what those expectations might be… and if you really want to try and meet them. So, it’s no surprise, 20 minutes into a sermon, for the pastor to say, “here’s what God wants you to do.”
No, we get commandments. What we struggle with is seeing a commandment as a blessing.
Let me tell you the end of a story and then go back to its beginning. If you stick around for a few minutes after service ends this morning, you’ll see something pretty amazing: in about 30 minutes, everything we have done to try and make this space feel like a church home will be undone. The band will disappear, the seats will disappear, these rugs will disappear. In the gym on the other side of that wall, TVs and rugs and toys and rainbow-colored room dividers will be put away. The tables in the hallway are probably already gone! The dishes we use for Communion will be cleaned and stored. And all of this will happen not because I do it (although I’m the only full-time paid employee of this church), or because a few leaders who were on the schedule today do it, but because dozens of people will do at least a little something to make it all happen. The same thing was true this morning before you got here: Robb pulled a trailer up at 8 and then 5 or 6 of us unloaded it. By 8:30 the musicians were here. By 9, kids volunteers were showing up. Coffee was being brewed by 9:30. Roy set up flags. What I’m getting at is this: Sunday services aren’t “the church,” people are… and the people who call Revolution home chip in together to serve not just you, if you’re a visitor, but each other, so that the load can be shared. And you know what? Most of the time, we all do this pretty joyfully.
But that’s the end of the story. Here’s the chapter that came just before this one: in 2020, a pandemic descended on the entire world and church services like this one stopped happening. Before the pandemic, Revolution existed, and we did our best to keep a tight schedule. Volunteers had shifts and roles. We had responsibilities. But when the world seemed to stop spinning, a few of us began to realize that along with all the hardship there was also an opportunity: what if, when this all ends, we don’t rush back? What if, instead of reminding everyone of what they used to do, of their obligations, we stripped things so far down that just a few of us could manage the work? And then we invited folks to come back not when they had a job to do, but when they were ready? What if we waited on each other to step back in because of love… instead of guilt?
This didn’t go perfectly, and we were never saints about it. But, when I look around twenty minutes from now and see folks chipping in, here’s what I think I’m starting to see: serving can be love as well as work. It can even be a blessing.
If we step back and look at this moment in John’s gospel as a whole, what do we see? We see Jesus, at crunch time, making sure that his disciples experience the definition and illustration of God’s love that he’s here for. They don’t need to be afraid of their unclean-ness: God will wash them. They don’t need to be afraid to submit to him: it’s a way to freedom, not restriction. And they don’t need to be burdened when they serve: it’s a path to blessing. Predictably, this is far too much for them to understand, all at once. It’s too much for us to understand! But the trick of John’s gospel is that the end helps us make sense of the beginning. Discovering that God washes those he loves, serves those who submit to him, and blesses those who follow his example is made possible when we see just how far Jesus is willing to go for the people he loves. Grounding the bigger story of God in the intimate story of Jesus’s relationship with his friends makes the whole thing tangible… and believable! He’s not just a good man who sets a good example. He’s not living out an “ideal” for us to admire and tiptoe our way towards. He enacts God’s character in the world so that we might see and believe (John 20:30-31). What felt distant has come near. What seems upside-down is actually rightside-up. What you long for is already here.
And, by living it out, he encourages us–in the deepest sense of that word, by giving us courage–to take a chance on following God with our hearts first. Clean the wounds of those who are hurting. Wash the feet of those who are dirty. Serve those who are used to being servants. And, like Jesus, bring tangibility, touch-ability, humanity to the immeasurability of God’s love. This doesn’t have to be an obligation! It can be a joyful echo of what you’ve experienced.
What I want to do right now is send us all out with a mission: “go and do.” But what if, instead, we go backwards? What has already been done for you? It’s hard to echo something you can’t remember! So, we’re going to close today not with a commandment to follow but a reminder to receive a blessing that has long been offered: God has found you. God has loved you. God has already filled the basin and soaked a towel, and he is waiting to serve you. If you’ve never allowed him to do this for you before, perhaps today is the day you say, “yes.” You might be someone who wants to skip to the ending: longing to be kind, eager to love, happy to be a helper. But you can’t fully share something you haven’t fully received. So what might happen if you let the God of the Universe wash your feet? How deep might the rewiring, the remaking go? What could it awake?
And if you’re someone who has trusted God in this way before, do you still remember? Do you see that there is blessing behind the commandments, not just one time, but every day? It’s good to be disciplined, but never at the expense of love. What if you took this moment to re–experience what it means to be served? To be so perfectly loved? I think that, all too often, those of us who are Christians choose to starve ourselves of an affection that is endlessly offered to us. God loves us, and the key to living out our faith isn’t fearful obedience, it’s incarnation: we become what we received, and we share what we remember.
So today, may we first allow ourselves to be served. And then tomorrow, may we serve others with joy because our memory is fresh and our hearts are full.
Revolution Words 