Did you see in the news that they cancelled the highway project just west of town, just where we pick up speed to 90? How many of us thought it was a bad thing to do in the first place, a waste of money, an investment of the wrong sort? Anyway, I guess someone listened and the project has been cancelled. They are now going to plant new trees where they cut some down and the money is going to be used for something else more immediately needed... Have I given it away yet? April Fools!

One might think, had we been present with Jesus at the Last Supper, a possible Seder meal to celebrate Passover, that Jesus was kidding when he took towel, basin, and water and proceeded to wash his friends' feet. Maybe it was first thought to be Jesus' April Fools' joke. But Jesus wasn't kidding, was he? There may have been laughter in his heart and a twinkle in his eye thinking about how what he was going to do would be perceived in the hearts and minds of his friends. But he did it! He did what a servant would do. He turned the honour/shame rule of his society on its head and took a towel, which he girded around his waist, a basin and a pitcher of water and proceeded to do the humblest of all things... he washed his friends' feet.

It is hard for us to capture the surprise that this would have engendered. We read the story every year and try to find something new to preach about. Jesus gave a new commandment, a mandatum, a mandate to love, and washed his friends' feet as an example for us to do as he has done.

Walter Brueggemann, not so much a reflection about Maundy Thursday and Jesus washing feet, but a reflection about Lent and the suffering that Jesus experienced, said in the March 21 edition of Sojourners Community online newsletter, "Participation in (Jesus') suffering consists in a life of trusting obedience boldly lived in contradiction to the way the world is organized. Lenten discipline is a practice of our own life as the willing giving up of self in obedience in order to receive a new self from God."

In recent years, in his retirement, Brueggemann has spent a great deal of time in workshops and speaking engagements telling us followers of this radical, surprising Jesus that biblical faith calls us to order our lives in a different way than the world is organized. Our two congregations watched one of the Living the Questions series that Brueggemann hosted, "Countering Pharaoh's Production-Consumption Society Today." In this series, Brueggemann, using the story of the Jews' exodus from slavery in Egypt, pointed out how Pharaoh keeps drawing us back into slavery. The consumptive, afluenza life that Pharaoh embodied and that is prevalent in our western world, is seductive and draws us back over and over again into more consumption and more affluence. This is the challenge that Brueggemann is making about how the world is ordered: consumption and affluence, power and privilege!

In a Sojourners magazine article recently, Brueggemann described a triad of worldly qualities that has led to many economic and social problems; he says that these worldly qualities are not recent, but have been around for 1000's of years. One of these worldly qualities is the illusion of autonomy. This is the self-sufficient, "I'm OK," rugged individualism that is so prevalent in the West; it's the idea that the individual is the primary unit or building block of society. The second quality of this triad is anxiety. This isn't so much a quality as it is a truism of our society. Brueggemann reminds us, as did Paul Tillich and others before him, that autonomy leads to anxiety. When we separate ourselves from community, when we practice a radical self-sufficiency, when we separate ourselves from God, this inevitably leads to anxiety, which Tillich described as non-being. I know that when I separate myself from others, which I tend to do from time to time when I'm stressed or depressed, I feel anxious about life; I lose a sense of balance and perspective. The third quality of Brueggemann's worldly triad is greedy acquisitiveness. I probably don't need to say much about that. Brueggemann put it succinctly, "The autonomous person, beset by anxiety, can only resolve to do better, to get more, to arrive at full control of the future by full control of the present." (Sojourners online, "From Anxiety and Greed to Milk and Honey," February, 2009.)

In countering this triad of worldly qualities, Brueggemann reminds us that biblical faith invites us to return to covenantal existence, abundance and radical generosity. Jesus invites us to remember the covenant, to remember God's extravagant gift of abundant life and how radical generosity leads to a new self. Covenantal existence is life in community with neighbour, with God, and with stranger alike—this is the way of Jubilee and Sabbath. Biblical faith, having set aside autonomy in favour of covenantal life, leads us from anxiety to abundance. Brueggemann reminds us that the God of the gospel is the One who continues to give, who keeps on giving. God is the energizer bunny; God keeps on giving. And thirdly, generosity is our invitation away from greedy acquisitiveness into the understanding that we are all in this together, that we are brothers and sisters. And I would add that this is about the universe not just about our fellow human beings; this is about being itself. A radical generosity sees our sister moon and brother sun, as St. Francis put it, which in turn leads to a different sense of the environmental crisis of today's world. A biblical understanding of generosity leads to the realization that all life, the poor and the vulnerable especially, are legitimate recipients of God's grace!

Biblical faith calls us from separation to relationship, from anxious living to abundance, from greed to generosity. And all of this was summed up in Jesus' simple and yet profound, easy yet radical act of washing his friends' feet. The beatitudes are summed up in this action. Obedience to God's love and life-giving way was summed up in this act; and in paradoxical fashion, obedience to God's way of love, in fact, led Jesus to the radical freedom to live in love and step outside the socially accepted norms of his day and wash feet... smelly, dirty, dusty, calloused, feet!

Jesus' act was an act of biblical faith that contradicted the way of the world and that invites us into this dance of new life. We engage in the biblical faith of Jesus, abundant life in community with God and a radical self-giving generosity, that can lead to struggle and suffering as we resist the worldly order of things, but that also leads to God's gift of a new self, a new in-community self. It's the two-step dance of self-giving love and receiving a new self from God. And this dance goes on every day, every moment.

In giving the mandate to love, Jesus calls us back to the biblical faith of our ancestors, to a radical generous and abundant life in community with neighbour and God. This leads us to be seeds in the world, seeds of new life and God's abundance. Seeds for living more simply in the world, seeds for saying the word Dayeinu—it is enough, seeds for acceptance of the other, seeds for living a radical grace in a culture of fear, seeds for... well you fill in the blank... The seeds of Maundy Thursday, the mandate to love and to live a biblical faith of abundant generosity in community, are planted in us to bear fruit on Easter morning.

The seeds are planted. Where will our Easter, biblical faith bear fruit tomorrow? Amen.