A sermon

For couple of days now, I have been hounded by a character from the Bible. Jesus asks his disciples to go into Jerusalem where they will find a man carrying the pitcher of water. They are to follow him into a house and tell the owner of that house that the Master wants to have Passover in the guest chamber. This is where they have the Last Supper.

The man carrying water was going against the very strict gender roles of the time because carrying water was women's work. At least one Friend, Peterson Tuscano, believes that this man was transgendered. Another writer suggests that he may have been so secure in himself that he was unconcerned about gender rules. There are many stories that we could imagine about him, but whatever the situation, he clearly gave up cultural privilege to publicly do women's work in a community that was oppressive to women. I am inspired by his courage, and I am made tender by the ridicule and exclusion that he must have faced.

Within his house, there was a vacant room prepared for a feast. There was emptiness during the time of community in celebration. Peterson said the guest chamber may have been empty because the extended family felt disgusted by the way the transgendered man was going about things and decided at the last minute to boycott the planned dinner. I like that interpretation, but whatever the surrounding story may have been, it the image of it resonates with a sense of loss and exclusion.

This empty space allowed Jesus the space to do His work. It was confusing work, though. Earlier in the story, in the book of Luke, Jesus talks to a large crowd about how they must eat his body and drink his blood, and quite understandably, the teaching does not go over well. Most of his disciples stop following him at that point, leaving a small remainder of believers. I don't think that the faithful few understood what this talk about eating a body and drinking blood was about, and I do not understand it either. However, I think that the disciples knew that they were being deeply loved when Jesus shared that bread and wine with them. Maybe that is all any of us really need to understand.

I think that within each of us there is a spark of the man who carried the water, and I think in each of us there is an empty room. It must've been the Quaker writer Thomas Kelly who encourages us to weed out busyness and distraction because the emptiness that we seek to fill might be the place where God’s love can grow within us. Kelly encourages people to sit with the emptiness, and to prayerfully let it be filled by God, and not by our own activity. This is not a comfortable thing to do, but I believe it can yield something more nourishing and glorious than the pain spent in pursuing it.

What fills the emptiness might not make sense, just as the Last Supper did not make sense at the time. Like the disciples, we will know love when we feel it. Inexplicable love will show us that we have found what we were looking for, and it will leave us changed.