Jesus Said, Wait With Me
Matthew 26:36-46
April 05, 2007
Maunday Thursday

There’s something powerful about doing what we do tonight. We have simplified this Maundy Thursday service down to its scriptural bones: supper and prayer. We stay with this last supper and Jesus’ last free moments in the garden in order to hear a promise that there will be more freedom and much more life to come.

I have reversed the usual order of things. I am preaching first and then you will hear the scripture. I do this so that you can hear the scripture with new ears. So you will hear how Jesus and his disciples came away from supper and arrived in a place called Gethsemane . You will hear Jesus go to prayer, but first he asks his friends to sit with him, stay with him, wait with him, remain with him, stay awake for him, pray with him. You already know they can’t and won’t. Jesus must have known it, too. To stay with Jesus in what Jesus had to pray about would be to face a crushing ferocity – to look at pain and evil at a level almost unimaginably terrifying.

Because we know the story of the resurrection that comes on Easter, we know that Jesus will not abandon those who abandon him. We have a hint of what is to come in the very last verse you will hear tonight. Jesus says: Come, get up, let us be going. To the end, Jesus carries with him all who love him, even those who love him and have failed him.

And yet Jesus prays for more from his friends and disciples. Listen when he asks them to stay awake and pray that you may not come into the time of trial. In fact,we do pray that prayer. When we pray the Lord’s Prayer we ask lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. A far better, more accurate translation of deliver us from evil says (literally): save us from the time of trial.

I do pray that none of us should ever have to face what Jesus faced or even what his disciples faced in watching Jesus pray. Trials are not far-fetched. We have only recently emerged from a century filled with the history of murderous regimes and complicit, passive bystanders. We are not done with global conflict in the new century. We are being touched by war and war’s collateral damage as we meet tonight.

Elie Wiesel – a concentration camp survivor – once commented that he had no problem understanding Nazi evil, but he simply could not get a grasp of bystanders who pretended that they did not know, did not see, could not have changed what happened.

To stay awake with Jesus in our own time means not to be bystanders, not to sleep through our lives pretending that it is enough to be good persons. Many good people become bystanders; only a few stay awake and face trials.

I was deeply touched last night by a story I heard here in this sanctuary as choir practice began. Sue Wells’ mother Leona died just a couple days ago. Sue told us here last night a story about her mother and she has given me permission to tell you.

Leona worked in housekeeping at Providence Hospital in her working years. Now hospitals are institutions and institutions have hierarchies and rules, some of them to protect the institution, not the clients. Amonhg the rules in Leona’s working days was a rule that said housekeepers don’t do nurse’s work. But Leona would often find a patient in need of a nurse and she would call a nurse to come. Then Leona would call again. And again, until finally – finding, for example, an elderly patient sitting on a bed pan for half an hour or more, Leona would care for the patient herself. And for this good act, Leona would be "written up," – censured formally.

I never met Leona. I cannot know why she did what she did, but my guess is that dignity was important to her – the dignity of others and her own dignity. Dignity is just a way of staying awake in the world while upholding what is good against the tidal wave of opportunities to let dignity slip away. I think of Enron. I think of the tissue of lies on which the invasion of Iraq was built. I think of the director of the homeless shelter here in Springfield who is now serving jail time for misuse of resources intended for people who are cold, hungry and without a roof. What does it take not to let dignity slip away? Where does the slipping away begin?

Dignity is choosing your behavior in the world. Perhaps it is as simple as staying awake when others let their eyelids grow heavy. Leona saw how others were treated and was willing to be mistreated herself for their sake. She was not a bystander.

At the very end of her life – a feisty life, Sue told us – after Leona had had a stroke that left her conscious but unable to communicate clearly, people around her by her hospital bed did pick up one last request. One last, very clear request. Leona said: I want to see the supervisor!

Well, she gets to. Not only because Jesus carries with him all who love him, but because Leona has nothing to be ashamed of.

That’s what I would leave you with tonight. It is Maundy Thursday. Let us hear Jesus say to us on the night before he is crucified:

Wait with me and you will have nothing to be ashamed of. Stay awake and you will see more freedom, much more life!

Amen