Maundy Thursday: Our small steps of commitment and faith

Maundy Thursday is celebrated the world over as a time for Christians to come together and partake in the communion of the body and blood of Christ. People who have confessed their short comings and have taken the decision of being at peace with one another flock to church to receive the communion set in motion by our Lord Jesus Christ. But what is indeed the significance of this communion or the Holy Qurbana (o) in church?

Jesus commits to his disciples and says that he wanted to have this meal with them before he suffers and that he won’t do this again till the fulfillment of the Kingdom. He then says the formulaic sentence followed by many churches up till today and announces that he is giving them his body and blood as a sign of the new covenant between God and human beings. We are all under this new covenant of commitment that Jesus makes to us. It is a commitment to suffer for the cause of many and to fight for all. As we partake of the body and blood of Christ we are also coming under this covenant and commitment to do good. For that we have pursued a tough time of cleansing ourselves of all things which are anti Christ. Today we then come forward in that commitment that as God has made a covenant with us we also make a covenant with God that we will do what God seeks of us, which is to be Christ like.

What could be the good expected of us? Isaiah 58:6-9 offers us a splendid idea. “Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin? Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly; your vindicator shall go before you, the glory of the LORD shall be your rear guard. Then you shall call, and the LORD will answer; you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am.” We are bound to a commitment of doing specific things which are expected as part of our fast and commitment to God. It is a clear call to do good like Jesus chose to do. Fight injustice, let the oppressed go free, cover the naked, share our bread with the hungry and the Lord will hear our cry and say “Here I am.” Allowing the body and blood of Christ to work inside us is necessary as otherwise we only partake and nothing seemingly happens out of that. The wonderful opportunity to partake and to effect change brings about a true commitment from God to hear our cry and reply Here I am.

The partaking of the body and blood of Christ makes us enter into covenant with God and gives us the unique opportunity to be co-workers in God’s kingdom. The partaking is not a simple act of dealing with our short comings and coming forward to accept communion but steps of commitment and faith saying that I will heed to the wish of God to correct injustices in society and open my life to the poor and let the oppressed go free. Those small steps towards communion that we take are big steps of a commitment that I will contribute my bit to change the world that I live in. What a beautiful thought it is and what a wonderful commitment we share. Amen.

Praise to Thee, O Lord, To Thy Father Praise,
Worship, glory be To the Holy Ghost.
Grace and mercy be on us sinners all,
Opened be to us Zion’s gates above
May our pleas be heard at the throne of Christ.
Praise to Thee, O Lord, Praise to Thee, O Lord,
Ever praise to Thee, Our hope. God bless.


(Excerpts from a sermon preached in St. Ignatius JSO Church, K.R. Puram, Bangalore during Pesaha service yesterday night.)
Picture courtesy www.lds.org

Understanding the cry and joy of nature: The power of backward thinking

Yesterday I was a fortunate person with nature filled care
Yesterday I was lulled by the wind and caressed by the rain
Yesterday I dreamt of a life, of happiness, love and joy
Yesterday I had everything…today I have memories of yesterday

Introduction
There can be no development without destruction. This is the truth we are faced with. As we build our joy in the form of buildings and structures, we seldom realise that we trample upon the lives and the joy of others. We construct our happiness by bringing others to tears. Based on our theme, we bring nature to tears as we jump with joy with our additions of steel and cement.

The cry and joy of nature
India has been ravaged and defiled in the quest for money and power. A complete misreading of the voice of Isaiah has taken place. If Isaiah meant his prophecy that ‘the valleys will be filled and every mountain and hill shall be made low’ to prepare the way of the Lord, it is questionable whether the hill killing and valley filling now has anything to do with this. Rather the natural is being made unnatural and the right wrong. The lure of high real estate prices and the greed of making quick money have led to digging out our history and building new histories today.

We have to make sense of the cry and joy of nature with this. The oppressed people in different parts of the world are usually wiped out by challenging, attacking and destroying their history and memories. The same happens with nature. We question nature’s existence by challenging its role, attacking its existence and destroying its glorious past. With no memory left, nature itself becomes a reconstructed notion of what is in front of us. Therefore, the unnatural becomes the norm of the natural.

Reversing the trend
But what can we do when we are being sucked into a culture of forced forgetfulness? If nature is crying, it is to keep us happy! Can we pull back? We should be able to as otherwise we will be faced with total destruction. To undertake this we have to scratch out bits and pieces of our history and learn from the knowledge of our ancestors. This calls for a total slowdown and going backwards. It is funny considering the fact that governments of the world have over the past year and a half, tried to infuse the world economy with one stimulus package after the other to fight the self induced recession.

The power of backward thinking
Thinking backwards in our culture is also seen as thinking negatively and so not apt. The world is going fast and so one either keeps pace or drops behind. But our scriptures and religious traditions also talk of a slowing down and of a going backwards. One would say that this is preposterous. In a way anyone who is firmly placed in the present culture of growth, stimulation and progress would find this totally untoward and unacceptable.

Wray Herbert points out an interesting thought of backward thinking. He refers to an experiment which asks some people to walk towards the front and others backwards. Finally they are asked to identify certain colours against their names. The people who walked backwards perform better in the test. This may be because they were able to identify with their past and bring out their primal instincts. We have the over assuming habit of seeing our ancestors as backward and primitive. But these are the very people who lived in harmony with nature and had simple but effective solutions for sustainable living. Their way of life was at an optimum speed and had an approach of caring for the coming generations, unlike our attitude to life.

Learning from primal communities
Our lives often revolve around what we can teach others and seldom around what we can learn from others. What we fail to understand is that nature precedes us and so do certain communities of people like the adivasis and tribals. They are the primal people of this land and it is they who have always lived with nature, taking what it offered and never snatching what was not theirs.

P.V. Rajagopal relives his experience of working with adivasis in India. Once he gave a talk on the nirdoom choola, a smokeless cooking system. A woman present tells him that she already knows about this. He questions her maintaining that this is a new system and it is impossible for her to know about it. She asks him, “How does smoke come?” He replies saying that smoke comes when we cook something over a fire. She tells him, “For us smoke does not come because we never cook anything as such. Everything is had just as it is.” This is the wisdom of primal people. They are the pioneers of environmental justice and sustainable living. And yet we call them illiterates and backward people! What a travesty of events!

Re-inventing traditional concepts of the church for the new generation
We have to look at traditional celebrations, festivals and lents and re-invent them in the line of the concept of the cry and joy of nature. The amount of fire crackers used can be reduced and car and bike rallies can be made into walks by the people. Church buildings can make use of solar, wind and other renewable energy forms and even work towards reducing their carbon foot print. The lenten season can be used as a time to slow down and switch off by which we slow down and also reduce our energy consumption and become more compassionate towards nature. The people and the clergy can concentrate on things like this to prepare themselves during lent instead of just following a few diet restrictions.

Conclusion: Making memories come alive
The picture is crystal clear. We have memories of the joy of nature. But if these remain as memories, they will be replaced by the cry of nature. It is nature’s legitimate right to cry if we continue our aggressive development policies and heartless war against what is natural. Just as the joy is a celebration, the cry will be an instant gloom. We are already seeing signs of it through nature’s way of protest. Temperatures are rising, glaciers are melting and rains are washing us away. Maybe it is time to stop looking ahead and start looking back. It is a time to bring back our memories of the good times and learn from communities which we have pushed behind. This is the call of Isaiah. Things have to change. For the better hopefully!

(This blog post was published in Gurukul Jyothi 2010, the college magazine of the Gurukul Lutheran Theological College, Chennai)