Maundy Thursday (Gründonnerstag) 2023 as ‚Visiting Pilgrim‘ at Halifax Minster
Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come. Amen
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ!
„How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news, who proclaim peace, who bring good tidings, who proclaim salvation, who say to Zion, ‘Your God reigns!’” Isaiah 52:7
Tired feet.
Tired pilgrim’s feet on Maundy Thursday – the first step in the so-called Easter triduum, the sacred period of three days between Maundy Thursday and Easter Day.
Tired visiting pilgrim’s feet. Feet carry us to other places. Sometimes even to a foreign one.
So here I am. Well, Halifax Minster is of course not foreign to me. And I am happy to be here. With Max. And with Ture. And we’ve met old friends.
And yet, this land to which we have made our pilgrimage has become stranger. The hurdles are more noticeable. The distances feel greater. Our limbs are more weary.
Personally I’ve been on pilgrimage for a while this year. Due to circumstances. And due to opportunities.
In February, I served as a pastor in the „Haus der Stille“, the „House of Silence“, the meditation centre of our Rhineland Church.
There was much silence and prayer. The motto was: „I am tired. Tiredness as a spiritual entity“.
There is reason enough to be tired: The exhausting time of the pandemic. The devastating floods in the summer of 2021, which badly affected parishes not far from me in Germany. The war that is on our doorstep. Dramatic changes in the relevance of our churches to the society we live in.
The feet feel the burden they have to bear.
In March, my pilgrimage took me to a small North Sea island together with vicars from the Rhineland, Westphalia and Switzerland. We found ourselves in East Frisia, on the isle of Spiekeroog, part of Mesolithic Doggerland – an area of land, now submerged that once connected Britain to continental Europe. Now right on the border between the mud flats and the open sea, between late winter and early spring. Snow, rain, sun. Plus howling winds. And the vastness of the sky. The watchword here was „Catch your breath“. To feel God’s breath, which breathes life into us.
What sustains me at these transitional points in ministry, in life?
Here, too, I felt the pilgrim’s feet in the sand, in the sea, in my personal story.
Finally, footsteps on the way to Halifax. We stopped in Cambridge on Tuesday. I was ordained there almost exactly 30 years ago.
We visited the place where Martin Bucer was buried in Great St. Mary’s. Martin Bucer, contemporary of Martin Luther, one of the great Church reformers – he also worked in the Rhineland. In the 16th century, he drafted a church constitution for the Electorate of Cologne, which was rejected. Political circumstances prevented the ideas of the Reformation from taking hold in Cologne and the surrounding area. Bucer had to flee Germany because of danger to life and limb, and found asylum in England. Thomas Cranmer, who was Archbishop of Canterbury under Henry VIII, ensured that he could continue his reforming efforts here in safety. He brought the Cologne Church Order with him. And it seeped into the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, drop by drop.
Another small footprint: a booklet, dated 1815: Laudes Britanniae Magnae, de Germanorum libertate.
It was written by one of my predecessors, Maximilian Friedrich Scheibler – like me, a Lutheran pastor in Monschau. In 1815 he praised Great Britain for supporting the Prussians, Austrians and Russians in their war against Napoleon. In Germany, the booklet was lost in the bombing raids of the Second World War. At Cambridge University Library it survived. After years of research I held it in my hands excitedly and gratefully.
So this is how we discover footprints of the common past of our countries and churches, lives and personal stories – footprints that connect.
And now – here we are.
Refreshed this morning at the moving and powerful Chrism Mass at Wakefield Cathedral. The promise, pledged in ordination, renewed.
The weary pilgrim’s feet, bearing the burden of the past years, decades and centuries, will be fortified tonight. Foot washing as a sign of hospitality in a distant land after a long journey through time.
This week, may we be strengthened in our pilgrimage as we journey with Jesus through time.
We will of cause pause at intervals. Listening to how exhaustion finally overcomes us. Insufficient faith paralyses us. Fear overwhelms us. We will experience how Jesus precedes us into death. How, in suffering, he bears all burdens on our behalf, takes away our guilt. We will hear that we are not yet lost.
On Easter morning than, the path of fear to the empty tomb. The path of joy from the tomb to the good news of life, against all expectations.
But – we have not yet reached the end of our pilgrimage. We still have to struggle on and catch our breath.
Our feet require strength, just like those of the disciples. If they had continued to wander on as they thought fit, they would have become hopelessly lost. But because God did not abandon them, they stayed on track.
And this also applies to us: reconciliation and forgiveness, love that unites, feet that carry us into a foreign land – and remind us that we are all God’s creatures, great and small, family, friends, strangers and outsiders.
It is part of the nature of the God in whom we believe that God is one who led his people out of oppression, out of slavery in Egypt, into freedom. The commandment to protect is therefore also explicitly rooted in this story of liberation.
„Do not oppress a foreigner; you yourselves know how it feels to be foreigners, because you were foreigners in Egypt.“ (Ex 23:9).
This leads us directly to the essence of Jesus‘ ethics.: the Golden Rule: „So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.“ (Mt 7:12).
When we on our pilgrimage gain insight into the situation of vulnerable foreigners, and empathise with them, it becomes evident to us they should be treated with esteem and respect.
When we see „foreigners“ around us in need of help, we can truly feel what the Golden Rule means – being on a pilgrimage together.
Tired feet in a foreign land, and yet together on the path of discipleship – the feet of those who bring good news, who proclaim peace, who bring good tidings, who proclaim salvation, who say to Zion, ‘Your God reigns!
May the reigning God help us recognise this as true and life-giving, most especially in our troubled times. Amen.
And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
Amen.
Maundy Thursday, 06.04.2023 at Halifax Minster, Jens-Peter Bentzin
pastorinthehighfens 