Grace and peace to you from the one who is, and who was, and who is to come.

Forrest Gump said, “You can tell an awful lot about a person by their shoes.  Where they’re coming from, where they’re going.  I’ve worn lots of shoes.”  I think there’s something to this sentiment.  Shoes are a pretty good record of where we’ve been and where we come from.  You don’t have to be Imelda Marcos for your shoes to tell a story.  Some of the more significant pairs I have include a pair of flip flops I’ve been wearing around different pools for years, a beat up pair of work boots from my days working maintenance, a pair of black dress shoes with some padding where they wrap around the back of your ankle for walking the halls of the hospital I trained and worked at, and a pair of ratty gym shoes with a hole in one of them from when I stepped on a nail and it miraculously went diagonally through the toe of the shoe and not through my foot.  I’m sure all of you have some shoes that would tell your story – from drywaller’s stilts to dress flats, from cowboy boots to slippers, and maybe even those winter boots it looks like we can finally put away.

But it isn’t just the types of shoes we have that tell our story.  It’s the scuffs and gouges in them, the broken heels and the holes worn through them.  Where ever you go in life, whatever you walk through, your feet walk you through it, and they pick up bits and pieces of where you have been and take them with you.  Sometimes we walk through some mud or dirt, and as we track that around, we realize there’s places we shouldn’t or can’t go while those traces of where we’ve been still cling to us.

The shoes of Jesus’ twelve disciples were probably well-worn from following him around Galilee by the time they shuffled through the streets of Jerusalem with tens of thousands of other pilgrims who had come to celebrate the Passover in David’s city.  When they walked up to the room where Jesus hosted that last meal for his followers, their well-worn shoes, if they could afford shoes at all, were probably sandals.  Living in a hot, dusty region, and walking through the trash-strewn streets of an ancient city, washing the dust and dirt and grime off your feet was an important part of coming inside for a meal.  And by the way, people in Jesus’ time generally ate their meals lying on couches, meaning your feet might very well end up close to someone else’s food or face.  You simply couldn’t receive your host’s hospitality if you were too concerned about what you had picked up and carried with you along the way.

When they had gathered around the table in the upper room, Jesus got off his couch, shed his robe, tied a towel around his waist like a servant, and filled a wash basin with water.  Offering his guests water to wash their feet was expected, but the host of the meal actually doing the washing was certainly not expected.  In fact, it was rare that even slaves were made to do this unflattering and unglamorous but much needed task.  Yet here was Jesus, the disciples’ “teacher and Lord” crouching down and doing for the disciples what they should have been doing for themselves. 

Not surprisingly, Peter was the first to speak up when Jesus started washing away the filth on his followers’ feet, wiping clean the scars and wounds those feet had picked up along their way.  Seeing his leader do this is so unbelievable that Peter has to ask if this is really happening: “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?”  After all, the people the disciples lived among were very concerned with minding their manners around God, keeping a close eye on purity and cleanliness.  Of course Peter would insist that he had to wash his own dirty feet; Jesus couldn’t possibly love someone with feet as dirty as his.  Peter let his worries about where his feet had been and what they now looked like come between him and God’s love.

We’re not as worried about literal, physical purity, but we still sit there with Peter, worrying about what we’ve stepped in along the way, about what’s stuck to us and weighing us down, about the wounds and scars that come from journeying through life.  Our feet may not literally be as beat-up as Peter’s, but we know we still pick up little bits of where ever we go, and bear the marks of where we have been and what we have been through.  In the same way Peter’s dirty feet were keeping him from receiving Jesus’ loving care, our feet, our memories and reminders of where we have gone, can become weighed down with wounds and regret to the point that we worry about whether God’s love can reach us. 

But while Peter could have washed away the dust and dirt on his feet himself, we cannot clear away the things we track with us through our lives that we feel coming between us and God’s love.  We all carry with us the hurt we have felt, the wounds we have suffered, the traces of the places in our lives we never want to go back to, and the ones we hope no one ever knows we’ve been.  With all that stuck to our feet, how can we fulfill even the simple command to walk humbly with God?  How can we love others they way Jesus loves us when everything we carry with us keeps us from feeling that love ourselves?

Jesus didn’t only wash the Peter’s feet, he washes our feet – he clears away whatever has stuck to us in the world that comes between us and God’s love.  Even when we are afraid to let God see what we think is ugly or unclean or undeserving, Jesus never shies away from us.  He tells us, “Unless I wash your feet, you have no share with me” not as a threat or an ultimatum, but so we see that we don’t have to wash our own feet in order to receive his love – we only need to trust God to wash our feet, to clear away the what might come between us, so we can feel that love.  When we are washed by Christ, we are defined by where he is going, not by where we have been.

Even though John tells us that Jesus washes the feet of the rest of his disciples, only one other disciple besides Peter is mentioned by name in his telling the story of the Last Supper.  This disciple’s feet carried him to where the high priests and the council were plotting to have Jesus murdered, and they carried with them the marks of the life of a thief and a liar.  His name has come to be a synonym for betrayal – the polar opposite of the trust we need in God.  Because of what he did his name has become so reviled I’ll bet you can’t you remember the last time you met someone named Judas.

Judas is the embodiment of what comes between us and God’s love – he is turned in on himself, wrapped up in his own fortunes, betraying Christ rather than trusting him.  But I think there was something else that hurt Jesus even more than Judas’ part in the death he knew he would have to die.  Judas’ mistrust, his betrayal, was that he couldn’t trust that Jesus would wash his guilt from him, and the guilt of where he had been didn’t just cling to him – it killed him.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to explain grace.  I’ve been talking with our confirmands and with a young member of our congregation who is preparing to join the feast Jesus gave us this night.  I feel like I’ve put together some honest, understandable explanations of grace, but in the story we read together tonight, I saw something much better – an example. 

Grace is Jesus holding Judas’ feet in his hands, knowing where they have gone and where they are about to go, and still choosing to wash them and wipe them clean.  This picture of grace truly is worth a thousand words about grace.

Grace is what drove Jesus to embark on that final walk to the garden, and the walk he knew he would take from there.  As he walked, the many feet that had followed him through his ministry would abandon him.  He would walk through pain and suffering along the way, and his feet would receive one final, agonizing wound.

The disciples’ could not have predicted that Jesus would be washing their feet any more than we could have foretold where Jesus’ final steps would lead him.

But just as washing their feet wiped away the things that kept them from getting close to Jesus, this final journey Jesus’ feet will take him on will overcome the last thing that can come between us and God’s love.

Amen