Journey to the Passion: Healing Hearts in Community

Thursday, April 17, 2025, Maundy Thursday – Gospel: John 13:1-17, 31b-35, 1 Corinthians 12:12-14, 20-27

In 2023, I had the incredible privilege of co-leading a spiritual pilgrimage to the Isle of Iona off the coast of Scotland. It was quite a journey getting there. We of course flew overnight to Glasgow and then after a restful night in the airport hotel, we took a bus to a ferry and then another bus to a ferry that finally carried us across the water to Iona.

And though I had never before been to Scotland nevertheless to Iona, as I stood on the bow of that ferry, my heart burst open and I began to cry because the feeling of homecoming was so strong.

There was just something about the people I was with and the place we were headed that held me in a healing embrace of community and love.

We have been on our own pilgrimage in this season of Lent. On Ash Wednesday, we began walking with several Holy Habits, or spiritual disciplines. We’ve heard about silence and solitude, prayer, scripture, sabbath, fasting, and witnessing. We have been journeying to the heart of faith.

Through my Sunday sermons at Redeemer, we also walked alongside different kinds of hearts we humans experience that are reflected in scripture. I spoke of humble hearts, stubborn hearts, hungry hearts, and resentful hearts. Last Sunday, as we came even closer to the center point of our Lenten journey, we focused on the shattered heart of Peter.

But today is Maundy Thursday. And the heart of this day centers on the last supper, the Holy Habit of the eucharist that arose from that event, and on the way that Jesus takes the form of a servant to his community of disciples by washing their feet. In this service, I want to bring together our final Holy Habit of community and the idea of how our shattered hearts can be healed within community.

We’ve probably all experienced the power of community to heal and comfort us. We know how soothing it can be to have a friend sit with us when we’re grieving or depressed.

We can feel so powerless when someone we love is going through a tough time, but often the best medicine we can give them is to just hold space and be present as a friend.

You’ve heard me talk a lot in the last year about friendship. And one of the reasons I talk about friendship so much is because of my own experience. By the time I reached high school, I was in a lot of emotional pain and felt like I didn’t really belong anywhere. But I connected very deeply with a core group of friends who loved me. We are still in touch even now, and I’m honestly not sure I’d have survived my high school years if it weren’t for them.

We also know that there is greater power in numbers. In Matthew 18:20, Jesus says, “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, I am there among them.” When we gather in Christian community our prayers are more powerful, our discernment is more finely tuned, and our resources more expansive to be of greater service to those who need us.

Paul is also helpful here, as he talks about community both in terms of being in the one Spirit, and being “in Christ” and in the “body of Christ.” What does it mean to be the body of Christ? For one thing, it means that together, we become something larger than our individual selves. But we don’t disappear as individual members. Let me read a bit of what he writes in his first letter to the Corinthians:

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body — Jews or Greeks, slaves or free — and we were all made to drink of one Spirit. Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many.”

Then a bit later he continues,

As it is, there are many members, yet one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you,’ nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you.’ On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect; whereas our more respectable members do not need this. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member, that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.

Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.”

Within the body of Christ, look how each one of us – no matter our station or history – has dignity and respect!

Each of us has a role and a purpose. Each of us is loved and welcomed. Every single one of us belongs in the body of Christ. In the body of Christ, we bear each other’s burdens, we lift each other up, and we help each other to see how much we are loved.

We live in a world that seems to shatter hearts with abandon. The entirety of human history has been filled with cruel people and oppressive systems. And it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the pain of the world. There are times when I see what’s happening politically, environmentally, interpersonally, and I am filled with despair. And I wonder, what can I do? I’m so small and I can’t fix this weary world.

But here’s the beauty of the body of Christ, and of Christian community. In his book The Universal Christ, Father Richard Rohr writes how Paul’s use of the phrase “in Christ” is “Paul’s code word for the gracious, participatory experience of salvation.” Being “in Christ” is our core identity, meaning that “humanity has never been separate from God – unless and except by its own negative choice.”

Paul, writes Rohr,

seemed to understand that the lone individual was far too small, insecure, and short-lived to bear either the ‘weight of glory’ or the ‘burden of sin.’ Only the whole could carry such a cosmic mystery of constant loss and renewal.” For Rohr, this means that “When your isolated ‘I’ turns into a connected ‘we,’ you have moved from Jesus to Christ. We no longer have to carry the burden of being a perfect ‘I’ because we are saved ‘in Christ,’ and as Christ.”

We are saved in Christ and as Christ.

So let us be like pilgrims together, journeying in this Holy Habit of Christian community. Let us no longer stay far off like the prodigal son, yearning for the homecoming we see on the horizon, but let us carry our shattered, hungry, and lonely hearts right into the center of the circle, and into each other’s arms, and allow this body of Christ to save us.