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That Kind of Work

The Rev. Canon George M. Maxwell, Jr.
The Cathedral of St. Philip
Atlanta, Georgia
20 March 2008
Maundy Thursday – Year A

“You do not know what I am doing, but later you will understand.”  (Jn 13:7)

I worked on a construction crew on Hilton Head Island one summer while I was in college.  I’ll never forget my first day.  We started early in the morning unloading cinder blocks from the back of a truck.  We dug the trenches of a foundation for a yacht club.  We used the cinder blocks to build support posts.  And, then, we filled the posts that had been constructed the day before with concrete.

By the end of the day, my hands were swollen and bleeding.  And, they felt like they were on fire.  The chemicals from the concrete had gotten into all of the scrapes and cuts.  I drove home steering the car with my wrists. 

Thank God for my Mother.  She knew what to do.  She soaked my hands in hot water and salts, and dressed them with an antibiotic ointment.  Then, she went to the store and bought me some leather gloves so that I could go back to work the next day.

This experience had a lot to do with my becoming a lawyer!

Some of my classmates were able to console themselves during exams with the belief that they could always live a simpler life in the trades if things didn’t work out.  I never once thought I had that option.

Yet, sometimes we characterize this kind of vocational decision as a choice between the body and the mind.  We deem those tasks that require more of the body to be inferior to those that seem to require more of the mind.  And, of course, that often persuades us to think less of those performing the more physical tasks.

I know some people think that we all have an innate need to feel superior to others.  I’m not so sure.  Sometimes, I think that we don’t need to feel superior to other people as much as we just want to get out of doing the hard, dirty work of taking care of ourselves.  We want to avoid what we perceive as the menial tasks, and dedicate ourselves to those that we think require more creativity and skill.

I’m not even sure that we start out thinking of ourselves as above anyone else.  I think we might just get to that point so that we can feel better about asking someone else to do for us those things that we don’t want to do for ourselves.  We may need to convince ourselves that they are inferior so that it’s alright to make them take care of us.

But, however it happens, we do soon get to the place where we are cut-off from those performing the most basic caretaking tasks.  You can feel it in the names we use for them.  “Rednecks” are growing our food, “mow-blow-and-go guys” are cutting our grass and “garbage men” are hauling away our excess.

The problem, though, is that in cutting ourselves off from those caretaking tasks and the people who perform them, we are wounding ourselves.  We can’t survive on our own.  Our lives are sustainable only to the extent that we are able to make common cause with each other, and with creation as a whole.  

I made a new friend this week.  His name is Ernest Tyson.  But, he goes by Tyson because there were two other Ernests in the neighborhood where he grew up.  Tyson runs Wiregrass Farmers Cooperative in rural Alabama.  He used to be a police officer.  After years of watching kids in his community go from hanging out on street corners to standing in front of a judge in juvenile court to sitting behind bars in a federal prison, he decided to do something about it.  With a grant from Heifer International, he started a community garden and began trying to convince the kids he saw on the street corners to come work on the land.

He wanted them to put their hands in the soil and experience the rhythms of the seasons.  He wanted them to feel the satisfaction of working hard, the joy of caring for the earth and the wonder of watching things grow.  He wanted them to get a sense of themselves as useful.

The kids liked it.  But, their parents often did not.  Time and time again, Tyson would go talk to a parent who would forbid her child from working in the garden because she didn’t want her child to “get dirty.”  She didn’t want her child to go back to the farm.  She didn’t want her child doing that kind of work.

As I listened to Tyson tell his story, I couldn’t help but wonder why getting dirty is such a bad thing.  Why isn’t it a badge of honor, signifying the hard work of doing what needs to be done?  And, does this aversion to getting dirty have anything to do with how cut-off we seem to be from so much of the work of taking care of ourselves.  I couldn’t help but wonder if there is a connection between the problems of the permanently unemployed trapped in our urban areas looking for food and the illegal immigrants swarming into our rural areas harvesting our crops.
           
“Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.” (Jn 13:9)

In the scripture readings for today, John tells us that, in the middle of the meal, Jesus got up from the table, took off his outer robe and tied a towel around his waist.  He poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciple’s feet.  We usually interpret this passage as a story of humility and hospitality – a story about how Jesus demeaned himself by washing the feet of his disciples. 

Tyson’s experience made me start to wonder about this, though.  It’s fine as far as it goes.  But, it doesn’t quite get to the hard part.  It doesn’t quite get to how we really feel about “getting dirty” and the people that do that kind of work.

We are demeaned not by performing the servant’s task on occasion.  We are demeaned by failing to honor the servant who performs that task every day.  I don’t think Jesus thought he was demeaning himself.  I think he thought he was honoring the servant.  Jesus didn’t lower himself to the level of service; he raised service to the level of godliness.

Let’s face it.  It’s hard to ignore the guy at your feet when it’s Jesus!

And, for Jesus to wash his disciples’ feet is not just an act of humility.  It is not just an act of hospitality.  It is an act of salvation.  Once we see Jesus in the face of the servant, our wound has been exposed.  The healing process that we couldn’t start on our own has been started for us.  And, it feels like we have to let it run its course before we can become a real community and not just another group of people living alone together.

Foot washing may belong to another era.  But, we really don’t have to go beyond our own dining rooms to see what Jesus was talking about.  Most of us don’t wash our feet during dinner any more, but almost every one of us ends each meal with someone having to clear the table, put up the food, wash the dishes, clean the floor, wipe down the counters, take out the trash, launder the napkins and turn out the lights.  Some of us grew up thinking much of this was women’s work – which should be our first clue that it is important! 

We don’t think of these tasks as requiring any particular creativity or skill.  They need to be done, but we wouldn’t pay much for them.  We may stop to see if they were finished, but we rarely take the time to see if they were done well.  In fact, if we aren’t responsible for them, we rarely think about them at all.  And, the next day, there is little to remind us that the need for them ever even existed.

But, we’re missing something.  There are some things that we can learn only through our body.  Doing at least some of the hard, dirty work of taking care of ourselves seems like a necessary discipline to understand what it really takes for us to live the way we do and to appreciate the people who do so many of these tasks for us.  That kind of work has dignity in and of itself that can be discovered only in the doing of it.
As the author of one of my favorite cook books says, “the pleasure is in the task, not something that comes from the task.”  His advice, “When you wash the rice, wash the rice; when you cut the carrots, cut the carrots; when you stir the soup, stir the soup."

“Do you know what I have done to you?”  Jesus says.  “You also should do as I have done to you.” (Jn 13:12, 15)

I think Jesus is telling us that we all need to spend some time cleaning up after each other to know what it really means to give life to each other. 

Amen.

Notes:  The insight that the root of our desire to be superior lies not in our wanting to be above other people, but in our wanting to avoid the hard work of taking care of ourselves and each other comes from Wendell Berry.  He elaborates on this theme both in his book, The Hidden Wound (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1989), and in his essay, “Racism and the Economy,” which is published in the collection of essays edited by Norman Wirzba, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2002).  Many of the images that I use to illustrate this theme were also inspired by Berry.
The cookbook I reference is Edward Espe Brown’s Tomato Blessings and Radish Teachings: Recipe and Reflections (New York: Riverside Books, 1997).  The quoted text appears on page 4.

Comments? Contact The Rev. Canon George M. Maxwell, Jr. at: gmaxwell@stphilipscathedral.org

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