Dying to Self

Footwashing in the 21st Century

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'Jesus Washing Peter's Feet at the Last Supper' by Ford Madox Brown, 1865This is in response to a couple comments in my Love Feast post. Matt and Andrew both brought up footwashing. Originally, I was responding as a comment in that thread, but decided to turn this into a post.

When I was younger—and most of the Jesus People stuff had not yet passed into history—I was really into footwashing. In fact, I had planned that I would wash the feet of the woman I planned to marry (no one in particular on the horizon at that time, though) as part of my proposal.

But then, for whatever reason, footwashing fell out of fashion with me.

Sometime last year I was reading a blog where the writer (who escapes me) said that the whole point of footwashing was that it served a practical purpose in the days of dusty roads and sandals. We don’t really walk dusty roads and the washing of a traveler’s feet is no longer a daily, hospitable act. The writer asked then to consider what today is a practical need that would serve in its place.

I’ve thought about that a lot and have come up with no single thing. We are a disconnected people, so I think that letter writing (real letters, not e-mail) or a phone call just to chat would work. Cutting a neighbor’s grass or washing and waxing her car are good ones, too. Offering to babysit a couple’s kids so they could go out for a date is thoughtful.

The spirit in which Jesus washed feet was to compel humility. It’s humbling to give a footwashing (and for some of us today to receive it.) In that same spirit, perhaps our practical substitution for footwashing today would be the action that spurs humility in us and blesses the receiver. I’m not sure that washing someone else’s car is humbling, but it at least reinforces the idea that we are servants. Most of the truly humbling acts that we have in our modern society have been farmed out into professions. I think there is nothing more humbling than being a hospice worker or in-home caregiver who deals with the aged who cannot perform even the simplest acts. Maybe the man or woman who works with the profoundly retarded, brain damaged, or AIDS patients in the beginning throes of decline is today’s designated footwasher.

All I can say is that the servant is not above the Master. We are called to service and yet daily opportunities for service elude us, either because we have have so distanced ourselves from others or because we have forgotten how to recognize an opportunity to serve.

A prayer:

Lord Jesus, open our eyes to the practical needs of the people we encounter daily. Give us servant hearts that can lay down our own lives and address the simple needs of others, no matter how much humility is needed to meet them. In a day where pride reigns, let us be those who are not so proud that we ignore others in their time of need or think that someone else will be up to the task we neglect. Let us reflect your love in a way grasped by both the lost and the brother in dire need. Amen.

The Christian & the Business World—Complete Archive

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As I was finishing up the series last night, I realized that I needed to make it easy on everyone who wanted to reference the whole thing, so here are the links to the entire thirteen-parter:

If you’re using Firefox or Safari, you can tab browse the whole thing (although your eyes might glaze over in the process.)

Hope this helps put it all in one place for the brave souls who want to start from the beginning.

Tougher People

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Migrant Mother by Dorothea LangeI don't usually blog about my emotional well-being, but it's been a rough week. Monday I got bad news about a serious dental problem I have that can only be resolved by drastic, painful surgery to the tune of a year's tuition (or more) at Harvard. With both of us deflated by this news, my wife asked me what people with my condition did before this kind of surgery was available. The only answer? They lived with it.

So I've been thinking since then about folks who lived long before any of the amenities we take for granted today. Amy Carmichael, missionary to India, never took a COX-2 inhibitor in her life, bedridden with constant pain for twenty years before she met her Maker. Yet her poetry and wisdom live on long after she succumbed to the affliction of living on this planet. Millions of women somehow got through childbirth without an epidural. And after suffering through the mind-numbing agony of a kidney stone late last year, I don't understand how anyone could have existed without opiates to dull the shrieking nerves.

Dentistry back in the old days consisted of a pair of pliers and a bottle of rotgut. There were no bionic limbs two hundred years ago for the soldier maimed in war; a hook or crutch would have to do. Infection took its toll on many body parts and no plastic surgery plied his trade in making torn bodies whole again. Deformity was life and you went on living it no matter how much you wanted the mirror to lie, if only for a moment.

Couples buried their children by the dozen. Mothers often accompanied their mis-born children to the grave. Life was often brutish, nasty, and short. Ask Hudson Taylor, the great Asian missionary, who returned to England—his own health shattered—after leaving his wife and several children in the cold Chinese soil. Many could tell you that living seemed much more about avoiding being in the wrong place at the wrong time. A simple handshake with the wrong person could leave a deposit of microbes for which there was no known cure, diseases like diptheria or pertussis that are rarely spoken of today.

You can't dismiss that people were tougher then. No one thought himself a victim of fate, either. One simply pressed on and that was it. There weren't scores of therapists to hear Abraham Lincoln talk about his sadness over the deaths of his children and the increasing mental instability of his wife at a time when the nation he presided over was torn in two, brother set against brother. More pressing needs begged for his allegiance, so he soldiered on.

I can't see myself crowded around Jesus, trying to clutch at His robe saying, "If only…." Instead, I would be marveling at the truly shattered people who flung themselves at him, people so broken that some of them weren't recognized as human any longer, except by the Lord Himself. I think I would have to give up whatever place I had in line if I'd seen someone like that. Those were hard days and it's a miracle to this child of the 1960s that anyone could live at all.

There aren't too many tough people in the West anymore. Perhaps this is why we are so willing to forget about the Lord; we have other answers for our problems, even the tiniest ones. A balm exists for whatever ails us as long as the price is right. And even when it isn't, the lengths we'll go to in making it right shows how easily we are bought, sold, and traded on the open market.

It's sobering to know I would've been one of those casualties a hundred years ago. I was hospitalized for two weeks at two years of age for pneumonia, a dreaded killer in the time of my great-grandfather, but not for someone born in the Camelot of Kennedy's era. Should my recovery have been only partial (and partial was what many hoped for in the fin de siecle), I would've been known as a "sickly child," a terminology we don't toss around today simply because we don't see it too often.

Jesus wants tough people who rely on Him for everything, particularly when everything is not provided without fail. If that's my prayer for myself right now, then it's my prayer for you, too. We can't live on "what if?" or "if only…." Faith demands more and asks for tougher people. On that Day, the Bride of Christ will be radiant in her beauty, but She will have gotten there bloodied and beaten—yet not defeated.

Be tougher.

{Image: Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother" (1936)}