Footwashing as We Stare Down Death

Read Online at Open Door's Website The table was set. The food was ready. The guests had arrived. Lazarus, dead only a chapter earlier, now reclined at the table. Word of Lazarus’ revivification had made its way to the chief priests and Pharisees, who had now begun plotting to kill Jesus. This party, held in Christ’s honor, was set against a dangerous backdrop.

Mary and Martha were there as well. As he was so often inclined to do, in a miraculous showing of inclusivity, Jesus ate with women and the unclean. It was as great a showing of Christ’s unkingdom as one might find; Jesus, without a word, dismantling oppressive purity codes.

Later in the evening, Mary took a bottle of fine perfume and poured it over Christ’s feet. The last time he had been with her and Martha, the smell of death had been in the air, but now the smell of perfume filled the house. The nard that Mary used had most likely been imported from India and cost well over a year’s wages.

No wonder the disciples responded with such distress at the seeming waste. It was a grand showing of excess, the contents emptied to the final drop. Women were not supposed to be this close to men or let down their hair in public, but in a magnificent act of defiance, Mary lowered her head and with her hair dried Jesus’ feet. To call it anything but scandalous misses the intimacy and prophetic nature of the act.

In John’s account, it is Judas who vocalizes the question that we, the readers, are asking and calls even more attention to Mary’s extravagance: “Why wasn’t this perfume sold and the money given to the poor?”It’s a question I myself would have asked. And then Christ, in response to Judas, the disciples, and me, tells us: “The poor will always be among you.”

Yes, the poor will always be among us because we are always to be among the poor. What Judas fails to recognize is that the poor are not to be an object of charity but rather an integrated part of the discipleship community. Furthermore, Christ’s statement likely goes back to Deuteronomy 15 and perhaps the Hebrew notion that acts of kindness can be extended to both the living and the dead. John’s further insistence that Judas does not care for the poor in actuality seems to further imply the necessity of this act by us.

Christ then validates Mary’s actions by saying that she is preparing his body for burial, putting her at odds with Judas. While Mary honors the dead, Judas brings the death about. She had fully entered Christ’s climactic nonviolent march to the cross. It’s debatable whether Mary understood the true significance of her action or whether she was the only one in Christ’s inner circle who did, but either way, she began a chain of events that culminated at the cross.

Five days later, as Jesus washes his disciples’ feet, this act of care from Mary is there, simmering beneath the surface, crying out from the subtext. Perhaps this was Christ’s final insistence that to follow him meant death. His message is plain: to be a disciple is to give up one’s life. What we see at that final supper is Jesus inaugurating a Beloved Community, a place and a people who will prepare and support one another for that task. To wash one’s feet is a dangerous task, an act of solidarity with one another as we stare down death.

Passover is approaching, and the people are speculating as to whether or not Jesus, wanted by the state, will show himself in the temple or at the feast. Instead, five days later, he assembles his disciples in an upper room. While the people take part in ritual sacrifice and purification, Christ ties a towel around his waist and washes his disciples’ feet. It is Peter who denies Christ’s attempt. He is not yet ready to have his feet washed, and even upon submission, he does not understand its meaning.

It is in this moment that I most resonate with Peter, unwilling to take up my cross, unprepared for where following Jesus will lead. It is one thing to follow in the dust of your rabbi. It is another thing altogether to follow him into the grave, and although there is a gravity in the Christian tradition bending toward resurrection, let us not forget the atrocity of Good Friday or the despair of Holy Saturday.

Every time the Open Door Community participates in worship at Dayspring Farm, we engage in the sacrament of footwashing. At the end of a long line of martyrs, we sit in a circle and wash one another’s feet. We are quite a ragtag bunch, struggling to stand alongside Mary and, more often than not, fumbling alongside Peter, unready and unprepared to face the risk and consequences of this radical alternative. And so we wash one another’s feet not out of pious humility, but as a sign of solidarity, hoping that as Christ prepared Peter for the place he was not yet ready to go, he will do the same for us.

We wash one another’s feet knowing that to follow Jesus is to die: to self, to Empire, and quite possibly at the hands of Empire. Yet we do these things, living into the joy that Christ promises: “Now that you know these things, you will be blessed if you do them. Now that I have washed your feet, go and wash one another’s feet.”

Zachary Crow is a Resident Volunteer at the Open Door Community.

Targeting the ‘Undesirables,' From Jerusalem to Atlanta

Read Online at Open Door's Website North of the Old City of Jerusalem there is a Palestinian neighborhood called Sheikh Jarrah. Should you find yourself there on a Friday, you will hear the beating of drums and shouts of protest. Should you continue walking, you’ll come across a large brown house that for 53 years served as the al-Ghawi family’s home.

The tragedy and travesty of Sheikh JarrahThe al-Ghawi family no longer lives in that house. Along with the Hannoun family, all 27 of them were removed by order of the court and their homes turned over to Israeli settlers. Now, the evicted al-Ghawi and Hannoun families live just outside in a small green tent, a place where they have firmly planted themselves as an act of resistance to the Israeli empire.

In March 2010, I sat outside that tent and listened to Nadia Hannoun’s words: “They damage our life. They damage our dream. They damage our children.”She went on to describe the nightmares her daughter was having. I sat behind my camera lens, shaking, unsure how to proceed. She continued:“We need our homes, and we need our rights.”

My friend and I finished the interview and began making our way back to his flat in Beit Sahour. We were returning to a house, and soon, I would be flying to my home. My white privilege was never more evident.

The methodical theft of Palestinian land. As I’ve continued to follow the lives of the Hannoun and al-Ghawi families, I’ve been most struck by the methodical and systematic theft of Palestinian land. Israeli settlements continue to invade Palestinian land. Plans are now under way in Sheikh Jarrah to construct a settlement. If completed, Shimon HaTzadik would consist of 200 housing units and displace 500 residents. Completion of this site would mean the encirclement of Jerusalem by Jewish land and quite possibly squash all hope of shared life in this area.

Sheikh Jarrah stands at the end of a long and ongoing attempt to marginalize and evacuate a very particular group of people from their homes.

It would be a while longer before I understood all the ways that my encounters in Sheikh Jarrah had left me so radically altered. They’ve provided for me a lens with which to view my life within the Open Door Community. What I’m learning is that Nadia Hannoun fell victim to a larger Israeli aim: clearing East Jerusalem of the “undesirables.” And, although it’s unclear whether the city of Atlanta took its cue from the state of Israel or Christopher Columbus, it’s a tactic that it has gotten quite good at.

I remember very early in my time at the Open Door a conversation with Partner Nelia Kimbrough in which she discussed Atlanta’s “10-year plan to end homelessness,” implemented in 2003. She said that she quickly learned that this plan to “end homelessness” merely meant getting rid of homeless people.

Take, for example, the spikes in arrests of the homeless surrounding the 1995 World Series, the 1996 Olympic Games, one of the many Billy Graham crusades, and the computer trade shows. From May 1995 to May 1996, there were a reported 9,000 arrests of the homeless, a rate four times higher than in preceding years.

Before the Olympics, Atlanta initiated “Project Homeward Bound,” footing the bill for one-way bus tickets out of the city. In order to qualify, the homeless man or woman had to sign a statement promising never to return. The director of the program explained that its aim was to keep homeless people from “continuing to be a drain on the social service agencies in Fulton County.”

Panhandling ordinancesOr more recently, you could look at Atlanta’s panhandling ordinances, which, in addition to making it illegal to “monetarily solicit someone who is within 15 feet of a building entrance or exit,” include an obscenely vague regulation of “any statement, gesture or other communication which a reasonable person … would perceive to be a threat.” First-time convictions warrant 30 days of community service, with 30 days of jail time for additional offenses. City Councilman Michael Julian Bond declared that such legislation “protects our citizens from those wolves who … cloak themselves in sheep’s clothing.”

Additionally, Atlanta has recently conducted a city-wide survey aimed at creating the first name-by-name registry of our homeless brothers and sisters in the city. In exchange for McDonald’s gift cards, they were asked, among other things for their age, length of time on the streets, and health status, allowing the city to make a list of the “chronically homeless,” not to mention police records complete with photographs. And, while the city claims that the survey is meant to “help people get housing,” we at the Open Door have heard the city of Atlanta cry wolf one too many times.

More and more often, I think of Nadia Hannoun, perched on the street corner in front of her family’s tent. I think about how desperately the state of Israel has tried to remove her from the land she so desperately loves. But then, ever so subtly, I hear the drumbeat, the sound of chanting, and the cries of resistance. Praise God for drums, and may the people of Atlanta learn to chant.

Zachary Crow is a Resident Volunteer at the Open Door Community.

Our Daily Bread

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The Baking of Bread as a Spiritual Act

Every Sunday at the Open Door Community, we observe the Eucharist. The table is carefully adorned with a tablecloth, handmade pitchers and cups filled with grape juice, and a loaf of two-toned bread baked earlier in the week. Bread is significant for a number of major religions, and remarkably so for the Judeo-Christian narrative. Thus, the baking and breaking of bread is an important part of our shared life together.

In the Jewish tradition, challah bread is baked thinly with eggs, and on occasion, honey and raisins. Unleavened matzo is used in Passover celebrations. Muslims have a high respect for bread for its simplicity, believing that Allah hates wastefulness. And, of course, the Christian tradition is ripe with imagery of bread. Manna in the wilderness, Christ’s reference to himself as the bread of life, the Eucharist, and the breaking of bread on the road to Emmaus are all ways in which the Christian narrative connects us to our neighbors and God through bread.

In ancient Palestine, all of life was dependent upon the harvesting of wheat and barley. Much like the Nile River for Egyptians, bread was considered sacred. It was a reminder of hospitality and friendship. In fact, our word companionarises from the Latin words com (with) and panis (bread). We get a sense of this in Mark 6:8 when Jesus tells the disciples, “Take nothing for the journey except a staff—no bread, no bag, no money in your belts.”

To have not expected or accepted the bread offered to them by others would have been at dire odds with the Beloved Community that Christ was inaugurating.

Ched Myers reminds us that “Bread breaking rightly stands at the center of the church’s life as an invitation to ‘remember’—to remember the economy of grace practiced by our ancestors in the faith, and to remember what we ourselves must do to embody an ethic of equality in a world deeply divided between ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots.’”

To bake bread is a reminder of our dependence upon one another and on God. It is a reminder that all of life, even bread, is sacred and that we are made whole by sharing it with others.

The Baking of Bread as an Environmental Act

We’ve altered and mutated bread in such a way that it typically no longer has the nutritional components it once did. Bread once contained einkorn, emmer, and spelt—all forms of wheat. However, the germ of wheat, because of its oiliness, tends to have a short shelf life. To cope with this, the iron roll mill was developed, which removes the wheat germ along with much of the nutrition. This process replaced traditional stone wheels, providing a much longer shelf life and producing the white bread that remains widely popular today. As a result, by the end of the Great Depression, Americans and the British were suffering widespread malnutrition and vitamin deficiencies. Britain mandated that its bread be made with the wheat germ included; America did not follow suit but opted to “enrich” bread synthetically.

In its simplest form, bread is little more than flour and water, but mass-produced bread today contains a great deal more. It includes fats, flour treatment agents, chlorine dioxide gas, emulsifiers, preservatives, and several chemical processing aids to delay staling. Yeast is increased for larger yields, which ironically speeds up the staling process, requiring more processing enzymes—and so the cycle continues.

The problem arises when we fail to think about where our food comes from. For many, grocery stores are magical places where food just “appears.” Most of us no longer maintain a connection with the earth or the seasons. Well over 80% of America’s daily bread is mass-produced, which, in addition to requiring large amounts of energy, releases chemicals in the form of pesticides, chemical fertilizers, and hormones into the land, water, and air. Further, we must consider the harm done by bread’s plastic packaging, most of which ends up in landfills.

The Baking of Bread as a Political Act

The “big food” industry’s subsidizing of cheap food preys on the poor. While it does give them access to more affordable food, it is also a contributing factor to their poverty in the first place. This connection can be traced through history.

In France, bread was once an indication of social class. The peasant class sought to imitate the aristocracy by consuming wheat and white breads, in contrast to the dark rye, barley, and oat breads they traditionally ate. Bread was also symbolic of revolt—the poor would often throw their crusts at the feet of their rulers as a way of declaring that they had failed to live up to their title of “nourishing prince.”

An example of how bread can and should be understood politically is a British bakery founded by Dan McTiernan. The Handmade Baker, in the village of Slaithwaite, operates as a not-for-profit workers’ co-operative. McTiernan believes, as do I, that the choices we make about food—particularly the choices we make with our money—are inherently political. I would argue that community bakeries such as McTiernan’s, as well as bread baked in one’s own oven, offer us new ways of imagining community, self-sufficiency, patience, and a deeper connection with the source of our food.

As Mahatma Gandhi made the spinning wheel a symbol of resistance, Christians do the same with loaves of bread. And, just as the spinning of yarn was once an act of defiance, so too can be the baking of bread. Capitalism, environmental harm, and systemic poverty have become synonymous with what it means to be an American. By baking our own bread, we reject all three.

Of course, the way we deal with these things is not limited to bread. But the environmental, political, and spiritual implications of bread lead us to ponder the way we seek to live within the world. One way leads us to the chain grocery store. The other way leads us to an oven.

Author’s Note: Special thanks to Nelia Kimbrough, whose August 28th teaching helped cultivate this article.

Zachary Crow joined us as a Resident Volunteer at the Open Door Community last May after graduating from Harding University. He bakes beautiful, bountiful, and tasty bread for our Eucharist services each week.