The following sermon was preached on April 15, 2022 at St George’s Transcona’s service for Good Friday. You can learn more about St George’s and find links to their YouTube channel by clicking here Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable and pleasing in our sight O God, for you are our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
Kate Bowler is a best selling author, podcaster and a friend. You may be familiar with her book, “Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I’ve loved. To paraphrase one of my favourite things she’s ever said, I’m tired of people trying to Easter the crap out of Good Friday.
Although I have been going to church my entire life, it wasn’t until I began worshiping in the Anglican church that I began to truly celebrate Good Friday.
Prior to that I would typically attend church on Good Friday and Easter Sunday, but the services would have looked almost exactly the same. At both services we’d quickly acknowledge that Jesus died and then spend most of our time celebrating the resurrection.
We Eastered the crap out of Good Friday.
People often try to Easter the crap of out my life too.
I had to update my personal information with a company awhile ago and my response to almost every question was, “Oh, that’s not true anymore.” That’s no longer my phone number. No, I don’t work there anymore. Yes, I used to teach there, but I don’t anymore. And on the drive home I thought about just how many things have changed for me in the past few years. How many things I’ve lost. How many dreams have died.
There have been Easter moments too, there has been new life and new dreams and things so good I still sometimes have to pinch myself to confirm that they are true.
But those things were born out of death. In order to get to the Easter moments, I have to fully live into the Good Friday ones, and the Holy Saturday ones too.
And it’s been hard for me, but it’s also been difficult for the people around me. People who, with the best of intentions, have more often than not wanted to force my Good Friday into an Easter Sunday.
And my choices boiled down to pretending it was Easter Sunday to make other people more comfortable or owning the truth that for me it was still Friday and that some days, I wasn’t sure Sunday would ever come.
I don’t know why things had to be so hard – it’s more than just the pandemic, which is hard enough on its own. I don’t know why things had to be so hard but I do know that one of the key things that has saved me in this season has been a decision I made early on to be honest, to resist the temptation to please people and live into a false Easter. The decision I made to say, “This is hard. This is not what I wanted. This did not all work out for the best. I did not land on my feet, I smashed my face off the sidewalk. It hurts.”
I needed to sit in a Good Friday space. To acknowledge the harsh reality of death. To feel the pain of it. To resist the temptation to pretend it was already Easter Sunday.
That saved me. That is saving me.
And the people who were willing to sit with me at the foot of the cross. The people who didn’t need to find a silver lining. The people who simply said, “I see how hard this it.”
They saved me.
There is no Easter Sunday without Good Friday.
A couple of years ago someone came early to attend the Good Friday service at my former parish and with tears in their eyes said, “I hope it’s OK to be here today when I’m clearly not OK.”
Is it OK to be here today if you’re clearly not OK?
You bet it is. It’s always OK and on this day we will acknowledge that truth in a particular way.
On Maundy Thursday we typically strip the church, removing linens and coverings and flowers and candles. When we gather for Good Friday the church is emptier, and we are emptier.
This year we’ve taken that one step further. The church is completely empty and we are gathered online.
The story of Jesus’ death is a powerful and important story that we should tell and re-tell again and again. Today is the day that we boldly and defiantly say, “It’s not Easter yet. It’s OK not to be OK.”
On this day we have full permission to hold the empty, to sit in the meaninglessness, and to acknowledge that not everything can be resolved.
On this day we have full permission to hold space for suffering, for grief, for death.
And we call it good.
And we do this in a world full of people who want to fill the empty, to find meaning, however shallow in the meaningless, to mute suffering and grief and cloak death in euphemisms.
Christ did not pass. We did not lose him. Christ died.
And it was good. It was horrible and painful and it sent everyone around him into a tailspin, but it was also good. Wasn’t it?
Reflecting on the horrors of WW2, German theologian Jurgen Moltmann wondered how theology could exist, how theology could speak, in the face of such overwhelming suffering. He determined that modern theology must be developed “in earshot of the dying Christ.”[1]
Theology, which really just means our thoughts about God, must be developed in earshot of the dying Christ.
What would we hear? What would we see if we resisted the temptation to skip straight to Easter and chose instead to sit quietly at the foot of the cross?
We would hear the sounds of death by crucifixion. The pounding of the hammer, the crack of the wood, the grunting of the soldiers, the panting, the groans, the screams of three men as their flesh is pierced by nails.
We would hear the conversation between Jesus and those other two men. Short, raspy sentences as they all struggled to breath.
We would hear the soldiers and people in positions of leadership casting lots and mocking Jesus.
And we would hear Jesus saying again and again and again, “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.
Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.
We would hear the women, loyal to the end, “beating their breasts and wailing.” Their grief too great to be contained.
And we would hear Jesus telling them to continue to weep, but not for him. We would hear Jesus telling them to weep for themselves and for their children because even more difficult days are coming.
And we might hear the wind moving through the grass as death leads to silence.
And we might begin to develop a greater humility for all the times that we have also “known not what we do.” And we might learn to hold space for those who weep. And we might condemn less and forgive more.
We might learn to pay attention and say to each other, “I see how hard this is. I can’t change it but I’m not going anywhere. We can sit in this Good Friday space for as long as you need to.”
Dr. Sheila Cassidy drew attention to the human rights abuses of the Pinochet regime when she wrote about her own experience of being imprisoned and tortured in Chile in the 1970s.
Dr. Cassidy knows, in her very bones, what it is to suffer, what it is to hold space for the darkness and the difficulty of death. She knows that it is only by living fully into Good Friday that we can ever hope to be an Easter people.
Listen to the words of her poem, “Starting Over – Fighting Back:”
And so we must begin to live again,
We of the damaged bodies
And assaulted mind.
Starting from scratch with the rubble of our lives
And picking up the dust
Of dreams once dreamt.
And we stand there, naked in our vulnerability,
Proud of starting over, fighting back,
But full of weak humility
At the awesomeness of the task.
We, without a future,
Safe, defined, delivered
Now salute you God.
Knowing that nothing is safe,
Secure, inviolable here.
Except you,
And even that eludes our minds at times.
And we hate you
As we love you,
And our anger is as strong
As our pain,
Our grief is deep as oceans,
And our need as great as mountains.
So, as we take our first few steps forward
into the abyss of the future,
We would pray for
Courage to become what we have not been before
And accept it,
And bravery to look deep within our souls to find
New ways.
We did not want it easy God,
But we did not contemplate
That it would be quite this hard,
This long, this lonely.
So, if we are to be turned inside out, and upside down,
With even our pockets shaken,
just to check what’s rattling
And left behind,
We pray that you will keep faith with us,
And we with you,
Holding our hands as we weep,
Giving us strength to continue,
And showing us beacons
Along the way
To becoming new.
We are not fighting you God,
Even if it feels like it,
But we need your help and company,
As we struggle on.
Fighting back
And starting over.[2]
In the strong name of the Holy and Undivided Trinity. Amen.
[1] My Bright Abyss by Christian Wiman, 133
[2] https://blueeyedennis-siempre.blogspot.com/2012/11/good-friday-people-and-reflections-on.html