Sermon Spotlight: Good Friday
Most years, I come to Good Friday having spent hours with different texts, having planned out services with Tami and Chip. We sit with our options, with the days of the Triduum, we turn it over and over, and look for a theme to push.
This year has been different. The projects have piled up. My health has asked things of me I wasn't expecting, we’ve spent more time in the Urgency or Emergency Room than last year combined, I think. And if I'm honest, some of the things I was most looking forward to this Lenten season, our Labyrinth Stations of the Cross, Fish Fries at the Legion, didn't land the way I had hoped. I have been busy in a way that has left me less able to think, imagine and plan, less able to sit with things, less able to find the quiet I rely on.
I tell you this not because my schedule is interesting, or for you to feel sorry for me, but because I suspect I am not alone in that experience.
These last three months have been exhausting in ways that are hard to fully name. Many of you have told me that you have carried a kind of trust, trust in institutions, trust in systems of government that you believed, even imperfectly, were trying to do right by people and that trust has been shattered. Not bent. Not tested. Shattered. And you are trying to figure out what to do with the pieces.
Others of you have been wrestling with something harder still. You want to respond. You want to act. We’ve regularly talked about making economic choices that send a message. And then someone gently points out that the people who will feel that impact first are the ones who can least afford it, the low-wage workers at the places we're talking about boycotting, the people already on the margins. It always amazes me how protected the wealthy truly are.
This has been my thought process, and it is, as Chip so often says, infuriating. We find ourselves holding an impossible situation we didn't ask for, where every option has a cost we didn't fully see coming. It has broken us in every direction at once, what we thought we knew, and what we feel in our gut. And the two have gotten so tangled together that most of us can't tell anymore where the thinking ends and the grief begins. What's left is just exhaustion. And sad. And the uncertainty of what comes next.
But here is what I have witnessed these past several months watching your faces, your bodies, your minds deal with it all: you have not been carrying this alone. You have been letting each other see and feel the emotions, the brokenness, the pain. You have been, many of you, broken together. And there is something in that, something I want to name before we go any further, that is not nothing. It is, in fact, closer to the heart of this Good Friday night than you might think.
On Palm Sunday, we talked about earthquakes. Remember, Matthew used the Greek word eseisthe, where we get our word, seismology. The city shook when Jesus arrived. The earth shook when Jesus died. The ground shook when Jesus rose. Three tremors, and tonight is the second tremor. Tonight the earth shakes.
When the structures we trust begin to crack, and break, when the ground beneath our institutions, our assumptions, our careful plans shifts, something authentically seismic is happening. It is not only political. It is not only personal. It is the kind of shaking that gets into your bones, that wakes you at three in the morning, which many of you have been telling me you have been doing, waking up at three in the morning, feeling that shaking that makes you reach for someone else's hand in the dark. A kind of shaking where you don’t want to be alone.
The earth is shaking. We know this not as metaphor but as lived experience. And Jesus knew it too. From the cross, according to Matthew, Jesus did not offer a prayer of serene acceptance. He did not speak a word of triumph. He cried out the opening line of Psalm 22:
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
I want you to sit with that for a moment, really sit with it. This is where my head has been these past many months, WHY?! The Son of God, in his final hours, does not have access to a feeling of divine presence. He had access to a psalm, a human poem, written by a human being in a moment of genuine abandonment and Jesus uses it as his own words. Because they are the truest words available. Because there are moments when the most authentic thing you can say is: I don't feel you here. Where are you? Why have you left me alone with this?
And we have to remember, this is not a failure of our faith. The psalm begins with a cry that has no answer, take that cry with you, not just tonight, but into tomorrow, into Saturday's silence and anticipation of the empty tomb. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? is a prayer. It is, in fact, one of the most poignant prayers in all of scripture. And if that is where you are right now, if the exhaustion has made God feel far away then you are in exactly the company of Jesus on this night.
I have been thinking about the song I referenced back on Ash Wednesday, a song that many of your children and grandchildren probably know, from K-Pop Demon Hunters, a film that has found its way into a lot of hearts this past year. In it, the main character sings:
I broke into a million pieces, and I can't go back.
But now I'm seeing all the beauty in the broken glass.
The scars are part of me, darkness and harmony —
my voice without the lies, this is what it sounds like.
And then, this line: I should've let the jagged edges meet the light instead. The jagged edges of broken trust. The jagged edges of an impossible situation with no clean answer. The jagged edges of a country that is shaking, of a community that is tired, of a faith that has been pushed to its edge and found itself crying out in the words of a psalm. Why!, Why! Why!
The jagged edges are real. The cry of abandonment from Psalm 22, and from Jesus dying on a cross are real, and it is yours, ours to pray, and you do not have to resolve it before Sunday.
But sometimes the jagged edges are exactly what lets the light in.
You all have been broken together these past months and that is not weakness as the empire around us would claim. That is the community God works with, the only kind there has ever been confused people, tired people, people holding impossible situations they didn't ask for, people whose trust has been shattered and who are still showing up anyway.
You showed up tonight even as the earth is shaking. We do not have to rush into Sunday. We sit here, together. And if you have nothing else to pray tonight, you have this: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? It was enough for Jesus. It is enough for you.
This year has been different. The projects have piled up. My health has asked things of me I wasn't expecting, we’ve spent more time in the Urgency or Emergency Room than last year combined, I think. And if I'm honest, some of the things I was most looking forward to this Lenten season, our Labyrinth Stations of the Cross, Fish Fries at the Legion, didn't land the way I had hoped. I have been busy in a way that has left me less able to think, imagine and plan, less able to sit with things, less able to find the quiet I rely on.
I tell you this not because my schedule is interesting, or for you to feel sorry for me, but because I suspect I am not alone in that experience.
These last three months have been exhausting in ways that are hard to fully name. Many of you have told me that you have carried a kind of trust, trust in institutions, trust in systems of government that you believed, even imperfectly, were trying to do right by people and that trust has been shattered. Not bent. Not tested. Shattered. And you are trying to figure out what to do with the pieces.
Others of you have been wrestling with something harder still. You want to respond. You want to act. We’ve regularly talked about making economic choices that send a message. And then someone gently points out that the people who will feel that impact first are the ones who can least afford it, the low-wage workers at the places we're talking about boycotting, the people already on the margins. It always amazes me how protected the wealthy truly are.
This has been my thought process, and it is, as Chip so often says, infuriating. We find ourselves holding an impossible situation we didn't ask for, where every option has a cost we didn't fully see coming. It has broken us in every direction at once, what we thought we knew, and what we feel in our gut. And the two have gotten so tangled together that most of us can't tell anymore where the thinking ends and the grief begins. What's left is just exhaustion. And sad. And the uncertainty of what comes next.
But here is what I have witnessed these past several months watching your faces, your bodies, your minds deal with it all: you have not been carrying this alone. You have been letting each other see and feel the emotions, the brokenness, the pain. You have been, many of you, broken together. And there is something in that, something I want to name before we go any further, that is not nothing. It is, in fact, closer to the heart of this Good Friday night than you might think.
On Palm Sunday, we talked about earthquakes. Remember, Matthew used the Greek word eseisthe, where we get our word, seismology. The city shook when Jesus arrived. The earth shook when Jesus died. The ground shook when Jesus rose. Three tremors, and tonight is the second tremor. Tonight the earth shakes.
When the structures we trust begin to crack, and break, when the ground beneath our institutions, our assumptions, our careful plans shifts, something authentically seismic is happening. It is not only political. It is not only personal. It is the kind of shaking that gets into your bones, that wakes you at three in the morning, which many of you have been telling me you have been doing, waking up at three in the morning, feeling that shaking that makes you reach for someone else's hand in the dark. A kind of shaking where you don’t want to be alone.
The earth is shaking. We know this not as metaphor but as lived experience. And Jesus knew it too. From the cross, according to Matthew, Jesus did not offer a prayer of serene acceptance. He did not speak a word of triumph. He cried out the opening line of Psalm 22:
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
I want you to sit with that for a moment, really sit with it. This is where my head has been these past many months, WHY?! The Son of God, in his final hours, does not have access to a feeling of divine presence. He had access to a psalm, a human poem, written by a human being in a moment of genuine abandonment and Jesus uses it as his own words. Because they are the truest words available. Because there are moments when the most authentic thing you can say is: I don't feel you here. Where are you? Why have you left me alone with this?
And we have to remember, this is not a failure of our faith. The psalm begins with a cry that has no answer, take that cry with you, not just tonight, but into tomorrow, into Saturday's silence and anticipation of the empty tomb. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? is a prayer. It is, in fact, one of the most poignant prayers in all of scripture. And if that is where you are right now, if the exhaustion has made God feel far away then you are in exactly the company of Jesus on this night.
I have been thinking about the song I referenced back on Ash Wednesday, a song that many of your children and grandchildren probably know, from K-Pop Demon Hunters, a film that has found its way into a lot of hearts this past year. In it, the main character sings:
I broke into a million pieces, and I can't go back.
But now I'm seeing all the beauty in the broken glass.
The scars are part of me, darkness and harmony —
my voice without the lies, this is what it sounds like.
And then, this line: I should've let the jagged edges meet the light instead. The jagged edges of broken trust. The jagged edges of an impossible situation with no clean answer. The jagged edges of a country that is shaking, of a community that is tired, of a faith that has been pushed to its edge and found itself crying out in the words of a psalm. Why!, Why! Why!
The jagged edges are real. The cry of abandonment from Psalm 22, and from Jesus dying on a cross are real, and it is yours, ours to pray, and you do not have to resolve it before Sunday.
But sometimes the jagged edges are exactly what lets the light in.
You all have been broken together these past months and that is not weakness as the empire around us would claim. That is the community God works with, the only kind there has ever been confused people, tired people, people holding impossible situations they didn't ask for, people whose trust has been shattered and who are still showing up anyway.
You showed up tonight even as the earth is shaking. We do not have to rush into Sunday. We sit here, together. And if you have nothing else to pray tonight, you have this: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? It was enough for Jesus. It is enough for you.
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