This sermon was preached for Good Friday on Friday, April 19 at the Episcopal Church of Our Saviour in Oakland, CA. The readings for this sermon is the Passion Narrative in the Gospel of John (John 18:1-19:42).
Last year, a couple of my friends asked me to give a speech at their wedding. As I was preparing my remarks, I asked Alec and Rachel to tell me about when they knew they wanted to marry each other. Rachel wrote to me that while she knew she would marry Alec for a long time, she had been waiting for the moment when she knew she was ready. That moment came just about a year before their wedding, when Alec’s grandmother fell very ill. A couple of days before she died, Alec and Rachel were in the hospital visiting his grandmother. Ella Fitzgerald’s “Cry me a river” was playing and Alec’s grandfather was sitting next to her and holding her hand. That moment was incredibly sad, but it was also beautiful. Suddenly Rachel knew. She wanted that with Alec, all of it—marriage, children, a whole life together. To hold the other’s hand before they died.
For my friend, it was not a moment of giddy happiness or perfect joy that solidified her commitment to the man beside her. It was a moment of profound grief and deep sadness.
Here, on this day, we gather together as the church in profound grief and deep sadness. We stand together in the pain and despair of the end of things. The end of a life. The shattering and scattering of a community. The death of a dream.
Holy Week invites us to sink into the last moments of Jesus’s life and experience them as the first followers did, as if Easter is not coming and the promise of the resurrection is unimaginable. And yet, here in this terrible moment, Jesus does something simple and yet extraordinary, teaching us to love even at the end.
Jesus’s death was not a good death. It was not a graceful ending to a long and fulfilling life. There was no Ella Fitzgerald, no hospital bed. Jesus’s crucifixion was the cruel, brutal execution of an innocent young man. Yet, here, amidst the long and devastating onslaught of horrific details of Christ’s passion and death, a small glimmer of the power of love is already poking through.
While hanging on the cross, bleeding, dying, struggling for breath, Jesus sees his loved ones gathered there with him: the faithful women, his devoted mother, and the beloved disciple. Now, it used to bother me that the evangelist left “the disciple whom Jesus loved” character unnamed. But then I learned to see the anonymity as the evangelist’s invitation to each reader to see ourselves as that disciple. Listen again:
When Jesus saw his mother and you whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, “Woman, here is your child.” Then he said to you, “Here is your mother.” And from that hour you took her into your own home.
In the precise moment of terrible pain, Jesus forges a new family. He reminds the faithful few at his side that even in the moment when God seems most absent in our lives, we have one another. We gather. These bonds that we make in these moments are strong, they are real, and they are holy.
This church, the Episcopal Church of Our Saviour, is no stranger to beginnings within endings, and endings within beginnings. It began as a converted barn on Sixth Street, and then as a rented parish hall on 9th and Madison. It reinvented itself in rented quarters on Lincoln Avenue when that building was torn down, and then again here, on 1011 Harrison. And with the church renovation project these next few years, we are facing an ending and a beginning all over again.
It has been beautiful and exciting to hear this church come together in the imagining of what you could be in this neighborhood. There is great joy in joining in the dreaming and the hope.
At the same time, Good Friday comes to remind us that the work of the church is also in the grieving and the letting go. These brick walls, these well-worn steps, this stained glass. Someday soon, we will let them go. Me before you. And when you do, I have seen enough of this parish to know that you will gather then, too. You will hold each other’s hands. And the strength of the bonds of this church will be reaffirmed. And Jesus will be there to forge them anew.
Good Friday reminds us to pause and let ourselves grieve in every change in our life. It warns us not to move too quickly into the joy of the Easter resurrection, but to take time to stop and mourn the death of something holy and good. Whatever pain you might feel in whatever losses you are facing in your life now, that pain is sacred all on its own, even without the hope of new life.
Above all, Good Friday calls us to share in this holy work of grief and loss together. In these Good Friday moments, Jesus binds us to one another. This isn’t the kind of world-exploding, paradigm-shifting, announce-it-from-the-rooftops power of love that astounds us on Easter morning. It’s an ordinary, everyday kind of power of love. Yet I know through it, God is changing the world.
Last year, a couple of my friends asked me to give a speech at their wedding. As I was preparing my remarks, I asked Alec and Rachel to tell me about when they knew they wanted to marry each other. Rachel wrote to me that while she knew she would marry Alec for a long time, she had been waiting for the moment when she knew she was ready. That moment came just about a year before their wedding, when Alec’s grandmother fell very ill. A couple of days before she died, Alec and Rachel were in the hospital visiting his grandmother. Ella Fitzgerald’s “Cry me a river” was playing and Alec’s grandfather was sitting next to her and holding her hand. That moment was incredibly sad, but it was also beautiful. Suddenly Rachel knew. She wanted that with Alec, all of it—marriage, children, a whole life together. To hold the other’s hand before they died.
For my friend, it was not a moment of giddy happiness or perfect joy that solidified her commitment to the man beside her. It was a moment of profound grief and deep sadness.
Here, on this day, we gather together as the church in profound grief and deep sadness. We stand together in the pain and despair of the end of things. The end of a life. The shattering and scattering of a community. The death of a dream.
Holy Week invites us to sink into the last moments of Jesus’s life and experience them as the first followers did, as if Easter is not coming and the promise of the resurrection is unimaginable. And yet, here in this terrible moment, Jesus does something simple and yet extraordinary, teaching us to love even at the end.
Jesus’s death was not a good death. It was not a graceful ending to a long and fulfilling life. There was no Ella Fitzgerald, no hospital bed. Jesus’s crucifixion was the cruel, brutal execution of an innocent young man. Yet, here, amidst the long and devastating onslaught of horrific details of Christ’s passion and death, a small glimmer of the power of love is already poking through.
While hanging on the cross, bleeding, dying, struggling for breath, Jesus sees his loved ones gathered there with him: the faithful women, his devoted mother, and the beloved disciple. Now, it used to bother me that the evangelist left “the disciple whom Jesus loved” character unnamed. But then I learned to see the anonymity as the evangelist’s invitation to each reader to see ourselves as that disciple. Listen again:
When Jesus saw his mother and you whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, “Woman, here is your child.” Then he said to you, “Here is your mother.” And from that hour you took her into your own home.
In the precise moment of terrible pain, Jesus forges a new family. He reminds the faithful few at his side that even in the moment when God seems most absent in our lives, we have one another. We gather. These bonds that we make in these moments are strong, they are real, and they are holy.
This church, the Episcopal Church of Our Saviour, is no stranger to beginnings within endings, and endings within beginnings. It began as a converted barn on Sixth Street, and then as a rented parish hall on 9th and Madison. It reinvented itself in rented quarters on Lincoln Avenue when that building was torn down, and then again here, on 1011 Harrison. And with the church renovation project these next few years, we are facing an ending and a beginning all over again.
It has been beautiful and exciting to hear this church come together in the imagining of what you could be in this neighborhood. There is great joy in joining in the dreaming and the hope.
At the same time, Good Friday comes to remind us that the work of the church is also in the grieving and the letting go. These brick walls, these well-worn steps, this stained glass. Someday soon, we will let them go. Me before you. And when you do, I have seen enough of this parish to know that you will gather then, too. You will hold each other’s hands. And the strength of the bonds of this church will be reaffirmed. And Jesus will be there to forge them anew.
Good Friday reminds us to pause and let ourselves grieve in every change in our life. It warns us not to move too quickly into the joy of the Easter resurrection, but to take time to stop and mourn the death of something holy and good. Whatever pain you might feel in whatever losses you are facing in your life now, that pain is sacred all on its own, even without the hope of new life.
Above all, Good Friday calls us to share in this holy work of grief and loss together. In these Good Friday moments, Jesus binds us to one another. This isn’t the kind of world-exploding, paradigm-shifting, announce-it-from-the-rooftops power of love that astounds us on Easter morning. It’s an ordinary, everyday kind of power of love. Yet I know through it, God is changing the world.
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