Good Friday:

Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.
-Henry David Thoreau




In that time when we understand ourselves, we also begin to know what we need and who we truly are.  Perhaps in our journey it is when we humbly accept ourselves that we can turn to a power greater than ourselves to lead and guide us.

As I stand at the Cross on another Good Friday, I learn of the heights and depths of God's love.

It is a time of darkness. The Lenten journey must bring us to face and accept this darkness. Without Good Friday there is no Easter.

But, as a pastor said on Thursday evening, because Jesus has gone there it is now a "luminous darkness. And in that, we will meet God."

Lenten Journey- Good Friday- Loving the Real

God does not love some ideal person, but rather human beings just as we are, not some ideal world, but rather the real world.
—Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Meditations on the Cross

On the cross, no matter how we explain it, God in Jesus knew the reality of being human. It was not a warm, fuzzy, feel-good moment. I have no idea how or why it happened. There are many different theological explanations. I have a hunch all of them are wrong- and all of them may have a kernel of truth. If I could understand it, it wouldn’t be the work of God.

What I do know is that in the eternal wisdom and will of the Creator of the universe, Good Friday was the first half of the revolution and restoration of humanity. Jesus knew very well how we humans act. God knew very well how we humans can be evil and do injustice to our fellow humans.

Yet there was that cross.

At that I am speechless.

Were the whole realm of nature mine, 

that were a present far too small. 

Love so amazing, so divine, 

demands my soul, my life, my all.

Good Friday

A Day of Pause and Reflection

For Christians it is the day in-between. We have had the the Footwashing, the Last Supper, Gethsemane, Calvary. As I have said a number of times on this blog we have the advantage of knowing how the story ends. We know who won't be in the tomb when the women arrive tomorrow morning. We should not forget our privileged position of awareness- nor try to read it back into the original story. I saw a church sermon title for tomorrow that did that.

Afraid- But Filled With Joy

is what it read and I have assumed that it is trying to put those two feelings into the original disciples on Easter morning- a certain way of getting it wrong. Just as we don't need to be afraid today because of yesterday's Crucifixion, they had no sense of joy, even when the women reported the tomb empty.

Joy came later.

When we try to give definitive answers to what the events of that Holy Week (I still like Passion Week, by the way!) we will always fail. I don't care who you are or how educated you are, we cannot get into the First Century mindset to understand what it meant then, let alone what it means today.

I came to that realization sitting in church on Thursday evening in the silence prior to the start of the Maundy Thursday Footwashing and Eucharist. I wanted to be there and it was a calm, refreshing and renewing place to be. I thought about all the 40 years as a pastor on this evening or the years when I was first a Christian and went to the Good Friday services. I pondered the changes in the service, as the pastor said, since in most of those years there was no such thing as a footwashing service. We did those things as a "Camp-thing" but few would have thought of that for a Maundy Thursday experience.

I remembered our Moravian Lovefeasts or Tenebrae services of darkness. I reflected on the words of the liturgy:

• Do this
• My body
• My blood
• In remembrance
• Until He comes

But if you had asked me what this all means to me today, I couldn't have answered you. Nor would I have tried. I know far, far less today than I have ever known; I have far fewer final answers than I have ever had or been given. I don't need to know the answers anymore. I don't need to believe some iron-clad, no-way-around-it theology or theological ideology. I know these words express a deep, personal and universal reality. I know there is truth, no, there is Truth here that I will never grasp with my head or logic.

Nothing about this is logical. Nothing about this makes any intellectual sense in spite of what many want to find. What makes the words of Jesus and the actions of God so powerful to me today is that they don't have the same narrow meaning they may have had 2000 years ago. They are words that lead us to something far more than I can ever grasp.

Because the spiritual reality that I can fully understand will not be the spiritual reality of God. God is greater than that. God speaks in each time and each place. The events in an Upper Room, a Garden or on the garbage hill of Jerusalem in 30 AD are actions of God. No doubts there. They are part of a Truth that I will never humanly understand.

So all I can do is thank God for what God has done and is doing for me and for all. All I can express is what I have seen and heard and received.

• Grace
• Peace
• Forgiveness
• Salvation
• God's love.

So I let that surround me, wash over my feet in the footwashing, be a blessing as I washed another person's feet and then enter through me in the Eucharist.

Thanks be to God!

Good Friday Meditation

Lent Picture A Day (45): Prosper

Early Morning - Good Friday

In Gethsemene

To be in the Garden with Jesus

Deep Theology from Lake Wobegon

Perhaps our greatest American theologian (and story-teller) of this age is Garrison Keillor on Prairie Home Companion. Hidden in his down-home stories, amid self-deprecating Midwestern humor, he drops explosions of spiritual truth we would do well to pay attention to.

Last Saturday's News from Lake Wobegon was a gem. (Note: It was a rebroadcast of one from three years ago.)

At the end of the news he is talking about the difference between Good Friday and Easter. Good Friday is where all the real, hard core sinners can be found. The people you will need someday when you are older and the wiles and energy of youth fail you. The good people go to church on Easter. It's the hardcore sinners you will find on Good Friday. It's too bad you didn't go on Friday, he said. Think about it for next year.

Oh the truth!

"While we were still sinners...."

Good Friday 2014

The Way of the Cross

The Via Dolorosa (the Way of Sorows)

A way of meditating on Jesus' walk to Calvary.

It is the way of Good Friday.

1. Jesus is condemned to death

2. Jesus carries his cross

3. Jesus falls the first time

4. Jesus meets his mother

5. Simon of Cyrene helps Jesus carry the cross

6. Veronica wipes the face of Jesus

7. Jesus falls the second time

8. Jesus meets the women of Jerusalem

9. Jesus falls the third time

10. Jesus is stripped of his garments

11. Crucifixion: Jesus is nailed to the cross

12. Jesus dies on the cross

13. Jesus is taken down from the cross

14. Jesus is laid in the tomb.

Giving of Oneself

Good Friday. A day of compassion.

Good Friday. A day of sacrifice.

Good Friday. A day of ultimate giving for others.

We don't understand the idea of sacrifice in the same way as they did 2000 years ago. The sacrifice of animals is no longer part of our ritual for forgiveness or to appease a god.

But we do understand sacrifice. We do it regularly. Parents sacrifice every day for their children. They learn to share with the child, give part of their portion so the child can have something. Spouses sacrifice everyday for each other. One will do some things to make it easier for the other- and vice versa- not because we owe it to them, but because we care.

Compassion.

I don't know much about Jesus' sacrifice other than the incredible theology that has developed from it. But it seems to me that Jesus' sacrifice is as simple as that one little word.

Compassion.

Thanks be to God for the love we have been given in Jesus Christ.

Good Friday

Calvary

Oratorio de la Santa Cueva

Cadiz, Spain

4/5/2002

Holy Week 2011 - Friday

I have put together a series of music video meditations for this week. Here is the sixth at the Crucifixion. Meditate on what he has done for us.

Interpreting the Elements

I remember as a teenager on Good Friday, I would be aware of the weather between noon and three. Or at least I would be aware when the weather at that time was stormy or less than enjoyable. "Ah, yes," I would think. "It's the hour of Jesus death."

Many years later, in a conversation with a neighbor and church member about Good Friday, her comment was, "Yes, it always gets dark or storms on Good Friday." I nodded my head in some kind of agreement.

I can no longer find the reference, but I do remember sometime in the past 10 years or so seeing an article about Good Friday weather in the area where I was living. There appeared to be no pattern or correlation between Good Friday afternoon and the weather. I then realized that, of course, it can't get dark and stormy everywhere in the world, let alone everywhere in my time zone, from noon to three on Good Friday afternoon.

In preaching this practice of seeing what we want to see with selective awareness and memory might be called isogesis- reading into the text in order to justify our experience and opinions. Or, as I have often said when I wanted to preach on a topic that didn't seem to be in that morning's lectionary reading, "I can shoe-horn anything into the text."

What made me think about this was this past Good Friday afternoon. I was in church for a small service of Holy Communion and reading of the Seven Last Words. It was a special and wonderful spiritual experience. I had thought at the beginning that it couldn't be a real "service of darkness" since it was daytime.

Well, as we came to the end of the communion and moved into the readings, it began to get dark. I could hear the wind picking up. I glanced out the door over my shoulder and it was starting to rain. Then there was some lightning. The rain increased in intensity. The pastor paused at the end of one of the words to let the ambiance settle in.

• My God, my God, why....
• Behold your mother...
• Into Your hands...

Would the service have been any less meaningful without the natural sound effects? Of course not. The wind and lighting, rain and thunder were not a message from God, per se. God didn't do that just for the 20 of us in that church at that moment. (Although I have no doubt he could, of course.) It was my sensitivity to the moment that made it more meaningful to me in a unique way.

It is a way to sharpen our own spiritual senses. What is going on around me at this moment? What might that have to say to me about my spirituality? About God? About my place in the world? When we begin to be aware of that we will discover that there is more going on than we had thought. We will hear messages from God that we would otherwise have gone right by. Anything that deepens our awareness of ourselves, our world, the people around us and ultimately of God is worth cultivating.

It is isogesis? In some ways, sure. But that is what being mindful leads us to. We can only see the world in light of our experiences, but being open and mindful allows us to become more aware of the things that might also call us to expand our experiences and understandings. If all we ever see only confirms our opinions and prejudices we are in a sad place. Spring thunderstorms in Minnesota, no less than a burning bush in the desert can be a hit up the side of the head.

This- all this- is holy ground. Pay attention.

Good Friday: Jesus and His Mother

pmPilgrim Photo; Station 4, Via Dolorosa, Jerusalem

A moment etched in time. Jesus and Mary. Along the Via Dolorosa, his final way of pain to the cross.

Did they have an exchange of looks? Any mother would feel the pain to the depth of her soul. This infinite pain of the death of the Son was beyond any before or since.

Did she still, at this last moment hold to her hope? Or was she now ready to give it up as a lost cause?

A while later she would hear him give the Beloved Disciple the task of being her son. A moment of love amid the darkness.

A promise always- love amid the darkness. When you follow God's way and trust that darkness is not beyond redemption the love sparks a light - eternally.

Even today. Perhaps especially today. It is the only day we have.

Christ on the Cross, Federico Barocci, 1604
The Prado Museum, pmPilgrim picture, 2002

Good Friday, 2009

There can be no resurrection...

if there is no death.

Yet we want to turn our heads,
avert our eyes,
ignore the crowd and
the weeping women.

Even the one holding him as he is brought from the cross-

his mother

experiencing the greatest pain a mother
can bear.

But here we will see something beyond our ability to believe or
even to understand.

Here we will see the start of something new-

a new way of describing the world

a new way of describing God

and a new way of being human.