Good Friday, 2015, Dr. Rebecca Gordon

It’s often said that every preacher really has only one sermon in her; she just finds different ways of giving that one sermon over and over. I think that’s probably true of me. (In fact, I’ll even admit to more than a little actual recycling in this one.) My one sermon is about the sacrament – the thing that has been made holy— which we enact in the Eucharist, and about the pain and death at the center of that sacrament, and about how we recognize the Body of Christ there.

The Eucharist is the center of my week, like the narrow neck of an hourglass. In the best times, my daily life leads up to and flows out of the Eucharist. I think this is probably true for many people at Saint John’s, and indeed for many Christians engaged in sacramental forms of worship. If the Eucharist is the center of our worship and our week, then the cross lies at the center of the Eucharist. Everything we do in our worship flows into and out of the cross. Tonight I invite you to consider the idea that it could be the same with everything we do as Christians in the world.

We often speak of the cross on which Jesus was executed as “holy.” In Spanish, it’s called “Santa Cruz,” like Santa Cruz, the name of our neighboring city about 60 miles south of here. Episcopalians even observe a Feast of the Holy Cross. The very name of this feast day raises a question: How can we call the cross — the instrument on which Jesus was tortured and murdered — holy? It’s like calling a CIA interrogation site holy; like calling the torture cells at Guantánamo Bay or in Chicago, Illinois holy; like calling a gallows, a guillotine, a gas chamber holy. How can we do that? To answer this question is to enter into a place that is beyond words, to enter into a mystery. Words can only lead us to the threshold; we each have to choose to step across it. So tonight, this Good Friday, I will try to use my poor words to invite you into a wordless mystery.

What kind of mystery is this? To begin with, it is the mystery of a living God who is willing always and eternally to know what it is “to live and die as one of us.” It is the mystery of a Creator who knows what it is to be a creature – to wake on a soft spring morning and smell the new plants pushing through the earth; to feel the pleasure of clean clothes on a clean body, to take that first sip of coffee, that first bite of toast, and feel the sweet and salty mix of jam and butter run down your chin, to look across the table and see other creatures whom you love, perhaps to remember last night’s sweaty crush of desire and satisfaction in the arms of some other creature. It is the mystery of a God who knows what it is to stand at night in stunned awe beneath an endless expanse of stars, galaxy upon galaxy, universe upon universe. It is the mystery of a God who falls in love with ordinary life – and who, like any living creature – wants desperately to hold onto it. The God who cries out, “Abba, Father, let this cup pass from me…”

But there is more to creaturehood than pleasure and ecstatic joy. Tonight we have chanted the whole of that great psalm, number 22, whose first line we are told in the gospel of Mathew Jesus himself cried out from the cross, “Eli, eli, lama sabachthani? – My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The mystery of the holy cross is also the mystery of the God who knows what suffering is, who knows what it is to be abandoned, to be left alone with the torturer, the God who has cried out with the psalmist: “I am poured out like water; all my bones are out of joint; my heart within my breast is melting wax.”

Good Friday is one part of the mystery of incarnation. Each year during Holy Week, we celebrate two parts of that mystery, Christ’s crucifixion and Christ’s resurrection, Good Friday and Easter. I’ll come to Easter in a moment. For now though, let us stay in Good Friday.

In the practice of many poor Christian communities around the world, Good Friday, not Easter, is the most important day of Holy Week. Folks in these communities recognize the Body of Christ in the One who accompanies them in their struggles. In San Antonio, Texas, for example, the Latino community re-enacts Jesus’ passion, with far more truth than any television special.

Who are these Good Friday people? They are the Black communities of this country, who have seen too many of their young men shot by a police force that so often feels more like an occupying army.  Who cry out to us and to God that Black Lives Matter. They are the 2.3 million men and women living for decades in our jails and prisons, tens of thousands of them in solitary confinement, sacrificed to a “War on Drugs” that kills so many in Mexico, in Honduras, on our own streets. They are the families of the 43 education students of Ayotzinapa, murdered in Guerrero, Mexico, som of whom will be with us this Sunday to welcome the resurrected Jesus.

They are the immigrant men who gather on street corners hoping for work. They are the nannies who must leave their own children to take care of the children of other people. They are the family of Amilcar Perez-López, a Guatemalan immigrant shot a month ago by the San Francisco Police. And they are the people of St. John’s, Nico at the ICU in St. Mary’s, Bonita, waiting for a new hip, and Jackie, living the tragic miracle of receiving a young man’s kidney. We are all Good Friday people, those of us who lie awake in that awful time between 2:00 and 4:00 a.m., when physical pain or gnawing fear are often at their worst, and sleep just won’t come. When will it stop hurting? Will it ever stop? Will I lose my job? My home? My lover? My children? My mother? My life?
To enter into the mystery of the cross is to know somehow that God asks these questions with us, that God also knows what it is to be tortured, what it is to find oneself in that place where all of time and space shrink down to the an eternal now of speechless pain and separation. Many of you know that I have spent some years now working on the problem of literal torture, particularly institutionalized state torture. One thing I have learned is that torture has almost nothing to do with gathering what its proponents like to call “actionable intelligence.” Torture is about destroying social bodies by attacking the minds and bodies of the people who make up those bodies. This is what the Roman state and its upper class collaborators tried to do to Jesus and the people with him. This is what our own state continues to do to this day, in secret places around the world, and in our own prisons. When we celebrate Good Friday, we remember the God who is there in every prison cell.

Good Friday commemorates that time – 2000 years ago and yet always now -- when the God who loved life as much as we do experienced – and continues to experience – what it is for a creature to suffer and die. Good Friday is that eternal time when we recognize the God who shares our pain. Recognizing the Christ in our own pain does not take the pain away. The mystery is that sometimes this recognition transforms our experience of that pain, so that somehow we are not alone with it.
In a few minutes, we will have the opportunity to venerate – to honor – a model of Jesus’s cross, to testify to its holy nature. I want to be very clear here: what is holy about the cross is not fear, pain, and torture. There is nothing good or holy about human beings tormenting one another, or about a state that makes such torment an institution, an organized practice. What is holy is the body of Christ that suffers. What is holy is our ability to recognize that body in our own suffering and the suffering of others. When you touch that wood, I invite you to recognize the body of Christ – which is us.
In a sense, every Sunday liturgy has a little “Good Friday” inside it, and a little Easter. Our Anglican liturgical form helps us to experience the central reality of the cross with our minds, hearts and bodies, as each Sunday we retell our story. “On the night before he was handed over to suffering and death…” runs the prayer of consecration. There at the center of the story stands the holy cross, the sign of the One who died in pain and loneliness – tortured to death for choosing the side of the poor and the unwanted, the crazy ones, the drunks and the drug addicts. It is God’s choosing God’s self-offering, that takes the cross, an instrument of torture, and makes it something holy – makes it the symbol with which we Christians are marked, as we were marked almost 40 days ago, on Ash Wednesday.

Then, in the midst of the prayer of consecration, we “confess the mystery of faith: Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again.”

Which brings us finally to Easter. Tonight, through the Eucharist we participate in death, but we also participate in resurrection and in the promise of the reign of God, which is both with us now and still to come. When we recognize ourselves as the Body of Christ we create solidarity with each other, with all humanity, with all creation, which is the only context in which death and suffering can have any meaning, can be redeemed. We participate in a physical way—eating and drinking with our own bodies—in the Body of Christ, both crucified and resurrected. But we truly become the resurrected body only when we make the Eucharist real beyond the altar table, in the world. That is why one of our Eucharistic prayers says, “Deliver us from the presumption of coming to this Table for solace only, and not for strength; for pardon only, and not for renewal.” A truly great preacher, St. Augustine, said it this way: “You are the Body of Christ: that is to say, in you and through you the method and work of the incarnation must go forward. You are to be taken, you are to be consecrated, broken and distributed, that you may become the means of grace and vehicles of eternal love.”
And that is why on most days our liturgy ends with a dismissal. It is the shortest part of the service, but in some ways the most important. For here we ask God  “send us out to do the work you have given us to do, to love and serve you as faithful witnesses of Christ our Lord.”

Tonight, we are not dismissed; until Easter, we remain caught between death and resurrection. But we leave tonight secure in the knowledge that Easter does come; that, in the words of another psalm, “weeping endures for a night, but joy comes in the morning.” So tonight, as you leave this place, remember that you leave it as a faithful witness to the mystery in which we ourselves become the body of Christ, “consecrated, broken, and distributed,” that we ourselves are called to become “the means of grace and vehicles of eternal love.”

Amen

Easter and the Families of the Disappeared, Easter 2015, The Rev'd. Dr. Richard Smith

Photo by Sarah Lawton

(Note: This year for Easter, our parish welcomed members of the families of the 43 disappeared students from Ayotzinapa, Mexico. They have been touring the US, hoping to develop friendships and share their stories. We were honored to have them for the holiest day of our year.)


It begins in darkness, at a tomb, a place of death. It ends with the dawn.

It begins with Magdalene in tears, frightened and outraged and grieving. It ends in a garden teeming with life and Jesus speaking her name.

It begins in darkness, at a place of death. “Early on the first day of the week,” John writes, “while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb.”

We know what it is like to move about in darkness, to be in a place of death.

The families of the 43 students of Ayotzinapa know that darkness, that place of death. Their sons were disappeared by their government and they are desperately searching for answers. Why must it be so hard to find out what happened to their sons? Any parent would want to know. Why is the path to justice so hard?

Darkness. Tears. Fear. Outrage, Grieving.  These families know these things.

Here in our town, Elvira and Refugio know that darkness, that place of death. They are the parents of Alex Nieto, the young man gunned down and killed by San Francisco Police on Bernal heights just over a year ago while he was eating a burrito on his way to work. Like any parents, Elvira and Refugio simply want to know what happened in the last moments of their son’s life. Why must it be so hard to find the truth? Why is the path to justice so hard? Darkness. Tears. Grieving. Outrage.

Yesterday here at St. John’s we celebrated the memorial for Amilcar Perez Lopez, a young immigrant in our neighborhood. He came here to work so he could send money to his family living in poverty in Guatemala. Like Alex, he too was gunned down and killed by San Francisco Police.

Now that the autopsy is complete, we know that in the version of events given by Police to the media and to the community, they were lying. The Police are lying! I'm sorry to say this: They're lying.

Why must it be so hard to simply learn what happened? Darkness. Tears. Grieving. Anger.

And, God knows, our own community of St. John’s has known our own forms of darkness this past year; we, too have been in a place of death: worries about ever finding a new kidney for Jackie, Gary now in a fight with cancer, a seemingly interminable physical rehab process for Brother Tikhon.

And our beloved Nico has now learned that doctors have done all they can for him. He is now dying.

The story begins in darkness, in the place of death. We know this darkness and the place of death all too well.

There is an ancient litany of the church to Mary, the mother of Jesus. It goes, “Holy Mary, who kept faith on Holy Saturday, pray for us.”

Holy Saturday, the day between Good Friday and Easter, was for this woman, a day of darkness, tears, grieving, outrage. Like the parents of the 43 students, the parents of Alex Nieto, the parents of Amilcar, Mary had lost her son at the hands of the state. She had no clue what might come next. No signs of hope. Nothing but unbearable pain.

Yet even in that moment, she kept faith, kept trusting that out of a moment even as dark as this, light would surely come; out of this place of death, new life would surely emerge. She kept faith.

She couldn’t see how or when it would come, or what it would look like. She only knew it would come, that death and tears and grieving and anger would not have the final say; that her darkest moment would be redeemed.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, love and joy, justice and truth, will win. Life will win. Mary knew this. “Holy Mary, who kept faith on Holy Saturday, pray for us”--so that we, in our Holy Saturdays, can also keep faith.

St. Paul once wrote to his community, “Sisters and brothers, we would not have you grieve as people who have no hope.” I take that to mean that we are to grieve as people who do have hope, who know that death and tears and fear and grief will not have the final say.

For many of us, it  still seems very early in the morning, still dark. But it is, after all, the morning of Easter, and so we know how our story, like that of Jesus, will end.

What began in tears and darkness in the place of death will end with a broken tomb, a garden teeming with life, and Jesus, with a smile on his lips and a sparkle in his eye, speaking our names. The triumph of life and love and laughter.

And although it is still dark, it is time for you and me to practice some resurrection, anticipate the life, the love, the justice that we, like Mary, know will come. We don’t know when or how or what it might look like, but we are Easter people, and we know how the story ends. If, at this moment, we find ourselves in tears, it’s because the story isn’t over yet.

And so we practice resurrection--speaking out about what happened to the 43 students, to Alex, to Amilcar. Not remaining silent. Resisting all the lies the authorities throw at us. Carrying our picket signs, filing complaints, writing letters, speaking up at community meetings. Not giving up. Like Mary, keeping faith.

Practicing resurrection: It’s why we celebrate this day with great food and extra hugs, bring back the Alleluias into our songs in church, share a few favorite jokes, have an Easter egg hunt for our kids. We’re just practicing resurrection.

Practicing resurrection: Perhaps we do it by hanging out with our brother Nico over coffee or a hot chocolate in the final days and weeks of his life.

Practicing resurrection: Perhaps we do it by becoming organ donors, so that people like Jackie with kidney failure won’t have such an ordeal finding a new kidney to stay alive.

Practicing resurrection, anticipating and bringing to birth the life and the love, the justice, the joy and laughter that we know with all our hearts will have the final say at the end of our own Easter stories.