Sermon: Every Day is Good Friday Somewhere

It is a fearsome thing to ask ourselves to look into the face of suffering.

In Santa Rosa, a 17 year old boy has been arrested for shooting and killing another teenager.
In New York, a gunman kills 13 people as they sit at their desks, studying English, the language of their new home country.
In Africa, 12 million children are orphans because AIDS goes uncontained and untreated.
This very day, in a world with more than enough food to feed every single citizen of the planet, 16,000 children will die from hunger.  One child every 5 or 6 seconds.

These are the “despised and rejected” ones of whom Isaiah speaks, the ones we cannot bear to look upon.  The ones we hold of “no account.”  The ones from whom we “hide our faces.”

The suffering of the world is so great that we feel the need to look away.
We cannot bear it.
It is too painful.
And so we change the radio station, turn the newspaper page, or toss yet another plea for help into the recycling bin.
It is too much.
We don’t know where to begin.
Every day is Good Friday somewhere.

Sometimes the suffering comes close, and we cannot turn it down, turn the page, toss it off.
We have our own Good Friday’s too –
those times of suffering that seem utterly unbearable,
when we feel engulfed in darkness, and can see no light.
When grief overtakes us and we wonder whether we will ever feel joy again.  When we feel so lost, so abandoned, so hopeless, so anguished that we wonder whether we will ever feel anything else again.

Dead.  Numb.  The end of our story that contained anything good.

Today, if we are willing to look, we witness the one we follow, our Lord and Savior, the rabbi our teacher, the very human Jesus of Nazareth endure horrific suffering.
Jesus was betrayed, brutally beaten, dressed in purple robes and a crown of thorns and mocked as the king who could save all others, but could not save himself. Jesus endured the worst, most shameful, horrific suffering imaginable.

Why was that necessary?
Why did God allow that to happen?
Why do we re-tell this heart wrenching story over and over again?

[Click below for the complete sermon.]

Good Friday Americana

Below, check out the slide-show of images of Christ’s passion captured by photographer José Vergara from various public urban spaces throughout America. The slide-show is accompanied by Vergara’s explication of his work. As he puts it, “Christ still has power.”

more about “Good Friday Americana“, posted with vodpod