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The Very Rev’d Ruth Ferguson -Rector of Christ Church Rochester

GOOD FRIDAY

April 7, 2023

The Christian tragedy of Good Friday is not only the crucifixion of Jesus but also the inadequacy of our response to it. At this grave, we confront every violent human suffering and death the world has known, and we cannot help but see the safe distance we’ve kept from them. We feel the weight of all the vigils we did not keep. Today, Christians grieve the inhumanity capable of “Roman Crucifixion” as surely as we grieve the inhumanity capable of “Crusade,” “pogrom,” and “holocaust.” We are weighted with the insufficiency and impotence of our uncertain guilt to change or reverse what has come of this. And we are vaguely aware that something in us recoils from his body - tortured, dying, dead.

Some of us will see in Jesus’ crucifixion and death the way in which God means to carry, in God’s own body, the violence and trauma of all unjust, untimely endings. Though we may remember that such endings as these comprise the average human experience, or witness, of death, the tragic reality is that we who are living must sometimes learn to forget; this is the ever present, ever necessary, ever insufficient human capacity for denial. If we are discerning, we know that Peter’s denial is not only an act of betrayal, but an inner state we share, one in which we seek to preserve our own humanity by turning from the loss of someone else’s. Good Friday is the reminder of our inescapable shame for our inescapable fear that, unless we learn to forget the faces of the world’s condemned and slaughtered, we will forget how to live.

There is every good reason for even Christian reluctance to be fully present here. In bowing our heads at the foot of his cross, we bow inward to the echoes of our imagination, to the faintness of a voice that is hoarse with fear and panic. Should we open our eyes fully, we will see on this empty cross his body as it was, with its opened flesh, its leaking fluids, its failing organs, and the cold damp of its death.

We look upon this cross knowing what the earliest Christians did not know: that the Church to come would, to its own shame - and to the horror of the one who died here – wield it as a weapon of war and conquest. We remember today what the Church would come to forget: the "power" of the cross as one of the places that God, who so loved the world, emptied himself out for us.

Good Friday is a holy day for Christians, not because Jesus’ suffering and death mattered more to God than any other suffering or death, or because it should matter more to us; the cross becomes holy for us when we recognize it as a place where God keeps vigil over (and within) every condemned and slaughtered body

Today, we look for what we cannot yet see: how God’s redemption of the world is often strangely hidden from us, even in death on a cross.

"The Crucifixion" William Blake (1757-1827) brush and ink

Seasonal thoughts:

A Note from the Rector

As I write these words, my lamp lit desk is an intersection of Advent and Christmas. Through the bay window on my left, ice skaters are circling the rink at Manhattan Square Park as the loudspeakers blast “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas.” Behind the chapel door (which I’ve propped open) across the hall to my right, the consort rehearses “Comfort, comfort ye my people” from the organ gallery across empty pews.  It’s Christmas on my left, and Advent on my right. What, then, is the “festival” of our lessons and carols tonight? Christmas or Advent? In truth, it’s both. 

Church people try to separate the two because each is a distinct season, a distinct experience. The act of separating Advent from Christmas is both necessary and impossible. Some of us use Advent to focus our yearning for God beyond Christmas day, if not as a refuge from holiday madness. But Advent, of course, is more than a hiding place from Christmas. Christmas can’t be hidden from Advent, not theologically, biblically, historically, eschatologically, spiritually, or even liturgically. Advent is for eternally travelling to Bethlehem, so we travel with the angels tonight ahead of the Christmas event, no less than the shepherds travelled with them at the event, and no less than the magi who followed the star after the event. Advent and Christmas flow into each other because God acts in human history in ways don’t fit with linear time.

Eric Milner- White, the dean of King’s College, Cambridge, came home from World War I alive. He reworked the original 1880 version of Lessons and Carols service to speak to the people of the trenches: to the survivors, to those died, and to their families. It was Christmas, but his heart was with the Advent people of Isaiah, walking in the darkness of war. He adapted the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, the one the world hears broadcast live from BBC every Christmas Eve, for those who walked in darkness but were yet to see a great light. Nine years later, when he introduced what an Advent service of lessons and Carols might mean, he wrote that it should “help us express the desire of all nations and ages,” the purpose of which should be “not to celebrate Christmas but to expect it.” 

More than the birth of Jesus, Advent anticipates a new world order, the birth of a new “time” and “place” where God will reign with a peace that passes all understanding. Christmas anticipates the very same. The difference, if there is any, is what the longing looks like. In Advent, it is seen in human faces registering terror, if not resignation, to what has come upon them in devastation and exile. In Christmas, the longing is seen in the faces of the mother and infant as they behold each other for the first time. “Advent” and “Christmas” are simply the names for the wild, radiant longing that sleeps underneath our despair or resignation in the world as it is. (Either is also a good name for the slow awakening we feel when we realize this is not the world God wants for us, and there is more to come.)  

As I write these words, there is Christmas celebration on the ice rink to my left, and Christmas expectation in the sanctuary on my right. Sometimes, we can’t keep the celebration separate from the expectation. If the Church should hope to shine Isaiah’s ever-ancient, ever-present light into the trenches of the present day, and should that light reach anyone who may be compelled to celebrate it, then we should rejoice. And even sing a Christmas carol or two. In Advent. Because the joy of God is not a joy to be reasoned with.

My priesthood is blessed with an ice rink across the street from my office.

Advent Quiet; Centering Ourselves in an Uncentered World

Advent is a battle and a refuge. We are creatures of habit, habituated to chronic work and worry, the absence of which destabilizes us.  Besieged and beset, we enter the refuge of silence only through some hard-won battle with the world and some still harder-won battle with ourselves. It is part of being human to mistake stillness at first for death, but this stillness is the opposite.

Advent is the stillness at the center of the whirlwind, the stillness of heightened attention and absolute presence. It is the silence of an unbroken voice beneath the noise, awakening us to everything that is radiant, hidden, and eternal. 

There is, in the wilderness of the world, a starlit clearing where you can see the original foundation of creation laid at its center, where you can still hear the first song of the first morning stars, and all the sons and daughters of God shouting for joy. 

You are invited to center with us in the silence of contemplative prayer for the world, for the earth and its every species, and for the hastening of God’s reign.

Saturdays in the chancel, 3:45 – 5pm: Dec 3, 10 & 17. Meditation cushions and mats, winter sun through the stained glass and God’s silence all provided as a sheer gift.

Dear Christ Church,

I couldn’t finish a sermon I was preaching a few weeks ago because an idea was coming to me. I was trying to put it into words and I needed to buy some time, so I said “hold on a minute!” while I made my way down from the pulpit. Sometimes moving helps you think, and I was thinking about how Lazarus is everywhere at once: the rich man’s gate, sleeping on the steps of Christ Church, pushing a cart full of makeshift shelter along the city sidewalks, hungry and dying with hungry and dying children, and all over the world. Each of us has our own picture or memory of “Lazarus” that haunts us.

I was thinking about how the needs of the world are infinite and we are so terribly finite in every way, and there are any number of reasons it becomes easy for us look at Lazarus lying at our gate without really seeing him. I was thinking about what it would take to make the choice to open our eyes more, to reach out and touch the pain we see, knowing that our limited and finite selves can never really give enough. Is it crazy to think our annual stewardship campaign could address not only the needs of Christ Church but the haunting, infinite, hunger we see in Lazarus and all around us? I don’t think it’s crazy at all: the two are very much related, and if they’re not, then we’re not being Christ’s Church.

Beyond helping us close our deficit budget, your financial gift to Christ Church helps us care for our building and the ever-evolving ministries and programs that we offer to one another and to the wider community. Church is best when we are not just working to sustain ourselves and our ministry financially, but working on how we can help others sustain in these frightening times. We come to church in order to be a church that gives itself away to others. We cannot solve the problems of the world, but striving to be that kind of church is more than enough.

Here’s the idea I shared a few weeks ago: let’s pledge twice this year. When you give to Christ Church, give at the same time to another community or global neighbor (the earth counts as a neighbor). Then consider sharing a few words about the “neighbor” to whom you are giving when we say our blessing at the Stewardship Dinner this Friday. You can also write the name of the neighbor/ organization on your Christ Church pledge card, and our stewardship team will comprise a list of those to whom Christ Church gives, and for whom we pray. Please fill out a pledge card so we can budget for the year ahead. You can mail it in, or bring it to church on a Sunday for the offering plate. See you in Church, Ruth+