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Holy Week
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad you're here, and we hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Hit the commons.church for more information.
Speaker 2:So we find ourselves here in the middle of this dark and agonizing story. Each year, we return to the site of Christ's struggle and travail, and we tell again this story of a god with us, A god with us who takes a criminal's place in the death row of his time and reveals something of the divine that we hadn't seen before. But before we go further, I wanna tell you another story. In the 2005, my wife, Darlene, her grandfather began to get sick. And I wish I could talk to you about grandpa George for a while, but I'll summarize this way.
Speaker 2:As a child, he and his families survived malnourishment in the 4445 due to Nazi occupation. And when Canadian troops broke through to their part of Holland, they left a significant impact on George when they shared their white bread with him. To the extent that he committed to going to Canada when he grew up and joining the military, so that's exactly what he did. At 18, he migrated, got a job, and joined the service. And he served the military for several decades, and along the way, he found love.
Speaker 2:He became a father to four children, and he grew into a robust faith in Jesus. George retired early and began volunteering his time to help rebuilding projects around the world torn apart by natural disasters. Also, he and Darlene's grandmother took in and befriended a Yugoslavian refugee family in the late nineteen nineties. And over the years, George picked up various hobbies and activities, including a love for walking. And this love along with his immigrant childhood experience culminated in 2003 when at age 69, he walked from Vancouver to Halifax over nine months to raise money for the Canadian Food Grains Bank, which is an organization that partners with the federal government to send Canadian food resources abroad to help those in need.
Speaker 2:Grandpa was a great man. He was diminutive. He was quiet, but he was quick to smile, and he was the best card player partner I ever had. He was a great example of what a spirited person with ingenuity and resolve can accomplish in one simple single life. And that's why when grandpa went out to walk one day and couldn't keep his pace, it wasn't good.
Speaker 2:Fast forward several months to the warm days of an Ontario fall, as family gathered, we were told that grandpa had just a couple of days to live. He was still cognizant and aware, though weak and largely immobile due to the the lung cancer that would soon take his life. And as a young man, I sat in that room in shock considering the very real and immediate future for this incredible man. This man who had done so much, had served so faithfully, had befriended so many people, and had walked so far only to find himself a passive receiver of what life brings us. And this is where we find Jesus in the story we tell today as well.
Speaker 2:As author and priest Henry Nouwen says, we see here that the time of action is past. Jesus doesn't speak anymore. He doesn't protest. He doesn't reproach or admonish. He's become a victim.
Speaker 2:He no longer acts. He is acted upon. Or as novelist Usaku Endo writes, the most striking feature of this text is the way it dares without hesitation to spotlight front and center stage the feeble and helpless figure of Jesus. This is our core affirmation today. Regardless of the ways that we explain how and why Christ's death on the cross is so important, how it confronts our separateness from all that is good and right and true.
Speaker 2:We affirm that God in Christ knows what it is to relinquish power, control, and volition. He knows what it is to experience human life as one being acted upon by outside forces, forces that are often cruel, unjust, and callously ambivalent to any and all kinds of victims. And there are implications in this kind of affirmation. Because if Easter Sunday is the day where the church speaks most clearly to the world with ecstatic and extravagant hope, If that's the day when we might appropriately be accused for believing and declaring some myth about death being defeated and the world being made new, then Good Friday is the reality check. Because this is the day when no one should be able to accuse us of pie in the sky existential escapism.
Speaker 2:No. This is the day where our Sunday claims are grounded, and that is done by means of weather worn wood and human flesh. Today is the day where, in my opinion, our claims about god hold their water. This story about Jesus isn't a Mission Impossible script replete with scenes where we think for just a second that things might not turn out well for the protagonist. This God we speak of isn't an escape artist performer.
Speaker 2:He's doing his own stunts, except his are a high stakes reality with no script beyond that of a death sentence. So we tell of a god with us who surrendered to the story he found himself in. The scriptures say, then he was crucified. It's amazing how much passion, how much suffering, how much violence, how much pain can be stored up in those four simple words, then they crucified him. In Greek, it's just a single word for our gospel writer.
Speaker 2:No mention of blood as in the previous chapter, no painstaking detail, no sensationalized images. Matthew spends far more time describing the nameless soldiers at the foot of the cross and the sarcastic onlookers passing by who we'll return to in a second. We know that crucifixion was a grotesque and a grisly affair. It was visceral. It was horrifying and very public in order to subdue those who were dissident.
Speaker 2:But this kind of violence isn't all that unique. It marks all needless death, actually. The crushing agony of loss, the shocking immediacy of a life snuffed out, the stark reminder of our fragility, the rancid hate and dehumanization that mark our shared history, these are all summarized in a single word. And I wonder if the same isn't true for each of us in some way. If the most painful, sorrow filled, and terrible moments of our lives aren't sometimes incorporated into our stories in similar fashion.
Speaker 2:She just left me. Then he hit me. Then they were gone. Then I lost everything. Then I was alone.
Speaker 2:And in such phrases, our lives get summarized with brutal efficiency into sound bites chock full of emotion and feeling only occasionally retold. And part of the discipline of Lent and our observance that brings us to Good Friday today is our capacity to perceive, sense, own, and name human suffering in the fabric of our world. First, we catch glimpse of a god who became a victim like so many. Then perhaps we awaken to our own sorrow, born of our own wayward words and actions that have harmed those we love or from the wounds that have been inflicted on us by others. But then we begin to see it in every headline, and we see it in every casual glance on the c train.
Speaker 2:We see it in every forced laugh. We see it in every passive aggressive Facebook post. And we affirm with scholar Deanna Thompson that, quote, the message of Christ on the cross is that god comes to us, end quote, that he entered our human story by choosing to become one acted upon. Then the scriptures say, the people passing by shouted abuse, shaking their heads in mockery and leading the and the leading priests, the teachers of religious law, and the elders, they also mocked Jesus. He saved others, they scoffed, but he can't save himself.
Speaker 2:He trusted god. So let god rescue now if he wants him. The underlying critique here, of course, is that a miracle worker who can't even keep himself alive doesn't deserve belief. And the truth is that this mockery is justified if you think about it because Jesus hasn't destroyed the temple like he said he would. It's standing just over there.
Speaker 2:Life goes on as usual for those who are in power and control because Rome's garrison still patrol the streets, and David's ancient city still sits pressed underneath the boot of the empire. This kingdom that Jesus spoke of, it appears completely ineffectual. Oh, Jesus, people are saying, how foolish to hope and to dream and to talk of the divine in the way that you have. And it seems to me that Jesus hears those mocking voices just as you and I do in the throes of our everyday lives. You're a failure.
Speaker 2:You're a liar. Why should we trust you? And in reading this way, we encounter a Christ who isn't no longer an actor, but one who is subjected to ridicule on all sides. Like him, we might hear the voices of critique coming from our own experience sharp and pointed as they come to us because they're true. For all the times we promised to follow through and couldn't, for all the times we let others down, for all of the misplaced expectations, for all of the humiliation of failing, these things, Christ knows.
Speaker 2:These voices we hear, be they others or even sometimes our own, he has heard them too. Behind all of this, Jesus faces the reality that we encounter in our darkest moments that god may not be as we believed. And I don't know if you've experienced this, but in moments like this, there comes a doubt and the debilitating paralysis that are hard to describe apart from the feelings of loneliness and rejection that flood in. Our affirmation today is of a god who knows these deep places of our stories. He knows each moment of helplessness intimately.
Speaker 2:And in the face of such, the text says, then Jesus shouted out again and released his spirit. Jesus surrenders. It was inevitable, really, because the effects of his execution couldn't be slowed or reversed. And as a broken victim, Jesus performs one final act of his will to surrender, which makes more sense if we acknowledge that like you and I, Jesus looked at the end of his own life with some trepidation. And in this moment, he chooses the purposes of God over his own self preservation.
Speaker 2:He turns away from the means that he had to write an alternative ending and save himself. And in doing so, he embraces the core of our suffering, that place where we all surrender our volition, our creative power, and our breath in the face of inescapable darkness. Had he contrived away off the cross, he may have been hailed as a hero. And in so doing, he would have become like any other holy person or demigod that cheated death. But we don't need someone who knows how to cheat death.
Speaker 2:We need it beaten. Because inevitably, all our powers to escape it, they run out. We needed someone who could willfully trust that love was greater than power, that to give up one's life despite the cost instead of violently defending it at all costs is the only means of true transformation. We needed someone who had stood on the precipice of death, who knew the anguish of suffering with nothing but the promise of god's mercy and love to fall into. Today, we affirm a broken god that looks like this.
Speaker 2:In a moment, I'm going to read our final scripture passage. I'm gonna offer you a moment to reflect, and then I'll return to offer a benediction. The passage that I'll read offers a glimpse of Christ's body being removed from the cross and being committed to the tomb. As we reflect, I pray that you can join in the affirmations that we make today that Christ was crucified, and like us, he was acted upon. And he took in his body that day the effects of all the violence and the anger and the hostility that we have handed out in our stories, and he swallows up in his shame that day the effects of the wrong and the pain and the wounding done to us in our stories.
Speaker 2:I pray that you can join in our affirmation that Christ took on the disdain and the mockery and the disappointment that we know because of our failure and our unmet expectations and our capacity to never measure up. I wanna invite you in our time of reflection to, in some small way, commit these parts of your story to the grave in Christ. Your willful mistakes, your unintentional ones, your character flaws, your inconsistencies, the woundedness inflicted and received when you were only innocent. All these burdens that we know so well. Commit them to a God with us who knows their depth and their power and who invites us to trust in this moment as he did on the day he died, that there is hope beyond the grave.
Speaker 2:That in the darkness of death, we will find embrace. As evening approached, Joseph, a rich man from Arimathea, who had become a follower of Jesus, went to Pilate and asked for Jesus' body. And Pilate issued an order to receive it or to release it to him. Joseph took the body, wrapped it in a long sheet of clean linen cloth. He placed it in his own new tomb, which had been carved out of the rock.
Speaker 2:And then he rolled a great stone across the entrance and left. Both Mary Magdalene and the other Mary were sitting across from the tomb and watching. Join me now in a moment of reflection. Oh, suffering Christ, on this day, you carried our burden in your broken body to the cross into death's abyss and from there into the grave. And we confess as the scriptures declare your solidarity with our shame in your journey to that place.
Speaker 2:Today, we confess these parts of our story marked by error, pain, and sorrow. And like you, we long to trust that God's great love holds us and that it is stronger than the death we know too well. Give us grace to surrender to the hope and abundant life that come from your gracious heart. We commit ourselves to you this day, body, soul, and spirit. Lord, have mercy.
Speaker 2:Amen.