Good Friday Sermon at Grace Church Cathedral

March 29, 2024 - Good Friday - Grace Church Cathedral, Charleston
Watch the video of this service on the Grace Church Cathedral YouTube page at this link
​(the video should begin at her sermon, around 45:20)

Blessed Good Friday. The first thing I want to say to you is thank you. Thank you, Grace, for all of the prayers, notes, meals, flowers, and other gifts you have showered upon me and my family during my recent health crisis. Your love and care for me and for my family mean more than you know. Thank you, with all my heart. 
 
Two weeks ago, I made a trip to Louisville. Just for the day. On Breeze Airlines—an adventure for the back.  But, I learned…if you fly in the front where the padded seats are, it’s actually tolerable. 
  
My best friend since 5th grade, Kim, lives in Louisville. She faced the necessity of putting her husband of 37 years, Dave, in a nursing home. He has early onset Alzheimer’s. She needed my help. So, I made a one-day trip to help get him placed. 
 
It was a hard day, a scary day, a bleak day for Kim. On that day, after we had gone to the nursing home to secure his admission, we went to the hospital to prepare Dave for transfer. 
 
He still looks the same, smiles at me the same, has all his mannerisms. Only, it is not Dave I saw. Not the Dave I have known for nearly four decades, that is. In place of his old jokes and conversing and laughter at my jokes, dreaming about his next dive off some far flung coral reef, now, reflected in his eyes, there is this hard, barren ground we call Alzheimer’s.
 
It is a painful thing to see.
 
One night in the height of my recent health crisis, sitting in the parking lot of Walgreens, on our way home from a trip to the Emergency Room, George asked me, “What meaning do you think you will take from this experience?” I do have his permission to tell you this story, I promise. He’s right behind me in the choir; he can confirm I’m telling you the truth! Still in barely tolerable pain and waiting for Nathan to bring relief in the form of medicine from the pharmacy, I said, “Not yet, George. Ask me later, when I’m through the pain. I can’t reflect on it while I’m in it.” 
 
I daresay Kim and Dave would say the same thing about their crisis, were they here. It was a good question George asked, just not, perhaps, the right time for it.
 
George’s question is truly the central question of this day. What meaning are we to take from suffering—our own, and, Jesus’ suffering on the cross?
 
There are two words from Isaiah that I call to your attention to aid us in our efforts to understand the suffering we experience in this life. 
 
The first is a word Isaiah uses when describing the suffering servant, his symbol for post-exilic Israel. It translates as “bear” in English—“Surely he has “borne” our afflictions.” The Hebrew word neseuh means to carry a burdensome load, like a beast of burden would do. This is not something any creature would willingly undertake.
 
Suffering itself is borne, carried. It is not sought after. It is not to be glorified. I never, ever want to experience the relentless pain I had in January of this year prior to my surgery again. Kim and Dave do not want the pain of Dave’s disease and of their separation as he enters a nursing home. You do not want the pain you carry in this life. There is nothing good about it. 
 
There is nothing redemptive about the suffering of children in Gaza, nothing holy about the war in Ukraine, nothing good about what happened on October 7 in Israel, nothing redemptive about the bloodshed occurring in every war-torn region of this world. 
 
And, stay with me here—there is nothing good about Jesus’ hands and feet being nailed to the hard wood of the cross. Nothing redemptive about slow torture and suffocation. Michael+—don’t throw me out for heresy just yet. I am not suggesting that Jesus’ death did not usher in redemption. 
 
What I am suggesting, my friends, is that today is not about glorifying human suffering. Suffering is borne, not chosen. It simply is ours to carry in this world. And the reason for its presence in this world created by a good and loving God is a mystery that has eluded every theologian who has dared to approach the subject of theodicy. 
 
When we are in pain, all we want is out. “Let this cup pass from me,” is the prayer of every single person, including Jesus, who has ever known the kind of pain you do not believe you can survive. So, from the first word, we take an understanding that suffering is not a choice, nor is it a thing to glorify.
 
The second word, actually translates to two words in English--tender root. In Hebrew, the word is sarish—which means a sapling, a suckling—a frail yet verdant offshoot of the parent plant. “To whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?” the prophet asks. And the answer: “For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground.”
 
This image shows up numerous times in Isaiah, as he speaks of the resilience of the people after Exile.
 
A few weeks ago, we shared an evening here at Grace with two leaders from a nonprofit called Roots in Palestine. Founded out of grassroots conversations between Jews and Palestinians in the West Bank a number of years ago, Roots works to foster a just peace in the Holy Land through trust-building across lines of vast difference. 
 
Leaders in this movement work within a broken reality without accepting it. One of the most compelling things the two leaders shared with us—one a Jew and the other a Muslim, is that this work, which they carry on in the midst of unspeakable pain, is giving them hope that peace is possible, that from this hard, entrenched multi-generational conflict, a root can shoot forth with new life in the region, a life no one has yet fully imagined in which the stories of both peoples can thrive.
 
Sometimes, from the very center of that which we did not choose, that which we cannot bear, a verdant, irrepressible root appears. It comes not from the suffering itself, but rather it emerges as a lone witness to the fact that there is a force more resilient, more persistent, more enduring than our deepest agony.
 
Life itself. Even in death, life itself.

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