My 12 noon reflection from Good Friday (April 18, 2025) on the Passion of Christ according to Luke.
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We’re sitting, at this moment, in a space that wasn’t always a chapel. It has, over the years, served a variety of purposes and will, this upcoming Monday, be transformed into a linen closet for our Trash and Treasure sale. When CLC first started in 1959, this was the main sanctuary and it evolved into a meeting space, a Sunday School classroom, and now a chapel used for all kinds of worship events. Everything in this space is designed to be movable – from the chairs to the altar to the plant by the window. Yet one of the things we don’t move – besides the painting of the Cross – are these papery stars hanging above us. Now, if I remember correctly, they were placed there by Darleen Castellano a year or two before COVID struck. She wanted to decorate this space for a Christmas pageant that was being put on by our Sunday School kids. It was, I think, the first worshipful thing we did here and the stars were only supposed to be there for a day. But since then, they’ve become a kind of witness to all kinds of things happening in this space. They’ve seen kids play games, watch people browse for hours over knick knacks and throw pillows, and listened to way too many extra long phone calls I sometimes have while pacing about. Yet they’ve also played their own role in helping to reflect the light just right when I recorded worship here during COVID. These stars have been a witness to a lot – and today we are like these stars – bearing witness to just how human we truly are.
And I wonder if, on this Good Friday, being a witness is all we’re meant to be. It’ll always be strange to call this part of Jesus’ life good since most of it is about how awful we can sometimes be. The One who hung every star in the night sky was also hung on the Cross. And while there are theories and ideas and explanations and all kinds of words to shape why this moment matters, the mystery of what God’s love is all about will never be contained by anything we say. Over and over again, God chooses to be with those who rarely have an imagination big enough to see ourselves, our neighbors, and our world with the grace that God gives us every day. We all have been a witness to situations and experiences where love can’t be found. And we all, in our own way, struggle to accept the ways we try to limit what goodness should do. We’ve seen and we continue to see how care and welcome and presence and hope are, for some, commodities not meant to be shared. We choose to make ourselves the center of everyone’s story because we can’t imagine any other story might be just as meaningful too. We know what it’s like to see each other at our best but there’s also all those actions, words, sins of omission, and long silences that have made life way more harder than it needs to be. But wherever we do our best to get in the way of our God, God makes a new way where hope and love will always shine.
Kayla Craig, in a poem about Good Friday, wondered how we could take this gift and move it into the lives we actually live. How could what Jesus did show up in the life of our kids, our family, and our friends? She hoped that everyone – the young, the old, those who believe, and even those who don’t might recognize the great love Jesus already has for them. And as we live through this Good Friday that pushes into the Easter that has already begun, she invites us to “…know a way that chooses mercy
when faced with an enemy,
A way that chooses
Sacrifice instead of comfort,
A way that chooses
Healing instead of violence,
A way that choose
Loud love instead of hidden hate,
A way that opens…hearts
Instead of closes them shut.”
A way that always remembers, a way that always bears witness, a way that lights our world no matter the darkness we’re living through.
Amen.