Good Friday and Easter Sunday 2025

Good Friday Homily 2025

Though there are independent records of the execution of Jesus by Roman occupation forces under the prefect Pontius Pilate, we have no record of the trial itself except for the accounts in the gospels. This is not really that surprising. Judea wasn’t exactly a great assignment, and there are few records of Pilate’s ten years of service in the region. He disappears from the historic record after he is dismissed from his post and returns to Rome.

We know that Jesus had followers and friends among the Jewish elite, including Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, and the gospels tell us Peter and a second disciple made it inside, so accounts of events before the Sanhedrin may be historically accurate. Did he, as legend often suggests, also have would be followers among the Roman soldiers? 

It seems unlikely that Pilate was the wishy-washy dreamer who washed his hands of the execution. Pilate had little regard for Jewish religion and custom, and a prefect was a military governor, not a civilian. His rise to that middling high office most certainly reflected a cold and calculated brutality.

If the events are dramatized, there is no question that they are characteristic of Roman rule. Though the cross has become the symbol of Christianity, the crucifixion of Jesus and the two bandits was far from a one-off. There were crosses outside of every city in the Roman colonies, containing the dead and rotting and sometimes still living and moaning bodies of runaway slaves and insurrectionists.

But tonight I want to focus on what happens before Jesus is nailed to a cross. There is, of course, the physical torture. Interrogated all night, he is then flogged, a mock crown placed on his head, a purple robe like that of a king across his bleeding back. He would eventually die under a placard naming him King of the Jews, often abbreviated INRI from the Latin.

Evil does not simply seek to execute threats to the powerful. It seeks to first humiliate its victim, to strip them of their dignity, of what makes them human. This is its own form of terrorism.

Like filming the tears and shaved head of a Venezuelan asylum seeker, a gay make-up artist named Andry Romero, abducted by the forces of a lawless government and sold to the Salvadoran carcel state. Or having a photo op in front of that barbaric death camp as a cabinet secretary in post-constitutional America.

The cruelty is not a bug. It is a feature. And our nation is not governed by those who follow Christ, but by those who follow Tiberius and his brutal legions. It is no wonder that white Christian nationalists idolize the forces that murdered Jesus, rather than Jesus himself, or the Holy Mystery that called him out of the tomb.

The question for us, as we see this cruelty, this mockery and humiliation that seeks to make some humans less than human, is will we be silent, will we be chanting for Barabbas like the Jerusalem mob, will we be hiding behind locked doors like the disciples, will we be denying our core beliefs like Peter.

This Friday, in a lawless nation complicit in war crimes and torture, what must we do to fight for the good and the dignity of all people? Amen.

Easter Sermon

Luke 24:1-12

Acts 10:34-43

During a recent Monday School class, I was asked why the Cross was the symbol of Christianity. I did not give a satisfactory answer, because I have struggled with that question myself for decades. 

More accurately, I have struggled with the sort of God who would instruct Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, only to relent, then would go on to do the exact same thing himself as a bloody sacrificial atonement for wounds to his, always his, divine ego, wounds inflicted in some mythical Garden of Eden. 

Never mind the misogyny or at least patriarchy hard-coded into that story. I accept science, even when discoveries challenge human exceptionalism, so I know there was no Eve to eat the fruit of the forbidden tree which had been placed there as a booby-trapped temptation… again, bad god.

Humans may well have something like original sin, but it is not the sin of forbidden knowledge, nor is it some theological inheritance. Our sinfulness, such as it is, is the result of our both/and-ness, both finite and self-aware.

For a period of time, I considered the “Ens?” a more likely symbol for my personal faith. Those familiar with Zen Buddhism will know it as the empty circle, painted with a rough brushstroke, that symbolizes enlightenment or “mu” or something we westerners mis-translate as emptiness. 

If Good Friday cannot be rendered “good” by way of a bad god, at least the Empty Tomb can have a good meaning. Ens?, then, could be the mouth of that empty tomb. I am semi-Buddhist most days, and comfortable with the necessary work of constructing my own faith. The right of Christian conscience, the right to decide what we will believe, is part of our tradition in the United Church of Christ, the reason we do not have creeds. My job is to give you the tools you need to figure out what you believe, not to tell you what to believe. This work is not for the lazy.

But I want to come back to the Cross this morning, when we are supposed to have the events of Golgotha properly in the rearview mirror. The question, “why is the Cross the symbol for Christianity?” brought me back to a groundbreaking piece of theology by the late Dr. James Cone, his 2011 book “The Cross and the Lynching Tree.” Cone was no Ida B. Wells, his interest in theorizing rather than documenting, but he included some brief accounts in his work, including this reporting from 1905:

“They murdered the negro in cold blood in the jail doorway; then they dragged him to the principal business street and hung him to a telegraph pole, afterwards riddling his lifeless body with revolver shots. […] And there the negro hung until daylight the next morning – an unspeakably grisly, dangling horror.”

It is impossible to miss the similarity between the Roman Empire’s practice of torturing and murdering troublemakers, leaving the bodies as a warning, to be desecrated by animals of every variety including those on two legs, and the practice of White Supremacists throughout America, for lynching was not restricted to the states of the former Confederacy, nor has it every truly stopped. It has simply taken on new forms.

Broken bodies served as a warning throughout the empire, but the bodies on Golgotha were of special note, for the Torah declared that those who died on a tree were especially unclean. 

It is the uncleanliness of the body, the double uncleanliness of the murdered body, the triple uncleanliness of the body murdered by hanging in a tree, that kept the women from doing what was women’s work at the time, finishing the cleansing of Christ’s body. It was not until dawn on the third day, when they discovered the empty tomb, though John tells us two powerful men, Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, had initially anointed and wrapped that body, an extraordinary grace in their context.

The French anthropologist Rene Girard famously documented the ways we humans have always created scapegoats, continue to create scapegoats, proclaiming the victim unclean, the violence justified and sacred, “Onward Christian Soldiers” and countless holy wars and heretics burned at the stake. 

The primitive and performative cruelty of our post-constitutional government declares that everyone rounded-up by the Neo-fascist forces of Immigration and Customs Enforcement is a gang member or terrorist, defined as such not because they actually belong to any gang, not because they have engaged in or even sympathize with terrorism, but defined as gang members and terrorist simply for having been abducted to justify their sale to a Salvadoran gulag. Today’s slave trader sits in the White House.

It was only in the Cross that Girard found our barbarism challenged, for the Cross showed us once and for all that it was not the violence that was holy, was never the violence that was holy, no matter how many priests danced around the bloody altar. The one who was good, was holy, was the victim, and it was the power of God, in whatever form you understand God, to render the broken body clean, the broken body sacred, on a dawn beach in Galilee in 30 C.E., mangled in an open casket in Chicago in 1955, on an office floor in San Francisco’s City Hall in 1978. The power of God to empty the cross of sacred violence, to distance God’s self from our brutality moved Girard, an intellectual atheist, to embrace the Christian faith, albeit in non-violent form.

The cross as a sign of violence, human or divine, is just one more horror in an endless string of horrors, but the cross emptied has power. Instead of sanctioning scapegoating and retributive violence, it shows it for what it is, not God’s work, but our own. 

God did not crucify Jesus, un-credentialed rabbi and miracle-worker. He was murdered by good people of privilege intent to keep their privilege, and by the brutal militarism of empire.

And then we, in all of our human creativity, seek to undo what God has done, and once again turn the cross into a sign of violent and racist empire and privilege, just as it was two thousand years ago. It is the sign of the enslavers, not the enslaved, of Putin’s pet patriarchs in the Russian Orthodox Church and Paula White’s latest grift launched from her position of white Nationalist privilege.

God is with the innocent victims, and it is their stories we must lift up. There is nothing more Christian than the impulse to say their names, to tell their stories, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia and Andry Romero in CECOT, El Salvador, Robert Brooks and Messiah Nantwi, murdered while in custody right here in New York, right up the road, George Floyd a new Christ rendered holy not by a perfect life, but by the violence done in our name, in the name of a law and order that protects hierarchy and privilege.

And there is nothing less Christian than the lies of people like Alex Jones and his Infowars that seek to erase the victims, calling them crisis actors, the lies of the racist and rapist who tries to justify performative cruelty, an endless perp walk of people who are not perpetrators, but are victims.

It is our job to say their names and declare that what man would profane, God can redeem.

Our holiness does not come from performative perfection. We are both/and, creature and self-aware, holy mystery and the might-be of every day, and every single human, every single human no matter what label has been assigned, might yet come up out of the grave of sin, and live.

What are you looking for? He is not here. He… She… They… are risen indeed, are holy, will be holy, as long as we say their names. Amen.