This is the transcript of the sermon I gave at Holy Communion’s most recent Tre Ore service, in which the Seven Last Words of Christ are explored over the course of three hours.  Each word is read – and then a preacher offers a reflection on that word.  Special music follows the sermons- sung by me except in those instances when a guest preacher has arranged to bring musicians with them. (In most cases, I choose what to sing as I’m listening to that particular sermon, so I can sing something fitting.)  After that comes a word of prayer and a congregational hymn.  All that unfolds roughly within twenty five minutes – usually with time taken for reflective silence.  That same format is followed for all the words – except that no music or hymn follows the final sermon.    This year’s service was opened by Holy Communion’s Pastor Laura Fladten (“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”)  After that was Pastor Gillian Weighton, pastor of First Presbyterian Church (“Women, behold Thy Son.) She was followed by two members of Holy Communion-  Jeri Smith (“Today, you will be with me in paradise”) and Susan Anderson (“My God, why have you forsaken me?”  Next was Pastor Tony Larson from Olympia Brown Unitarian Church (“I Thirst”) and Holy Communion’s Mark Doidge (“It is Finished.”)    As I listened to all of the sermons before mine- each one so compelling in its own way-  it made me wonder if what I had planned to say what sufficiently personal.  It also got me thinking about all of the powerful sermons I had heard in this service over the years.  And that thought is what prompted me to calculate exactly how many Holy Communion Tre Ore services I had been a part of since becoming Holy Communion’s minister of music back in 1998.   Only then – scarcely a half hour before my own sermon was scheduled to begin- did I realize that this year’s was my 30th Good Friday at Holy Communion, which caused me to add some reflection on past services to my sermon.   I was preaching on the seventh and final word of Jesus from the cross:  “Father, into Your hands I commend my spirit.”   Here is what I said:  

Good Friday.  Once upon a time,  I thought that Good Friday was only about Jesus and His painful death on the cross of Calvary.  Maybe I always thought about this particular day in this particular way because of all of the darkness…. the fact that for a typical Good Friday service, so much of the sanctuary and all of us gathered there would be essentially engulfed by the shadows.  We were grief-stricken, largely silent onlookers with our eyes fixed solely on the Cross- scarcely aware of each other.  Maybe it was also because the typical Tre Ore and Tenebrae services would include so much silence as we listened and watched.   And that intense quiet might be a big reason why so many of us deeply cherish our Good Friday experiences and hold them very close to our hearts …. moments when we would be forcibly wrenched out of ourselves, our of our own busy lives,  out of our own experiences,  out of the world …. and taken to Golgotha and to a Friday a long long time ago.   And of course, there is also the central story of Good Friday-  one of the most astonishing stories not just in the history of religion, but in the history of the world-  an story unique to the Christian narrative.

As I have grown older,  I have come to realize that Good Friday is not only about Jesus and His story- but is also about me …. about you …. about us … and our stories.  It is about our hopes and dreams…. our loves and losses … our victories and defeats … our joys and sorrows.  It is about forgiving and being forgiven.  It is about caring for the hurts of others and being cared for ourselves.  It is about enduring thirst and having our thirst quenched.  It is about feeling terribly forsaken and receiving comfort.  And it is about the fragility of life and the inevitability of death.   All of it – all of our human story – can be somewhere in these Seven Last Words.  They have an astonishing capacity to open us wide open to see ourselves and our lives with new clarity.

I have been in this sanctuary for every Tre Ore service here at Holy Communion since 1988.   Which means that today is my 30th.  And over the years I have been privileged to hear remarkable stories told from this pulpit.  Susan Anderson, I still remember you preaching on “It is Finished” and in the midst of that poignant sermon,  you shared the painful story of having recently lost your job.  It was a very powerful human moment.  A few years after that, a man named Ken Harris stood in this same pulpit and preached on that same word, “It is Finished” – telling us about one of the most painful moments from his otherwise illustrious career as a decorated track and field star, when he ran recklessly in a high-stakes race and ended up finishing last.  I mention these two particular sermons just because they represent a modest yet clear indication of the vastness  of the human story, and of how the story of Good Friday speaks to all of us in many and various ways.

And this Tre Ore service itself has been an exciting and even extraordinary opportunity for all kinds of different voices to be heard.  Thirty years ago, this service was an entirely Holy Communion affair, with the seven sermons delivered by our own three pastors and four laypeople from the congregation.  And even within the relatively limited scope of those services,  it was a remarkable array of voices.   Even just the three pastors-  Pastor Ross Larsen, Pastor Walter Hermanns, Pastor Sandy Roberts, there was a striking diversity in voice and style and perspective.  And then you folded into the mix the voices of various laypeople, most of whom had never set foot in a seminary classroom,  sharing their own perspectives of faith,  very much grounded in their own lives and how each of them had encountered Jesus and sought to live as Jesus intended all of us to live.

I can still vividly remember the first time the possibility was raised – over 20 years ago – that we might invite other congregations to participate in this Tre Ore service-  and not just other Lutheran churches,  but other kinds of churches as well.   I am sort of shocked and maybe a bit embarrassed to admit how deeply disconcerting I found this possibility.  It felt to me like we were releasing careful control over something really precious and exceptionally beautiful.  What would these outside voices have to say?  Would they collectively speak in a reassuring unison at the foot of the Cross?  Or would they at least produce a beautiful harmony?  Or would it be a crazy quilt of disparate voices – a kind of theological cacophony that would leave all of us in the pews more confused than anything.

Well,  it has proven to be a remarkable chorus of voices that have spoken in this pulpit over the years- and there is no question whatsoever that – taken together – what has been preached in these Tre Ore services has been incredibly beautiful, powerful and meaningful.  And for those of us who have been a part of this service over the years,  it has been a strong reminder that the Kingdom of God is vast, encompassing the whole human family and all of human history … and that this One named Jesus has something to say to everyone, even to those who do not call themselves Christian, and even to those who have no idea who He is.

And that is especially true of Good Friday – that its central story is so much bigger than any of us or any one tradition.  It is one of the few places where even Christians who fervently disagree on almost everything else can come together at the foot of the Cross in wondering awe and take in what Jesus willingly did for us.

The vastness of the human family in the context of the Good Friday story was really brought home to me earlier this spring.  Some of you may be acquainted with a local music group called the Belle Ensemble, which was created by Nick Barootian, a talented young man who grew up in this congregation.  I was so very grateful that my calendar finally allowed me to accept one of Nick’s invitations to be part of one of their performances.  In this case, it was for the performance of a masterwork from the baroque period, The Seven Last Words by Heinrich Schutz.  It was a potent experience for me – in part because we sang it in its original language, German.  I did not expect to be so profoundly moved by hearing and singing these familiar words in a foreign tongue.   It was a vivid reminder that the story of Good Friday is not just ours here in Racine – or in Wisconsin – or the United States – or the English-speaking world ….. but it was for the whole world that Jesus died.

His seventh and final word, in German,  is “Vater, in deine Hände Befehle ich meinen Geist.” In Spanish:  “Padre, en tus manos encomiendo mi espíritu.” In French: “Père, je remets mon esprit entre tes mains.” In Danish:  “Fader, i dine hænder jeg anbefaler min ånd.” In Italian: “Padre, nelle tue mani consegno il mio spirito.”  And those are just languages from the western world.  If I were to really adequately demonstrate what I’m talking about, I would be speaking the words of Jesus in Czech and Russian and Swahili and Chinese… and on and on ….  to underscore what Jesus did on behalf of human beings everywhere on that first Good Friday.

So much of what this day is about is the fragility of life and the inevitability of death-  and though once upon a time this day was entirely about the death of Jesus, as one grows older this day somehow becomes about how death ultimately enters all of our lives as well: sometimes long awaited and even longed for …  and sometimes as a shocking and unwelcome intruder …. sometimes as a terrible and wrenching surprise,  and sometimes as the graceful, inevitable sentence at the end of a long and beautiful paragraph.  But however it comes,  it always comes.  And it is something that we all share in common, from the lowliest peasant to the most glorious king – we all die.  What does that reality – the inevitability of death – do to our living?  How do we see our lives in contrast to it?

I’m not sure I have the answer to that question.  In fact, I know that I don’t.  It is something that I wrestle with all the time.  I do know that some of the most powerfully transformative moments in my life have been moments when death reared its head in some way or another.  As children,  many of us first confront the sobering reality of death with our pets.  Over the course of my childhood,  my family lost at least six different dogs.  It was life’s way of reminding us that we are not here forever. Not any of us. I still vividly remember a night back in high school –  it must be at least forty years ago now – when the phone rang and my father received the news that a beloved member of our congregation in Atlantic, Iowa had been killed in a car accident.   He was known as Country Bob because we had two Bob Andersons in our church-  City Bob and Country Bob – and it was Country Bob who had been killed.  His son Dwight was a classmate of mine.  I remember feeling to the marrow of my bones how wrong it felt for something like this to have happened.  And yet,  there was something about the way my father greeted that tragic news, put on his clerical collar and coat, grabbed his Bible, and headed out the door to drive to the Andersons home in the country to meet with them in their hour of sorrow that really helped me understand that death is a part of it all …. and that we wouldn’t really be human and we wouldn’t really live if there wasn’t that final curtain that inevitably comes down.

There were certainly other moments in which I felt the pain of death’s intrusion – maybe most acutely when I came to school one day and was dumbstruck to hear that a wonderful young man two years younger than me,  Stuart Nichols,  had been killed in a tragic farm accident.   His death leaves me shaken to this very day.  It was brutally abrupt proof that we do not write the script.  We never have and we never will.  All we can count on is the abiding love of God, who is with us in the womb – when we first enter this frightening world – every day of our lives – and at the very end, wherever and whenever the end comes for us.

It’s interesting-  When I think of what it felt like to be in this sanctuary thirty years ago,  I realize that I was at that moment in time largely amidst strangers.  I knew some people, of course,  but I did not know anybody who had come before me.  So I had no idea of the names and faces of the dear souls who had sat in these pews before I ever appeared on the scene.  Now I stand in this pulpit thirty years later- and as I look out, I see where Ed and Leona Aller used to sit, or Bob and Ellen Johnson,  … and so many other beautiful souls no longer with us.  Somehow, thinking about that reminds me that death is nothing new … although it may feel new to us, and may be something that we are confronting in a way we have before – a reality we had never fully weighed until we receive that terrible phone call or that bad news from the doctor – or when our life winks out in some inexplicable way when we least expect it.

But whenever or wherever the end of life comes,  the story of Jesus reminds us that there is something still more powerful than death – and that we need not cower in the corner in fear.  I am struck by the sharp difference between the words of Dylan Thomas and John Donne as they each reflected on the reality of death.   Dylan Thomas,  the talented but deeply troubled Welsh poet,  wrote his most famous poem in 1951, two years before his untimely death -a death largely self-inflicted by his abuse of alcohol.  He wrote:  “Do not go gentle into that good night.  Old age should burn and rave at the close of day.  Rage, rage against the dying of the light!”

That is one choice.   Writer John Donne suggest another:  “Death, be not proud – though some have called thee mighty.  For thou art not so!”  It is in the moments of our lives when death enters the scene that we are privileged to see this and can come to believe it.  Even with something as devastating as losing a parent when they are just 58, as you experienced with your father, Susan, and as I experienced with my own mother … or even with something perhaps even more devastating – the death of one’s own child ….  the great miracle of seeing how life goes on, emerging from the ashes,  is one of the most extraordinary blessings that one can experience.  And it is a blessing that I wish for all of you on this Good Friday and beyond- that you would have the faith and hope and trust to step to the foot of the Cross, to not evade the darkness and pain of this day,  and to embrace the gift of true and eternal life that we are offered.

Someone earlier today in this service quoted one of my favorite scripture passages:  the fourth chapter of Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians.  I love this passage – especially as it was transformed into a really beautiful song by a composer named Bonnie Letcher.  I think of these words so often – but never more so than on this particular day.

Thy children, Father, are tried and betrayed.  Distressed we are, yet we will not despair. 

We are cast down. We are sore afraid. Pressed on every side. Yet God is there. 

Someday, we’ll perish like the grass that is mown.  And yet the Light of God shines through us

so man will know that the power is not our own. His Spirit dwells within to renew us. 

That is why our faith should never be destroyed by the cares that will surely come our way.

For though our bodies may faint and die, our strength in God is growing every day.

And so we know that the things we can see- the troubles all around us- they will soon be gone.

We look beyond to things we know will. The joy that is to come goes on and on. 

Amen.