Struggling with Good Friday

There was a time in my life when I struggled with understanding Holy Week, especially the services that seemed to value what I understood as the unjustifiable punishment and death of One who was innocent. In avoiding the services that moved through Holy Week, I believed that they were nothing more than depression sessions, used to manipulate the guilty into feeling more guilt. For me, Jesus was found in Easter, the resurrection and New Life that is birthed through His living.

In recent years, though, having to lead worship and bring the story to life to my church, I have had to struggle with how to honestly portray something that I truly resist. There are so many more questions that have been born within me because I have allowed myself to face my resistance and wrestle with it. As time has gone on, I have allowed myself to appreciate those for whom these services really mean a lot. At first, I found value in the services only out of my love of those in my congregation who seem to have their faith rekindled through them.Although my faith is rekindled with more of a resurrection focus, I feel that in order to honestly pastor a congregation, I need to allow myself to explore the entire realm of which faith is born within all of my parishioners. As I have struggled with texts that I resist, I am beginning to discover something. It is out of struggling with things that do not make sense to us that our faith is strengthened. Through what I saw as depressing and death focused, I now am able to more fully value as a way to allow New Life to be born within me.

Perhaps out of the struggle, I found myself trying to put to words how I now value these moments in life. In a way I want to convey that it is in these moments when we allow ourselves to dive into what we normally would avoid only to discover how much we were missing.

Here is how I am opening the services this Thursday. Please let me know what your thoughts are (the copy and paste reformatted the line, hope you can follow along anyway).

I'd like your feedback...no matter whether you are a Good Friday person, an Easter person or somewhere in between.

Having this time invites all of us to sit with whatever comes to us.

Here, we may discover questions that surrounded the disciples when all this took place.

There may be questions that come that we haven't considered before.

We go to this place so that we can take heart

         in discovering that it is okay not to have all the answers.

There are some things that only one's faith can move us forward.

 Many times in life we find ourselves right where the disciples and Jesus were this night;

         between light and darkness, on the edge of the unknown,

                     unsure and afraid; because living in God's reality,

                                 we find that there are no easy answers, but only mystery.

Yet, we live in a world where absolute verifiable proof is required for truth to be understood.

Like reading the black and white pages of a book,

         fact and fiction are separated on our library shelves.

However, for those who yearn to live in the Truth that is God's,

         discover that the world's truth is subject to one's individual reality;

         where my black may your white and God's truth rests somewhere in between.

Tonight we will sit in the shadows,

         among the mixed hues of black and white;

                     and discover that somewhere within the gray shades of the unknown

                                 we can take comfort in knowing that we are not alone.

Tonight, we join those who have struggled before us;

         those who also encountered the unanswerable questions, the pain and the fear;

         those who felt the isolation and loneliness in the black and white world;

         those whose faith helped them sit in the gray shades that didn't make sense;

                     and become one with them.

Tonight, we discover that all of this which is too difficult to get through alone,

         offers healing and wholeness when we share this Holy meal together as one.

 Following our Holy meal, our service turns towards journeying the shadows of darkness,

         into more questions that cannot be answered,

                     and into a death that makes no sense from the world's viewpoint.

Together we will remember the biggest of our world's absurdities;

         while holding onto the hope that in allowing faith to enter into the shadows;

         we will be able to discover New Life that brings unimaginable beauty

                     and find a way to believe within the simplicity of a gray uncertainty.