Good Friday Joint Sermon

L: I want to start tonight by naming something that I think a lot of us are carrying into this room.

Exhaustion.

Not just the kind that comes from a long week, though it has been a long week. The deeper kind. The kind that settles into your bones when you have been paying attention to the world and the world keeps breaking your heart.

We have watched rights we thought were settled get unsettled. We have watched institutions we trusted — courts, churches, democratic norms — bend in directions we didn't think they could bend. We have watched the language of faith get weaponized by people wielding it like a club. And some of us — many of us — have started to wonder if any of it matters. If resistance is worth it. If the arc of the moral universe actually bends toward justice, or if that's just something we say to make ourselves feel better.

And then we come to Good Friday.

Which might be the most honest day in the Christian calendar.

Because Good Friday is the day when the bad guys win.

Q: Let me put that even more plainly.

Good Friday is the day an innocent man is tortured to death by the state. Publicly. Deliberately. As a warning to anyone else watching who might be getting ideas.

And if you came in here tonight looking for comfort, I want to warn you:  That’s not tonight’s story.  That's Sunday's story. Tonight we stay with Friday. Because I think we rush past Friday too quickly. I think we are so trained to get to the resurrection that we don't let the death land.

So let it land tonight.

Jesus is dead.

His movement is scattered. His closest friends have run away or denied knowing him. One of them handed him over. The authorities got exactly what they wanted. And the crowd that welcomed him with palm branches five days ago — that same crowd — watched him die, or looked away, or both.

Does that feel familiar?

L: The world Jesus walked into was not so different from ours.

His people were living under occupation. Under an empire that demanded loyalty, extracted wealth, and made brutal public examples of anyone who challenged its authority. And into that world, his community was asking the same questions we ask. How do you live with integrity under a system that is rigged against you? What does resistance even look like? Is it worth it?

There were four answers being debated in real time.

Some — the wealthy, the connected — chose to collaborate. Adapt to empire. Work within it. Get what you can. It wasn't noble, but it was pragmatic, and it worked, if you measure working by personal survival and comfort.

Some chose cultural resistance. Assert your identity. Be visibly, defiantly who you are. Let your very existence be the protest.

Some checked out. Walked into the desert. Built new communities from scratch, convinced that the only way forward was to abandon the corrupt society entirely and start over somewhere else.

And some picked up weapons.

Jesus looked at all four of those options and chose none of them. He chose something harder and stranger: direct, nonviolent confrontation. In public. In broad daylight. With no army, no institutional backing, and no illusions about how it would end.

Q: Because he knew how it would end.

I don't think Jesus had a divine escape plan. I don't think the cross was a chess move that God  calculated in advance. What I think — what the Gospels actually show us — is a human being who understood exactly what empire does to people who step out of line and yet he chose to step out of line anyway.

The roads he walked were lined with crosses. He’d seen this. He knew. He knew what could happen. 

And in the garden, the night before — Luke tells us he was in such anguish that his sweat fell like drops of blood. He prayed: "Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me."

Take this cup from me.

That isn’t the prayer of someone executing a master plan. That’s the prayer of a man who’s terrified, and exhausted, and really, genuinely doesn’t want to die — and who chooses to go forward anyway.

There’s more courage in that prayer than in all the triumphant theology we’ve built on top of it.

L: And then empire did what empire always does.

It won. Completely, decisively, finally. Or so it seemed.

But here is where the story gets complicated. And honestly, harder.

Because empire didn't just kill Jesus. It did something far more insidious.

It stole him.

Within three centuries, the movement that began with a executed peasant radical was the official religion of the Roman Empire. Constantine put a cross on the banner and marched forward. The same Gospel writers who encoded their resistance in careful, dangerous, deliberately anti-imperial language — those same texts became the founding documents of the most powerful empire the Western world had ever seen.

And the theft has never really stopped.

Q: I need to ask you something, and I want you to sit with it honestly.

Have you ever been in a church — or a religious space of any kind — and felt that something was wrong? That the words being said and the reality being lived didn't match? That the institution was serving something other than what it claimed to serve?

That feeling isn’t a failure of your faith. That feeling is your faith working correctly.

Because the Jesus of the Gospels wasn’t building an institution. He wasn’t interested in your personal spiritual wellness plan. He wasn’t offering a transaction — your belief in exchange for a comfortable afterlife while the world burns around you.

He was turning tables.

And somewhere along the way, we were taught — carefully, consistently, over a very long time — to keep our faith private. Personal. Managed. Between ourselves and God, with no particular relevance to who holds power, who’s getting crushed,  and who eats and who doesn't.

We were taught that sin is a personal problem with a personal solution. That salvation is a transaction, not a transformation. That the spiritual and the political are separate categories, and mixing them is bad taste.

And I’m suggesting to you tonight that this isn’t a theological position.

It’s a political one.

It is exactly what empire needs faith to be.

L: Because the moment the radical intention of Jesus' ministry becomes public — the moment it becomes communal, embodied, concerned with who has power and how they use it — it becomes dangerous again.

Martin Luther King knew this. The FBI surveilled him for it. They called his faith radical and his church a threat.

Gandhi knew it. From outside the Christian tradition entirely, he saw the same dangerous kernel, set it side by side with his philosophy, and used it to bring down an empire.

Every time that kernel surfaces — every time someone drags faith out of the private and back into the public — empire finds a way to absorb it, co-opt it, or kill it.

And yet.

It keeps escaping.

Q: Was Martin Luther King's movement a success? The laws he marched and bled for are being dismantled right now, in our lifetimes, methodically and deliberately.

Was feminist activism a success? Are the gains of the LGBTQ+ rights movement a success, when so many of them are disappearing?

I’ve been asking myself that question a lot lately. And I think the honest answer is: I don't know. I genuinely don't know.

What I do know is that the failure of those movements to permanently hold their gains doesn’t mean they were wrong to resist. It means resistance isn’t a single event. It's not a march, or a law, or a Supreme Court decision.

It's a practice. A way of living in the world. A choice you make again, and again, and again, knowing that the people who come after you may have to make it again after that.

L: From the cross, Matthew tells us, Jesus cried out in Aramaic: "Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani."

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Those are the opening words of Psalm 22. A psalm his community knew by heart. A psalm of absolute desolation — and then, at its end, against all logic and evidence, the stubborn insistence that God has not hidden from the suffering of the afflicted.

He died quoting a song about abandonment that ends with hope.

I don't think that was an accident.

I think that is the whole of Christian theology in a single moment.

Q: Tonight we don't get the resurrection. That's not tonight's story, and I think we need to stop pretending it is — stop rushing to Easter before we've actually sat in this room, in this dark, and let Friday be Friday.

The tables are overturned. The movement is scattered. The man is dead.

And empire is still here.

Still controlling the message. Still weaponizing the language of faith. Still making examples. Still telling us that our role is to be quiet, private, personal, manageable.

L: Here is what Good Friday actually is, if we let it be what it is:

It is not the story of a failure.

It is the story of what it costs to refuse.

And we are here tonight — this congregation, in this room, in this particular terrible and beautiful moment in history — because somewhere in us, we have not been able to stop refusing. Because something in us keeps insisting that a different world is not just possible but real, even when all the evidence points the other way.

That insistence is not naivety.

It is the most dangerous thing in the world.

Q: No one is telling the story of the man whose table was overturned.

We are here tonight to tell the story of the man who turned it over.

Who was afraid.

Who prayed to be spared.

Who went forward anyway.

Who died quoting a song of abandonment that ends with hope.

The question tonight isn’t whether he succeeded.

The question is what we do with the inheritance.

Whether we keep faith as something private and safe and manageable — or whether we are willing, in whatever way we can, to drag it back into the open. Into community. Into the world that needs it.

Good Friday isn’t a day for easy answers.

It’s a day to look clearly at what it cost.

And ask ourselves, honestly, what we are willing to pay.