Good Friday Sermon

O Lord, by your wounded hands: teach us diligence and generosity.
By your wounded feet: teach us steadfastness and perseverance.
By your wounded and insulted head: teach us patience, clarity and self-mastery.
By your wounded heart: teach us charity and love,
O Master and Savior. Teach us love. Amen. (adapted from Daphne Fraser)

Good Friday is about leaning into the wounded Christ. The one so violently beaten and abused. He becomes the broken Christ on the cross, alone to die. What could have been such love and hope on Maundy Thursday that ends with betrayal, denial and defeat. Lots of images represent that brokenness – a crucifix with Jesus on the cross or a plain wooden cross, remind us of what happened.

In 2018, I came across an image of what is called El Cristo Roto – the Broken Christ – it is a Good Friday image and an image for me of what is happening with Covid-19. Brokenness.

“Broken Christ” (Cristo Roto) is located on an island in the town of San José de Gracia, Aguascalientes, in México. It is a concrete and steel sculpture of Christ, as if he were hanging on a cross, without one arm and missing part of a leg, a mutilated Christ without a cross.

Beneath the 92 foot high statue is a plaque:

“Leave me broken…
I’d like that when you look at me broken like this,
you’d remember many of your brothers and sisters
who are broken, poor, indigent, oppressed, sick, mutilated…
Without arms: because they are incapacitated, left without any means to work;
without feet: because they are impeded to walk their way;
without face: because they have been robbed of their honor and prestige.
They are forgotten… those who see them turn away
since they are like me – a broken Christ!”

A broken Christ. Heart wrenching. And in this time of Covid-19, we see it all around us. Some much suffering. So much separation. So much brokenness in our world today:  people who are often forgotten. mutilated, infected. Suffering and dying away from loved ones.

That statue like or commemoration of Good Friday itself makes us uncomfortable and it should. Broken and alone Christ dies on the cross for the world. But we cannot leave it as something long ago. So many today live Good Friday lives as that Broken Christ tells us.

It is heartbreaking. But what we do with that heart ache is so important. As the author & Quaker Parker Palmer put it this way…

“Heartbreak is an inevitable and painful part of life. But there are at least two ways for the heart to break: it can break open into new life, or break apart into shards of sharper and more widespread pain.

A brittle heart will explode into a thousand pieces, and sometimes get thrown like a fragment grenade at the perceived source of its pain — there’s a lot of that going around these days.

But a supple heart will break open into a greater capacity to hold life’s suffering and its joy — in a way that allows us to say, “The pain stops here.”

The broken-open heart is not restricted to the rare saint. I know so many people whose hearts have been broken by the loss of someone they loved deeply. They go through long nights of grief when life seems barely worth living. But then they slowly awaken to the fact that their hearts have become more open, compassionate, and welcoming — not in spite of their pain but because of it.

So here’s a question I like to ask myself: What can I do day-by-day to make my heart more supple?

In her poem, Lead, Mary Oliver invites us into that heartbreak — not because she wants us to wallow in suffering, but to help us become more open and responsive to our suffering world.” (An Invitation to Heartbreak and the Call of the Loon by Parker J. Palmer)

Lead by Mary Oliver

Here is a story
to break your heart.
Are you willing?
This winter
the loons came to our harbor
and died, one by one,
of nothing we could see.
A friend told me
of one on the shore
that lifted its head and opened
the elegant beak and cried out
in the long, sweet savoring of its life
which, if you have heard it,
you know is a sacred thing,
and for which, if you have not heard it,
you had better hurry to where
they still sing.
And, believe me, tell no one
just where that is.
The next morning
this loon, speckled
and iridescent and with a plan
to fly home
to some hidden lake,
was dead on the shore.
I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.

May the God of mercy, forgive us when we have shied away from heartache and pain in our world. May God break our hearts open, never to close again to the rest of the world, so that El Cristo Roto, the Broken Christ, Jesus our Lord & Savior, may help us reach out to the forgotten & broken among us and to bring the brokenness of our world in Covid-19 to the love that God has so graciously given us. Amen.