preaching cross & resurrection

In my time at University Hill Congregation I had numerous occasions to preach at services on Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday. Three sermons in three days. It was a rich challenge to preach my way through the beating heart of Christian spirituality. Here are links to some of those Good Friday, Easter Vigil and Easter Sunday sermons ...

Good Friday Preaching         Easter Vigil Preaching         Easter Sunday Preaching

palm / passion sunday

Growing up the Sunday prior to Easter was called "Palm Sunday". The service was a retelling of the story of Jesus' entry into Jerusalem on a donkey (or a colt, depending on which version was told). But this changed by the time of my ordination. Then it had been renamed as Palm / Passion Sunday. This has made for a somewhat awkward liturgical dance. It means putting together the celebratory shouts of "Hosanna" alongside the same crowd's chants of "Crucify".

Over the years that I served in ministry at University Hill Congregation we had a custom of beginning the service with a palm processional led by the children. Waving fern fronds (readily available in our environment) the children would lead a line dance through and around the congregation as all sang an African song: "Sanna, Sanna, Sanna". The entry into Jerusalem became our entry into Holy Week. Then the service turned to a retelling of the Passion narrative.

good friday preaching

For twenty years at University Hill Congregation I was in the habit of preaching a Good Friday sermon every other year. We shared our Good Friday observance with St. Anselm's Anglican Church. On the years when we would visit our Anglican neighbours I would be privileged to preach. I consistently found this to be one of the most powerful and challenging preaching assignments of the year. Looking back, I recall three of those sermons in particular. Two have previously been posted on this blog: "Ecce Homo" and "The Seven Last Words". A third, titled "Despised" (from 2002), hosts the crucial passage from Isaiah 52:13-53:12 and is posted here ...

We are not surprised that on this Good Friday we read the gospel narrative of that black day. This is at the heart of the matter for us. Yet from the earliest days the church has looked elsewhere to make sense of it all. Remember, what we call the Old Testament is the only Bible the first Christians know. It is their ‘Word of the Lord’. When they tell the story of the mob and the judgment and the cross, they turn to the peculiar passage that bridges the fifty-second and fifty-third chapters of Isaiah. Recall the story of Philip encountering an Ethiopian eunuch on the road to Gaza (Acts 8:32-33). This seeker asks Philip to interpret a key text in his Bible. Remember? It is from the ancient poem by Isaiah: “Like a sheep was led to the slaughter, and like a lamb silent before its shearer, so he does not open his mouth. In his humiliation justice was denied him.” Written in the humiliation of exile six centuries before Jesus’ final humiliation, Isaiah's prophesy becomes the interpretive lens for the church that gathers at the foot of the cross. It is no accident that four of the six texts used by George Frederick Handel to portray Good Friday in the oratorio “The Messiah” are taken from this very passage (Part 2 - Is 53:3-6; also in Part 3 - Is. 53:8). This is the church’s original interpretation of the events of Good Friday.

a palm / passion sunday prayer of intercession

I offered this Prayer of Intercession for Palm/Passion Sunday when I served as Worship Elder during Holy Week at University Congregation. It followed the singing of the hymn "Ride on! Ride on in Majesty!"

Ride on! Ride on in majesty!
         You who shape the stars and sky.
         You who hold the sun and sea.
         You who shape today and tomorrow.
         You who hold neighbour and stranger.
                    Your steadfast love, your tender mercies, your startling grace
                             suffers all, bears all, hopes all
                                     and we are in awe, speechless in gratitude.

a palm / passion sunday prayer of approach & confession

I offered this Prayer of Approach and Confession for Palm/Passion Sunday when I served as Worship Elder during Holy Week at University Congregation.

You come to us in humility.
You enter the gates of the city on a donkey.
You pass through the doors of our hearts as long-awaited guest.
               

We cry: “Hosanna … Blessed is the One who comes in the name of the Lord.”

Blessed are You, for You know the truth about the trouble
          in our world,
          in our city,
          in our soul.

ecce homo

(A Good Friday sermon preached at St. Anselm's Anglican Church on April 3, 2015)

At the heart of Christianity is a tragic, traumatic story that turns out to be the source of healing and redemption. The story of the terrible suffering - the Passion - of Jesus Christ dominates the gospels. The eight days of Holy Week take up an inordinate number of verses, as if the rest of the narrative is an elongated introduction or prologue to the originating event, the primal memory, of the church. Today we find ourselves at the shocking centre of Christian faith – Christ crucified. The Messiah lynched. God Incarnate rejected, humiliated, violated, abandoned. The Apostle Paul says that the story we tell today scandalizes the religious community and sounds like utter foolishness to everyone else. It doesn’t matter if one is Jew or Gentile, churched or un-churched the first thing to say is that when it comes to God a cross is the last thing we expect. We expect religion to present a God who is appropriately civilized. We want a religion to teach our children proper values. Instead we weave palm fronds into the shape of an instrument of torture (think water boarding) and teach our littlest ones to wave them in the air. We imagine that the purpose of spirituality is to teach us practices that console and comfort. Yet when the “spiritual but not religious” arrive they find the church deeply rooted not in a sensible spiritual practice but in a history that must be described as terrible. Redemptive, yes. Salvific, absolutely. But certainly also terrible.

with our friday fatigue

On Good Friday we hosted a neighbouring Anglican congregation in worship (next year that same congregation will host us). It meant that the Anglican priest was our powerful preacher. At University Hill the prayers are not led by the preacher. Since I am regularly the preacher it means that I rarely lead the prayers. However, on a day when I am not preaching it is my turn to offer prayer. The prayer of confession today took the form of the Solemn Reproaches of the Cross. My task was to speak the prayers of approach and of intercession on behalf of the congregation. Here they are ...

an idle tale?

- Luke 24:1-12; Psalm 118 (a sermon for Easter Sunday)

“Perplexed. Terrified. Disbelieving. Amazed.”  These are the words that Luke uses to describe the church’s response to the resurrection. We expect words like “praised God” or “filled with rejoicing.” There must surely be a “Hallelujah” or at least an “Amen.” After all, these are the words that fill the Easter section of our hymn books. We know that Easter Sunday is a day for rejoicing. And it is. But, first, says Luke there is perplexity. The resurrection is not simply the rebirth of the earth in the springtime. Don’t get me wrong, I am as grateful for a glorious spring day like today as you are. It is just that the resurrection confounds nature. It is the reason that Easter is perhaps best celebrated in the southern hemisphere, where the days are growing shorter and the leaves are dying, not budding. Then the songs of rejoicing might sound, well, a bit more perplexing. Even in its rejoicing over the news of the resurrection the church remains perplexed by the mystery. Are you perplexed by the resurrection? Join the crowd!

the seven last words

(a sermon for Good Friday)

There is a tradition of marking Good Friday with a service that begins at noon and continues until three o’clock. It is worship that remembers the three hours of darkness when the sun does not shine. In these services it is customary to have not one sermon, not two, not even three but - count them - seven, yes seven, sermons! Imagine. A sermon marathon. In some communities multiple congregations gather to mark the three hours, inviting seven different preachers to preach seven different sermons. Each sermon considers one of the seven last words that Jesus utters from the cross. Some of you are right now saying prayers of thanksgiving that we do not have a similar tradition here. You will forgive me if I confess that it is a dream of mine to one day be one of seven preachers caught up in the Spirit, proclaiming the gospel on this crucial day. But since such a service does not appear to be on the immediate horizon I am taking the liberty of lining out a brief synopsis of seven sermons that might be preached if we decided to stay behind at noon until three this afternoon.

John's gospel records three of the seven words. Luke records three more. Matthew and Mark each record the same one, making the total seven. Seven is a significant number in the Bible. It is a number of completeness. Together these final words provide the church with a powerfully complete meditation on the gospel and the cross. They also give us speech for our own dying, our own suffering, our own participation in Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. When we wonder what a good death, a faithful death - a death that participates in Christ’s dying and rising - is like we speak and we listen for words like these.

friday, saturday, sunday

The long Easter weekend is the heart of our life as a people. Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday are the crucial days that pattern the gospel into our minds and hearts, speech and action. The church is like a figure skater, repeatedly practicing the same figure until the movement is imbedded deep in her muscle memory. So in every season and every sermon we rehearse moving through this three-day narrative of the good news. This figure of the Triduum has become our short hand of the gospel, a way of asking each other “How is the gospel with you today? Are you living in Friday, Saturday or Sunday today?”

the crux

The turning point of the Christian year and the Christian life is the cross. This is the crux of the matter. The dating of the year may turn on the birth of Jesus (Anno Domino - Year of the Lord) but the life of discipleship hinges on the events of Lent, Holy Week and Easter. Curiously, English use of the Latin word “crux” (literally “cross”) stems from early scientific experiments. Noting that a sign at a fork in the road was called a crux (since it took the shape of a cross), Sir Francis Bacon adopted this term to describe the crucial experiment that would either prove or disprove a theory. The drama of the gospel life is rehearsed whenever the church arrives at the moment of decision that is marked by the crux of Christ.