Good Friday With WILLIAM WILLIMON's Lectionary Sermon Resource - Episode 364

Welcome to Voices in My Head, the official podcast of me, Rick Lee James. I'm a recording artist, a singer, a songwriter, an author, a worship leader, and an ordained minister in the Church of the Nazarene. The Voices in My Head podcast is where I discuss music, movies, books, pop culture, theology, and more with friends, colleagues, and sometimes just by myself. Now make sure to let me know what you think of today's episode by leaving me a review on iTunes or by tweeting at me @RickLeeJames on Twitter. And please join my mailing list at RickLeeJames.com where you can receive an email every time a new episode is released. And by the way, in case you're interested in a daily dose of kindness and encouragement beyond this podcast, I also run the Twitter account @MrRogersSayHi. Where I post daily quotes from Fred Rogers, one of the voices in my head. Well, I guess that's it for the intro, so sit back, relax, and listen to the latest episode of Voices in My Head.

Well, welcome back to Voices in My Head. As always, I'm your host Rick Lee James, and these are special quarantine editions of the podcast. Thanks for being here with us. At the beginning of the show, I do just want to remind you all that if you are interested in podcasting and maybe this this is the time for you to get into it. You can go to podbean.com/voices and you can use my account there. Actually, it's kind of like my code. It lets you know that I sent you if you go to podbean.com/voices, and you can find out more about how to start your own podcast using Podbean. It's a great platform and I highly recommend it. I've been using it from the beginning, and honestly, it gets better and better every year that I use it. There's a lot of great features, and you can post podcasts straight to several different platforms all at the time like YouTube and your social network platforms and emails. And it's a really great platform to use for podcasting. So podbean.com/voices, they're one of the sponsors of the show and I proudly use them. Well, these are strange times here in quarantine. Most of the US is supposed to be staying in their homes right now and not going out any more than you absolutely have to. It's, it's a hard thing for most of us. And, but, you know, it's not terrible either. I mean, it's not like we're in terrible places. We get to stay in our homes and do some different things. I have been so unbelievably busy. I can't wait for life to go back to normal so I can get some rest again. Honestly, it's just been incredibly hectic, so much to the point that I haven't had time to get any guests on the show between working for my church and trying to get everything online. And then we started doing a broadcast service over the radio from our parking lot so people can come stay in their cars and still come to a service on Sunday morning. So we are doing a number of services each week. Now we're in Holy Week, and I thought maybe one really hopefully useful and good thing to do today would be— well, I have a lot of ministers who listen to this show, and a friend of mine and friend of the show, William Willimon, has been a guest on here a few times now, and he has a wonderful wonderful lectionary sermon resource. And so, giving him full credit for everything in this episode today, I want to use Will's lectionary sermon resource for Year A, Part 1, looking at Good Friday. If you're looking for a good sermon resource and something that can help you in planning, I use this sometimes in a devotional way. I use it a lot with my praise team when I'm doing devotionals with them. But what it is, is he goes through and he gives a theme for the week. If you're using the Revised Common Lectionary, he gives an introduction to each of the readings. He gives a prayer to go along with them. He has a section called Encountering the Text, which is a little bit of commentary on the text for that week. And then there's Proclaiming the Text, where he gives a sample sermon. And so what I wanted to do is go through today which is— we are in Holy Week right now, and at the time of releasing this, in just a couple of days it's going to be Good Friday. And I wanted to, as a resource for many of you, but also for my own heart, I wanted to use his chapter on Good Friday from William Willimon's lectionary sermon resource today. So it's kind of like story time with Rick Lee James today, because I'm going to be reading, but these are the words of our friend William Willimon, and I'm grateful for his work ministry, and he has a lot of good things to say for Good Friday. So if you don't mind, that's what I'm doing today. And honestly, if you do mind, I'm still doing it. So I hope that you'll find this very beneficial today. So the readings for Good Friday are Isaiah 52:13-53:12, Psalm 22, Hebrews 10:16-25, Hebrews 4:14-16 and 5:7-9, John 18:1-9 and verse 42. And it's titled in his chapter, "Terrifying Friday," and the selected reading is John 18:1-19, 42. The theme: the story of the crucifixion of Jesus is a violent, terrifying tale of blood, torture, suffering, and death. And yet Christians believe that the events of Good Friday are integral to our salvation. In these terrible events, God is working for our good. Bringing all creation into divine embrace. God is with us. Introduction to the readings. Isaiah 52. Isaiah speaks of the servant who carried the sin of many and pleaded on behalf of those who rebelled. Hebrews 10. The letter to the Hebrews speaks of a covenant that is in their hearts and of forgiveness made possible by the blood. Of Jesus. The John passage from John chapter 18. John tells of the betrayal and denial of Jesus by His own disciples and the trial and terrible crucifixion of Jesus. Now the prayer. Almighty God, who for our sakes became human in Jesus Christ, give us the grace to bear the truth that confronts us on this Good Friday. May we, through honest confession of our sin, come to see the ways that we have rebelled against Your will for us. Despoiled your creation, wasted the opportunities that you have given us, and failed to live up to your loving desires for us. Grant us the insight to gaze upon your tortured body on the cross and see there the truth of the depth of your love for us, the way that you take upon yourself our sin and bridge the great gap between you and ourselves. Make this Holy Day for us a day of truth, your truth. Amen. And Encountering the Text is the next heading in this resource. The story that the church tells today is familiar to everyone who will be in church on Good Friday. In a way, it is the story that is at the heart of the faith. The passion and death of Christ. The theological significance of the betrayal and crucifixion of Christ is deep and mysterious, requiring the church's greatest theological reflection down through the centuries. What do we mean when we say, "Christ died for our sin"? I suggest that you not delve into theological reflection this Good Friday, but rather that you simply read the story, and reflect upon the self-evident, obvious quality of the Passion. It is a horribly violent, terrifying tale. There are people who think the Christian faith is wrong to form itself around such a violent story. We will say basically two things about the Passion. First, it is a story that tells the harsh but real truth about ourselves, that is, we are indeed violent people, who tend to crucify our saviors. Second, God does not shrink from entering into the full human condition, even the worst of it, in order to be with us, so that God might save us. And now, proclaiming the text. We were working our way through some key portions of the Old Testament, and I had warned the women's Bible study group that on this Wednesday we would deal with what I called texts Texts of Terror. I got the phrase from a groundbreaking book by Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror: Literary Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives, Minneapolis Fortress Press, 1984. Because it was a women's Bible study, I opened with Jael, who is called blessed above all women in Judges 5:24. I told them Jael hammered a tent peg through the skull of sleeping Sisera. An enemy general. There were gasps from a few of the students. Then I told them about Judith, who faked lust for Holofernes, an Assyrian commander, then prayed, "Give me strength today, Lord God of Israel," in Judith 13:7. She then plunged his own sword into his neck. Oh yes, then there was the wife of the Persian king who won permission for the Jews throughout her husband's Persian Empire to destroy to kill and to annihilate as many as 75,000 of their enemies. Esther 9:13-16. Well, the Bible study ended awkwardly with some of the women complaining about my need to use some discretion in the parts of the Bible you discuss. By anyone's reckoning, these are indeed texts of terror. Mostly we ignore these stories, and there are many others in which there is violence and bloodshed, often in the name of God. I once got into all sorts of trouble for mentioning that Ananias and Sapphira were struck dead for withholding part of their cash from the early Christian community in Acts 5:1-11. It's just not an appropriate sort of story for our church, I was told. And yet this day, this Friday we call Good, we cannot imagine an even more horrifying tale. In reading the story of the passion of Christ, his torture and death, we know that we have left the notion of the Bible as a book filled with exemplary people and a nice, admirable God. Instead, the Bible is revealed, in this story, to be a book about God's relentless determination to love violent, bloody sinners, even if God has to die to do it. We don't do too well with these terrifying moments of scripture. Who wants to face Elijah, cursing a crowd of jeering boys in the name of the Lord, after which two she bears appear and maul 42 of them, in 2 Kings 2:23-24? And God asks Abraham to kill his only child. And in this day, we come to the climactic moment of the whole Jesus story, that ominous event toward which we have been moving steadily each Sunday, God's will puts God's own beloved child on the cross. Many wonder, "How can we believe in a loving God who does, or at least allows, such unloving things? How do we believe in a God who evokes such texts of terror?" We can try to interpret them in a way that makes them seem less terrible. God sent a ram to take Isaac's place at the last moment. God raised Jesus from the dead. Thus the terrible tales become stories of rescue and resurrection. But that diffuses some of the real terror of worshiping and obeying God, and not knowing that there will be rescue, the terror of thinking that you are doing the right thing, only to learn later that you did not. That also ignores the terrible truth of the stories in which God sanctions violence. Killing every firstborn in Egypt before the Passover, Exodus 11:5, or ordering Saul to slaughter the Amalekites down to the last woman, child, and donkey in 1 Samuel 15:3. It is a great mystery how a loving, generous God somehow gets implicated in all this, just as it is a mystery how God is able to take even the most terrible of terrors of this day on Calvary, and weave even this into God's purposes. But there is no mystery that these stories, as terrible as they are, are stories about us. We like to think that we have at last risen above these terrible events. Of course, we think that from the safety and security of a country that has no war here at home, though we sure know how to make war elsewhere. The violence that we do generally gets done from the vantage point of others. We hire others, somewhere, to slaughter the animals that we consume in gourmet dinners, and we pay the soldiers who must go elsewhere to fight our battles, all the while talking about how good and peaceable we are. I suppose, like sinners of every time and place, we attempt to take refuge in our presumed righteousness, living under the illusion that if we just behave properly, we are terror exempt. Obey God and avoid ever picking up a sword. Yet we tolerate a culture in which the murder rate is higher than anywhere in the world. Nearly 2 million of our citizens are incarcerated in this, the freest country of all. The terrors that we work tend to be subtle, but no less terrible for the victims of our legislated, economically induced, urbane terror. It might be possible to tell yourself that we have risen above all that Old Testament primitive terror. We have made progress. We are progressive.

We are good.

Until this day, this Good Friday, and the story that it has to tell. If Jesus had been nailed to the cross by demonstrably, obviously bad people, then we might be able to walk away from this story free of implication. Yet one of his own, Judas, betrayed him. All of his disciples forsook him. A huge crowd, some of whom must have warmly welcomed him into Jerusalem during the first of the week, cried, "Crucify him!" This is what these texts of terror do for us. They rob us of our presumptions of righteousness, our smug pretentiousness that clings to the lie that we are basically good people who are doing fine after all, that is, people who don't need saving. But we are not such people, today's story tells us. We are members of the fickle, screaming crowd who one Friday marched gaily up a hill outside of town and just happened to crucify God's only Son. What's to become of us? We have met the most terrifying of enemies, and the enemy has our face, the sound of our voice. What's God going to do with us now? The terrible, terrifying mob of humanity. What's God to do with us now? We must wait until Sunday to find out. But for now, he looks down from the cross to which we nailed him and says, "Brothers and sisters, I love you still. God forgive." Relating the text. A passage from Jonathan Edwards: A person that sees himself ready to sink into hell is ready to strive, some way or other, to lay God under some obligation to him. But he is to be beat off from everything of that nature, though it greatly increases his terror to see himself wholly destitute on every side of any refuge, of anything of his own to lay hold of. As a man that sees himself in danger of drowning is in terror, and endeavors to catch hold of every twig within his reach, and he that pulls away those twigs from him increases his terror, yet if they are insufficient to save him, and by being in this way prevent his looking to that which will save him, to pull them away is a necessity to save his life. Jonathan Edwards, Thoughts on the Revival of Religion in New England, 1740, to which is prefixed a Narrative of the Surprising Work of God in Northampton, Massachusetts, 1735. New York American Tract Society. From the folk I talked to, I heard two reactions to Mel Gibson's film, The Passion of the Christ. There were those who were deeply moved by the film's depiction of the horrible, intense agony of Christ, though as one of my friends noted, "It took Gibson about 2 hours to show us what it took Matthew only about 5 minutes to tell." There were others who were simply repulsed by the sheer violence of the film. One of my friends said, "The film was pornographic in the way it lingered on every horrible moment of the crucifixion." Disgusting. There is a chance that today's proclamation, following Matthew's story of the Passion, may have this same effect upon worshipers in your congregation on this Good Friday. Imagine being asked to stand before a grand gathering of the good and the wise and being asked to make a speech about goodness, beauty, and the meaning of life, the point of history, the nature of Almighty God, or some such high subject, and having no material at your disposal but an account of a humiliating, bloody execution at a garbage dump outside a rebellious city in the Middle East, it is your task to argue that this story is the key to everything in life and to all that we know about God. This was precisely the position of Paul in Corinth. Before the populace of this cosmopolitan, sophisticated city of the Empire, Paul had to proclaim that this whipped, bloody, scorned, and derided Jew from Nazareth was God with us. As Paul said, he had his work cut out for him because preaching about the cross is folly to those who are perishing. Foolishness and stupidity. A cross is no way for a messianic reign to end. Yet what else can this preacher say, because whether it makes sense to us or not, In God's wisdom, he determined that the world wouldn't come to know him through its wisdom. Instead, God was pleased to save those who believe through the foolishness of preaching. A crucified Messiah? It is an oxymoron, a violation of Israel's high expectations for a messianic liberator. For God the Father to allow God the Son to be crucified, dead, and buried is for God to be pushed out beyond the limits of human expectation or human help. The cross is the ultimate dead end of any attempt at human self-fulfillment, human betterment, or progress. As Jesus is hanging from the cross in humiliation and utter defeat, there is nothing to be done to vindicate the work of Jesus or make the story come out right except the power of God. And the cross is also a demonstration of just how far God will go to stand or in the case of the cross, hang with us in solidarity. God is with us. Thank you for listening to Voices in My Head today. You can go to voicesinmyheadpodcast.com, and I'll have a link there where you can find this great book by William Willimon, Lectionary Sermon Resource for Year A Part 1, and maybe you would like to pick up a copy for yourself if you find it helpful. If not for your congregation, maybe even just devotionally and for further study. I hope you all have a very meaningful Holy Week, and I hope that you will have courage to walk with Jesus toward the cross so that we may celebrate more fully in His resurrection. I know these are difficult days, and even though we are apart, We are together one in the Spirit. God bless you, and thank you for listening to Voices in My Head.

Thank you for joining me here this week on Voices in My Head. I hope you'll visit me on my website at rickleejames.com where you can find out more about me, get my music on vinyl and CD, follow my blog, and even schedule me for a concert or a speaking engagement. Better yet, even a book signing. Happening in your neighborhood. You can find all that and more at rickleejames.com. Also, it would mean a great deal to me if you could write a review of this podcast on iTunes. The more positive reviews that we receive, the more visible this podcast will be online. And now for the benediction: May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so By the power of the Holy Spirit, you may abound in hope. God bless you, and thank you for listening to Voices in My Head.