Good Friday - April 14, 2006
A Sermon by Deborah Pender Hutchison
Saint David's Episcopal Church, Bean Blossom, Indiana
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
A woman sits in her kitchen, despair reshaping the deep lines of her
ancient face into a mask of hopelessness. Before her on the table where
she served breakfast to her kids for so many years, where she’s
sat with friends drinking coffee and laughing, a small pile of small
bills, month-end remnant of the pension check. Will it be food this
time, or the medicine her doctor tells her is necessary to keep her
tired heart beating?
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
They called it permafrost because it never thawed. But now, the
softening ground has destroyed the foundation of his house, made it
unlivable. Bewildered, he gazes at open water where, in the long memory
of his people, there has always been the wide ice on which they hunted
seal. The ice is in his heart now. That cold dread that comes when the
world is ending.
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
The blue-black skin, the swollen belly, the lethargy, the eyes huge
with terrors unspoken, mark this a child of Africa. Sudanese? Mother
raped and slaughtered by the Janjeweed. South African? Ugandan?
Nigerian? Waiting for someone in some boardroom somewhere to decide to
send antiretroviral drugs to the least of these, ones who cannot pay.
Mauritanian? Ethiopian? Zambian? From most anywhere in that vast
beautiful broken-hearted famine-haunted continent.
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
She is working in her garden, clearing the beds of winter debris,
enjoying the first warm day of Spring, getting the place spiffed up for
his return, when a dark car pulls up to the curb. She recognizes the
insignia displayed on the door. She recognizes the uniforms worn by the
two young men who emerge, grim-faced, dreading this work, but dutiful.
As they walk toward her, she considers simply going inside, shutting
the door, not letting them in, as if that would make what they have
come to tell her not real.
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Lives wrenched apart by a boy’s decision to clothe himself in
explosives, enter a crowded market and trigger the detonator. News that
the cancer has returned. Job gone, no pension, after thirty years of
service, while the CEO walks away from this bankrupt company with a
multi-million dollar severance package. Your golden child’s
bright light quenched in adulthood by an inexplicable shift in brain
chemistry.
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Hopes dashed. Hearts broken. Lives careening out of control. The
generational wounding woven of things done and left undone. And the
suffering that seems to have no reason whatsoever. The Good Friday
litany is endless. A world of hurt. It extends outward into past and
into future. It speaks the sorrows shot through the lives of those who
share with us this present moment.
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Our work this day, in scripture, prayer, hymn, meditation – is to
be with those who suffer, including our very selves. Not to heal or fix
or remedy. That is for another day. Today we set aside our habit of
whistling in the dark, our practice of looking on the bright side.
Today is the day to look straight into the unblinking eye of what we
normally do everything in our power to avoid – the vast and
unrelenting agony of the human condition.
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Words of the soul’s darkest passage – the cry of hearts
torn open by grief, frozen in terror, crushed by loneliness, drowning
in despair. The first line of the twenty-second Psalm. Spoken by Jesus
in his final agony, according to two of the four gospel versions of the
Crucifixion. Were they whispered so quietly that even those at the foot
of the cross were not sure of what they heard? Or were they howled at
an implacable heaven for all who stood on that stony hill to hear and
tremble? Only those who were there could tell us that, and they are
long dead.
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Why, why, did he speak so? A mystery from a man of mysteries. All I
know is this. I struggle this day and every day to stay present to pain
– mine, yours, all. I know that to turn away is to make a place
for hurt to breed and grow more suffering. And I don’t want to be
an agent for that in any way.
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Because he said these words in his extremity, I know that there is no
place I can go where he has not been. On this day of sorrows, that will
have to be enough. ~