Good Friday

04/25/25 • -1 min

Rev. Lindsay Mizell

Christ on the Cross with Mary and St John by Rogier Van Der Weyden
(1457-1464)

Good Friday 2025
Rev. Lindsay Mizell

I’m Lindsay Mizell and the pastor at Vineyard Springbrook and since the beginning of Saint Brendan’s, you all have invited us to be part of your Good Friday and we’re grateful for your patience with us when we don’t know your rhythms and customs is kind and gracious.

Father Doug and Peter and Ash and I all are in book club. Not the same book club. They have a book club that is of elite intelligence, and I have a book club that tells too many jokes. But luckily, we’re on the other side of a wall and we can hear Doug laughing the whole time, which is the gift of every Thursday morning to all of us.

A year or two ago, in my book club, we read a book that that no one really liked and was my favorite one that we’ve ever read. We came every week, and everyone hated it. I came every week so excited because I loved it so much. The book is called “The Sound of Life’s Unspeakable Beauty.” It had me at the title. The book it was written by a German luthier, so a violin maker.

The book is about the progress of of him making a violin and then he talks about the things of God all throughout it. We begin the book and he’s in the woods. He’s in a forest picking out the perfect tree that he’ll cut down the tree that would become this violin. And he’s he’s a master luthier. People are waiting years and years and years, the best violinists in the world; waiting on these instruments. We find him in the middle of the forest, and he’s cutting down this tree and we follow him through the whole process. Finally, we get to this finished violin being played by a master. And all the while as he’s telling us the process, he’s riding about his thoughts on God and life and how these things intersect.

It becomes this lovely journey through a man’s creation and also his theology. I think about this book all the time, like constantly, it is it is my Roman Empire. There is a time, though, when he gets the point where the violin is made, but before it’s made it, it’s only made for him for a little while. He calls it the closed sound of the violin. During this time, he’s the only one to hear it sound. And in the chapter when he’s talking about this this close sound, this this precious moment with this violin, just he and it, he speaks about suffering and God.

He begins his chapter like this, “I once heard a wise Jewish saying that God has two chambers in his heart an outer and an inner. In the inner chamber, he hides his pain and weeping. Sometimes God lets us glimpse his inner heart, but he shrouds it in metaphors so that we can bear it. Sometimes God lets us glimpse his inner heart, but he shrouds it in metaphors so that we can bear it.”

I’ve certainly found this to be true of God that when God allows me a glimpse into his inner heart, into his pain and into his suffering, he covers it with image and metaphor so that I can bear it. I meet with a spiritual director and and he says often that if we were to allow ourselves to see the world as God does, to see the world through God’s eyes, then we would spend much time with every life breaking our heart, including our own. In most of my life, I only see God’s inner chamber of grief and loss through image and metaphor.

It’s in the loss that exists in creation when leaves fall off of trees, trees losing their leaves, waves, ocean waves when they come in and then they take everything they can out with them and and go away. The sun disappearing into the horizon. The groan of creation is very hard to miss and it points beyond itself to that inner chamber of God’s heart. I see it covered through songs and books and movies and art images that point beyond themselves to the inner chamber of God’s own heart.

In more tangible metaphors, like lost jobs and lost love and lost keys, which happens far too often in my own life, these real things, these real moments, and yet they point beyond themselves into that inner chamber of God. Much of my life with God and my own prayer practice lives in image and metaphor. It’s one of the ways that God operates through the entirety of the scripture. He’s often described as like a fire, or like a light, water, a rock, a tower, a breath, a mother bird, a mother bear. It makes me think of how when God comes to Moses, he comes in a cloud or in our Old Testament lesson that Peter read to us earlier an angel who speaks on behalf of God sharing his heart.

We humans require a shrouding or a covering, an image or metaphor clouds or angels, because the fullness of God’s presence is beyond what we can bear. If I’m honest with you, I think I can bear it. I think I can handle it. If I picture myself on Mount Sinai, God is coming down to give me, God is giving me the law. I just I don’t think I would need a cloud for him. I don’t think I would need a fire or ...

Rev. Lindsay Mizell

Christ on the Cross with Mary and St John by Rogier Van Der Weyden
(1457-1464)

Good Friday 2025
Rev. Lindsay Mizell

Previous Episode

Maundy Thursday

Rev. Dr. Les Martin

Washing of the Apostles’ Feet by Master of the Housebook (1475 and 1500)

Maundy Thursday
Rev. Dr. Les Martin
Do you understand what I have done for you?
John 13:12b

In the Name of the Living God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

In Judaism, during the Passover Seder, there’s a section at the beginning known as The Four Questions. The most famous one being the one asked by the youngest child who is able: “Why is this night different from all other nights?” The four questions all have to do with the meal, at least on the surface. However, the answers point to how the meal brings to mind the time of the Exodus.

Holy Week is our Exodus. The Triduum (trid-you-um) or three great nights of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter, our Passover. It’s fitting, therefore for us to have a question of our own. Jesus asks, “Do you understand what I have done for you?” We might also ask it this way: what do we receive tonight?

When Jesus gave the cup to his disciples, he said to them “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.” Our liturgy, drawing from a different text says, “ Drink this, all of you; for this is my Blood of the New Covenant, which is shed for you, and for many, for the forgiveness of sins: Whenever you drink it, do this in remembrance of me.” The thing that is important for our purposes tonight is that word “covenant.” In Greek, it is diatheke, and if you look it up, the definition is perhaps more precise. It is a certain kind of covenant- one declaring a person’s wishes regarding the disposal of their property when they die. Like a Last Will and Testament. This is why the old King James Version says “This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you.”

Now, if this meal is Jesus’ Last Will and Testament, what do we receive? An inheritance- and what an inheritance it is. He bequeaths to us his life, his perfect submission to the Law, and his merits, for we are accounted as adopted daughters and sons.

The story is told of Paul Brand, a missionary doctor in India. When an epidemic of measles spread through the town where he lived, his daughter came down with a very bad case of it. Since he had no vaccine to treat her, Brand located a person who had recently recovered from measles. He drew blood from them and injected the plasma from their blood into his daughter. She was healed with blood that was borrowed from a person who had overcome the measles. We, too, are healed with borrowed blood. As Lutheran theologian and Pastor John Kleinig writes:

Full remission! That’s what Jesus provides for us by the blood he shed for us and now offers us in his Supper. He grants us full remission from the spiritual sickness of sin, the malignant cancer that infects us in our souls and bodies, for which there is no natural treatment or human remedy. The wages of sin—its outcome and cost—is always death (Rom 6:23). Jesus reverses this by giving us his blood to drink in his Supper. Through it we have the eternal remission of all our sin.

Free to live without condemnation, guilt or fear. That would be food enough. Yet, in this meal, we receive even more. In our Epistle tonight Paul asks us pointedly, “The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?” (1 Corinthians 10:16) It is not just that this meal grants us the inheritance of our remission from sins, it brings us into communion- a common union- with our Lord.

“Just as by melting two candles together you get one piece of wax,” St Cyril of Jerusalem writes, “ so, I think, one who receives the flesh and blood of Jesus is fused together with him. And the soul finds that he is in Christ and Christ is in him.”

In our eucharistic liturgy we pray for God to use the sacrament in this way, praying that we may “be made one body with him, that he may dwell in us and we in him.” God answers that prayer. As we take the Sacrament , what we eat is what we become- and that changes us gradually, from the inside out. We become more and more spiritually alive as we feed on Jesus. We draw our life from him as we remain in him and he remains in us. By the means of the bread and the wine we consume, we become his body. We grow up into him who is our head.

At the end of the dinner, Jesus washes the disciples’ feet. He does this, per his own words, as a teacher- showing us just what kind of a body we are now. We receive clarity as to the nature of our identity as the Body of Christ. It involves giving ourselves away in love, just as our benefactor and our head, Jesus did.

After washing the feet of his disciples, Jesus says “I have given you an example – you should do just as I have done for you.”(John 13:15) Later, after the meal, he will be even more direct, saying:

I give you a new commandment: love one another; as I have loved you, so you are to love one another. If there ...

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Resurrection Day

Rev. Doug Floyd

Christ and Mary Magdalene, a Finnish Legend by Albert Edelfelt (1890)

Easter 2022 (Updated from Easter Vigil 2016)
Rev. Doug Floyd

Back before. Before bombings in Ukraine. The bloodshed in Nigeria. Back before almost 100 million refugees and displaced peoples wandering the earth. Back before 24-hour news cycles. Back before never-ending political ranker. Back before Facebook and emails. Back before business lunches and late-night study sessions. Back before grandchildren, children. Back before first kiss. Back before family picnics and pool parties and dreams of growing up. Back before walking, before speaking, before breathing. Further back.

Back before parliaments and presidents and kings and queens. Back before empires. Before nations. Before tribes. Further back. Back before Cain and Abel. Before Eve and Adam. Back before the wolves and bears and birds. Back before forests and grasslands. Back before thunderstorms and sun and moon and earth and sky. Further back. Earlier. Earlier. Back before something. Anything. Back before nothing. Before existence.

First and only. Love. Father, Son, Spirit. The perfect communion of love.

Perfect bliss. Perfect peace. Only love. And then unfolding mystery. The turning. Love poured out. God creating heavens and the earth. The Formless and void. Darkness over the face of the deep. The Holy Wild of God hovering, brooding over the waters.

Father speaking. Spirit stirring. The Word making. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. (John 1:1-3)

“And God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light.” (Genesis 1: 3)

And God saw that the Light was good.

Light. Water. Heavens and Earth. All bathed in Love. The Holy Wild of God dancing in His creation.

The Father speaking. The Spirit breathing. The Son forming and filling all things. Land and sea. Seeds. Plants. Fruit trees. Sun, stars and moon. Sea filling with all kinds of wondrous and beautiful creatures. Skies filling with birds and songs. Animals walking the land. Man. Woman. Paradise.

And it was very good. And it was all bathed in love.

But then the tempter and the temptation. Man turning away from love. Away from Father. Turning away from the freedom of love. Turning toward nothing. Toward enslavement, brokenness. The horror of sin. The undoing of all good things.

Cain killing Abel. Brother against brother. Sister against Sister. Husband against wife. Parent against child. Child against parent. Nation against nation. All manner of unrighteousness and evil, covetousness, malice, envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness, gossip, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents,foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. (Romans 1:29-31)

A world created in love, grown cold and falling into the dark abyss of the loveless. No eyes for God. Walled against him.[1] Cursing him. Ignoring him. Dead to him. Dying to all things. Falling into nothingness.

The Father will not abandon His world to nothingness. His love will create a new world in the midst of this world gone wrong. God’s love will enter the very heart of the world in the heart of His Son.

The very of heart of healing.

Into this prison of death, Love descends. The Word becomes Flesh. The Light penetrates the darkness. God enters the messiness of human history. Jesus, Son of God, born of woman. Fully God. Fully man. Eternal love descending into creation. Descending into humanity. Descending into the abyss of human sin and brokenness. Descending into sorrow and grief. He keeps falling.

G.K. Chesterton writes, “Glory to God in the Lowest” “Outrushing the fall of man is the height of the fall of God.”

God in Christ keeps falling.

Falling under our iniquities, our lies, betrayals, denials, deceptions, destructions. Our petty sins. He keeps falling under us. Bearing the weight of the world, the sin of the world, the betrayal of the world.

Falling fully into death. Our death. The death of all things. All hope, all life, all love, all truth. Falling into the undoing of all things. Falling, falling, falling into all hopelessness, all failure. Falling into the end of all things. The annihilation of all things. Falling into the formless and the void.

As Von Balthasar reminds us, “He wanted to sink so low that in the future all falling would be a falling into him and every streamlet of bitterness and despair would henceforth run down into his lowermost abyss.”[2]

On the cross, Jesus Christ the Word made Flesh dies.

Into the great silence. (Pause)

In this silence, love and the power of an indest...