Good Friday

Good Friday

“The courageous women who weep … ” –John 18:1—19:42.

“On Good Friday, so much focus is rightfully on Jesus’ suffering on the cross. But let’s look down below him and see the courageous women of John’s story. In memory of them, let us pray for women who today will weep for their children, refusing to be comforted. And let us hold in prayer the women in today’s Golgothas who, in the face of horrible suffering, somehow find the strength to hold each other up.” —Eileen D. Crowley, “Sunday’s Coming” in The Christian Century (4/11/2017).

In Arkansas starting on Easter Monday in 2017 there were eleven executions planned because one of the drugs being used had an expiration date at the end of that month. There had not been an execution for twelve years. I remember that earlier execution well because I was a deacon at our cathedral then, which is close to the governor’s mansion. We had an ecumenical prayer service for the person to be executed and the person he had killed. I know I played the harp at the service, probably the African American spiritual, “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” We then went to the governor’s mansion and sang and prayed by candlelight until after the execution.

All of the men on death row last year had killed young women. I wonder what these girls now in eternal life are praying for and if they are lighting candles. Some of the stories about the men reveal that they had awful lives with a lack of love from women like the ones who followed Jesus. My prayers today are of course that governors all over our country will stay executions and that eventually this state would abolish the death penalty.

My third prayer is that we will do our best to raise strong and loving women like the ones at the cross with Jesus, so that their children will know love and not violence against others, especially against women.

Joanna. joannaseibert.com

Purchase a copy of A Spiritual Rx for Lent and Easter from me, joannaseibert@me.com, from Wordsworth Books in Little Rock, or from Amazon.

Buechner: Maundy Thursday

Buechner: Maundy Thursday

“‘WHAT YOU ARE GOING to do,’ Jesus says, ‘do quickly.’ … Jesus tells them, ‘My soul is very sorrowful, even to death,’ and then asks the disciples to stay and watch for him while he goes off to pray. … His prayer is, ‘Abba, Father, all things are possible for thee; remove this cup from me; yet not what I will but what thou wilt,’—this tormented muddle of a prayer which Luke says made [Jesus] sweat until it ‘became like great drops of blood falling down upon the ground.’ He went back to find some solace in the company of his friends then, but he found them all asleep when he got there. ‘The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak,’ he said, and you feel that it was to himself that he was saying it as well as to them.” —Frederick Buechner, “Last Supper” in The Faces of Jesus: A Life Story (Paraclete Press, 1974).

We all continually struggle with our own humanity. So many spiritual friends I meet with, including myself, spend a lifetime seeking perfection. Holy Week is a time for us specially to remember Jesus’ struggle with his humanity as best told in the synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. On Maundy Thursday in these Gospels, Jesus reveals to us how difficult the human condition is, as he asks for this cup to pass, he sweats “blood,” he suffers, he cries out in anguish, he thirsts, and he even asks God, “Where are you?”

A huge painting of Jesus praying at Gethsemane hung at the front of the sanctuary inside the Methodist Church where I grew up in Virginia. The image of Jesus praying in the Garden is different from any of the other references to his praying in the Gospels. This time Scripture connects us to the human side of Jesus. This is an image to keep when we, as well, are praying through difficult situations in our lives.

We can talk to and identify with those who have had experiences similar to ours. I see this most often in grief recovery groups where people listen to each other because they know that the other has some idea of the pain they are going through. I see this in twelve-step groups where alcoholics and addicts and co-dependents listen to others who walked a very similar path to theirs. How amazing that our God loves us so much, so deeply that God came to be among us. This week especially we remember that God has experienced and understands what it is like to suffer and be human. There is no greater love.

Joanna. joannaseibert.com

Purchase a copy of A Spiritual Rx for Lent and Easter from me, joannaseibert@me.com, from Wordsworth Books in Little Rock, or from Amazon.

Hope out of Shameful Acts

Hope Out of Shameful Acts

“In The Cross and the Lynching Tree, James Cone highlights a paradox of the gospel: out of the shameful and humiliating act of crucifixion comes hope.” —Debra J. Mumford, “Living the Word” in The Christian Century (3/14/2018).

We drove through Montgomery, Alabama, the week before the opening of The National Memorial and Museum for Peace and Justice—better known as the Lynching Memorial and Museum. We think we caught a glimpse of it in the distance. We felt a call that we must return to Montgomery someday to visit both parts.

Between 1950 and 1877 more than 4400 African American men, women, and children were lynched by being burned alive, hanged, shot, drowned, or beaten to death. The memorial structure on the center of the site is made of more than 800 steel monuments, one for each county in our country where a racial lynching took place. The adjacent museum is built on the site of a former warehouse in which black slaves brought in by boat or rails were imprisoned before going to the slave market.

It is ironic that James Cone, one of American’s best-known advocates of black theology and black liberation theology, died two days after the opening of this memorial and museum.

In her Good Friday message in The Christian Century, Debra Mumford reminds us how the horrific lynching of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in the Mississippi Delta in August of 1955 sparked national outrage that led Rosa Parks to move from the back to the front of the bus in Montgomery that December. Her arrest began the 381-day Montgomery bus boycott that was a groundbreaking event in the civil rights movement.

The Lynching Museum and Memorial and the Good Friday services in which we will soon participate can serve to remind us of the shameful acts that did and still take place in our world. We are to remember this on Good Friday and remind each other, especially our spiritual friends, that our hope, our small part, is not unlike that of Rosa Parks. We are to change the world by remembering the cruelty and standing our ground with trembling hearts in love wherever we see injustice.

Cone and Mumford are reminding us that when we talk with spiritual friends, at some point we are also to remind them that our traditions teach us about great hope that can follow horrendous and unjust tragedy.

Joanna. Joannaseibert.com

Purchase a copy of A Spiritual Rx for Lent and Easter from me, joannaseibert@me.com, from Wordsworth Books in Little Rock, or from Amazon.