Good Friday

Good Friday. At the Foot of the Cross, April 3, 2026, noon, St. Mark’s.

This year, this place has experienced too much suffering and death. On Good Friday, here we bring our grief, mourning our loved ones, as well as contemplating the why of Jesus’ suffering and death. We linger at the cross for a few uncomfortable moments. It is a reality. Jesus died. It is a profoundly unjust, overwhelmingly painful death. Like millions of Christians around the world today/and at least since the 4th century, we make this pilgrimage at this hour/to the top of Golgotha to decide what Jesus’ death means to each of us. How shall we make sense of other deaths and the death of Jesus?1 / In grief, our words are a continual flight of ideas.

The stark rawness of today brings some answers.

Of all the world’s religions, our faith is the only one with a God who suffers at his death, one who has experienced our own pain firsthand. He is a suffering servant, which no one had ever heard of before. Jesus means to transform the world by loving it,/ not controlling it, which makes his life hell much of the time. But Jesus’s suffering makes him our best company/when we run into bad times. He has been there. There is nothing that hurts us that he does not know about. At our most broken, most frightened, most vulnerable, we have this companion who has been there and promises to be there with us. There he lives, beside and inside us in the lowest places in our lives. Nothing we say can shock him or make him turn away. If we say, “Where are you, God? I’m all alone here.” On Palm Sunday Matthew reported HE also says the same from the cross. Good Friday reminds us that the Christian faith does not  remove our suffering. Instead, we are given a God who intimately knows our pain and suffers with us/ and for us.2 This is love that crosses all boundaries. This is the love that never dies.

 As we stay on this hill and look up at the wounded crucified Jesus, we recognize he has become what we most fear: nakedness, exposure, vulnerability, and a failure.3,4 ///

We come closer to hear Jesus’ first words from the cross recorded in John./  We see his lips move, but cannot understand what he says. Jesus never observes our own suffering from a distance, so we, in turn, move nearer to him as we see his mother and the beloved disciple do. With a faint croaking sound that comes with overwhelming thirst, Jesus whispers to his mother: “Woman, here is your son.” And to the disciple, “Here is your mother.”/

Mary is only mentioned twice in John’s gospel and never by name, which may make her presence symbolic. Fleming Rutledge5 believes we are witnessing the creation, the birth and modeling of a new community which will carry Jesus’ Spirit of love into the world.

After the beloved disciple takes Mary home/ and the other disciples crawl out from under their rocks, they find themselves in the presence of two people whose connection with God’s love has now become far more intimate than theirs. While those in power in Jerusalem believe they are tearing Jesus’ family apart, Jesus lovingly quietly puts it back together with a new Spirit of caring for each other where3 “we glimpse divine love.” My experience also is that Jesus constantly does this. When our loved one is physically separated from us by death, Jesus gives us a new and different loving relationship with them/ and others if only we have eyes and ears to see/ and hear/ and accept it.////

As we stand below Jesus, we again see other courageous women from John’s story, Mary’s sister, and the woman from Magdala. They as well are symbolic of the women standing on today’s Golgotha, in the face of horrible suffering, somehow finding strength to hold each other up also in a new community.” 4//

 Rutledge again reminds us how the degree of thirst suffered at a crucifixion is indescribable. As Jesus is so close to death, John’s Gospel next records that he says, “I thirst.” We remember a recent story in John when Jesus asks a Samaritan woman at the well, “Give me a drink.” Jesus then explains, “whoever drinks of the water that I shall give…will never thirst; the water I give will become a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

All through the Hebrew Bible, God is in command of waters. He causes waters to flow and sets their boundaries. He causes it to rain for 40 days and then calls the flood back into its beds. He piles up the waters of the Red Sea so the Israelites can escape from the Egyptians. In the wilderness, he makes water gush from a rock when people are thirsty. /Remembering all this is too staggering to absorb./ The One who created the majesty of the Arkansas River and the Gulf/ and the calm waters of Lake Chicot, the One from whom flows the gift of the water of eternal life,/ is the One dying of terrible thirst.5,6

 Soon, we hear the exhausted Jesus take his last gasp and cry out, “IT IS FINISHED.”// We remember hearing those same words wailed/ from exhausted women who have endured long, painful childbirth as they make that final push before delivery of a new life. It is finished!/ Briefly, for a moment, we recall Jesus’ words from last night before his arrest: “When a woman is in labor, she has pain because her hour has come. But when her child is born, she no longer remembers the anguish, only the joy of having brought new life into the world. You have pain now, but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.” (John 16:21-22)///

But the scene before us offers no joy. It is unusually dark when we help lower Jesus’ torn, naked body from the cross and lay him in the dark cave that holds the truth and love we tremble to name.7 It will be the Sabbath. His time to rest. His part is over. His work is finished.8

We go home and get ready for the Sabbath. It will be hard to say our prayers.

 “God, where are you? We desperately need you./ We search for hope in the darkness./ God, you have continually redeemed evil and turned it into good since the beginning of time. But this horrific event is too dark. We desperately need to be reminded what is good about this Friday?”9/

We hold onto the truth that even from the cross, you draw us closer to you, caring for and loving us, just as you did for Mary and John. We cling to your promise “to be an abiding presence with us in suffering,/ as we wait with you through the long night until the morning light. /Our Apostles’ Creed, recited at funerals and in our Baptismal Covenant, reminds us that you first descend into hell after your death. You leave us this reminder that you will always be present, even in the darkest parts of our lives, which feel like hell./ We wait in hope/ through darkness until dawn for that possible wailing /of new birth, new life/ that women have heard and seen for centuries before.”10 ///

We will finally fall asleep, but in our longing for you, God, we will return to this place near sundown tomorrow.

Joanna Seibert

1Julian DeShazier in Christian Century, March 23, 2016.

2 Barbara Brown Taylor, “The Suffering of God,” God in Pain (Abingdon, 1998) pp. 120-124.

3 Barbara Brown Taylor, “Mother of the New,” Home By Another Way, pp. 97-99.

4 Eileen D. Crowley, “Sunday’s Coming,” Christian Century April 11, 2017.

5 Fleming Rutledge, “Woman, behold thy son!... Behold thy mother,” The Seven Last Words from the Cross (William  B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2005), pp. 30-34.

6 Fleming Rutledge, “Thirst,” The Seven Last Words from the Cross (William  B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2005), pp. 54-57.

 7 Barbara Brown Taylor, “The Silence of God,” God in Pain (Abingdon, 1998) pp. 110-114.

8 Barbara Brown Taylor, “It is Finished,” Home By Another Way (Cowley,1999) pp. 103-105.

9 Frederick Buechner in Wishful Thinking.

10 Br. David Vryhof JJSE.org.

Wednesday in Holy Week, 12-Step Eucharist, April 1, 2026, Saint Mark's

Romero, MLK, Bonhoeffer, April 1, 2026, Wednesday in Holy Week, 12-step Eucharist. Romero (March 24), MLK (April 4), Bonhoeffer (April 9), Hebrews 12:1-3

“Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, …let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us.”

Tonight, as we journey through Holy Week with Jesus at this 12-step Eucharist, we also honor three contemporary Lenten martyrs who also walked the Holy Week journey with Jesus: Oscar Romero, Martin Luther King, Jr, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Interesting, isn’t it, that Oscar Romero, Martin Luther King, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, three of the most well-known 20th- century Christian martyrs, die during Lent.  Archbishop Romero is shot on March 24 at age 62 at the altar in El Salvador while celebrating the Eucharist/ after speaking out against the brutality of the ruling government,/ Martin Luther King is shot on April 4 at age 39  in Memphis where he goes to support striking sanitation workers,/ and Bonhoeffer is hung on April 9 also at age 39 for participating in plans to assassinate Hitler, dying 23 days before the Nazi surrender. Romero is shot while elevating the chalice at the end of the Eucharistic prayer. When a death squad kills him, his blood spills onto the altar mixed with the blood of Christ in the chalice. All three men are icons for our Lenten and Holy Week journey, people who speak their truth even when they offend the ruling authorities./ This is also what happens to Jesus. Jesus’ message offends the religious rulers of the Temple, who then conspire with the Roman authorities to kill him. Jesus is not killed at age 33 by the Jews/ but by the elite Jewish religious authority that convinces the elite Roman authority to believe that Jesus’ presence impedes keeping the peace in occupied Palestine. ////

Our Lenten journey has centered on “moments of clarity,” dying to an old life, and being reborn like Nicodemus—embracing a new Easter life, learning to be blind and then seeing, understanding what it feels like to have Christ crucified within us, and then living a new resurrected life rooted in the truth about ourselves and those around us.//

Romero, MLK, and Bonhoeffer don’t begin the Lenten journeys of their lives speaking out the truth in love. They were all three quiet, unassuming men: Romero, appointed bishop by the Vatican with the El Salvadoran government’s approval because he seemed “quiet and safe”;/ King, chosen for his youth and because he was the newest and youngest black pastor at age 25 in Montgomery;/ and Bonhoeffer, a thoughtful Lutheran theologian. But during their journeys,  all three see the injustices inflicted by those in authority on their friends and neighbors. They die to an old life of silence and living in the darkness of conformity and are reborn into a new life of speaking Christ’s truth in love. Eventually, like Jesus, all three realize they will be killed for speaking out. All their writings suggest that they, like Jesus, ask that the cup pass from them, but it doesn’t./We honor them tonight and pray for just a little of their courage and strength to do “the next right thing,” to speak out against the injustices in our world and support those who are harmed daily within and beyond these walls where we live and work and play and worship.//

“Consider those who endured such hostility… so that we/ may not grow weary/ or lose heart.”          Joanna Seibert

Lent 3A Two Days in Samaria, St. Mark's, March 8, 2026

Lent 3A Two Days in Samaria St. Mark’s, March 8, 2026

John 4:5-42

Without question, the best word to describe our life in community is “polarized.” Every night on the news, we see Red and Blue states. More churches remain divided into groups with little understanding of the issues of sexuality and biblical authority. Our country remains polarized over immigration, the social responsibility of states versus national governments, and our relationship with the rest of the world. The rights of illegal immigrants and the rights of Muslims fill every weekly newscast. Family life and friendships have more elephants in the room, protected by the fence that says, “Don’t go there.” The list of topics we dare not or do not discuss is growing/ as the reality of community is shrinking.

 In today’s gospel, there is an often-overlooked passage of great significance for us who live in this polarized world. The text is not only a model for Christian behavior./ It constitutes marching orders for us who take the idea of following Jesus seriously./ The passage is: “So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them, and he stayed there two days.” /

You all know about the relationship in Jesus’ time between Jews in Samaria,/ the part of Palestine between Judea and Galilee,/ and the rest of the country. Some 700 years before Jesus’ day, the Northern Jewish kingdom, including its capital of Samaria is destroyed by the Assyrians. The Southern Jewish Kingdom is not conquered at that time. The Southern Judeans teach their children that the Jews left in the region around Samaria are lower class who intermarried with the Assyrians and are therefore religiously impure. Later in the sixth century BC, the southern kingdom is now taken into captivity by Babylon. When the southern Jews return from Babylon in 538 BC, they continue to consider the Samaritan Jews left behind as unclean. Soon, both southern Judean Jewish leaders/ and northern Samaritan religious leaders teach that it is wrong to have any contact with the opposite group,/ and neither is to enter each other’s territories or even to speak to one another.//  

The Gospel today begins with: “Jesus came to a Samaritan city called Sychar (sI ker).”/ The gospel ends by telling us that Jesus stays for two days. There is a gap,/ an unimaginable gap in the story. Jesus ventures across this gap/ and stays for two days. What does this begin to tell us about following Jesus?

A popular question today is: What would Jesus do? Looking at these two days in Samaria, the question is, “What did Jesus do?” Obviously, no one knows because it is not in the text,/ but we can speculate by remembering how Jesus interacts with the unnamed Samaritan woman that noonday at the well. First, he talks to her. Jesus neither attacks the woman nor judges her. Jesus never calls her a sinner because she has had five husbands and now lives with a man who is not her husband./ In her culture, divorce is almost always only an option for men.2 Five men pass this woman around. One takes her and gives her a divorce; another takes her, divorces her, and again and again. She does not choose to take five husbands and another man./ Jesus applauds her honesty and allows the Samaritan woman to see who she is by telling her who he is. In fact, the woman is the first man or woman in John’s gospel whom Jesus reveals himself as the Christ!/ Jesus crosses all boundaries, breaks all rules, drops all disguise, and speaks to this woman as if he has known her all her life. He empowers her to become an evangelist, to return to people she thought she could never face again, speaking to them as boldly as he speaks to her. ///

Today we hear about a conversation, the longest recorded conversation between Jesus and anyone else in the Bible!1//

A conversation occurs between people when certain elements are in place: First, people must recognize that they may have differing backgrounds and traditions, different families, and different values, and that they come from different parts of the world. Second, people in conversation must first find common ground. Third, people in conversation must be open to the possibility that either or both may change as a result of the exchange. Often, we say, “Oh, we had a great conversation,” when what we really mean/ is that the other person sat there for 30 minutes listening to us talk.2 Jesus, on the other hand, begins by listening/ because Jesus is so good at loving people,/ and listening is one of the best ways to love. Unfortunately, listening has become a rare art. We cannot completely listen to our neighbor if we are preoccupied with our own appearance, or focusing on how we are going to impress them/ or deciding what we are going to say when our neighbor stops talking/ or debating whether what is being said is true, relevant, or agreeable.

Listening/ is an active act of love/ when we concentrate on what our neighbor is saying, becoming accessible and vulnerable to what they are telling us./ After Jesus listens, he speaks in ways that prove he has heard what has been said, not only in words, but also in the person’s body language.// That is why the Samaritans can hear what Jesus says and why many come to believe.////

 Notice that Jesus’ two-day visit does not fix the Samaritan problem. He does not convince them of the Southern Jewish ways. Our faith does not call us to be right nearly as often as it calls us to be righteous, just,;// not so much to have the “right” idea as to do the next right thing. We are called to be faithful, not necessarily successful./ Going to Samaria for two days of listening and talking is the right thing to do, no matter the outcome.///

 What does that begin to tell us about following Jesus?

Ponder this together: Where is our Samaria?/ Where is the gap wide and the chasm deep in our lives? Is Samaria that incomprehensible political position, red or blue? That view of sexuality or biblical authority that is so offensive? That race-tinted view that makes our world look so different from the world of another? That history or memory that leaves us struggling in a life of fear? The person we cannot forgive? That place where demons of addiction or fear pounce on us? Or is our Samaria the living room full of elephants, with manicured barriers for conversation?// Samaria is every one of these and a thousand more.

And dare we speculate what it would mean to follow Jesus into our Samaria?/ Frank Wade3, former rector of Saint Albans in Washington, describes going to Samaria as “ Not like a propaganda flight where we drop leaflets from a thousand feet./ Not a local raid where we count success by simply touching the enemy./ Not as a safari where we view them in their natural habitat./ Not a photo op where we pose. Instead, we are asked to follow Jesus as disciples, as people more interested in justice or righteousness/ than in being “right,”/ who can love by listening /and then speak as if we have really heard what has been said in our Samaria.” /////

Jesus went to Samaria and stayed there two days. What does that tell us/ about following /Jesus?

1Barbara Brown Taylor, “Identity Confirmation: John 4:5-42,” Faith Matters, Christian Century, February 12, 2008, p. 19.

2Fred Craddock, “Talking Religion Defensively,” Cherry Log Sermons,  pp. 48-53.

3Frank Wade, “Two Days in Samaria”, St. Alban’s Parish, Washington, DC, February 27, 2005.

12-Step Eucharist Nicodemus and Darkness Lent 2A Saint Mark's, March 3, 2026

12-Step Eucharist Nicodemus and Darkness Lent 2A Saint Mark’s, March 3, 2026

In a small but evocative detail, John tells us that Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night.

Intellectual Curiosity leads Nicodemus to Jesus, while fear of losing his position of authority brings him after dark. Nicodemus acknowledges Jesus’ authority/ established by Jesus’ works,/but then he challenges the teaching Jesus offers him and argues that it is impossible. Jesus subtly questions whether Nicodemus actually wants to see, or if he prefers to stay in the dark.

However,/ darkness and hesitancy in this story can also be inviting. In Learning to Walk in the Dark, Barbara Brown Taylor observes that “new life starts in darkness. Whether it is a seed in the ground, a baby in the womb, or Jesus in the tomb,/ new life starts in the dark.” There is a nurturing quality to darkness that holds space for beginnings and transformations. The hiddenness of darkness makes it a relatively safe home for vulnerability.

In the darkness, Nicodemus can hesitate and ask questions and not pretend to know all the answers. He can set aside his authoritative position in the community and confess that he does not understand it all. Darkness is a space that can make it easier to embrace the vulnerability necessary for Nicodemus to experience the birthing of a new Spirit within him.

Nicodemus will not be able to logic or think his way into the new life, new birth, Jesus is inviting him into. The familiar life where Nicodemus perceives, teaches, and judges truth/ is not the one where he will be able to see this new kingdom of God. He needs to connect to a life from above, one that requires faith. This is the connection in darkness to new birth and the wind. The ultimate invitation to Nicodemus is to respond to Jesus’s invitation to trust something he cannot see or completely understand.

Jesus explains to Nicodemus/ in what has become one of the most famous verses in all scripture/ that anyone who believes in him will have eternal life. This is the heart of Jesus’ teaching: a call to trust/ a love /that is greater than any love we have ever known.

Jesus calls for trust from a person who approaches by night, seeking the safety of the shadows. Jesus calls for trust from a person who wants to apply the logic of the flesh/ to the life born of the Spirit. Trusting Jesus is ultimately at the center of the life he comes to proclaim. In the dark,/ we have to trust what we cannot see, and that is where new birth, new life, resurrection, begins./

Trust is essential in our Christian spiritual journey, but especially for people seeking recovery. We reach out in our darkness to people who offer us promises of hope, as we are unable to see how to escape from our life of darkness and addiction. There, in those meeting rooms, we embrace vulnerability that leads to new beginnings and growth, and a new life, a new birth in the resurrection,/ now/ and eternally.

Serena Rice, “In the Lectionary, March 1, Lent 2 A, John 3:1-17,” The Christian Century, February 23, 2026.

Sam Shoemaker, January 31, transferred to February 4, 2026, 12-Step Eucharist 5:30 p.m. Saint Mark's Episcopal Church, Little Rock

Sam Shoemaker, January 31, transferred to February 4, 2026, 12-step Eucharist 5:30 pm Saint Mark’s, Little Rock.

Do you ever wonder where the 12 steps we repeat every month came from? Listen to this story.

1934 Calvary Episcopal  Church, New York City

The Rev. Dr. Sam Shoemaker has been rector of Calvary for 10 years. He has developed Calvary House, a hostel and center for ministry and small groups in the city. He also runs Calvary Rescue Mission, a place for the “down and out” to get a meal and rest. Bill Wilson, an alcoholic New York stockbroker, visits there during his last days of drinking. Bill is influenced by Ebby Thacher, a friend who has become sober through a spiritual program called the Oxford Group led by Sam Shoemaker, while Ebby meets at Calvary House.

In 1935, Bill Wilson becomes sober and spends more time with Sam Shoemaker in Shoemaker's book-lined office, talks with Him, attends Oxford Group meetings, and visits Calvary Mission and Calvary House. Dr. Shoemaker sends Bill a letter when he is 60 days sober, thanking him for his help getting a chemistry professor sober.

 Later, Bill Wilson says, “Every river has a wellspring at its source. AA is like that. In the beginning, there was a spring which poured out of a clergyman, Dr. Samuel Shoemaker. He channeled to the few of us who then saw and heard him, the loving concern, the Grace.. to walk in the Consciousness of God- to live and to love again, as never before. 1 Dr. Sam Shoemaker was one of AA’s indispensables. Had it not been for his ministry to us in our early years, our Fellowship would not exist today. Sam Shoemaker passed on the spiritual keys that liberated us. He was a co-founder of AA.”  The first three Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous were inspired in part by Shoemaker. “The early AA got its ideas of self-examination, acknowledgement of character defects, restitution for harm done, and working with others straight from the Oxford Groups and directly from Sam Shoemaker, their former leader in America, and no one else.” I am quoting Bill Wilson directly.

So, Dr. Shoemaker provided a refuge for alcoholics in New York and directly influenced the Twelve Steps through his long and close friendship with Bill Wilson. 2,3,4

You have heard from Bill Wilson. Now here are the words Sam Shoemaker later said.

“I believe the church has a great deal to learn, not from any individual member of AA, but from the incredible collective experience of AA. I pray to God that what is happening pretty steadily and consistently throughout the fellowship could happen in every church. The AA fellowship is made up of people who are beginning to be changed, not saints and not perfect. We in the church can all learn by this example, and if we think we’re above it, we are in real danger.”5

Every January 31, the Episcopal Church remembers the ministry of this Episcopal priest in New York City who saved and changed the lives of so many people at this service today. One of my most spiritual moments was attending an AA meeting over ten years ago in Sam Shoemaker’s office at Calvary.

Perhaps you have seen an Episcopal presence in AA. Still, even more, perhaps you can see that Sam Shoemaker transmitted to AA a message that it is all about love, the same message we hope is transmitted at every church and at every Eucharist.

1Karen Plavan, “A Talk on Samuel Moor Shoemaker,” Calvary Episcopal Church, Pittsburgh, January 31, 2010

2. Dick B, “Calvary House and the Oxford Group,”  The Oxford Group and Alcoholics Anonymous, A Design for Living that Works, p. 114.

3“A Biography of Sam Shoemaker,” AlcoholicAnonymous.org.

4“AA Tributes, Samuel Shoemaker, ‘Co-founder’ of AA,” Dickb.com

5 Michael Fitzpatrick, “Rev Sam Shoemaker, His Role in Early AA Part 11,” Recoveryspeakers.com

Lessons Isaiah 51:17-52:1a,1 Corinthians 5:6-8,Luke 4:40-44. Preface   of God the Holy Spirit

Joanna Seibert   joannaseibert.com