Good Friday is about confessions, the cross and obedience unto death.
It is said that confession is good for the soul. I tell others that practicing what you teach builds authenticity and integrity in community.
I confess that I feel I deprived my children of some of the most poignant opportunities for learning about the core of our faith as Christians. I don’t take all the blame for this failure of parenting in the religious traditions. The decision to find a community of faith that would provide for the weekly religious instruction of the boys while we attended worship felt like the appropriate thing at the time. In almost all their years growing up, we attended worship weekly. We were not just Christmas and Easter Christians. We taught them through our shared experience, that participation in Christian community was a core family value. Nevertheless, I feel that in an important way our children missed out on some important religious experiences, and I doubt that can be corrected on my part. They knew that grandparents on both sides attended “kneeling Church.” But rarely did they actually experience worship on their own knees. Now, they will have to discover for themselves some of the lesser practiced traditions of the Catholic Church; things like veneration of the cross, and Easter Vigils, if they are ever to know what it is to follow the traditions of the highly liturgical Catholic streams in the Body of Christ.
For years I had seen the telecasts of the Vatican commemoration of Good Friday, observing the Pope’s journey with the cross. I watched masses of people engage in the veneration of the cross and find myself thinking how strange that seemed. Initially I questioned this practice thinking it suspect and verging on idolatry, as most who are instilled with the attitudes of the protestant reformation will assert.
After our children came of age and moved out of the home, Tim and I began to reclaim some of the practices of his childhood. When our United Methodist congregation did not offer a Good Friday Service, we would check the schedules and attend the service at the Roman Catholic Church. But in attending those services, we came almost as guests to the community, visitors and therefore more as observers than full members of the church, despite all that is said about us belonging to the one body of Chris universal.
When time came in the service for the veneration of the cross, we sat with reverence, not engaging in the display of affection and veneration.
Speaking for myself, I felt rather frozen to my place in the sanctuary. It was one thing to reflect on the significance of Jesus’ death on the cross; his obedience to our Heavenly Father, and my culpability and vicarious participation in his crucifixion. It was an entirely different thing to move from my place in the sanctuary and step toward the altar to participate in such a public demonstration. Now I can say, “What a pity for me, a missed opportunity.”
Even as a pastor for a small congregation, while I began to push and challenge my members, adding a Good Friday service to the Holy Week schedule in the first two years, still, the idea of including veneration of the cross to our worship was inconceivable. Attendance at our service was so feeble in year one and two that subsequently I encouraged members to join with our Lutheran Brothers and Sisters in Christ in marking the Holy Day. This was one of those places were I realized that perhaps I was more Catholic than Methodist.
It is good to reflect back on these places of learning. The Missouri Synod Lutheran congregation held a somber enough service, reflecting on the passion of Jesus Christ. It avoided those “popish” practices of veneration of the cross. It filled much of my need to mark the life and death in final preparation for the much anticipated celebration of Jesus’ resurrection. I don’t know that I would have felt at ease to participate in any act of veneration of the cross among the beautiful people of Ashton. I think I would have probably observed and refrained from approaching a cross that lay at the front of the sanctuary if it had been included in the service. This because I believe I was still largely trapped and frozen within an intellectualized faith, lacking full body participation in terms of worship, yet being pulled by the Holy Spirit to recover what the early church fathers had passed on from generation to generation.
This year, with the change of Priest at St. Timothy’s, I have been blessed to experience liturgical design and leadership in a new way. Fr. Paul has filled our week with the ancient practices for the modern day. Timeless and timely ritual for the body, mind, and spirit, including an opportunity to venerate the cross within our Good Friday worship service. For the first time, I was able to see and feel this practice as a member of the community gathered. In this way, I was able to come with my whole self in devotion to God, in reverence to Jesus Christ, and with openness to the work of the Holy Spirit; without inhibition or embarrassment.
As I remained in silent meditation following my time at the cross and altar, I also reflected on those who followed. Many very senior members of the congregation, with painful and unsteady joints, approached and kneeled, displaying humility and devotion in their approach. But the most moving of all that I observed, were those that came together as a unit, parent and sons, grandmother and grandson. These are the ones whose devotion and faithfulness to their baptismal vows the Holy Spirit used to prick my conscience and expose the deprivation of my own past.
Lamb of God, that takes away the sin of the world, have mercy on me, a sinner.
When one enters seminary to prepare for ordained ministry, one goes thinking they are sure about their place in the household of God. One merely goes with trust that God will mold and form us in the image of Christ, to bring others to faith, and to tend to the souls of those placed in our care. When I said yes to the call of Christ to follow that path, I never expected that the Holy Spirit would be leading me back toward the church of my youth. I only knew that I must follow the command, to pick up the cross and expect to be built up by the Holy Spirit for the work which lay before me. How I thank my Lord for leading me to this time, place and community, to continue to grow in grace and love for the work to which he is ever and always preparing ahead of me.
“For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” 1 Corinthians 1:18
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