I feel nauseous. I am dizzy. My body is trying to release something that it was not made to hold onto. Today is Good Friday. The day we contemplate the crucifixion. This will be the only sermon I give this year. I don’t have a tangible reason for why I made this decision. It is a choice that has settled in my bones.
I am writing this post on Wednesday, just two hours after I had finished completing the message. By the time this post goes public, I will have started preaching the sermon. My body is in so much pain right now. What I am trying to do, what I tried to do, is write an honest sermon in a time where we are so deeply devastated. The painful part is that it has been made apparent (over and over again through public discourse, Palestinian theologians, political platforms, and church pulpits) that misinterpretations of this Christian faith were instrumental and bringing us to the doorway of genocide and devastation.
What do you do when the faith you are teaching is also the harbinger of death? How do you talk about faith and hope when the centerpiece of this religion is intermingled with the erasure of an entire indigenous peoples? Who suffers when we make the choice to talk about the state sanctioned murder of Christ while ignoring that we live in the empire who is funding genocide and defunding the humanitarian organization providing aid in Palestine?
I’ve spent the entirety of lent asking myself this question. My only attempt at an answer is in the sermon I will be preaching. What you will find below is the whole message I am preaching on Good Friday. Thank you for reading it.
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