Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church

Good Friday, 2008
The Rev. Melissa Skelton

Over the last three years, I’ve often thought that preaching after this mesmerizing sung gospel is overkill: that what we really need to do is to stay seated and simply enter into one of our shared liturgical silences.

But I know this cannot and should not be—because somebody has to say something.

I learned this at the requiem mass for my own daughter who died at the age of five of pulmonary hypertension. Don Armentrout, Professor of Church History at the seminary in Sewanee, Tennessee, the town where my daughter died, was the homilist at that liturgy that Dean Terry Holmes celebrated. At the last minute Don got up and said that on reflection, he had discovered that he had nothing to say, that the death of a child had left him mute and that we should all simply observe a time of silence together. At the time I thought—of course, I agree with him—there is nothing to say. But a few days later, I thought, even if there’s nothing to say, we have to try to say something.

We have to try to say something about suffering in this world of ours because in many ways, that’s what the cross of Christ puts in front of our faces. We have to try to say something about it because it’s not just an odd occurrence that intrudes into our otherwise happy lives from time to time, it’s day-to-day life for many of the world’s peoples.  We have to try to say something, even if it doesn’t really explain anything or satisfy us at all.

In a soon to be released book entitled God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question—Why We Suffer, author Bart Ehrman does go the route of searching for what explanations the Bible might offer about suffering. What Ehrman discovers is that there isn’t just one explanation for how a loving God could permit suffering but many explanations, none of which Ehrman finds adequate. For him, then, this becomes a faith-challenging, even faith-destroying exercise.

While I can empathize and identify with the desire to find an explanation and how frustrating it can be not to find one, what I’ve learned is that I’m not a person comforted or helped ultimately by explanations, Biblical or otherwise. In the end, the only thing that helps me is the cross, itself, the cross rising up and over and through the shattering events of my own life and the life of those who suffer in our world. The cross, comprehending what for all of us is incomprehensible.

So here are some crosses I have known.

There was the crucifix belonging to the Catholic woman in the hospital where I served as a summer hospital chaplain. She had dancing brown eyes and loved Burt Reynolds and was dying of cancer. The crucifix had belonged to her father who had held it as he, sea-sick, had crossed from Italy to America in the early 1900’s. He had given it to her when she was a little girl, telling her the story that went with it. On the day of her death she held that same crucifix in her hand as the talisman that gave her the strength she needed to complete her own difficult crossing.

And then there was the crucifix behind the altar in a small downtown African-American Episcopal Church in Spartanburg, South Carolina. It was not expensive or even tasteful. On it was a struggling, muscular black Jesus, who looked down with blazing eyes on the congregation, many of whom were descendents of slaves, as they sang the Black national anthem: “Stony the road we trod, bitter the chastening rod, felt in the days when hope unborn had died….God of our weary years, God of our silent tears.”

And then there are the rows and rows of white marble crosses at the American Cemetery in Normandy. In that cemetery of over 9,000 graves of those who died at D-Day. There are thirty-three pairs of brothers buried side by side, at least one father and son, and four women. The orderly rows, have always looked both obedient unto death to me and deeply reproachful of all that we do to fill the cemeteries of the nations with soldiers and civilians who have died in the war.

And then there are our own crosses here—loved by some, not loved by others, each of which has its own distinct voice—the voice of the one above our altar that I imagine is saying, “My suffering is passionate struggle,” the voice of the one in our chapel that I imagine is saying “My suffering is broken-hearted sadness” and the mysterious whisper of the bare wooden cross each of us will again have a chance to venerate, even to touch tonight.

And finally there are the dozens of crosses scribbled on bits of paper given to me by the children of parishes I have served, including this one—children who at one time or another were afraid of those crosses, but who in their own way, like all of us engaging that powerful image, are trying to come to terms with the fact that, yes, there is suffering in the world, there is or will be suffering in our loves, and none of it has an easy explanation.

It is perhaps these last crosses that mean the most to me—that say the most to me about the work we are forever doing on the issue of unexplainable suffering and the cross of Christ.

 In her book Offering the Gospel to Children, Gretchen Pritchard says this about the cross: “The cross is mystery and terror; we feel we would gladly shield our children from it. But I have found that children do not want to be shielded from the cross. Stumbling block and folly though it may be to grown-ups, to children the cross is the power and wisdom of God. Children know that the world is full of terror, that no answers are easy, that no comfort comes without cost, pain and mystery. It is not the cross that terrifies children, but the false gospel that bypasses the cross and leaves us forever alone with our pain and guilt…the false gospel of optimism that tries to assure us that Adam and Eve are still in the garden among their tame animals and there is nothing outside.”

Children of the living God, behold the wood of the cross. Behold a god who dares to give god’s self over to the unexplainable suffering of the world. Behold the wood of the cross. Look at what it is revealing to you. Listen to what it is saying to you.