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Lenten Devotional Series

Don't Give Up, Christ Didn't.  Cry out!  Christ did.

by Pastor Matt Fitzgerald
 

Jesus is a good man. His friends abandoned him. His religion turned on him. His government condemned him. And now he is bewildered, desperate. Pain radiates through his hands and feet. 
 
Meanwhile, we still hope that that bad things happen to bad people because God punishes them accordingly.
 
On Good Friday we find our faith in an ordered universe shot to hell. 
 
***
 
He shouts, moans, mumbles, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
A wretched cry but also an intensely religious one.  In the darkness, Jesus' cry reflects the very light that he is longing for. 
 
On Good Friday Jesus suffers at the fragile boundary that separates dismay at life's cruelty from the belief that life is cruelty; the thin place between pain and cynicism.
 
We have visited this perimeter. When the drinks after work start to tighten up their tentacles. When illness exposes health as an unstable illusion. When your conscience is awoken. When the last dead body on the front page of the newspaper is the last one that you can handle. When white buds punch counterpoint against the spring blue sky and you still feel empty.  My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
 
***
 
Despair is not the opposite of faith. It is faith's confirmation. Indeed, the boundary between despondency and surrender may well be the holiest place on earth. The moment that doubt in God's care seizes you, grabs you by the throat and throttles you, you become, in Paul Tillich's words, "desperate about the meaning of life." 
 
And, such desperation is "the expression of the meaning in which you are still living." If you didn't care you wouldn't protest. If God wasn't there, you wouldn't call out to him. The depth of your despair verifies the intensity of your faith. 
 
The world's injustice makes you cry for peace, and the cry marks you as a believer. The neighborhood's injustice makes you work for the poor, and the effort marks you as a believer. The crucifixion makes you long for resurrection. That longing is just another word for faith. 
 
Saint Pauls is a church that welcomes doubt. Not just the easy modern uncertainty that lets you question the burning bush or the virgin birth, but deeper doubt. When you wonder whether life has any significance beyond comfort and pleasure, bring the argument into Saint Pauls. When your pain makes you wonder if God may be a distant mystery, loved as easily as one might love a theory, bring that suffering into worship.  You may you doubt God's goodness with every measure of your soul. And the intensity of your doubt only serves to re-enforce the reality of the very care you question. Don't give up, Christ didn't. Cry out! Christ did. Amen. 
 


Please join us as we observe Good Friday with a solemn, beautiful worship service at 7:30 this evening. The service will feature communion, the last words of Christ and stirring music. Our chancel choir will be joined by violinists Rachel Barton Pine and Hannah Barton.
 
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Chicago, Il 60614

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