April 3, 2026 Good Friday

I mentioned last night that my two homilies this year for Maundy Thursday and Good Friday are paired. When you have time, I invite you to go and watch last night’s homily as well.

In brief, we reflected on the power of servant leadership to orient us toward the core truth of our faith: that God comes to us in relationship, that God cares for us in relationship, and that God does not abandon us—or anyone else—in relationship. Remember that Jesus washed Judas’ feet too. Judas dined and reclined with Jesus before his final act of betrayal, and Jesus, knowing all of this, did not abandon his relationship with the one who would kill him.

I want to start tonight with an image that several of you have sent me. It is the first image in a series produced by the Simple Way community as a modern take on the Stations of the Cross. Many of you have found these images moving and powerful. They are indeed evocative and provocative. But I want to ask you tonight—what does this evoke in you? What does it provoke in you?

Friends, what I fear is that images like this can be thought-provoking, but they can also become antithetical to the gospel. In such images, we can easily “other” the one we do not like. The framing of this image compels us to objectify the officers depicted—they become the soldiers, the authorities, maybe even “the Jews,” who are to blame for the crucifixion. But there is a reason we are the crowd on Palm Sunday. There is a reason we are the ones who shout, “Crucify him!” No category of people is to blame for the brokenness of this world except for the category of human being.

We are all complicit in a world of death and destruction. If you find this image compelling, ask yourself: what in your life reflects the agents here? Where and how have you failed to honor the dignity of every human being?

Depending on your age—did you speak up during the injustices of the Jim Crow era and white oppression? During the Vietnam War, the school integration riots of the 1970s and 1980s? What about the Reagan-era callousness toward LGBTQ people during the AIDS crisis, or the destruction of our industrial backbone by Clinton in the 1990s, or the emotionally detached bombardments from North Africa to the Balkans to the Middle East? What about Obama’s drone warfare and hardline immigration policies? Did you or I speak up then? Were we as zealous as we are now? Were we marching in the streets then?

The truth is this: the law of justice convicts all of us. Every one of us, at some point, has failed the purity test of righteousness and justice. I don’t say this to judge anyone personally, but to help us see our overwhelming incapacity to be perfect people—to not hurt or harm one another. The human condition, at its most basic, is one of brokenness and suffering. As our Buddhist friends say, life is dukkha—life is suffering.

If all of this feels overwhelming, it should. We are all guilty of insurmountable suffering and pain, and there is no way to escape that—except through the powerful work of salvation that Christ offers on the cross. Even now, he breaks himself for us, that we might be redeemed from our brokenness.

Before anything else, it is Jesus who has washed our feet, who has made us clean, who offers us relationship even as we put him to death.

Jessica Bond, an Australian graphic designer, found during the pandemic that her faith became an outlet for expressing the comfort she found in Christ washing feet and offering relationship to all, at every moment. Whatever divisions we sow, whatever ways we objectify or commodify one another, Jesus breaks those barriers down. He cleanses us from our iniquity while offering grace.

So often I structure my homilies to give some kind of instruction about how we should live—to give a takeaway. But tonight, I do not have that to offer. Tonight is the night we remember that there is ultimately nothing we can do. That isn’t to say there is nothing to be done—but there is nothing we can do. Christ alone is the mediator of our salvation. Christ alone has the power to free us and liberate us from the sorrows and atrocities of this world.

This is the night to hear that again—to know that in our messiness, hatred, and division, there is one, even now, making things right.

Our Eastern Orthodox brothers and sisters understand this especially well. I am indebted to the Orthodox scholar Father John Behr for two points he makes in his Good Friday teachings.

The first is found in the great Easter hymn of the Orthodox world—the Easter Troparion: Christ tramples down death by death. We often default to the empty tomb because it seems most remarkable. But just days before Christ’s death, Lazarus too walked out of the tomb. Resurrection is not unique to Christ. It is this night—this moment, this death—that is the most important event in all of human history. Because it is in death that Christ defeats death.

As St. John Chrysostom proclaims: Hell took a body and discovered God. This is our moment of salvation.

Father Behr’s second point is about time. We are so fixated on linear time that we forget the reality of true, eternal, liturgical time—in which this moment is always present. The Easter Vigil reminds us: This is the night of creation. This is the night of the Exodus, of the dry bones, of the Last Supper, of the crucifixion, of the empty tomb.

It can be easy to give up when things seem insurmountable, when nothing seems to get better. But this is the night Christ comes to us in love—when he washes our feet, deepens our relationships, and dies for us, even as it is our own hands that kill him.

Last night I encouraged us to orient our lives toward service—to strive to dine with and wash the feet of those who would harm us. And if that challenge didn’t go in one ear and out the other, we likely still failed to live it out the moment we left worship. We rage at the television, stew over social media posts, and lose sight of our shared humanity. The moment we lose sight of another’s humanity is the moment we lose sight of our own.

It is Christ alone who breaks through that impasse. Christ alone saves, renews, and cleanses us. Christ alone carries us forward into the glory of the light and love that destroys all powers of evil and destruction.

It is tonight—this very moment—that Christ defeats those powers and the hold death has over us. We may go to our graves without seeing the fullness of that truth, but in the eternal kingdom, the work is already done. The victory is already won. The grace of love and the gift of reconciled relationship are already bestowed.

Even if imperfectly, may we feel that grace and that gift tonight, even as we continue our pilgrimage through this valley of tears.

April 2, 2026 Maundy Thursday

I’m going to share with you all at the outset tonight that this sermon and tomorrow’s sermon are paired this year as one thematic arc connecting these first two nights of our great and holy Triduum—the three holiest days of our Christian year.

And I promise, this is not simply a ploy to get you all to come back tomorrow—though that would be nice. The truth is that these two nights take us into the deepest heart of our faith and the truth of who we believe Jesus to be, and the salvific significance of his work upon the cross.

But I want to start in a place very far from there—and from here.

I was born in 1986, and we moved to the Illinois side of the St. Louis metro area when I was a year and a half old. My father pastored a small church for a few years, but by the late 1980s, we were attending Winstanley Baptist Church, which became my spiritual home for the rest of my childhood and adolescence.

Winstanley is located on the top of a small rise on the edge of the bluff line overlooking the Mississippi River, and its entrance sits a mere 500 feet from the eastern edge of East St. Louis. I suspect there were some who wished it was farther away than that.

Winstanley was a product of East St. Louis. Originally a mission church, a group of 33 people met together in the fall of 1907 to formally establish it as a congregation. For decades, they worshiped just blocks from Miles Davis’ childhood home. But in 1968—like many predominantly white churches of that era—they abandoned their downtown home for a place just over the line, literally on the “better” side of the railroad tracks.

And that could have been the end of the story. Except for death and rebirth. Except for servant leadership.

Some of you may remember the years when East St. Louis was consistently one of the most crime‑impacted communities in the country. For years, incredibly high violent crime rates paired with profound corruption made life unimaginably hard.

I’ve told you before about Chet and Michelle Cantrell, who toiled for 30 years serving disadvantaged and underserved children and youth, and about Dr. Steve Phillips, who on his first Sunday in the pulpit at Winstanley proclaimed, “It’s all downhill from here,” reflecting our call to be servant leaders in the community and world around us.

That regeneration—that renewal of spirit and mission—turned a white‑flight church into a powerful force of good works and justice in the world around it. And that legacy of transformation left an indelible mark on me.

That mark isn’t just because of the works. It’s because of who Winstanley was. Over the years, we counted among our membership clean‑cut Air Force officers alongside battle‑scarred enlisted men from Korea and Vietnam. I sat in Sunday school with two Matts—one from a family of leading auto dealers and the other the son of a truck mechanic whose hands were permanently oil‑stained.

It was a church that taught me something profound about being a servant, about being a Christian in this world—but also about the humanity within each and every one of us. The imago Dei—the image of God—that each of us is endowed with by our Creator.

This night, more than any other night of the church year, reminds us of these parallel realities. Christ, in his service to his disciples, models for us the way we are to be servant leaders in the world around us.

If we really put Jesus in context and remember that many of his life experiences were not so different from our own, we begin to see how we are to be in the world. He could have been a zealot—a fighter and protester in the streets, zealous for the law but focused solely on external transformation of systems and institutions. He could have been a Pharisee—or even a Sadducee—focused on the law as a way of living a righteous but detached life, removed from the struggles of inequality.

But he does neither.

He is the Word of God made flesh. He comes as a presence of service—one who builds relationships. He does not take sides, because he offers transformation and healing for all.

What Jesus teaches us—both in the institution of the Eucharist and in the hidden sacrament of foot washing—is that we are to be involved in the dirty, grimy work of service, healing, and transformation that the world so desperately needs. But we are always to do such work within the context of relationship.

Remember too, tonight, that Judas is here at the table. Judas too gets his feet washed. Judas too dines and reclines with Jesus.

Even the one who seeks our death—we are to wash their feet too. We are to invite them to the table.

Years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. observed, “I think it is one of the tragedies, one of the shameful tragedies, that eleven o’clock on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in Christian America.”

And yet, research in the last twenty years has shown that churches and places of worship remain some of the last bastions of diversity—of relationship across economic, social, and cultural lines.

Blessedly, that was my experience at Winstanley. And I pray that can be our experience here at St. Anne’s too. And in many ways, it is.

But my invitation to us tonight, friends, is this: as we follow Christ and his instruction—as he institutes the Eucharist and teaches us to care for one another and wash one another’s feet—let us remember the central and fundamental call that Christ gives us:

To be people of relationship.

Relationship grounded in justice. Relationship grounded in the works of the Kingdom. Relationships that do not tolerate or accept systems of oppression and injustice, but that are always open—to new life, to transformation, to a new way of being.

The door to relationship is never shut. It is never shut for Christ. And it should never be shut for us.

So tonight, as we receive these admonitions, I pray that not only do we embody them in this moment, but that we carry them forward—this call in a world so divided, in a moment so polarized—to be the people of relationship.

And in being people of relationship, to be the people of transformation that Christ calls us to be.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.