You'll probably call it a sermon. But it's just some thoughts I wante dot share with y'all.

Good Friday is the day we remember Christ's death. It is the solemnest and one of the most important days on the Christian calendar. For me, I was more prayerful and spiritual than I have ever been. Good Friday is central, I think, to my faith and the quesiton it poses to me is, "Why did Jesus have to die?" It is a question written extensively on and the language of the gospels makes one things certain, that Jesus, did, in fact, have to die. There is something going on around the edges, behind the scenes, somehting no one comes out and says to us, but there is something inescapable about Christ's dying. Some plot hole, something we sometimes fear is the missing key to our eternal salvation.

There is a profound sense of an everlasting guilt trip in what I have to answer this, to fill this plot hole, what everything seems to be pointing to this year, on this Good Friday. It is not original to me, but the answer, or the part of it I have been exposed to this year, is painful, but also hopeful: We killed him.

How could this possibly be hopeful, I ask. Well, many explainations of the imperative and imminant need for Jesus to die have to do with sin. That sin was removed from us by our sacrifice of our savior, or any number of other supernal powerplays between God and Us and Satan. All of it relieving us, in the end, of our eternal damnation. But, I ask, as I have heard asked, what sort of God is it that demands the outrageous suffering and death of an innocent man? Even one such occurance is too much in God's eyes. This is not final, and my worry and fear and doubt are not quenched by this explanation, that we killed Jesus, but it helps. It is better that our sin and our innate betrayal and our profound evil and denial of God's unending love be responsible for this horror, than that we live ruled by a God who would demand it.

It is not the total explanation, but it seems to work for now, it helps me sleep a little easier, it refreshes my faith. But look at us. Look at our world. Men and women of unrelenting peace and love come along all the time and we wouldn't know it. I'm so in denial, I'm so afraid of God being here and now, alive and in my life and reminding me of my sin and my failure to hold to any standard, knowing the places where my faith lacks. I'm terrified of God being right here, right now, waiting for me to break out of my sinning.

If God would only go back to heaven, where He belongs.

Then I could keep him as distant as he would be keeping me. But He doesn't. And here I am, living my lifestyle, consenting to the murder of someone who could be the next prophet. Not standing up for the oppressed, still addicted to all the comforts of my life. Letting history take its course over the graves of the nameless. And I try. We all try to quench our thirst for justice.

The questions I ask myself this year, this time, are, "what do I do that feeds a drive for war?" "What do I do that coroborates the consistent degradation of human life?" "What am I doing that is consistant with the part of me that killed Christ?"