Just Another Day

Good Friday, 2026 

Do you want to know what I find so startling about today, Good Friday, in the middle of most important three days of the Church’s year? It is startling just how normal today is compared to other days. Sure, the stock markets closed today in New York. It's not a bank holiday. The mail was delivered and I see that the UPS and FedEx trucks are out and about. But in my journey to church, traffic was the same, minus the school buses because, yes, the schools are closed. 

In short, life is pretty much going on right around us, with hardly a thought as to what day today is.

Good Friday is important to us Christians, sure; but as far as the culture at large is concerned, it's just another Friday... neither Good, bad, nor indifferent. In our culture, try to go to the mall on Christmas Day. Good luck with that. But today, everything is open for business.

I know that not every big day on the Christian calendar means that everything in the world has to shut down. I get it. But if something is big enough, things just change... maybe not stop, but they'll just feel different! I remember when 9/11 happened in 2001. I was living about 800 miles away from Ground Zero in Marietta, Ohio. And what I remember most about that day and the weeks that followed is that everyone seemed to be equally affected by the enormity of what took place. Flags were everywhere. Respectful silences were observed. People talked in hushed tones.

But Good Friday is not like that. Not at all. Everyone is resolutely going about their business. People are buying…ironically, they are buying Easter baskets and Easter dresses. There have even been Easter egg hunts going on to keep the kids who are home from school busy.

Now some of us may be shocked by that. Those of us who have twinge of nostalgia for the old days…those of us who remember Blue Laws and such…may think of this as bad news. But the news is neither good nor bad. It just is. It is how the world works. It is just this kind of busy, distracted, workaday world that God sent his son into.

There are other moments in our lives when our personal clocks stop but the world just keeps humming along. I remember when my father died, and then six months later, my mother was dying. Both times meant a long drive from southeastern Ohio to New Hampshire, where my parents moved to be near my oldest brother. Both times it meant going through the rituals of hospital visits, funeral home, funerals (in my Dad’s case in two places…one in the parish where he was a deacon, and one at the church where he was being interred), of meeting people—some of whom I had not seen in ages if ever—and then going from place to place and then the long drive home.

And during all of that, when my world was so focused on my parents and my family and each loss, the normalcy of the world around me seemed out of sync with the very small, very slow world I was living in with my brothers and our families. Both times it felt like I was inside a bubble where time, even light itself, seemed to slow to almost nothing, while the world around us sped as if they were on fast forward. 

I think that it was just that way for the people who walked that first way of the cross, when Jesus was crucified. To the locals, the parade of prisoners on the way to Golgotha was probably a nuisance, holding up traffic. The wailing women were a public disturbance. The practiced urbanites of Jerusalem probably saw demonstrations and spectacle (and marches to the gallows) all the time, so they just averted their eyes and walked past as if it weren’t there.

Besides if you stopped to stare at the spectacle, you might be unlucky enough to be picked out by one of the guards and forced to carry one of those gawd-awful filthy crosses. Like that poor Simon of Cyrene. As if the guards were saying, you wanna look? I’ll give you a real close look! Now wouldn’t that just ruin your day?

But even the guards, except for a few who had eyes to see, saw this as just another day at work.

No, the world just went about its business when Jesus was crucified. Time only stood still for those who were most deeply involved. Jesus’ mother and the women who stayed with Jesus through it all, the disciples who watched from a distance: they were inside the bubble. They were the ones that saw the rest of the world in Fast Forward, if they noticed the world all.

For us in here, we who have come into this church and are gathered in darkness at the foot of the cross, it may have something of the same quality. Like being inside a bubble, an alternative world from the rest of life “out there.”

But come to think of it, there is that quality about living life in Christ, isn’t there? That we are aware of something that others might miss. We’d be tempted to hold it over them. To hold it against them. 

Except that I have this strange feeling that if I found myself along the Via Dolorosa before it was called that, that I would be looking at my smart phone, drumming my fingers, averting my eyes waiting for the parade to pass by. Maybe I’d shake my head and mutter a “poor sap” at the poor fellow with the thorns around his head.

This procession, this execution, might have been just another execution of just another prisoner. Just another man without a name, another prisoner without a number, except for the people who did witness was going on and who did understand.

They did not stay inside their bubble for long. The resurrection would burst their bubble, and they would step out of the slow time of grief, and enter, not into the Fast Forward time of the world, but into God’s time. They would come out and first tell each other that this death was like no other death, and this man like no other man. Soon they would be telling a very busy world, that God was there among them and they didn’t even know it and he was killed and he is alive. And through his death, we are made whole. Their seeing allows us to see.

When we walk to the cross, we are not in a different time. We are in God’s time. And when we step out of here, we who have witnessed the cross will through our words and story help others see the cross for themselves.

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Lessons for Good Friday, April 3, 2026 

Here is the link for the Church of the Good Shepherd, Dunedin, FL

Here is the link to the Episcopal Church's Good Friday offering, supporting the work and ministry of the Anglican Province of Jerusalem and the Middle East

Strange Normalcy

Doesn’t it seem strange to you how normal everything is today?

I mean, here we are at what it is arguably one of the most holy days of the Christian year… especially when teamed up with Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday for what we traditionally call the “Triduum” or “The Great Three Days”… and yet nothing is different.

If I wanted to, I could have stopped at the bank, the post office, and the grocery store on the way to or home from church. Maybe you will too, buying last-minute groceries or stuff for the (grand-) kids Easter baskets.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I am not here to rail against the unpiety of the culture or some such righteous nonsense. My point is not to shame people who have lives to live and very little time to get stuff done. God forbid! As you’ve heard me mention before, I certainly remember growing up in New England in the last days of the old Blue Laws where the state enforced the closing of business on certain religious holidays. But this is not an exercise in nostalgia, either. It’s just an observation. And one that I think is worth noting.

Because, as much as some might say, this is not new. The world has been going about it’s business while God has been doing God’s work right before our eyes since time immemorial.

When I was a kid, my home parish, the Church of the Good Shepherd in Hartford, CT, would take part in a public stations of the cross with the other churches in the downtown of Connecticut’s capital city. It was the 1960’s, and influenced by the civil rights movement and the peace movement, the churches would do the fourteen stations of the cross around what was then a bustling commercial, business, and governmental downtown, stopping at the Federal Courthouse, the main offices of big banks and the headquarters of insurance companies, the city jail and police department, the juvenile hall, and so on. You get the idea. And even then, as we processed with our cross and led by clergy in vestments, and reading scriptures and saying prayers, people would bustle past us, buses would stop and go, horns would honk… the world was going on about it’s business.

One of my favorite American artists, Allan Rohan Crite, the late 20^th century African-American artist from Boston, who was an Anglo-Catholic Episcopalian, and he not only created the covers for my parish’s weekly bulletins, he drew the passion a lot. And he typically located it, as with all his Biblical scenes, in the middle of the city, in downtowns, neighborhoods, and tenements. One of his renderings of the stations has stayed with him since adolescence. It showed Jesus carrying his cross through a modern busy city of the 1940’s, people rushing past to and fro, hardly aware of the African American man carrying a cross, scarred and barely dressed, wearing a crown of thorns.

And that is not far from the truth. Because in the busy world of downtown Jerusalem, ruled by the Roman Empire, crucifixions were a dime a dozen. They executed their condemned on the roads into the walled city to attract attention, but they were as part of background every bit as much as billboards are today. We see them, sort of… but few stand out, and mostly they just block the view.

No, the crucifixion of Jesus was just the business of the day. Except to his followers, friends, and family… and certainly Jesus…! It was nothing special.

But not for God

It is precisely in the midst of the everyday… the everyday business, the everyday boredom, the everyday cynicism, the everyday cruelty.. of human life that God placed Jesus and in the midst of such sin that we are so used to that we hardly even notice, where God stakes a redemptive claim. Here is where it ends. Here is where love conquers hate. Here is where it ceases to divide us from God, each other, and ourselves. Here is where death ends even on a cross planted on a busy thoroughfare where traffic buzzed past.

This is where God does redeeming work: The Passion happens in a busy city going about it’s business.

The sign of that victory will come on the third day.

But right now… life goes on. God redeeming love happens, but no one notices. Not yet, anyway.

Holding our Breath

Christ is reigning from the tree: Come, let us adore him.

When I was a kid, we used to play a game.

If we were in the car and we’d drive by a cemetery we’d hold our breath. Where did that game come from? Maybe from an old superstition, not wanting to breathe in bad spirits or the spirits of the dead. Maybe it was a way for the young to flip their nose at death. Maybe it was a way to take our mind off of the fact of death itself.

Maybe we just wanted to see how long we could hold our breath. But I think there was more to it than that. I say that because I have done a lot of breath-holding in my life...especially around death.

Games in the car are one thing, but it was only a matter of time when I had to confront death straight on and breath holding, while natural, was not a practical option.

These came in the moments when I have been witness to death. Sometimes I have witness the death of a person who was surrounded by family and friends and we prepared for that moment in prayer, in story-telling, and in tears.

But there have been other moments when the person was alone, virtually unknown except for perhaps a name on a driver’s license found in a wallet or purse. Or people who have died violently, or suddenly, or was suddenly stricken with no one there to help. It is these people I think of whenever we say the Great Litany and we pray “From dying suddenly and unprepared, Good Lord, deliver us.”

For these, I could still hold my breath. I would keep these at arms length with a clinical eye. Yes, my heart would tug, but these—especially in hospital ministry—I would attempt to keep at a safe distance. If you don’t, you go cuckoo.

But sometimes you can’t hide. And these there were the deaths of people close to me: my parents and family members, my friends and people in my parish. These were different to me. These were stark in their immediacy and impossible to hold at a clinical distance. This was when I could not hold my breath because there was no breath to hold.

We will all face death—and not just our own. We are told death is part and parcel of living.

Jesus died.

That is why we are here tonight. Jesus died.

It is important for me to say those two words in all their stark brevity. The bumper sticker tells us that Jesus died for our sins. We say that in our collects, prayers, scripture and story; and that is true. That is why he died. That is the meaning of his death.

But at the moment, when it happened there were no slogans, no anthems or hymns, no bumper stickers. In that moment it was just this simple fact that could barely be uttered by those closest to him: Jesus died.

We are tempted to jump past this moment and go straight to Easter. We are tempted to hold our breath and drive around this truth. It is like whistling in the dark—that nervous act of apparent confidence in the middle of the unknown. We do that when we are faced with a hard fact of life that we do not want to deal with. We hold our breath. We whistle in the dark. We cover our ears and hum. But no amount of avoidance can dodge this fact: Jesus died.

Jesus did not pretend. He did not hold his breath and wait till it went away. He died. If we forget that he died, or if we hold or breath or whistle past it, then we forget that Jesus lived, breathed, ate, loved, worked, grew as much as he taught, healed, preached and touched. Jesus had family and he had friends. He had enemies as well as people indifferent to his existence. He lived. Just like us.

I heard a sermon once from a priest named Fr. Bill Lewellis, who talked about whether or not Jesus knew what was going to happen. He said,

“I have always believed in … and I set my heart today on God in Jesus.

“For most of my adult life, however, it has been crucial to my relationship with Jesus to think that Jesus lived his life without knowing how things were going to turn out … that he was not an actor who knew the ending of the script. I believe in the true man in Jesus. I set my heart on Jesus as true man.

“Because Jesus was truly human, he had no more (and no less) reason to trust God than you and I do. He had the tradition. He had the scriptures. It seems he knew them well. He had friends. He had prayer.

“Those who wrote the gospels (after the resurrection) knew more than Jesus (when he walked his way of the cross) about how things would turn out. That is crucial for me. Otherwise, I would have to believe Jesus, when he suffered and died, was simply a good actor. And if I believed Jesus were an actor, I could not believe that he understands how I think, how I feel, how I can live through hills and valley of prayer and despair … how I struggle to understand myself."

As we face the reality of Jesus’ death we discover the truth that God is with us—not just in the things we like, or in the times we choose, but all of life. Our victories and our set backs; our joys and our despairs; in our choices and in the things we don’t choose; in what we are aware of and in what happens deep inside us. He is with us in the things we face, and he is with us in the things we don't know, and he is with us in the things we avoid. God is with us in living and in our dying. In Jesus, God and humanity join, and everything which keeps us apart dies on the cross.

Tonight, we know, Jesus died.

We can’t hold our breath. Whistling in the dark won’t make it go away.

Jesus died. And so we live.

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Here is the bulletin for Good Friday at St. John's Episcopal Church, Clearwater, FL

Here is a video of the liturgy.

Here is a video the sermon.