Good Friday

“Like the ancients, we know about ashes, and smoldering ruins, and collapse of dreams, and loss of treasure, and failed faith, and dislocation, and anxiety, and anger, and self-pity. For we have watched the certitudes and entitlements of our world evaporate.

Like the ancients, we are a mix of perpetrators, knowing that we have brought this on ourselves, and a mix of victims, assaulted by others who rage against us. Like the ancients, we weep in honesty at a world lost and the dread silence of your absence.

We know and keep busy in denial, but we know. Like the ancients, we refuse the ashes, and watch for newness. Like them, we ask, “Can these bones live?”

Like the ancients, we ask, “Is the hand of the Lord shortened, that the Lord cannot save?”

Like the ancients, we ask, “Will you at this time restore what was?”

And then we wait: We wait through the crackling of fire, and the smash of buildings, and the mounting body count, and the failed fabric of medicine and justice and education. We wait in a land of strangeness, but there we sing, songs of sadness, songs of absence, belatedly songs of praise, acts of hope, gestures of Easter, gifts you have yet to give.”

Walter Brueggemann. Prayers for a Privileged People (pp. 81-82). Kindle Edition.