Friday at Sea
This is the second year that I’ve been at sea when Christendom remembers, celebrates, what we call Good Friday. It’s an odd experience to be away from Church life and particularly so during the significant ritual times. Advent, Christmas Eve, Holy week and Easter. This morning my companion and I watched one of the cable news channels talk with a Rabbi, and Catholic representatives of Christianity. It is the northeast so an awareness of whom would speak for Protestantism probably does not register because, in fact, there is not one voice that speaks with the authority of a Catholic Bishop within common Protestantism however one might define it. I’m thankful they didn’t call Franklin Graham, Falwell Jr, or some other TV evangelists to represent the Protestant point of view in a conversation about Passover and Easter being at the same time.
Here at sea, a day from land and returning to the busy nature of our existence, it was again odd to watch the sunrise over a Friday that our rituals call “good.” The sunrise was beautiful, breath taking, and blinding as it broke the horizon of another day on this side of the world. If anything in Christianity, this is Passion Friday or injustice Friday or imperial execution Friday, but those are too harsh for the dominant theology and they do not fit neatly into the sacrificial atonement theology at the heart of traditional and even “emerging” Christendom.
Breath taking, beautiful, and blinding. I think back to a day when we descended into the depths of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to a room where there is a drawing of a boat and inscription on a rock. The inscription says something like, “Lord, we were here.” It is believed that this was a sight where the first believes and followers of Jesus gathered to remember his death. Some theorize that the pilgrims must have traveled by boat to Jerusalem or maybe the boat represented the one that contained disciples that is storm tossed, frightening, with one or two persons willing to step out into the sea. No one really knows.
Right now, Friday is blinding and more significant for me than Easter morning. There are many living through the same conditions that Jesus of Nazareth lived through in his time. There are plenty of “apostles” providing the definition to what that suffering and injustice means . I’m seeing the room stewards, waiters, and maintenance staff differently today. Down there in the crew quarters is where Jesus is shouting for a different economic system while the folks working on this ship are simply trying to make a better life for their families by “serving” those of us that can afford to be here. It would have been more symbolic for the 12 to 15 foot seas to have been today rather than yesterday, but maybe that represents Christendom well. We come to the Maundy Thursday table with mixed feelings of grief and gratitude. Our emotions pitch and roll about what we know is going to happen and our participation in those systems. Our wondering, “Will I betray or deny you?” It is that sick feeling in the stomach when God asks, “Where are you?” Alas, we are soothed by the smooth waters of what has become “good” Friday rushing to meet a risen Christ. Some call it the mystery of our faith. This Friday at sea I’m wondering, “Where is God?”, and how I might join my voice with the ancients in the room so long ago and proclaim, “Lord, I was here.”