Rev. Lindsay Mizell

Good Friday 2025
Rev. Lindsay Mizell

I’m Lindsay Mizell and the pastor at Vineyard Springbrook and since the beginning of Saint Brendan’s, you all have invited us to be part of your Good Friday and we’re grateful for your patience with us when we don’t know your rhythms and customs is kind and gracious.

Father Doug and Peter and Ash and I all are in book club. Not the same book club. They have a book club that is of elite intelligence, and I have a book club that tells too many jokes. But luckily, we’re on the other side of a wall and we can hear Doug laughing the whole time, which is the gift of every Thursday morning to all of us.

A year or two ago, in my book club, we read a book that that no one really liked and was my favorite one that we’ve ever read. We came every week, and everyone hated it. I came every week so excited because I loved it so much. The book is called “The Sound of Life’s Unspeakable Beauty.” It had me at the title. The book it was written by a German luthier, so a violin maker.

The book is about the progress of of him making a violin and then he talks about the things of God all throughout it. 
We begin the book and he’s in the woods. He’s in a forest picking out the perfect tree that he’ll cut down the tree that would become this violin. And he’s he’s a master luthier. 
People are waiting years and years and years, the best violinists in the world; waiting on these instruments. We find him in the middle of the forest, and he’s cutting down this tree and we follow him through the whole process. Finally, we get to this finished violin being played by a master. And all the while as he’s telling us the process, he’s riding about his thoughts on God and life and how these things intersect.

It becomes this lovely journey through a man’s creation and also his theology. 
I think about this book all the time, like constantly, it is it is my Roman Empire. There is a time, though, when he gets the point where the violin is made, but before it’s made it, it’s only made for him for a little while. He calls it the closed sound of the violin. During this time, he’s the only one to hear it sound. And in the chapter when he’s talking about this this close sound, this this precious moment with this violin, just he and it, he speaks about suffering and God.

He begins his chapter like this, “I once heard a wise Jewish saying that God has two chambers in his heart an outer and an inner. In the inner chamber, he hides his pain and weeping. Sometimes God lets us glimpse his inner heart, but he shrouds it in metaphors so that we can bear it. 
Sometimes God lets us glimpse his inner heart, but he shrouds it in metaphors so that we can bear it.”

I’ve certainly found this to be true of God that when God allows me a glimpse into his inner heart, into his pain and into his suffering, he covers it with image and metaphor so that I can bear it. I meet with a spiritual director and and he says often that if we were to allow ourselves to see the world as God does, to see the world through God’s eyes, then we would spend much time with every life breaking our heart, including our own. 
In most of my life, I only see God’s inner chamber of grief and loss through image and metaphor.

It’s in the loss that exists in creation when leaves fall off of trees, trees losing their leaves, waves, ocean waves when they come in and then they take everything they can out with them and and go away. The sun disappearing into the horizon. 
The groan of creation is very hard to miss and it points beyond itself to that inner chamber of God’s heart. I see it covered through songs and books and movies and art images that point beyond themselves to the inner chamber of God’s own heart.

In more tangible metaphors, like lost jobs and lost love and lost keys, which happens far too often in my own life, these real things, these real moments, and yet they point beyond themselves into that inner chamber of God. 
Much of my life with God and my own prayer practice lives in image and metaphor. It’s one of the ways that God operates through the entirety of the scripture. He’s often described as like a fire, or like a light, water, a rock, a tower, a breath, a mother bird, a mother bear. 
It makes me think of how when God comes to Moses, he comes in a cloud or in our Old Testament lesson that Peter read to us earlier an angel who speaks on behalf of God sharing his heart.

We humans require a shrouding or a covering, an image or metaphor clouds or angels, because the fullness of God’s presence is beyond what we can bear. If I’m honest with you, I think I can bear it. I think I can handle it. If I picture myself on Mount Sinai, God is coming down to give me, God is giving me the law. I just I don’t think I would need a cloud for him. 
I don’t think I would need a fire or I don’t need an angel to speak on behalf of God. I want him and all of his fullness wherever I can find him. I think that I could handle it in the other truth is that in my imagination, I have far more fortitude and fearlessness than is ever actually true. 


Because what I know is that I’m wrong about that. I know that I would need a cover a shroud, some sunglasses, and the way that I know that is because I get so uncomfortable on days like today. I get so uncomfortable when the practice of Jesus followers is not to jump to the resurrection, which I want to so badly, but to stay at the crucifixion. 


There is one moment in all of human history when God opened himself and showed the world the fullness of his heart, both the inner and outer chamber, in Jesus, God gives us his heart, and he wraps it in flesh and he sends it into the world. On the cross, he opens up that heart in all of its fullness. allowing the world to look at not just the outer chamber, but the inner one as well at the cross, we see the basis of all hurt, the basis of all despair, the basis of all sorrows, visible in Jesus Christ.

When Jesus had received the wine, he said, it is finished, and then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit, or in the psalms, my God, my God, why have you abandoned me? 
In a moment, the sorrow that fills the heart of God breaks into the world for the first time unshrouded, uncovered, and full. Other Gospel writers tell us that in this moment the Temple veil tears, uncovering God’s truest heart and the world shakes and darkness covers the land because even the earth can barely bear the fullness of that inter chamber. And God’s people, they see his sorrow uncovered in full for the very first time. 
And when we look, we see that one of the decisive characteristics of God’s love is in fact his sorrow. The Church Father, Origen said, “What is this passion which Christ in Jesus has suffered for us? He suffers a passion of love.” 
In Jesus, God poured the fullness of his love, and in the crucifixion, he removed the last bit of cover, and we see what is in his heart when it’s cracked fully open. And what we find in the inner chamber of God’s own sorrow is the saving power of love.

I want to read from the violin maker one more time. 
He says in Jesus we are not dealing with the saving power of suffering, but with a saving love that is willing to suffer. Suffering does not have the power to save, but God’s love does, and love is ready whenever necessary to suffer. In the sorrow of the cross of Jesus, we find the vulnerable love of God willing to walk out the fullness of his sorrow and the fullness of his suffering and this requests of vulnerability from us.

This day, Good Friday can’t be like any other day. We can’t sit at the cross and not be vulnerable ourselves. The vulnerability or the vulnerable fullness of God’s own heart requests the vulnerable fullness of ours in a vulnerable partnership. 
There’s a Christ song in in Philippians, too, that I think explains this vulnerability that the cross of Christ requests. It says, though he was in the form of God, he did not consider equality with God as something to be exploited, but he empties himself, taking on the form of a slave being born in human likeness, and being bound found in human form, vulnerable human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

Jesus narrated for us what love required for God to do and modeled for us the vulnerability that it requests of us. 
This day should not be like any other day. It is a day for opening ourselves to what God has shown his people to treating that inner chamber with the vulnerability and reverence that it would ask the vulnerable mercy of God’s sorrow and his suffering the inner chamber of his heart on display for all of us. Today is a day to observe and to listen, to make room for what God has uncovered and to see how deep and wide he is willing to walk into sorrow and into suffering in the name of love you can stand. 
Thanks.