Stations of the Cross: When Pilgrimages Return

Last Friday afternoon was my assigned time to conduct the Stations of the Cross. I love that liturgy. Its Franciscan roots speak to my soul.  The engagement of the entire person - body, mind and spirit - provides a holistic encounter of the Holy. It can touch the worshiper deeply as they walk between the stations, singing the Stabat Mater, considering the station’s image and then entering into what is happening at that point in Jesus’ life. At that moment, we are there with Jesus. 

An appearance…beyond human resemblance

I got to the parish early. As I waited for the faithful two parishioners who would join me for the Stations, I was finishing my reading of Dr. Marvin Dunn’s A Black History of Florida Through Black Eyes on my Kindle for an article I am writing for a local Black newspaper, The Orlando Times. I had just read the section in which he details the lynching of 14-year-old Emmet Till in Mississippi in 1955 when my parishioners arrived.

 

The first of my three pilgrimages last year was to the Mississippi Delta, starting in Memphis, continuing to Little Rock Central High in Arkansas and ending at the landing at Glendora, Mississippi where the bloated, decomposing body of Till was recovered by two young white boys his age on a fishing trip.

Our pilgrimage had gone to the site, to stand in a circle on the banks of the Tallahatchie River and together lament, voicing our anger, our grief, our fears, our hopes, our prayers. And we did so knowing that the collective Shadow of a racist America which took the life of this beautiful young man has been given license to run rampant in our nation today.

But we were still there, standing together, hoping that the popular maxim will prove to be true: Love is stronger than death.

I had not thought about that day for a long time. Dunn’s account had brought it back into focus. But it was not until we arrived at the Sixth Station, A Woman Wipes the Face of Jesus, that suddenly it became very real to me:

We have seen him without beauty of majesty, with no looks to attract our eyes. He was despised and ejected by men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief, and as one from whom men hide their faces, he was despised and we esteemed him not. His appearance was so marred, beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of the children of men. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities, upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed.

It is my custom when I lead the Stations to have parishioners read the text. This day, I heard this account in a beautiful baritone voice from a young Black man from the Bahamas whose father is an Anglican priest there. As he spoke these words, the memories of Glendora, Mississippi came flooding back, disturbing visions of a young man whose appearance was so marred, beyond human semblance, that he was nearly unidentifiable by the local coroner.

His Mother would insist that his funeral be open casket so that the world could see what had happened to her boy. The Black magazine Jet would run the photo of his marred appearance on its cover. It would be a wakeup call for an America in deep denial, the moment America was required to take seriously its acquiescence to – and thus its role in - the terrorism that marked the Jim Crow South.

But that was not the only pilgrimage to come swimming back into focus for me last Friday.

The Gospel Was Hazardous to the Health of the Preacher

As a seminarian, I had taken two pilgrimages to El Salvador in the early 1990s, the first during the cease fire overseen by the United Nations peacekeeping team. I was there with a group of observers of the cease fire under the direction of the World Council of Churches.

The Episcopal calendar observes the Feast Day of the Salvadoreño Martyrs on March 24. They include the beloved Archbishop Oscar Romero. On March 23, 1980, he had just delivered a sermon by nation-wide radio which concluded with the words, “In the name of God, and in the name of this suffering people... I beg you, I implore you, I order you, stop the repression!" The very next day he was  shot down while celebrating the eucharist at the chapel in the convent where he resided.

On our visit there I stood on the gold star implanted in the terrazzo floor of that chapel at the spot behind the altar where Romero was standing. As I looked to the open door where his U.S. trained paramilitary soldier stood, taking aim at a saint, a coldness washed over me that disturbed me down to my very core. This was a place where evil temporarily had its way.

 

We also visited the University of Central America whose Jesuit priests had been slaughtered by the paramiltary at their dormitory along with their housekeeper and her daughter. Preaching the Gospel in an authoritarian state driven by the global corporate interests had proven hazardous to the health of Salvadoreño clergy who dared speak out against the terrorism employed to to keep the populace under control.

In addition to the Jesuit priests whose liberation theology called out systemic evil as a sin, that terrorism would take the lives of the the Maryknoll Sisters whose only crime had been to minister to the young women of El Salvador, seeking to provide them food, education and medical care.

Their raped and mutilated bodies would be found dumped on the road to the international airport, a warning to those entering El Salvador of what the powers that be demanded of anyone entering their borders. Like the Rome that was willing to use the body of Jesus for propaganda in a public crucifixion, the point was clear: We are in control here, do not resist us. We will crush you.

 

Upon entering the UCA Chapel, I would feel my life breath sucked right out of my body. The Stations in the Chapel were all charcoal drawings of victims of the terrorist activities of an authoritarian state upheld by my own country. Its paramilitary agents who carried out that terror had been trained in the School of the Americas directed by our “security” agencies and funded by American taxpayers. The stations did not depict mythical figures of a religious rite. These were real human beings who, like Jesus, had become targets of the empire.

The images of those Stations were deeply disturbing. And as they came flooding back into my mind’s eye as I led the liturgy in our memorial garden, the words of our Sixth Station were unavoidable:

His appearance was so marred, beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of the children of men. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities, upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed.

The Stations Tell a Story About Humanity

As I stood at the Sixth Station in our memorial garden last Friday, listening to my Bahamian parishioner read the text of that station, I found myself back in that Chapel, breathless, devastated by the evil in front of me. And I found myself standing on the banks of the Tallahatchie River in Glendora, Mississippi, painfully aware of how these words reflected my experience there.

 

In my understanding, what makes the Stations so powerful is not that they remember a single event in human history. Rather, they tell a story about humanity that continues to occur all around us. That is why we walk those 14 Stations, remembering Jesus’ last day, knowing that his life story speaks to our own, knowing that they raise a question about how we will respond to these events here, now, in our own lives.

The Stations are a lament, a willing entry into the suffering of our world. It would be easy to engage this rite and walk away congratulating ourselves on having met our Lenten duty. But the Stations demand more from us than that.

Jesus continues to suffer in his people here, now, all over the world, in places with names like Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, Venezuela, and Minneapolis. The Stations connect us to “the people of God” to whom we offer “the gifts of God” each eucharist. All of them. That includes those who are suffering and those who cause that suffering.

When Pilgrimages Return….

 

The impact of a pilgrimage is always hard to predict. Pilgrims are not tourists. They come to see, to be present, to know what happened in these places, to learn the stories of atrocity. Like our eucharist in which the context is set by the words “On the night before he entered into suffering and death…” pilgrims willfully enter into the same, if only vicariously. And they return changed, no longer the person who came to those places and entered into the events that would never allow them to continue to see the world as they did before.

And sometimes the pilgrimage, permanently etched in the pilgrim’s soul, returns when they least expect it.

Pilgrims know there is nothing they can do to heal the wounds they have chosen to engage, even as they may ask themselves what possessed them to do so, as I have often done. But they have come. And they return to their homelands with wounded hearts, disturbed souls and stories of suffering that they will feel compelled to tell others, knowing that most do not want to hear them even as they know they must speak their truth nonetheless.

A Privileged Pilgrim’s Gratitude 

 

This day I am conscious of the role that the Franciscan spirit has played in our world. Francis insisted upon meeting with the Sultan in the middle of a war zone, hoping to end the Crusades he rightly saw as destructive and thus completely counter to the G-d both the European knights and the Islamic Saracens believed they served. That Franciscan connection would play out in a long pattern of guardianship of Christian holy sites in lands controlled by Muslims who had come to trust the Franciscans. And the friars would bring back a liturgy reenacting Jesus’ final day in the form of the Stations of the Cross that soon would spread to parishes across Europe.  

I am grateful for my rootedness in an order founded by a Francis who gave up his life of privilege to work with the poor, the sick, the outcast. And I seek to follow the Way of a Jesus who, as Richard Rohr notes, can always be found in the Gospels by going to where the suffering is occurring, knowing that suffering which is not transformed will always be transmitted.  

Finally, I am grateful that as a man of privilege, in a world where that makes all the difference, I have been able to engage pilgrimages which have broken me open, required me to reconsider the world I thought I knew, to hear the stories of broken but unbowed peoples, to be entrusted with them, and to be commissioned to tell them to my own people. Just as I am doing here. It is an incredible gift as well as burden. I welcome them both.

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  frharry@cfl.rr.com

 hcoverston.orlando@gmail.com

 If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.

Those who believe religion and politics aren't connected don't understand either. – Mahatma Gandhi

For what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d?  - Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. - Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Wisdom of the Jewish Sages (1993)

 

       © Harry Scott Coverston, 2026

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Martin and Isaiah: Epiphanies

“He made my mouth like a sharp sword, in the shadow of his hand he hid me…”

 This is one of those rare occasions when the lectionary appointed for a given Sunday coincides with a commemoration on our saints day calendar. The lessons for this second Sunday of Epiphany could not have been better chosen to commemorate America’s prophet, Martin Luther King, Jr. whom we remember this day and whose national holiday is tomorrow.

We have all been shaped by a consumerist culture that creates expectations of constant comfort. We tend to idealize our heroes and sanitize their life stories, placing them on pedestals where they are frozen in place, from which they cannot come down and disturb us with the rest of the story of their lives. But I believe it is important to dive deep into those stories including the chapters in which we find ourselves. And that is what I seek to do this morning regarding Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

Pilgrimage: Descent into Our Collective Shadow

Last summer I was part of a pilgrimage that visited sites in Memphis, Little Rock and Mississippi to witness the events of the civil rights movement that had happened in those places. One of the highlights of that trip was the morning we spent at the Mason Temple in Memphis.

 

This was the place where Martin Luther King, Jr. had delivered his famous Mountaintop speech. I learned that he had not planned to be there that night amidst the pressing demands of the sanitation workers strike he had come to Memphis to lead. But a large crowd had come out in a thunderstorm to hear King’s words of encouragement filling this Church of God in Christ sanctuary that seated a thousand people. And so his aides called the Lorainne Motel where King was staying and begged him to come.

King arrived without prepared remarks, speaking to the crowd extemporaneously in lyrical words that would become legendary. He began with a reference to the matter at hand: “Let us keep the issues where they are. The issue is injustice.,, the refusal of Memphis to be fair and honest in its dealings with its public servants, who happen to be sanitation workers.” This is what the people gathered there that night had come to hear.

But soon his speech took on an almost ethereal quality when he uttered words that would soon prove prescient: “We’ve got some difficult days ahead….But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop … I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land”

King would depart from the Mason Temple amidst a thunderous applause and return to the Lorraine Motel. Within 24 hours he would lay dead on its second floor balcony, struck down by an assassin’s bullet.

 

Breathless in a Saint’s Pulpit

As I sat in the empty Mason Temple that morning, a fellow pilgrim played the Mountaintop sermon on her phone. Closing my eyes, I could hear the passion in his voice, the urgency of his words foretelling his pending death, much like Jesus had spoken at the Last Supper. King’s voice once again rang off that spacious polished wood ceiling. For a couple of moments, Martin was there. And so were we.

 

When the recording ended I felt a sudden urge to go up into the pulpit from which King had preached his last sermon. As I stood in that space infused with the spirit of a martyred saintly man, I found myself absolutely breathless. After a moment, I returned to my seat and closed my eyes, waiting for whatever might come next.

What came was a vision of Jesus at the Last Supper. He was fervently trying to prepare his disciples for his death and the need for them to take up the mantle of his movement, his Way of Jesus, seeking a kingdom of God already present but not yet fully realized. Suddenly, I realized that this was also what Martin had been doing that last night in this place. Like Jesus, his words indicated he knew his death was imminent. And, like Jesus, he was convinced that his movement must go on and he was calling his disciples to that undertaking.

That was the moment it dawned on me that this was why we had come that morning, Martin’s modern day disciples, still seeking justice for all of G-d’s children, still working to create the Beloved Community, all these years later. And the question I came away with was this: “Martin, what are you calling us to do at this point in our lives?”

 

“I will never accept it….”

The Hebrew Scripture lesson for Epiphany II reflects the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., who like Jesus, was prone to quote Isaiah. The prophet begins with this statement: “The Lord called me before I was born, while I was in my mother's womb he named me.” Martin would have understood that passage implicitly, growing up in the home of his Baptist minister father who guided the Ebeneezer Baptist Church in downtown Atlanta for 44 years, hearing his father’s thundering sermons and engaging in nightly Bible lessons with his grandmother.

  

But his father’s influence was hardly limited to theology. When Martin Jr's father took him into a shoe store in downtown Atlanta, the clerk told them they needed to sit in the back. Martin Sr. refused, responding "We'll either buy shoes sitting here or we won't buy any shoes at all." Before leaving the store with Martin Jr. but without any new shoes, he told his son, "I don't care how long I have to live with this system, I will never accept it.”  And as we all know today, neither did his son.

Isaiah said the Lord “made my mouth like a sharp sword…” This is not eloquence for its own sake, but speech that cuts through denial and a false peace. While King developed preaching skills that were spell binding, they were never merely ornamental; they were sharpened instruments—disciplined, honed, often restrained until the moment of necessity. And he inevitably wielded them with finesse.

The heart of Isaiah’s passage offers us this: “But I said, ‘I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity…’” This reflects the interior life of prophetic leadership. It names exhaustion, doubt, and the fear that sacrifice has been meaningless. King’s later sermons and letters often echoed such doubts. Isaiah admits that faithfulness does not always feel effective. That’s why Mother Teresa often said, “God does not call me to be successful, God calls me to be faithful.”

 

Epiphany – A Light to Enlighten the Nation

 

This is where Epiphany comes into the picture. Isaiah says, “It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob…I will give you as a light to the nations.” While King’s witness began narrowly focused on civil rights for African Americans in a Jim Crow America, his vocation could not be contained there. By the end of his life he would speak out against the Vietnam War, against economic exploitation and against the spiritual corrosion of racism in white America. Like Isaiah, King realized God’s insistence that justice can never remain parochial; justice is the birthright of all of G-d’s children. And as King soon discovered, justice comes at a cost.

That cost is reflected in a chilling line from Isaiah which readily applies to the story of Martin Luther King, Jr. The prophet refers to “[the] one deeply despised, abhorred by the nations, the slave of rulers…” We tend to idealize King today. But he was deeply despised during his lifetime. As a child I remember seeing a John Birch Society billboard on I-75 just south of Ocala with a photo of King in a classroom it falsely declared to be a “communist training school.” Painting civil rights workers as communist was the preferred practice du jour in a racist America which tarred everything that challenged Jim Crow segregation as communist. It also served to rationalize anything that might be done to those who challenged the status quo.

Including death.

Isaiah knew that G-d’s chosen servant would be despised while faithful. Indeed, he would be despised because he was faithful. And we cannot honor King this day without asking the question I came away from the Mason Temple asking myself: Who bears that despised vocation now?

 

Calling, Covenant, Courage

 

I believe that question confronts us directly in our own time. We are living in a moment when white Christian nationalism has gained real power in our land—distorting the Gospel, erasing the history of the movement King led, and sacralizing fear. We see people of color targeted because of appearance, immigrants treated as disposable, truth treated as an enemy, and those who protest injustice met with militarized force.

If hearing this makes us uncomfortable, that too may be an epiphany. Prophetic truth rarely arrives gently. The question before us is not whether we agree in the abstract, but whether we are willing to bear the cost of faithfulness when justice makes us visible—and therefore vulnerable.

If we are to be the beloved community of which King dreamed, we must be willing to speak up, to stand up, to say no to practices we know to be wrong. That may mean enduring conflict within ourselves and within our families of birth and families of choice, even as we honor the image of G-d they bear. We are called to pray for those who might cause us harm out of fear and loathing, knowing, like King, that even if we become targeted, G-d is always with us. 

Not everyone is called to be a prophet. And, thankfully, not everyone who would be an instrument of peace is required to be a martyr. But we Episcopalians have taken a vow to work for justice and peace for all people, respecting the dignity of all human beings, a commitment we reaffirm every time we renew our Baptismal Covenant. It is up to each of us to find the way in which we will live into those promises remembering that we are never alone in that calling. Our response to the vows we make in our Baptismal Covenant is clear: I will with G-d’s help. Thanks be to the G-d who is always with us in all things. Let us pray:

Holy One, by the hand of Moses, your servant, you led your people out of slavery, and made them free at last: Grant that your church, following the example of your prophet Martin Luther King, may resist oppression in the name of your love, strive for justice and peace for all your children, respecting the dignity of every living being in living out the blessed liberty of the Gospel of Jesus the Christ; who with you and the Holy Spirit, are one God, now and for ever. Amen.

 

 

A sermon offered on Epiphany II, the Commemoration of Martin Luther King, Jr., January 18, 2026 at St. Richard’s Episcopal Church, Winter Park, Florida.

 

You may listen to this sermon as preached at this link beginning at 29:00

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dyxu3yNQLn0&t=1740s

 

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  frharry@cfl.rr.com

 hcoverston.orlando@gmail.com

 

 If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.

Those who believe religion and politics aren't connected don't understand either. – Mahatma Gandhi

For what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d?  - Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. - Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Wisdom of the Jewish Sages (1993)

 

       © Harry Scott Coverston, 2026

  ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++