"Confidence to Enter the Sanctuary" - Sermon for Good Friday 4-3-26

I had confidence to enter this sanctuary.

We arrived at All Saints’ nearly five years ago, never having laid eyes on any of you or this place, save for virtual meetings and a tour on Zoom. Bound by pandemic protocols, the search process that brought us together was unusual. From far-off Flint, Michigan, Kate and I arrived at 1350 Waller Street in our rented, ten-foot U-Haul truck. Your senior warden at the time, our beloved Margaret Taylor (of blessed memory) greeted us when we stepped out of the cab onto the sidewalk. She was much taller in person. “Would you like to see the church?” she asked me. She opened the first set of doors, and then the second, and led me into this sacred space. It was the aroma of incense and candle-wax that captured me first, followed by the dark, California redwood, the stained-glass windows, and the veiled tabernacle, appropriately housed in the center of the liturgical east wall. I said to Margaret, after a few moments of sensory bliss, “It’s how I imagine heaven to be.”

We have confidence to enter the sanctuary – this sanctuary today – thanks to Jesus’s passion for us. Jesus’s passion for us is a passion of both his great love for us and his great suffering for us.

Jesus of Nazareth – the Incarnate Son of God – is the Suffering-Servant of Isaiah’s prophecy. Is the Forsaken-One of the Psalmist’s lament. Is the dual-natured I-Am-He of the Johannine passion, from whose piercéd side flowed baptismal water and eucharistic blood.

This blood-and-water Jesus, both priest and sacrifice on the altar of the cross, opens the curtain shrouding the sanctuary and rends the veil separating heaven and earth. This one provocative act – God’s Son suffering even death, death on a cross – is what gives us confidence to enter the sanctuary. Confidence to hope without wavering. Confidence to gather and to encourage. Confidence to provoke one another to passionate love and to good deeds. Never having laid eyes on Jesus, still we have confidence to enter the sanctuary. To imagine earth as heaven might be. And to live it.

Father Daniel S.J. Scheid, SCP

Good Friday – April 3, 2026

All Saints’ Episcopal Church, San Francisco

“Confidence to Enter the Sanctuary”