A PASTORAL On the Death of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo • The Ninth Day of July, 2026

 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

We are not a callous people. We cannot put off feelings of sadness because they make us uncomfortable, nor can we wrap ourselves in the blanket of anger because we feel pain. Instead, as Christians we must feel them, and feel them as Christ did from the vantage point of his cross; not from the vantage point of our own concerns.

Episcopal Anglicans often awake before dawn to say these words: “The dayspring from on high hath visited us, to give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.” 

We sing Zechariah’s song while it is still dark outside because we believe the light coming over the horizon is not just the sun rising on another day, but God’s mercy rising to meet us, and because we believe that the first work of our day ought to be with feet turned toward peace.

Tuesday morning, that light rose on Canal Street in Houston’s Magnolia Park neighborhood at around seven o’clock. It rose on Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, riding to the homebuilding company that had employed him for most of the last thirty-five years. He was shot, dead at Ben Taub Hospital by sunrise. The dayspring visited him, and he received a mercy that ensured in a certain hope that he rose to his savior’s arms. 

His sons are American citizens. Lorenzo brought them through college on the wages of his early mornings. Now they sit in grief. And because they are our brothers, we cannot say we have not been wounded: If one member suffers, all suffer together. Moreover, they are our brothers and our fathers; they share with us our humanity and God’s provision of dignity in all that this means.

I do not presume to speak conclusively on this matter. Judgments are for courts and officers of the government, charged as they are with finding the truth. I do join The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), and all those concerned that this be reviewed and investigated. People in our country should not be shot for a civil immigration infraction. This is similar to being hunted, pursued, and shot for a misdemeanor. Particularly when Mr. Araujo had been attempting to receive legal status, and our U.S. Government had not kept their promise of due process. This does not make Araujo's situation unique; in fact, it is normal. What makes it unique is that he was killed for a minor civil infraction.

The government’s officers tell one story: that Mr. Salgado Araujo tried to evade arrest and turned his vehicle toward an agent, who shot him in self-defense. His family and neighbors tell another story: that this longtime employee, a man with no criminal record who has been working toward citizenship his entire life, was scared by the appearance of unmarked cars at dawn. Mr. Salgado Araujo’s son has filed a complaint and requests not only that justice be served but that we see all the evidence: the dash cam footage, the arrest reports, an accounting that shrinks from nothing. 

But before this happens, before we sort out custody and commands, we must deal with scripture because that is our part. I wish to say what we have nearly forgotten how to say: this was a man. “The stranger that dwelleth with you.” Immigration status, legal definitions, and enforcement priorities, all of these may be true, but they are not the first words to be spoken about a person from our perspective. The first word said over Lorenzo was that he was made in God’s image. 

Scripture will not allow us the convenience of dehumanizing an other human being; for any reason. The bible says, “The stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.” The God who spoke that truth against the Egyptian custom binds our treatment of immigrants to the memory of our own history. Egypt, Babylon, Rome, and all governments are all powers. And, in scripture and for ages these words have addressed them. And, lest we forget running from the powers that wished to kill him the Lord rode into Egypt as a refugee, in his mother’s arms. When we look on this man on Canal Street we see one whom Christ would not be ashamed to call His brother.

Let us pray, then, as the Church has learned to pray when nothing else can be done:

O God, whose Son had no place to lay His head and was numbered with the transgressors: receive Lorenzo Salgado Araujo into the arms of Thy mercy, and let light perpetual shine upon him. Comfort his sons in their fatherlessness, and be Thou the Father of the fatherless. Bring every hidden thing to light, that justice be neither counterfeit nor delayed. And give us grace to behold in our brothers what we had trained ourselves to see as a case. Through Jesus Christ our peace, who is Himself the Dayspring from on high. Amen.

Notice what we have prayed for: we have asked the Dayspring to visit us. Not Lorenzo only, but us. And we have asked to be led into peace.

There is no abbreviated version of that, and there is no escaping it. If you want to care for human beings, that means we care for immigrants, and we welcome refugees to your parish. Sit with the grieving; accompany the fearful. We are forever invited to sit with this family and all families like it. You will tell the truth about what happened, demand the truth from officials, and reject sterile polemics about which side is tougher on crime. 

As followers of Jesus, we bring our brothers’ death to the altar, where another Man’s dying was made into our life, and there you will receive that life again. We do not know yet how this went according to God’s will. But we do know how to walk into His presence.

It will remain dark on Canal Street, and weeping endures for the night. But we say the Benedictus in the dark so that we will remember to say it when the sun comes up. The dayspring from on high hath visited us, us, and Lorenzo and his sons. Let us go. Let our feet be guided into the way of peace. 

Your brother in Christ,

C. Andrew Doyle

Calvary from the Book of Common Prayer and Anglican Episcopal Perspective

Introduction

Yesterday I was visiting with an old friend and the subject of the cross came up. As I reflected on the conversation (for the two of us were of a similar mind) I have to say that many people are not of the same mind on the cross, nor have we ever been historically. Nevertheless, as we have traveled our way from the earliest church disciples, authors, patristics, catholic, Anglican and Episcopal road, I find that it is worth saying that there is a center stream which I am going to try and piece together below for those interested in just such a meditation on this Good Friday.

Where does this come from? Well, I could not have done all of this work in one night, though I was quite fixated on the topic. I have pulled together 30 years of teaching on the subject, several of my favorite authors, writing from a couple of books I have already published and stitched them together. The truth is there is probably a whole book of material by this point in one's ministry. I hope you find this good theological food to eat on this day of fasting.

The Anglican Theology of the Cross

From within Anglicanism have come traditions decidedly more protestant, decidedly more catholic, universalism, unitarianism, and perhaps even deism. To some degree I would argue these still represent very live options in our pews today. For the priest and the theologian it behooves us to strive to do better and wrestle with the issue at hand at a deeper level and well within our own tradition instead of appealing constantly to the traditions of others.

Properly understood, the Anglican theology of the cross does not begin with theory. It begins with a story: the story of our Lord of glory lifted up upon a hard tree of wood and there glorifying God by his shameful death. By this dreadful enthronement upon the cross, the truth about God, about the world, about sin, about power, about love is revealed. 

Anglicanism has never fit comfortably with those who would press this mystery into a single explanatory framework. Instead Anglican Christians have received the cross through scripture, prayed it through liturgy, preached it through pastoral concern and inhabited it through sacramental living. Anglicanism has produced a theology of the cross that is both catholic and reformed, biblical and doxological, beautifully restrained yet fiercely bold.

The cross is that place where the obedient Son completes the will of the Father, where sin is judged, where death is vanquished, where the Church comes into being and where the life of this world is restored.

The Prayer Book tradition makes clear this point immediately. Anglican theology is never merely an abstract intellectual exercise; Anglican doctrine is doctrine prayed. The liturgy of Good Friday reveals this: the Church comes not to rationalize away the offense of Calvary but to kneel before it in worship. There the cross is venerated as that whereby “the whole world is lifted up to salvation, life, and resurrection.”¹ This liturgical instinct is vital and decisive. Anglican theology of the cross does not shrink away from the shame of Golgotha, neither does it sentimentalize it. Anglicanism dares to confess that here, in abandonment and humiliation, in blood and thirst and pierced flesh, the very victory of God is being wrought.

This is why the Church does not turn away. It lingers at the foot of the cross because there the community in faith beholds the deepest truth of God’s self-giving love disclosed. 

Scripture shapes this doctrine. The tortured servant of Isaiah, Psalm 22’s lament that becomes praise, the Letter to the Hebrews sermon on Christ’s final self-offering, and John’s sublime passion narrative all find convergence in Anglican understandings of the cross.² 

In John we see a detail especially formative for Anglican reflection: on the cross, even in his agony, Jesus is glorified. Jesus does not simply happen to crucifixion. He is sovereign in his surrender. Pilate may think that he is killing off a threat to imperial authority, but in reality he proclaims the truth from a rooftop: Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews” (John 19:19). The irony is theological. Those who seek to judge Jesus on that hill outside Jerusalem will find themselves judged by him. Anglican theologians have made much of this Johannine motif. 

New Testament scholar Raymond Brown argues that while the Synoptics frame Jesus’ death with cosmic disturbances, John locates the sign within Jesus’ own body.³ Brown then draws this out with John 7: 38–39 and the evangelist’s firm conviction that Jesus cannot be glorified apart from the gift of the Spirit. Anglican theology refuses to divorce Jesus’ glorification from the work of the Spirit. One reason is sacramental: the crucified Christ is not merely remembered by his people; he is the fount of the Church’s life. From his side come the signs of baptism and Eucharist, the sacraments through which the crucified and risen Lord draws his people into communion with his own divine life.

But Anglican theology typically places the cross within the broad narrative of salvation history. It is impossible to understand the cross apart from the doctrines of incarnation, resurrection, ascension, Pentecost, and participation in Christ through the sacraments. 

Jesus does not die upon the cross as though he were a third-party bystander. He does not die upon the cross as though some sad accident of history had befallen him. Jesus does not die upon the cross as though fate had turned against this exceptional teacher. He dies upon the cross because he is the eternal Son of God made flesh and gives his life for the world. Anglican theology has repeatedly affirmed that the gospel story cannot be summed in mere abstractions; rather, the central truth of salvation is the birth and life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”⁴ As such, the cross reveals the triune God at work in history for the sake of his creation. The Father gives his Son; the Son receives that gift and offers himself up; and the Spirit is poured out in salvation. To speak properly about the cross we must therefore speak trinitarianly.

Which is why Anglicanism has historically been leery of certain views of atonement which narrow our vision to a singular dimension or one that jars against other central convictions about the doctrine of God. It is difficult for Anglicans to say along with some thinkers that God the Father forced or even dragged his reluctant Son up a hill to be murdered. Such an understanding tears at the very nature of God and suggests that God is divided against himself. I have pointed this out a number of times in my own writing comparing God's command to not sacrifice Isaac. 

It does not mean that Anglicans shy away from substitutionary language; indeed most would affirm that Christ dies “for us,” in our place and on our behalf. What it does mean is that Anglicanism tends to view substitution in light of the whole biblical canvas of imagery: sacrifice, victory, representation, recapitulation, covenant, healing, divine humiliation and self-offering.⁵ Anglicanism does not indulge in a vocabulary of chaos. Instead, it remains remarkably faithful both to Scripture and to the church’s classical doctrinal grammar.

We see this especially in the Epistle to the Hebrews. Christ offered once for all a single sacrifice for sins, by which he entered once for all “into the holy places not made with hands that are eternal.”⁶ But how does Craig Koester summarize the Johannine impact upon Hebrews’s sacrifice? “On the cross Jesus changes the situation between God and humanity: God no longer allows our past and present sins to stand against us.”⁷ I think Anglicanism would receive this gently. We do not think of the cross as one sacrifice among many possible sacrifices nor do we see it as purely an example of paitent endurance. Rather, we confess the cross to be that through which and in whom our reconciliation with God is accomplished.

The Anglican preacher desires above all else to drive home these truths of new life and new creation that issue from Calvary. Article XXXI insists that we affirm the sufficiency of the cross without reservation precisely so that Christians might live better lives and bring more fully into being the kingdom for which Christ died.

In fact Anglicanism does connect the cross deeply with our moral lives as creatures made in God’s image. To say that “the offering of Christ once made” suffices should always issue forth in grateful obedience. Those who bear the image of God must remember that their crucified Lord entered into our suffering, not to exempt us from pain but to enter into our innermost pain with the love of God. Article XXXI makes sure we do not slight the centrality of the cross to Christian discipleship.

Anglicans treasure Article XXXI because it sets both the sufficiency and finality of Christ’s work in clear terms without denying the breadth of biblical imagery surrounding atonement. Article XXXI does not attempt to provide a comprehensive mechanical account of how atonement works, it simply insists that it does! That is classic Anglicanism: saying whatever must be said about the doctrine of salvation while remaining reticent in those secondary matters open to Christian disagreement.

In other words, the Anglican via media should not be mistaken for compromise. Anglicanism typically eschews reduction. Anglicanism can affirm with Anselm that sin is serious disorder and must be satisfied for because we are in desperate circumstances; it can affirm with Luther and Calvin that Christ bore what we could not bear; it can affirm with Athanasius and Augustine that Christ has defeated both death and the devil. It can affirm with Irenaeus that all of creation finds its recapitulation and healing in Christ, and it can affirm with the Prayer Book that cross of Jesus Christ is the wood from which our joy is made.

Consider the very important Anglican theology given to us by way of Fleming Rutledge. Rutledge rightly recovers the biblical language of penal substitution, but tempers it with victory language and substitutionary language without collapsing it into reductionist penal theory.¹⁰ Anglicanism is not about creating novelty within theology; it’s about refusing to accept bad false choices in theology.

We might call this depth patristic also. Anglican theology at its best recognizes itself to be continuous with Christian antiquity.¹¹ Anglican historians More and Cross highlight this particularity when they describe the Anglican tradition as relentlessly returning again and again to the doctrines of the Incarnation and Eucharist as the inexhaustible center of the Christian life, drawing heavily from the resources of Irenaeus and Athanasius.¹² Athanasius and Irenaeus also shape Anglican understandings of the cross. Athanasius will not treat the cross as mere divine fiat or judicial puppet show; the cross is where the incarnate Word enters into death to destroy it. Irenaeus sees in Christ the obedient one who undoes the disobedience of Adam and reaches down to heal all things. Anglicanism has drunk deeply from these wells and therefore keeps the cross locked within the larger narrative of God’s activity for the world.

The cross of Christ is the place where true power makes itself known by taking the form of the powerless.

Nor does Anglicanism believe the cross is a purely spiritual or internal resource for private believers. The cross of Jesus Christ is public, communal, and cosmic. The Son of God is crucified between two criminals by an unholy alliance of empire fueled by crowd psychology and political expediency. The principalities and powers stand exposed before the cross of Christ. Episcopal theologian William Stringfellow speaks often of what he calls the “moral reality named death.”¹³ Fallen human authorities make much of death; they enshrine falsehood as normalized truth; they make evil seem inevitable. But the cross unmasks every last lie. The Roman executional device for barbarians becomes the true throne from which the Judge of every earthly tyranny comes to wield his power. We are a people of institutions and this is hard but a true cruciform revelation.

The Church must never forget that the cross shattered the sword. To proclaim the cross is to proclaim that love bears the violence of evil away and transforms it from within. Good Friday demands the proclamation of Easter as surely as Easter calls believers back to worship the Lamb who was slain.

Which is why the cross is central not only to Anglican theology, but Anglican discipleship and ethics as well. To take up one’s cross is no mere platitude of pious spirituality. The pattern of the Christian life is shaped by Calvary. Anglicanism has been cautious of those who would romanticize suffering, however. Anglicanism affirms the cross not because suffering is wonderful but because the crucified God shows us what love must look like: humble, obedient, sacrificial, healing, and life-giving love.¹⁵ To be crucified with Christ means that Christians now live for others through sacrificial love, not to earn our redemption, but to share in the life of the redeemed but are unable to do so apart from the Eucharist. 

Anglicanism has been remarkably consistent in affirming both the once-for-all sacrifice of Christ on Calvary and the real liturgical participation in that one sacrifice by means of the Church’s Eucharistic celebrations. The theology of the Prayer Book with regard to the Eucharist is deeply anamnetic, sacrificial, and participatory. We do not repeat Calvary when we celebrate the Eucharist; rather, we are brought by the power of the Holy Spirit into the reality of Calvary. The one who is crucified and risen makes himself known in the breaking of the bread.

A final pastoral word is fitting. Any theology of the cross that remains merely conceptual has not yet learned its deepest lesson. The crucified Christ does not explain all suffering, nor does he make grief less bitter in the moment it is endured. What he does offer is something more profound: the assurance that suffering is not a place abandoned by God. In Christ crucified, God has entered the furthest reaches of pain, shame, loneliness, and death. For those who suffer, this does not remove the wound at once, but it does mean that no sorrow is borne in utter solitude. Beneath the shadow of the cross, lament may still be spoken, tears may still fall, and unanswered questions may remain. Yet Christian faith dares to hope that even there, especially there, the love of God has not let go.

Therefore, the cross cannot be far from the center of Anglican theology in our church and whatever we are speaking about. It is biblical, creedal, patristic, reformed, catholic, and pastoral. At the foot of the cross we remember that we do not have the final word about God. But we know this: the last word from the cross in John’s Gospel is not despair but triumph: It is finished” (John 19:30). Brown is correct that for John this is first and foremost a declaration of victory.¹⁷ By his death on the cross the ruler(s) and powers of this world have been judged.

The radiance of the glory of God is veiled that day behind wood, rain, and scourging; the Son of God is lifted up upon the tree and still we say, “This is our King!”

Footnotes

1 “ Good Friday Liturgy, Article VII ,” The Book of Common Prayer. Oden notes, “In line with this strong biblical theology of the cross, Anglicans will never set aside the incarnate Lord at Calvary. What happens on Calvary is no mere example; it is the definitive act of God for the salvation of the world.” Oden, Feasting on the Word (Vol. 1), 292.

2 Anglican theology might be uniquely poised to combine these four strands. They are all present in Scripture; they all point towards Christ’s glorification on the cross.

3 Brown, The Death of the Messiah, 646.

4 CP Article XXII.

5 Scripture itself includes sacrificial imagery alongside victory motifs (See 1 Cor 15:53-54). Scripture also uses covenant language to describe what Christ has done (Rom 3:24).

6 Hebrews 9:24.

7 Koester, Hebrews, 339.

8 Dietrich Bonhoeffer once memorably quipped, “When Christ calls us, he calls us to follow.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together .

9 CP Article XXXI.

10 Rutledge brilliantly synthesizes penal substitution, Christus Victor language, and substitutionary atonement language without collapsing into penal atonement theory proper. Fleming Rutledge, The Hidden Life of God.

11 That is not to say that Anglicanism claims to perfectly embody every nuance of patristic theology.

12 More and Cross, Anglicanism.

13 William Stringfellow, “The State and Christianity.” http://www.stringfellowcenter.org/?cat=10.

14 As someone who has worked with victims of clerical sexual abuse and human trafficking it is difficult to speak much about evil without thinking of real human faces and flesh-and-blood sufferers.

15 While the cross clearly does shape the love of God, God’s love is not defined by the cross. God so loved…

16 John Stott’s The Cross of Christ remains one of the best guides to faithful preaching of the atonement.

17 Koester, Hebrews, 340.

Bibliography

Brown, Raymond E. The Gospel according to John XIII–XXI. Anchor Bible 29A. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970.

The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church. New York: Church Publishing, 2007.

Doyle, C. Andrew. Bedeviled and Beloved: An Anglican Naming of Evil, Responsibility, and Hope. Manuscript.

Koester, Craig R. Hebrews: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. Anchor Yale Bible 36. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.

More, Paul Elmer, and Frank Leslie Cross, eds. Anglicanism: The Thought and Practice of the Church of England, Illustrated from the Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century. Milwaukee: Morehouse Publishing, 1935.

Quantin, Jean-Louis. The Church of England and Christian Antiquity: The Construction of a Confessional Identity in the 17th Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Rutledge, Fleming. The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015.

Stott, John R. W. The Message of Romans: God’s Good News for the World. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1994.

Stringfellow, William. An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land. Waco, TX: Word Books, 1973.