Help us, loving God, to walk the way of the Cross
and find it to be the way of abundant life. Amen.
You all know that along with Jim Greene and Edward Norvell, I am a member of the leadership team for Racial Equity Rowan – a group that is committed to bringing conversations and workshops about racial healing to our community. We began our work in 2019 and, since then, I’ve attended many 2-day workshops as a member of the team. I’ve lost track of how many, I think it’s 12 workshops that I’ve been to. And while I’m nowhere near an expert on the topic, after a dozen workshops, things begin to sink in.
The
team that facilitates the workshops often talks about the importance of
definitions. If we don’t agree on terms, there’s not much hope for learning or
progress. One of the terms that we discuss is “power.” When participants are
asked what power is, they say things like “authority,” “control,” “influence,” or
“strength.” Those understandings aren’t wrong, just overly complicated. Power
means “to be able to.” That’s it. You have power if you have the ability to do
something, to do anything. When it comes to conversations about racial equity,
this is an important definition because it means that all of us have power –
you don’t need to be an elected official or a prominent business owner. No, we
all have voices, choices, and votes. So bear this definition in mind – to have
power is to be able.
Given
that definition of power, most people have power in every situation because
there is always some action or inaction that can be done. But there are some
situations in which we truly are powerless, and this week’s Collect describes
one such predicament: “Almighty God, you know that we have no power in
ourselves to help ourselves.” When it comes to our salvation, we have no power
in ourselves to save ourselves. We are not able to raise ourselves from the
grave. We are not able to make ourselves perfectly worthy of being loved. We
are not able to atone for all of our sins and make right all of the things we
have done wrong.
Because
we are limited, we are not always able. We are limited in space – we can only
be in one place at a time. We are limited in time – if we are fortunate, we get
100 healthy years, and that’s it. We are limited in knowledge – we only can
know so much, we are always bound by our perspective, and we are unaware of how
our subconscious mind is in the pilot’s chair of our decisions and emotions. We
are physically limited – our bodies break down and we have only so much energy.
We are limited in our experiences – to choose one path is to not take another. I’m
sure there are other ways we all feel like we run up against our limits.
There
is one place though where we encounter strength even in our weakness, wisdom
even in our ignorance – the Cross of Jesus Christ. As we heard St. Paul write
in the opening chapter of his letter to the Corinthian Church – “The message about
the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being
saved it is the power of God.” He goes on to note that Christ crucified is the
power of God. The Cross is how God is always able to save us even when we have
no power in ourselves to help ourselves.
It’s
okay to be honest about the absurdity of all of this though. The paradox of the
Cross is real because the Cross is both a symbol of defeat and victory; or, as
one theologian has described it, the Cross has a “terrible beauty.” One of the
most significant theologians of the past hundred years is James Cone, an
African-American minister and professor. In a powerful and important book
called The Cross and the Lynching Tree, he writes, “The Cross is a
paradoxical symbol because it inverts the world’s value system with the news
that hope comes by way of defeat, that suffering and death do not have the last
word, that the last shall be first and the first last. That God could make a
way out of no way in Jesus’ Cross was truly absurd to the intellect, yet
profoundly real in the souls of black folks. The Cross was God’s critique of
power.”
Indeed,
the Cross subverts our understanding of might and questions the values of our
society. Most people want to be self-sufficient, popular, successful,
comfortable, and well-liked. The Cross is none of those things. Some words that
we might use to describe the Cross are: ugly, painful, vulgar, repugnant, terrifying,
appalling, cursed, disgusting, inhumane, shameful, and disgraced. Those are not
things we would expect the Creator of all things to willingly experience and
embrace. In fact, St. Paul says that the Cross is “foolishness,” and the word
he uses in Greek is moria, where we get our word “moron.” And he’s right,
the Cross is moronic and scandalous according to the expectations and norms of the
world. And therein lies its paradoxical power.
The
Danish philosopher of the 1800s, Søren Kierkegaard wrote “Christianity takes a
giant stride into the absurd. Remove from Christianity its ability to shock and
it is altogether destroyed. It then becomes a tiny superficial thing, capable neither
of inflicting deep wounds, nor of healing them.” As they say in the tech industry,
this is a feature, not a bug. The absurdity of the Cross is where we see the
power and love of God demonstrated as the Cross disturbs the ways of the world.
It is precisely when we are at the limits of Sin and Death that God’s ability
to make another move when we have none that we see our salvation.
What
makes the Cross so difficult to embrace isn’t only its hideousness, but that we
have to admit our weakness. Truth be told, you have to be in a pretty bad
situation to look at the mutilated corpse of a 1st-century Jewish
peasant that is nailed to a piece of wood and think “Thank God, there’s still
hope.” It is only after we have tried and failed to be our own messiahs, only
after we recognize that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves, that
we start to see the beauty and power of the Cross. Again, quoting James Cone – “The
Cross speaks to oppressed people in ways that Jesus’ life, teachings, and even
Resurrection do not. The Cross places God in the midst of crucified people.”
Only when we are honest about our limits and powerlessness do we start to see
the unlimited power of a love that is willing to go as far as the Cross for us
and for our salvation.
And
for us, a mostly white congregation, we need to see the Cross from this angle.
Cone further writes, “The lynching tree – so strikingly similar to the Cross on
Golgotha – should have a prominent place in the American images of Jesus’
death.” The fact of the matter is that Jesus was lynched, and this should
deeply disturb us as we live in a community that lynched African Americans as
recently as last century and in a society that continues to execute minorities and
people with mental illness as disproportionate rates; not to mention the fact
that we’ve had far too many examples of wrongful convictions. If we are going
to be so bold as to worship and follow a Crucified Messiah, we need to be courageous
enough to help people get off of the crosses that our society puts them on.
But
we don’t want to go there. That sounds too dangerous, too risky, too political.
So we prefer to have the Cross be a piece of jewelry, a symbol without a body
on it that allows us to forget what it really means, a triumphant sign to lead
our procession when we sing “Lift High the Cross.” We prefer what the 20th-century
martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “crossless Christianity.” He once wrote, “Cheap
grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism
without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without conversion.
Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross.” He
contrasts this with what he calls “costly grace,” which he says “is the gospel
which must be sought again and again… It is costly because it costs a person
their life, and it is grace because it gives us the only true life. It is
costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner.
Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of his Son.”
That’s
a significant cost. The Cross would have us reexamine our values, priorities,
and commitments. The word “sacrifice” is not often associated with faith, but
it ought to be if the Cross is going to be meaningful. Too often we think in
terms of what we get from our faith, but not enough about what sacrifices we
make in and for love. The Cross calls our attention to our inability to be our
own saviors. The Cross reminds us that there are people all around us who are
living with similar degradation and violence as a part of their daily lives.
The Cross teaches us that it is not the size of our wallet, the extent of our
influence, the superiority of our intelligence, the grandeur of our job title,
the appeal of our looks, or the strength of our muscles that saves us. No, our
salvation comes when we embrace the truth that mercy is ours because God has
chosen to forgive us before we deserved it; that peace is ours even in the valley
of the shadow of death because our Good Shepherd is always with us; that hope
is ours because even when we have no options left, God makes a way out of no
way; that love is ours and “love bears all things, believes all things, hopes
all things, endures all things.” The love of God that is revealed on the Cross
of Jesus is why we can believe, trust, and live as if all shall be well.
HR
Niebuhr was a significant Christian ethicist in the 20th century,
and he said “The Cross does not deny the reality of death. It reinforces it. It
denies its finality.” In other words, the Cross tells us that when it comes to
suffering, we can’t go around it, only through it. This means that when we encounter
brokenness or pain, it is not a sign that we have been rejected by God, that we
are being punished by God, that we deserve our misery, or that we are hopeless.
Rather, foolishness of the Cross reminds us that when we run into trouble, when
we are at our limit that, God’s grace, mercy, and peace are ready to take the
wheel. The Cross helps us to see abundant grace in a scared world that can only
see scarcity. The Cross is a sign that we are never alone, we are already
forgiven, we are always loved. The Cross makes us who dare to look upon it and
see our salvation to be audaciously loving, persistently merciful, and defiantly
hopeful.
You
don’t get to the power of Cross by logic, but by love. Thanks be to God that
God is love and that even when we are not, God is able.
