October 25, 2015 Core Stories Sermons from The Church of the Covenant Core Stories of the Bible #7 The Cross The Reverend Amy Starr Redwine The Church of the Covenant Presbyterian Church (USA) 11205 Euclid Avenue Cleveland, Ohio 44106 CovenantWeb.org
1 Corinthians 1:18 25 For 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. For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart. Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God s weakness is stronger than human strength.
The Cross 1 Corinthians 1:18 25 A young man begins to discern a call to the religious life. As he struggles with this sense of calling which has both thrilled and disturbed him, he spends time in a small chapel. He prays to and questions God, but he doesn t just bow his head and close his eyes while he does this. Instead, he fixes her gaze on a cross. Because he is Catholic, the cross he contemplates is a little different from the crosses we display in our Reformed Presbyterian tradition. The typical Catholic cross is a crucifix, a cross on which Christ s body hangs, emphasizing the suffering Christ endured. In contrast, the Reformed cross is almost always empty of Christ s body, emphasizing the resurrection that came after Christ s suffering and death. And in our tradition the cross is not always something we go to in times of questioning and contemplation. Psychologist Carl Jung would argue that we should. Jung believed that images have a particular kind of power, the ability to stir in us deep truths that we often understand unconsciously before they become part of our conscious awareness. He argued that the cross might just be the most significant image in Western civilization. 1 But to understand it, to let its meaning and power work on us, we must spend time contemplating it. And yet, few of us do. Even in our sanctuaries, even in this sanctuary, the cross is dwarfed by other symbols of our faith or instruments of worship. Look at the size of our most prominent cross, compared to the reredos, the rose window, even the organ. We certainly aren t the only church that struggles with the place of the cross in our worship space. A friend told me a story about a church in Little Rock, Arkansas that caught fire. Although the fire department arrived quickly, it was too late. The sanctuary was destroyed. Word spread almost as quickly as the fire itself and the members of the church began to show up, hoping the reports had been exaggerated.
They had not. As the reality of what had happened sunk in, sadness filled the hearts of the congregation members as they realized that this building was more than just a building. It was a place they had been baptized or where they had baptized their children. It was where many of them had gotten married, and where they had gathered to say goodbye to beloved family and friends who had died. It was where their faith had been nurtured and nourished. If they hadn t realized all of this, then perhaps they could have walked away from the ruins. But the memories of what this place meant inspired them to rebuild. A committee was quickly organized, a group of people who agreed to devote their time and energy to the restoration. The results were magnificent. No one who had seen the rubble of the burned out sanctuary could have imagined that something so exquisite could come out of that tragedy. Like this sanctuary, which tends to make people catch their breath the first time they see it, this new sanctuary was a magnificent harmonization of colors, lighting, windows, pulpit, and pews. There was just one problem. You see, it turned out that not everything in the former sanctuary had been destroyed in the fire. Miraculously, the one thing to survive the blaze was a cross. Not a beautiful, decorative cross that would fit in with the new sanctuary s decor, but an ugly, rough-hewn cross, just two pieces of gnarled wood strapped together. This cross that simply looked like a cross had hung in the original sanctuary for so long that people had stopped noticing it. As hideous as it was, it more or less blended in. But not so in the newly rebuilt sanctuary. The building committee was in complete agreement on this: it would not blend in; in fact, it would disrupt the beauty of this space. When people entered, their eyes would not be drawn to the windows or the pews or the pulpit, but to this awful cross. So the building committee had to face the question: what are we going to do with the cross? 2 The cross has always been a problem, since the first time Jesus predicted his crucifixion and the disciples pretended not to hear him. One of the first churches to wrestle with the question of what to do with the cross was the one Paul founded in Corinth.
Corinth was the kind of city we cosmopolitans of the 21st Century would recognize. It was a place of great diversity a city between two ports, it attracted people from many different cultures and religions. It was a place where many different languages were spoken and where the exchange of ideas was valued almost as highly as the exchange of material goods. Of course, as with any such city, Corinth had its problems. There was a great disparity between rich and poor and a strict social structure based on status and influence and wealth. Paul arrived in this city fresh from Athens, where his preaching was not so well received. But in Corinth, the Spirit was at work, and when Paul left the eighteen months later, he left behind a strong group of believers that was a microcosm of the city: rich and poor, Jew and Gentile, male and female, young and old. Not surprisingly, soon after Paul left, cultural norms began to seep into the fabric of this fragile new community, causing divisions. Immoral acts, accusations against one another, arguments over leadership, refusal of different socioeconomic classes to share the Lord s Supper together. 3 It wasn t long before Paul started hearing reports that this beloved community had dissolved into a hot mess. This is the situation for which Paul penned his first letter to the Corinthian church. It is a letter that attempts to address all the bad behavior Paul has heard about, and to remind this people of their unity in Christ. And right at the beginning, Paul reminds them that when they fall back on the wisdom that the world teaches, divisions and in-fighting are inevitable. They are called to live by a different wisdom, God s wisdom, wisdom revealed nowhere more clearly than the cross. Last week in our adult education class on Jesus life, we talked about the fact that Paul s letters say next to nothing about that topic. If I was going to tell someone about Jesus, I would first want to tell them about the amazing life he lived; the healings, the teachings, the people he reached out to, the lines that he crossed. Paul is interested in none of that. For him, what matters most about Jesus is the way he died on a cross. Paul points out what we all know but prefer not to talk about, at least not in polite Christian company. The cross, he says is a stumbling block for Jews and foolishness to the Greeks. The Jews were waiting for a Messiah, but their idea of a Messiah was a military leader, someone who could liberate them from Roman
oppression in as flashy a way as God once liberated the Hebrews from Pharaoh and the Egyptians. That their Messiah could be one who was supposed to suffer and die on a cross? The most shameful and painful method of Roman execution? A method of execution believed to show that one was cursed by God? It was simply inconceivable. As for the Greeks, they were always on the lookout for a new philosophy, for new ideas and new wisdom. They had no interest in a Messiah, but they were interested in a life of meaning and purpose, truth and contentment. They were probably willing to listen to Jesus ideas, to consider his philosophy, but no matter how compelling his teachings, his death would have negated them. To the Greeks to die on a cross and say that reveals God is utterly ridiculous, downright foolish. Paul knows this all too well: the cross is a stumbling block, a scandal. It is foolishness. No wonder the cross tends to get lost in our sanctuaries, dwarfed by other symbols and instruments of worship. No wonder the cross has gotten fashioned into a thing of beauty, adorned with gold and silver and diamonds and jewels. No wonder there is a trend in church architecture to avoid crosses completely. We still don t know what to do with it. And yet, try as we might, there is no denying that the cross gives us our identity. It sets us apart. It reminds us that we are not just a fun group of likeminded people. We are the church. 4 And to be the church, to be defined by the cross, we must deal with the fact that when God came to be with us, to be one of us, to show us in the flesh what the love of God looks like, what humanity is capable of we killed him. Shamefully, slowly, publicly, painfully. The cross reminds us of the worst parts of ourselves: our self-absorption, our rush to judgment, our tendency toward violence and destruction. The cross is still so difficult for us to deal with because it forces us to face ourselves, and it reveals to us how desperately we need help, how desperately we need God. And yet this thing that reveals our desperate need for God also teaches us something about God s desperate desire to help us. 5 On the cross, God shows us just Ibid.
how far God s love extends, just how much God wants to make us whole. Because of the cross, there is no pain that we bear that God does not understand, that God does not participate in. On the cross God suffers. With us and for us. Willingly. Lovingly. To follow Jesus, to call ourselves disciples means that sooner or later will have to deal with the cross, the symbol of Christ s death and suffering, that is also the symbol that shows, more fully than any other, God s willingness to be with us, to be one of us, to love us completely, to accept and absorb and transform our suffering. What Paul wrote to the Corinthians two thousand years ago is no less true today: The cross is still a stumbling block for some and foolishness to many, but for we who have been called to follow Jesus, for we who know that in some profound way Jesus death on a cross has saved us, the cross is no less than the power and wisdom of God. In Flannery O Connor s short story Revelation, Mrs. Turpin is an excessively judgmental woman who sizes up everyone and everything she sees, placing them neatly into categories: white trash blacks ladies and gentlemen. At night, she sometimes occupies her mind by naming the classes of people. The way she sees it, so-called colored people are at the bottom of the heap just one step above are the white trash; above that are the home-owners, the class to which she and her husband belong; on top are people with lots of money and bigger houses and land. What bothers her, though, is the awareness that things are more complicated than that, for some people with a lot of money are, in her eyes, common and some people below her had good blood. In the story, she and her husband enter a doctor s waiting room and Mrs. Turpin quickly passes judgment on everyone there. As time passes, she begins to voice some of these judgments out loud, until finally, a young college girl who has been reading a textbook and shooting Mrs. Turpin dirty looks finally has as much of Mrs. Turpin as she can bear. Fed up, she hurls the textbook across the room at Mrs. Turpin, hitting her right above the eye and then attacks her, strangling her, shouting Go back to hell where you came from, you old warthog!
Mrs. Turpin is shaken to the core. Later that night as she remembers the incident, wondering why someone would say such a thing to a good and respectable person like herself, she sees a vision. It s a highway in the sky, and upon it a vast horde of souls were tumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of blacks in white robes and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people who, like herself and her husband, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. But as she looked closer at this group, she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away. 6 The cross burns away all the trappings of civilized society all the pretty things we use to mask our judgements, our divisions, our violence. When all the trappings of our broken lives are burned away, the cross is what remains. Our need. God s love. Our suffering. God s presence. And so perhaps the only acceptable answer to the question, what do we do with the cross? is: we look at it. We contemplate it. We do not let it become just another decoration. We let it sit here, right in the middle of our sanctuaries, right in the middle of our lives: a stumbling block, a scandal, utter foolishness. We do not detour around it or brush it aside. We look at it. We contemplate it. We wrestle with what it means to us, with what it means for God, with how it convicts us and how it heals us and how it saves us when we proclaim that Jesus Christ God with us, God in human flesh, our Lord and Savior died on a cross. Amen. The Complete Stories