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Sunday, September 12, 2010
Cross Talk
By Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz
Scripture: Mark 8:34 –35 The Common English Bible
34After calling the crowd together with his disciples, Jesus said to them, “All who want to come after me must say no to themselves, take up their cross and follow me. 35All who want to save their lives will lose them. But all who lose their lives because of me and because of the good news will save them.
Nine years ago¸ on September 11, 2001, David Banks, one of our church members, was working near the World Trade Center in Manhattan when the twin towers were destroyed. He told us the story of he and thousands of others fleeing for their lives as they left the downtown area in the midst of smoke and ashes. David said that one of his sources of comfort and hope during that hurried walk to safety was that he had in his pocket his little olive wood cross from St. Andrew Church. As he walked uptown as fast as he could, he had his hand in his pocket holding on to that cross.
We are talking today about the Christian symbol of the cross and some of the many meanings it has for us. I’d like to share one other fact with you as we begin.
In just a few days we will be installing the lights in our new 70 foot high exterior cross on our final sanctuary. We are working on having a nighttime ceremony to mark that event. We have already had lots of comments about how visible the new cross is, including one or two negative comments from community members, and I understand those comments. But most comments have been overwhelmingly positive from church members and from neighbors.
One of the most inspiring stories I heard recently was from a member who has a friend who is just moving into the Tresana neighborhood to the west of us. He said that this new neighbor chose the very location of his new home because he wanted to be able to see the new cross at St. Andrew Church! He did not want to live in a location where he could not see our cross. This is from a new neighbor who is not a member of our congregation, not yet, anyway!
As we think about the cross this morning and some of what the cross means to us, some of you are wearing crosses on your person, and some of you have an olive wood cross from Israel which we have brought back from each of our five trips to Israel over the past years. We also have others available at the end of the service if you want one or if you want additional crosses for friends and family.
I have one of these crosses in my pocket as well, and I also have a Greek Orthodox crucifix that I inherited from my immigrant father who brought this with him from his native island of Corfu.
The cross was not the earliest symbol for those who were followers of Christ. Do you remember what the earliest symbol was? It was the simple sign of a fish, often a secret symbol. Some of us have seen it carved into the stone sidewalk at Ephesus in Turkey.
The reason for the fish symbol is that the Greek word for “fish,” ichthus, is an acronym for one of the earliest Christian creeds. Each of the Greek letters in the word fish stand for these words: Jesus, Christ, Son of God, Savior. (Iesus, Christos, Theos, Huios, Soter)
It seems to have taken at least a couple of hundred years for the cross, that you and I easily identify as a basic Christian symbol, to have gained official recognition. It also seems that this happened, in the early part of the fourth century after Christ, with the conversion experience of the emperor Constantine.
One reason it took so long after Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection is that the original message of crucifixion, the message of a rough piece of (probably) olive wood, was a message of torture, cruelty, humiliation, shame, suffering and death. The Romans had many methods to kill persons perceived as their enemies. Jesus’ cousin John the Baptizer was killed by beheading. But, to hang a person on a cross bar, not very high up but almost at eye level for several days until a slow and agonizing death occurred, was a means of execution meant to create maximum agony for the longest possible time. The cross was used usually for an insurrectionist or a revolutionary. The persons hanging on the other crosses beside Christ were insurrectionists and not thieves.
That was the intent of the Roman means of crucifixion, and the word crucifixion itself is taken from the Latin word that means “torture”—cruciare.
But hanging people on crosses was not something invented by Rome. Crucifixion had been used for centuries, probably first by the Persians 500 years or so before Christ. About three centuries before Christ, the Greek general, Alexander the Great, was known to have crucified thousands. In the Roman period right before Jesus’ ministry, emperors were known to have crucified hundreds of others and positioned those crosses right on the main traveled roads as a deterrent to anyone thinking about rebelling against the political rule of Rome.
This method was reserved mostly for traitors and insurrectionists, and you remember that the reason Jesus was killed was that he was perceived as a threat by those in religious and political power. He was killed, theologian James Howell says on the front of your bulletin, because of what he did: “he touched the wrong people (the lepers and outcasts), taught subversive ideas, shook up the status quo, and threatened the powers that be.”
We need to remember that the Christian faith, the Christian tradition is the only one of the world’s major religions whose two most important leaders, Jesus and Paul, were executed as criminals because they were thought to be enemies of the state!
The cross was the instrument of torture and cruelty and death that accomplished that execution of Jesus of Nazareth, and then later, tradition tells us, for Peter and for Peter’s brother Andrew.
It is no wonder that the Apostle Paul talks about, “the scandal of the cross.” It was scandalous because God chose to transform this death symbol into what we know now as a sign of life and hope and resurrection. We need to put ourselves back a bit into that early Jesus movement thinking about how scandalous using a cross would be. Let’s use the analogy of having an electric chair on our platform and think about how shocking it would seem to gather around an electric chair today and talk about it as a symbol of hope!
What has the cross meant for us? What will our new, very tall, dramatically large and visible cross mean for us and for others?
One of the meanings has been that Christ died as a substitute for us. This is called the idea of substitutionary atonement and is a most common understanding of what the cross is about, though one that many of us have done some rethinking on.
The notion is that God requires a sacrifice to be able to forgive our sinful nature and that the only sacrifice acceptable to God would be the sacrificial death of God’s own son. This idea of an appeasing sacrifice appears throughout the Old Testament. This is probably the way that most of us were taught to think about the cross and about the crucifixion. But theologians, for the past hundred years at least, have raised important questions.
Dr. Marcus Borg is a good example and we have many of his books on our bookshelves. What picture of God is this that has to be appeased, or even, “bought off,” to put it crudely, by the death of an innocent, not to mention the innocent son of God? Didn’t God forgive people throughout the Old Testament, beginning with the first man and woman in the Garden?
I don’t mean to undermine a cherished teaching that may be important for many of us, but the portrayal of God in the theology of substitutionary atonement is a cruel and rigid concept of God that looks very different from the patient and forgiving father in Jesus’ most familiar parable of the prodigal son.
We can see so many other meanings when we look at the cross. As we look at a crucified Christ we see that God is with us even in the depths of our suffering. That is, for me, the power of seeing a cross with Christ on it. I’ll talk more in a moment about why the empty cross is important. Jesus knew that passage from Isaiah about the suffering servant and he chose to take that role upon himself¸ I believe, and he knew that if he were faithful to his mission of showing the grace and love and welcoming hospitality of God to ALL persons, that he would be putting his safety and his very life at risk.
The cross means that God in Christ is with us in our own suffering, that whenever we hurt, whenever we are ill, whenever we are in pain, Christ has been through that as well. He has been through it even more than we have, and that in our suffering, we are never alone.
When I visited one of our members a few months ago who was dying and just a few days away from death, I took some of our pocket crosses to him and to his family to say that the Living Christ, who has himself suffered, is with us now supporting us in OUR suffering.
That can be the power of seeing the cross with the body of Christ on it, Christ who suffered is with us today when we are suffering.
There is a different meaning for an empty cross. The empty cross says that Christ is risen, Christ is alive and at work each day, and if we realize what the cross originally meant, shame and humiliation and torture and death and we see how the power of God on Easter changed it into a cosmic plus sign, we can go on to see God’s Easter resurrection power at work in our lives as well.
Theologian Fred Buechner says that resurrection means that whatever we think is the worst thing is never the last thing.
LET’S HEAR IT AGAIN: WHATEVER WE EXPERIENCE AS THE WORST POSSIBLE EXPERIENCE IN OUR LIFE WILL NEVER HAVE TO BE THE LAST THING BECAUSE THE CRUCIFORM GOD WILL BE AT WORK JUST AS GOD WAS IN THAT FIRST CENTURY WORST THING OF CRUCIFIXION TO BRING SOMETHING GOOD AND NEW AND FILLED WITH HOPE.
That is the meaning of Easter, and that is the meaning of the empty cross. That is the meaning of our about to be lighted, at night, 70 foot tall empty cross. That is the meaning of our cross on our platform that we gather around each week.
We purposely chose this very rugged, very “ugly” sculpture because it does two things. It portrays the ugliness of that first instrument of torture and death, but it does something else as well, something hopeful. It has lots of gaps and spaces in it where the light shines through, the light of resurrection and new life. God is light in the midst of our darkness, and that light still shines in our darkness, any darkness.
Let me offer one more level of meaning as we look at a cross or hold onto the cross in our pocket or purse. If that cross reminds us of the costliness of Christ being faithful and being true to his mission, it can remind us of the costliness of our own faithfulness. The cross points us to the costliness of being a follower, a disciple, not an admirer or spectator, but being a disciple of Christ. Following Christ and living by his teachings of compassion and integrity will require some new behaviors and will take us away from what is just comfortable and convenient. Mike Slaughter says this in the quote on the front of our bulletin today.
We promise to do this when we sign up to follow and to join a community of faith. And when others join us, we promise “to order our lives after the example of Christ.” Examples of compassion, reaching and including the outcast, the “other,” living with high ethics and integrity, following a moral compass that is not based in greed or popularity but based in doing what is right so we can live with ourselves and live with Christ beside us.
The closing hymn we have been using for a couple of Sundays talks about what that faithfulness means:
Will you leave yourself behind if I but call your name?
Will you care for cruel and kind and never be the same?
Will you risk the hostile stare, should your life attract or scare?
Will you let me answer prayer in you and you in me?
Will you kiss the leper clean and do such as this unseen
And admit to what I mean in you and you in me?
Will you love the “you” you hide if I but call your name?
Will you quell the fear inside if I but call your name?
Will you use the faith you’ve found, to reshape the world around
Through my sight and touch and sound in you and you in me?
Those are the questions that we face when we decide to live a Christ like life, a cruciform life, a life not just for ourselves, but a life that points others to the hope of the cross.
My late seminary classmate from SMU, Spurgeon Dunnam, asked it this way one time: is that cross you are wearing, that cross you are carrying, IS THAT A DECORATION OR A DECLARATION?
Is it just a nice and pretty symbol? Is it a “good luck charm?” Or is it a touchstone and a compass for how to live the most fulfilling and important kind of life there is?
We will be lighting our new exterior cross in a couple of weeks and we will invite all of us to an evening when we turn on the lights to be a beacon and lighthouse for the next fifty years. And we will pray that the light of that cross will be a sign of hope and comfort and direction for all who will see it for many years to come. Amen.