Holy Cross Day

Sept 15, 2002

The Rev. Dayle Casey                                          Holy Cross Day (transferred)

The Chapel of Our Saviour                                    Isaiah 45:21-25

Colorado Springs, Colorado                                   Philippians 2:5-11

September 15, 2002                                            John 12:31-36a

            Yesterday, September 14, was Holy Cross Day, or, as it used to be called by its more elegant, high-church name, “The Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.”

            It is a feast long observed to commemorate the recovery a cross that was believed to be the actual cross of Jesus.  The cross was first discovered in the 4th-century, as the result of a miracle, it was said.  Later it fell into the hands of the Persians, and in the 7th century the Church obtained it once again.

            But whatever the story of the Cross upon which Jesus died, whether it is fact or legend, we remember the Holy Cross today, not as a commemoration of that 4th-century discovery, but as a celebration of the exaltation of Christ upon a cross.  It is our patronal feast day in this parish.  And what better patronal feast for a parish whose name is “Our Saviour” than a feast which honors the central act of God in history?  We are gathered at God’s table today, as always, not because we value a relic, but because we share a common faith in Jesus, a faith in the One whom, by virtue of his victory over the Cross, we acknowledge as both Savior and Lord.

            But the Cross has not always been seen as a sign of victory.  Before he died on it, as Jesus himself was trying to explain to the crowds and his disciples just what kind of death was in store for him, the crowds objected.  “We have heard from the law and from our tradition that the Messiah remains forever, so we don’t ‘get it,’ Jesus.  We don’t understand what you’re telling us.  If the Messiah remains forever, how can you say that the Son of Man must be lifted up?  Who is this Son of Man?”

            In other words, if, as we’ve been taught, the Christ is to come to lead and restore the people of God, then how can can it be that he will die a common and humiliating death on a cross, an end befitting only a criminal?

            The disciples failed to understand what the Cross is all about, as we fail to understand what it’s all about.  Our attention on the ways of man, our focus on wars and rumors of wars, on chariots and tanks and business and markets and fashions and success, we fail to engage the Cross as part of real life.  We fail to see the ways of God.

            A different perspective, maybe even a sense of humor, might help.  That’s what Dr. W. B. J Martin suggested in a sermon I heard him preach over forty years ago.  In a sermon he called “Justification by Faith and a Sense of Humor,” Dr. Martin said that it was a sense of humor that led Martin Luther to be turned upside down theologically.  As a young man, Luther had focused on good works as the way to salvation, and it was a big laugh that turned him around.

            The young Luther was perplexed by the question of how God, who is holy, could welcome into his divine presence unholy, sinful men and women.  Obviously, he insisted, one could be brought into the presence of God only through redemption, and through the confession and absolution of sin.  And Luther became obsessed with a need to confess every sin, even the most insignificant, because he believed that even the smallest sin, left unconfessed and unabsolved, would deny him access to God’s presence.

            So as a young monk Luther was scrupulous about doing all the things a Christian, and especially a good monk, was supposed to do, scrupulous not only about confession, but also about doing the good works expected of a monk, and about saying his prayers, all of which he believed to be the way to God’s heart.  “If ever a monk got to heaven by his monkery,” Luther later said, “it was I.”

            One of the works Luther undertook was a pilgrimage to Rome, where one day he found himself climbing the steps of St. Peter’s on his knees.  On each step he said the prescribed prayers and then bent to kiss the step, until, according to the story, about half way up, Luther suddenly stood, bent backwards, and shook with a great belly laugh.  He laughed at the absurdity of it all.  Not at the absurdity of the ritual and the prayers themselves, but at the absurdity of what he had believed about God for so long, which had led him to undertake the rites with such fear. 

            He laughed at the absurdity of a God who was more interested in his posture on the steps of St. Peter’s than in his faith.  He laughed at himself, at the absurdity of his belief that such works, rather than his faith in Christ, would put him right with God.  “All this time the joke has been on me,” he laughed.  “All this time I’ve been thinking that it’s all about me, this experience we call life.  All this time, I’ve been thinking that it’s all about me and what I do when actually it’s all about God and his grace.”

            And with just such a sense of humor, Dr. Martin said, with just such a laugh and change in perspective, Luther exchanged justification by works for justification by faith, and so turned his world, and ours, on its ear.

            I was reminded of this story during my first semester in seminary.  It was when a joke happened once upon a solemn occasion.  It was at a solemn high mass, a mass done the way only Nashotah House can do solemn high masses, with music worthy of angels and candles everywhere and all the bells you can stand and smoke so thick you can hardly see the altar, not just the piddling amount we use here.  It was my kind of mass.  We were there to do things “decently and in order,” with great solemnity and dignity, the way only Episcopalians can do them. 

            The first half of the mass worked perfectly; everything went according to the rubrics until we reached the offertory.  But as two of my classmates were bringing the elements to the altar, they tripped on the steps and, with a great crash, they dropped them.  Wine and water everywhere, and hosts rolling all over the place!

            Well, I tell you, that did a number on the sacristans, the senior seminarians who were the seminary counterparts of the altar guild and who were always sure that holy things should never be entrusted to us juniors.  They were beside themselves.  They didn’t know what to do.  But they soon mobilized, cleaning up the wine and water and picking up the hosts, while the rest of us sang the offertory hymn a second time, the organist just playing on and on and on until, at last, we were ready to resume.

            That Eucharist made an impression on me, such an impression, in fact, that two years later I related the event in a sermon during my senior year.  I suggested that we ought to do the offertory that way at every Eucharist, because it was such a better, more realistic image of the way we human beings clumsily bring our real offerings to God all the time, the offerings of our lives.

            The Dean wouldn’t buy it.  He thought my suggestion a joke, so we continued with the “decently and in order” routine.  But I still think it offers a better perspective on the truth, a more realistic image of who we really are.

            Anyway, the disciples and crowds around Jesus on his way to Jerusalem needed a different perspective on the truth.  They were so preoccupied, as we are preoccupied, with their own habitual and familiar vision of life and the world that they were blinded, as we are blinded, to the supreme irony of God, the irony of God’s way of dealing with his fallen creation.  They were blinded, as we are blinded, to the way of love and truth who was standing in flesh and blood before their very eyes and who was about to ascend a cross so that they could see and live.

            The joke was on them, as the joke is on us.  They could not understand, as we do not understand, how Almighty God should foolishly condescend himself to become one of us, and to die on a cross, in order that he might rescue us all.

            After all, we ask with the psalmist, “what is man that God should be mindful of him?”  Who are we that God himself should be concerned for us and care what happens to us?  We are just insignificant little beings who inhabit an insignificant little planet that floats around the edge of an insignificant little galaxy somewhere in the midst of an infinite universe.  So who are we that God should give a hoot, much less that he should himself assume our flesh, and become one of us, and make himself nothing, and take on the very nature and form of a slave, and humble himself, and become so humble a servant that he would even give up his life for us on a cross like a common criminal?  And all to save us, to tell us the punch line, to show us how life is meant to be lived!

            It just doesn’t make sense.  To us, it’s like a bad ending to a bad book.  It’s like an author who writes a murder mystery but who can’t find a way to solve the mystery, so after three or four hundred pages he has the detective go on vacation where he finds the murder weapon and a written confession in a bottle that has miraculously floated up on a beach half-way ‘round the world.

            A story where everything is wrapped up at the end by something that miraculously appears at the last moment, rather than being solved as the result of the internal facts and logic of the story, is a bad story.  It is a bad book because it’s bad drama.  Like a bad joke, it is flat.  It offers, literally, an unbelievable story.  Good stories just don’t happen like that.  And books like that are dismissed by the critics.

            And in just such a way, says C. S. Lewis in his little book Miracles, and for just such a reason, many people dismiss God.  They ask with the psalmist, but without the psalmist’s spiritual perspective, “Who are we, little snits floating insignificantly in infinite space, that we should be rescued at the last hour by a miracle?  Who are we that we should be pulled out of the pit we’ve dug for ourselves, pulled out at the last minute by God dying on a cross disguised as a man?”

            And Lewis agrees, if the story is about us.  If the story is about us, it would be a bad story, a flat, uninteresting story, even an unbelievable story, a story unworthy of an ordinary writer, much less worthy of a creative God.

            But what if....?  What if the joke is on us? Lewis asks.  What if we’ve been asking the wrong question all this time?  What if we’re looking at the facts from the wrong perspective?  What if the story, the story that began with creation and continues with all the clumsy ways in which men and women live our lives and turn paradise into hell on earth, is really not about us who are asking the question?  What if the main question of the story is not “Who is man?” but “Who is God?”

            What if the main plot or focus of the story is not about how little snits known as human beings and floating in space get themselves into trouble so that they need to be rescued by some miraculous and absurd method at the last minute?  What if the main focus of the story is really God?  What if the main focus is about what God is like, and about how the main thing about God is that God is eternal self-giving, eternal love?  What if the point of the story is about how the main thing about God is that he loves from beginning to end and at every moment in between, about how his love created the world, and about how he loves the world he has created so much that he is always, unceasingly, giving himself to the world from the instant of creation right on into eternity?

            What if the joke is on us?  What if the main question of the story is not “Who are we that the Creator of the world should give a hoot?” but “Who is God that we should praise him?”   Then, says Lewis, if that is the perspective, it is a very good story indeed, because it’s really about the unfolding of the internal nature of the main character.  Human beings and our sin are all part of the story, but the main point of the story is God and his love and grace, not how we are pulled out of the mire at the last minute.  The main point, the punch line of all this experience of existence we call life, is God’s love; the main point is about how God’s love is great and eternal and how God’s love is always faithfully offered, even when we find ourselves in the mire, in the pits and at the door of death.

            Who is God that we should praise him?  What if it’s not all about us, but about God?  God is the one who created the little planet we float around on, and who loves it and us, just as he loves all his creation, no matter how far out into infinity it is and no matter how far into absurdity we fall.  God is the one who loves the creatures he creates so much that he becomes like us by becoming one of us, even taking our very form and nature, and comes to give himself to us in the end just as he did in the beginning and always has throughout the story, so that the Cross is but the final and ultimate sign which shows us what God is like for all eternity.  Is that what the story is all about?

            If so, then what can we possibly do but what we’re doing right now?  What can we possibly do but offer an answering love and, drawing near to the Cross and to each other, bow the knee at the name of Jesus, and with great praise confess with every tongue that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father?

            In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?