“A View of the Cross”

The Apostle Paul’s message to the church at Corinth, in Greece, is said to be the result of serious problems within the church. Paul writes in response to the problems.  No Lear jet to rush him there, no teleconferencing – just prayer, letters, and a very long walk for someone to deliver them. Paul, in his own brash and insensitive way, tells the folks, the Jews and Greeks, the converted members of the church, that they are foolish.  Now that’s a good first line in any admonition.  In fact he uses “foolishness” five times in this short passage.

Translation of his message is: You all can stop arguing about who is smarter and who is more intuitive.  God’s wisdom is in the viewing of the cross. In Paul’s time the Jewish converts to Christianity were often led by signs they interpreted as messages from God. The Greeks, on the other hand, were fascinated with self-promotion of their perceived innate wisdom and acquired academic intelligence.  In his absence, Paul’s teachings about salvation through Jesus’ death and resurrection were being undermined by these diverse pursuits.  Paul writes, “The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to those who are being saved it is the power of God.” The cross is integral to salvation, but it is not easy, and we in our own time and culture often want to look past the cross, forget about the darkness of Good Friday, and get to the joy of Easter morning.

This, of course, assumes all Christians are secure in their belief in the resurrection. Dale is leading a book study in Adult Ed that deeply explores the resurrection.  Even though it’s already underway, give the course your consideration. It is reasonable to say we might not be worshipping here together without the cross of Jesus as a point of unification. The value of the cross of Jesus is a point of departure of many fine folks, good Christians who just can’t get their arms around the cross and what role it plays in our faith.

Many in the world think Christian believers are foolish to think there is anything beyond our death. H. Richard Niebuhr, a 20^th century United Church of Christ theologian says, ”The cross challenges the world view of the impossibility of salvation and eternity.  The new hypothesis,” says Niebuhr, “is that we ARE being saved. We are coming through disaster, but we will not be lost. The cross of Jesus does not deny the reality of death – it reinforces it. What it denies is death’s final power.” We Christians believe in the power of the resurrection of Jesus, the salvation we will share as followers of Christ.

If we’re honest, when we mourn the death of a loved one, we wonder what is next, regardless of our professed beliefs. When we see the images of 911 we wonder about our fragile security.  Have you noticed?  We rarely see those images anymore.  We humans in our wisdom, like the Greeks of Corinth, are good at setting up defense mechanisms. I don’t know about you, but I can set up a wall of denial and avoidance in minutes. We have to protect ourselves – isn’t that the so-called first law of life?

At the beginning of the Gulf and Iraq wars a determination was made not to show the returning caskets of servicemen and women killed in action. As a Marine veteran, I respect the protection of families in pain and grief. The last thing they need is a horde of photographers and TV hounds intruding on them. The decision on privacy belongs to them.  But what this administrative decision did was to deny and cleanse the images of death from our daily intake of world and local issues, some important, but many inane and gratuitous consumers of our attention.

As of Friday, there have been 4,217 combat deaths in Iraq. There have also been 51,800 documented deaths of Iraqi citizens and local police. You can view the casualty report every day, if you wish. We acknowledge the pain and privacy of the families, but if we do not see these painful reminders of the loss of life in our times, we are shielded from our responsibility as citizens to share the burden. Likewise, if we look away from the cross because it is too hard to imagine, too complex to analyze, we risk aligning ourselves with those who are in denial, those swept up in the perishing waters of lost faith who think the message of the cross is pure foolishness. 

Denial is a force to be reckoned with in the lives of people in all walks of life.  Having served in Desert Storm and then pursued a desk job to spend more time with his family, Marine Lt. Col. Michael Strobl didn’t have to take on his next assignment.  But when he came across the name of 19-year-old Lance Corporal Chance Phelps, a young Marine who had been killed by hostile fire in Iraq, Strobl requested that he be assigned for military escort duty to accompany Chance's remains to his family in Wyoming.  Truth is, he felt out of touch with those bearing the direct burden of the Iraq war.

His true story aired recently on HBO – and I’m sorry it wasn’t on public television.  What’s striking about the film is the pace.  Someone watching might say nothing much happens.  But the focus is unrelenting on the way in which Strobl simply stays with Phelps’ casket for the entire trip.  Strobl is much more being than doing.  In fact, when they reach one of their layover points, a young Marine comes to drive Strobl to his hotel for the night.  But Strobl asks for a chair and a blanket, saying he’d prefer to stay beside Phelps until they resume their trip in the morning.  Strobl’s coming to terms with himself is revealed in his face across the course of his journey as he ponders how Phelps died, deals with his own guilt about not serving in Iraq, and feels the pain of what Chance’s family must be going through as they await the arrival of their son’s remains. 

As HBO describes it, “'Taking Chance' chronicles one of the silent, virtually unseen journeys that takes place every day across the country, bearing witness to the fallen and all those who, literally and figuratively, carry them home.”  But in addition to bearing witness, Strobl is coming face to face with the cross that every soldier – every person – must bear at one time or another.  In spite of all our accumulated wisdom, the cross is hard to explain away.

I can’t help but wonder what is was like to accompany the body of Jesus from the cross to the tomb. We can only wonder what the apostles felt and what they did to try to avoid the pain of loss. The cross was barren, but they did not yet know its power.

If as Paul says in the gospel that the perishing is our doing, the saving is God’s doing. By the surprising, ultimate power of the cross, God says no to the apparent logic that everything moves toward death alone. Jesus, nailed to the cross by those who sought to overpower and outlast him, embraces his suffering and, rather than rage against it, takes the cross and his crucifixion as his entry into the saving power of God.  Through it, Jesus denies death the final word to the ones who feared Him most. The new hypothesis is that we belong to God who is saving us.

This is the heart of my message this morning. If we have the courage to face the cross, God offers salvation in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.  With that, we can live as valued children of God’s vast, brilliant Creation. God’s individual presence in each of us shows no loss of value in economic downtimes. God calls us to be disciples and offer the Christian faith for all to “come and see.”

Like the wisdom of Paul’s time, our college GPA and our income levels are irrelevant.  In the face of the cross, they won’t add anything to our application for salvation.  Ironically, the view of the cross offers considerable hope to those who feel they have been discarded. From the perspective of “those with their backs against the wall,’ as described by Reverend Howard Thurman, former Dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University, the empty cross of Jesus Christ leads to salvation.

So why do those with their backs up against the wall have such hope?  Speaking specifically of black churches, Reverend James Cone says they are powerful forces in the African-American community “Because religion has been that one place where you have an imagination that no one can control. And so, as long as you know that you are a human being and nobody can take that away from you, then God is that reality in your life that enables you to know that." In Cone’s vision, it would follow that neither race, nor age, nor gender, nor status, nor sexual orientation can separate us from God’s Presence.

In this Lenten season, we are led by God, to step past the worlds’ fatalistic view that there is neither hope nor logic in the resurrection of the children of God through Jesus Christ.  Before Plato and Darwin and Einstein explained life and the improbability of an afterlife, there was God’s Creating Word, made flesh in Jesus Christ.  But first there is the cross, and during Lent, we’re called on to spend some time there.  Physical death is a reality.  But there is also new life in Jesus Christ, breathed on us by the Holy Spirit. The message of the cross, weak and foolish to those who are perishing, is alive in us in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.