Holy Cross Day - September 14, 2024

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. David Bryan Hoopes

The feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross - September 14, 2024

Isaiah 45:21-25

Galatians 6:14-18

John 12:31-36a

The official title of today’s feast includes the lord Exaltation. On occasion I have been asked why that word is used in connection with the Cross on which our Lord was crucified. A question might be asked if Christians were worshiping a cross, an object used to humiliate, torture, and cause death. The cross is not to be worshipped but to be remembered for the One who gave his life so that others may have eternal life.

In Christian circles the cross is the most prominent symbol of the Faith. It is seen on church buildings, walls, altars, vestments, paintings, jewelry, and even on tattooed bodies. Many Christians male the sign off the cross in blessings, baptisms, and even in times res of joy, fear, or sorrow. Religious habits of monks, nuns, and religious often include a cross. 

History of the Cross

Scholars indicate that crucifixion as a means of Torture and death was invented by Phoenicians or Persians. It was adopted by the Roman Imperial Government as an extreme means of enforcing Roman authority and law. Such was not a Jewish custom. The Jewish way was stoning or hanging.

Jesus was crucified by Roman authority in collaboration with the Jewish religious leaders of Jerusalem. The charge was blasphemy (Jewish) and sabotage (Roman). Pilate, the Roman governor did not believe that Jesus was a saboteur and was not interested in the religious authorities’ charge of Jesus being a blasphemer (because Jesus’ claim to be Son of God, Messiah). Hower, Pilate was insecure in his position of governor to a hostile, occupied populace and did not want to incur the anger of the populace represented by the Jewish religious establishment. Pilate thus gave into their petition. Jesus was crucified and died. The Pax Romana was maintained for a time; The religious establishment were rid of one who had greatly disturbed their power. Life would continue as before. Yet, such did not happen. There was Jesus’ resurrection from death. The Christian movement would continue to grow. The Roman Empire would eventually collapse. The Temple and its cult would be destroyed. The holy city would be levelled. 

The Christion movement would become a dominant power in much of the world and a cross the most familiar symbol of the movement. However, such was not so in the first three centuries Of the Christian movement. The usual symbol then was a fish (Icthus, its Greek name). Its letters would stand fer Jesus Christ, Son of God. I expect that Christians in those days would regard a cross as a symbol of Roman oppression and cruelty.

When Constantine became the first Christian emperor (306-337) the cross became the dominant Christian symbol. It was emblazed on flags, shields, and buildings. Constantine chose his mother Helena to oversee the Construction of a great Church on Calvary Hill. During the excavation, a large beam used for a cross was discovered and deemed to be part of the cross on which Jesus was crucified. Thus, the cross become part of a cultic teaching of the Christian faith. 

Sadly, too often, the cross which should symbolize God’s grace which triumphs over human sin and wrong, is used as a symbol of oppression e.g. Nazi symbolism centered on a swastika, a form of a Greek cross. The Ku Kluk Clan still burn crosses to terrify Black people and others whom they despise. The cross was the dominant symbol of the Crusaders whose zeal is still felt today in Christian - Muslim interaction.

For Christians who believe that Jesus is the Son of God, the Messiah, the cross must never be used as a symbol of terror, hate, or exclusion. Jesus reminds us: "and I when I am lifted up from the earth will draw all people to myself.”  Jesus the Christ invites all to a life of love, compassion and justice.

Some time ago I was asked to co-officiate at a Christian - Jewish wedding. The bride was an Episcopalian, my parishioner, and the groom was Jewish. It was agreed that the wedding would be in the bride’s church. The rabbi and I had a very cordial relationship. The wedding counseling was done jointly. The day of the wedding rehearsal came. It was in the church. Much to my surprise, the rabbi asked if the large cross on the wall behind the altar could be removed or covered. I asked him why the request. He, somewhat embarrassed, replied that, some of the groom's elderly relatives would be attending and for some of them the cross represented pogroms, concentration camps, repressions, exclusions. Sadly, I understood. However, the cross remained in place. The wedding took place without incident. The reception that followed was joyous, and the couple after 24 years are still happily married.

At Holy Crosstide, I remember that incident and resolve that my witness to the Christisn faith must always be that of compassion and welcome. The Order of the Holy Cross endeavors to be welcoming, compassionate, and encouraging. As Benedictive, we are enjoined "to welcome all as Christ." 

At the beginning of daily Chapter, this prayer is said 'O Lord, you called us to take up our cross and follow you: Guide. and sanctify us that by our prayer and service we may enrich your church, and by our life and worship may glorify your Name. " 

An object, the cross, which was designed to be an instrument of torture, became an instrument of Christ’s gift of himself showing the immensity of God’s generous love which transforms humans's wrong into divine grace, Such is its "exaltation."

Holy Cross Day - September 14, 2023

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Mr. Samuel Kennedy p/OHC

Holy Cross Day, September 14, 2023

 

Isaiah 45:21-25

Philippians 2:5-11

or Galatians 6:14-18

John 12:31-36a

Click here for an audio of the sermon (not available for this sermon)

 In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.

“Crux est mundi medicina” “ The cross is the medicine of the world.”  These words are engraved in stone and rest over the entrance to the guest house here at the Monastery of the Holy Cross — they are hard to miss, and they are a bold claim.  A very bold claim. And I’ll confess, on some days, I feel that they may be too bold a claim.  There are days when I walk past that inscription, sigh, and shake my head, wishing we’d toned the message down just a bit.  Is the cross the medicine of the world?  Really?  How?  I imagine that each of us here can immediately call to mind examples of how the symbol of the cross has been co opted for the purposes of imperial expansion or selfish gain, or can call to mind examples of well-intentioned efforts by the church that have resulted in great harm -- all in the name of the cross.  But the claim persists, etched in stone, even when I struggle with it — that somehow, in spite of all of that, the cross remains the best medicine for the world.  

Before we think a bit more about how the cross may be the medicine we need, it might be good to consider the malady for which the cross is allegedly the cure?  There are about as many answers to that question as there are people who have asked it, but I want to spend time together this morning exploring one way of understanding our human problem and how the cross might be the best medicine for that ill.

I’m going to start somewhere we might least expect for thoughts on our diagnosis — the arena of U.S. politics — but please don’t panic, we’ll only stay there for a moment.  

In the the lead-up to the 2020 Presidential election, an short-lived contender in one of our major parties’ primary processes shared his diagnosis of our national malady as he understood it — he shared that he believed we were in the midst of a “crisis of belonging” and that our extreme political polarization as a nation and tendency to demonize those on the “other” side of the political aisle were, at their core, symptoms of this “crisis of belonging.”  I think he was onto something.

This crisis of belonging has “ailed” us since the dawn of our human story — this sense of estrangement coupled with a longing to belong —to belong within our community, to our God, and with ourselves.    We see these tensions echoed in our sacred texts as early as the story of Cain and Abel.  One of our primary problems as humans is that we tend to conceive of belonging as a limited resource, and we tend to turn our striving to obtain that limited resource into a zero-sum competition with those around us. 

One of philosopher René Girard’s key insights was that we humans tend to build social cohesion on the back of exclusion. And these dynamics work themselves out no matter how large or small the community is — be it as large as a nation state or as small as a family, a group of friends, or if we are not careful, even a religious Order.  As rivalry and competition grow within the community (along with their attendant social tensions and, in some cases, violence) human societies will often select a scapegoat —a person or group who is blamed for the turmoil and conflicts within the community. The scapegoat becomes the target for all of that collective blame and hostility, and is often subjected to violence or expulsion as a means of purging the community of its tensions and conflicts.  

This often happens subconsciously, but the striking thing is that this process works — at least temporarily.  For a season, social cohesion and sense of safety in belonging are restored, but in the long run, this mechanism only perpetuates cycles of violence, as the social order, the “sense of safe belonging,” is maintained via cycles of ritual expulsion and violence.  The irony of building community by this mechanism is that one is never actually ever safe — subconsciously we all know that we might find ourselves selected for expulsion at the next round of sacrifice— and this leads to deep, subconscious anxiety at both the group and individual levels.

This mechanism for social cohesion is at work around us all the time.  And we participate in this way of being together all the time, I participate in this way of being together all the time.

My go-to example for how this dynamic might play itself out innocuously is to ask, “What is the fastest way to bond with a group of Rotarians?  Well, crack a joke about the Lion’s club!  And what is the fastest way to bond with a group from the Lion’s club?  Crack a joke about the Rotarians!”

We can laugh at relatively harmless examples like this, but they point to darker outworkings of this mechanism.  History, of course, is filled with more insidious examples of what happens when particular groups are made the scapegoats for social ills and unrest.  The repeated scapegoating of Jewish people in the early 20th century led to the Holocaust, the scapegoating of Native Americans peoples led to the genocidal policies of our own early government and those across the Americas.

Over time, our mechanisms for sacrificial expulsion have become increasingly sophisticated, a bit better hidden, but they are still there. We may not have religious structures in this country that engage in ritual murder to reestablish social cohesion, but we do have a criminal justice system rife with systemic injustices that provides us with scapegoats all the time — typically in the form of black and brown young men. 

On the smaller, more intimate scale of our personal lives, gossip and shaming, the identification of a group “problem child” within our small communities — all of these actions participate in that same system of violence that, in the short run, make us feel safe and as if we belong, but ultimately contribute to the cycles of violence that tear our world and our hearts apart.

Now, you may be reasonably asking at this point, what in the world does this have to do with the cross?  How is the cross medicine for this illness?

“The Gospels show us that Jesus understands this mechanism,” of inclusion via exclusion; (Allison, 152-153) of maintaining social cohesion and order through expulsion, and Jesus understands that the religious and political structures of this world depend on this mechanism and therefore often unconsciously shore it up.  Through his life and ministry, Jesus lures the mechanism and these institutions into behaving according to their usual patterns, and that, predictably, gets him killed.  He dies a death of shame and suffering on the edges of the City —lifted high on the beams of a cross.  Jesus dies, as countless others have and will continue to die; in fact, he’s surrounded by two others dying the same death that he is— on the fringes of society, sacrificed to the idols of shaky cohesion and fragile peace.

But Jesus does this precisely in order to reveal that the whole exercise is unnecessary — that there exists the possibility of another way of being together.  And as we come to understand that it was God’s very Self that died on the cross that day, we discover that God is in no way involved in these mechanisms of inclusion via exclusion — stripping them of any imagined divine imprimatur.

The Way of Jesus that is the undoing of this Way of the World, was described for us in our Epistle reading this morning — it is the way of self-emptying love, the way of kenosis.  It is the way of a love that is grounded in the unending flow of the life and love of the Trinity, and as such, it is a love that is secure enough to not grasp for belonging as if it were a limited resource acquired at the expense of others.  As such, it is a love that is grounded and secure enough to actually inhabit the places of exclusion on behalf of others, and as Jesus does this as the Innocent Victim, he reveals this victim mechanism for what it is, and breaks the cycle of violence with forgiveness, exposes the injustice of scapegoating, and opens up for us a  New Creation — a new way of being human — a new way of being together.

This New Creation springs from the Way of the Cross, where belonging is not governed by zero-sum rivalries, but by the boundless, ever-flowing, fearless love and mercy of God.  This is the way we are born into through faith and the waters of Baptism.  This is the Way we are invited to walk at the foot of the cross.

The Way of the Cross runs counter to how we are conditioned to behave and to how we see the world around us functioning each and every day. And when we are faced with the opportunity to walk the way of the cross it can very much feel fraught with the risk of death — though for those of us who are protected by layers of privilege, we are usually only facing some form of social death — nonetheless, it is a death.  

But this is the way we are invited into.  It is the way we have been inaugurated into by Jesus’ work on the cross.  And as we come to trust a bit more in the boundless love of God for us, perhaps we can begin to grasp and strive a bit less.  As we let that love flow through unclenched hands and hearts, perhaps we can learn learn to stand in the places of exclusion on behalf of others, to break the cycles of violence with forgiveness when we experience it, and in so doing, in fits and starts, and however imperfectly, we can participate in ushering in this New Creation.

“Let this mind be in us which was also in Christ Jesus, who though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.  And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death — even death on the cross.”

In the name of God: Lover, Beloved, and Love Overflowing, Amen.

The Exaltation of the Holy Cross - September 14, 2022

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert Leo Sevensky, OHC

Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross - September 14, 2022

• Isaiah 45:21-25
• Philippians 2:5-11
• John 12:31-36a

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

O Cross, surpassing all the stars in splendor, world renowned, holier than all things, you alone were counted worthy to uphold the world’s ransom. Sweet the wood, sweet the iron, bearing so sweet a burden; we have here assembled to celebrate your praises, Alleluia. (Antiphon on the Magnificat for the Finding of the Cross) I've been listening to a series of lectures given at a recent preaching conference at Notre Dame University. One presentation in particular caught my attention. It was on preaching the parables of Jesus, and it was subtitled: “Explain. Exclaim. Proclaim.” I was a bit disappointed when the presenter said that the last thing we should do with the parables is try to explain them. Rather the preacher’s task is to exclaim and proclaim them anew, seeing the contemporary world as if through their eyes. I must confess that it is almost impossible for me to refrain from trying to explicate the mystery of the cross of Christ. There has been century upon century of attempts to explain, or at least understand, what was happening when Christ died on the cross. What was being wrought and by whom? Why was it necessary or was it? What was the human need and what was the divine response and was it efficacious? Anyone with even a glancing acquaintance with Christian theology is aware of the many theories or models that have been offered to help us wrap our minds, if not our hearts, around the mystery of this event so central for our Christian self- understanding. There are theories or models which stress the role of Christ as the victor over death or over that agent of death that we call the devil. Others emphasize the role of Christ as the perfect sacrifice, undoing the disobedience of our ancestral forbears. Or as the one who paid a certain debt to satisfy the moral outrage caused by human sin over against the stern face of a righteous and judging God. Still others draw our attention to the converting power of the perfect humility and self-emptying of Jesus the Christ. One thing that characterizes our human attempts to come to terms with the mystery of the cross is a sense that if only we could find the missing piece, a clue such as we might find in a mystery novel, we could finally understand it. But of course, the mystery of the cross of Christ is not at all like that of a mystery novel. It's not about some missing evidence or a hidden hint, access to which might enable us to make sense of it on our terms. No. The mystery of the cross is mystery in a totally other sense. It is a mystery that we must enter into and then explore further and further all our days. It is a boundless mystery, a relationship really, one that invites us more and more into the deep places of God. I'm not particularly wedded to any of these classic models of redemption or atonement, though I find some more interesting or helpful or suggestive than others. And I'm also not particularly enamored of catch phrases that try to encapsulate the Christian message in ten words or less. But I think there is a phrase, a meme, a slogan which our Presiding Bishop Michael Curry often uses, and I think he has his finger on a profound interpretive truth. It is the phrase, used to great effect at the marriage of Prince Harry and Meagan: “If it's not about love it's not about God.” If it's not about love, then it's not about the Gospel revelation of God given to us in Christ Jesus. Period. This is, as theologians might say, a fundamental hermeneutical principle. And it is a principle that needs to be applied with special rigor to any attempt to wrap our minds around the cross. The cross is all about love and nothing but love. Yes, it is a message of love that is embedded in a particular historical and political situation, which makes it messy and sometimes hard to comprehend. It is a message about love that meets evil, suffering and death head on. It’s a tough love. But it is above all a message of love and a sign of God’s enduring love for God's creation. It is not a sign of a vengeful God which a deficient Trinitarian theology ascribes to the Father. Nor is it a sign of a passive Son who is victimized by both the Godhead and the human order. Nor is it the magic work of the Spirit who is unable to do better than to pull a rabbit out of a particularly unfortunate hat. No. It is the work of the One God working out eternal love in a particular time and place, a place not so different from ours today. And any theology or spirituality that would lead us to think that the cross that we celebrate today is ultimately a tragedy rather than, in the classic sense of the term, a comedy is simply wrong. Before the gospel reading we sang the hymn “Come O thou Traveler.” It is one of over six thousand hymns written by the endlessly prolific Charles Wesley, the 18th century Anglican priest who, with his brother John, gave birth to the Methodist movement. One of the glories of Wesley was his deep conviction that, from first to last, the work of God—including and especially the work of the cross—is a work of love. In that hymn, which tells of Jacob wrestling with the angel, Wesley continues the scriptural story from Genesis. Before he releases him, Jacob demands the Angel (that is God) to name himself. And he does: Tis Love, tis Love! Thou diedst for me! I hear thy whisper in my heart: the morning breaks, the shadows flee. Pure universal Love thou art; thy mercies never shall remove, thy nature and thy name is Love. Others have said it before him, of course, and perhaps none more passionately or eloquently than the Lady Julian of Norwich. In memorable words at the end of her Revelations of Divine Love we hear this: Wouldst thou learn thy Lord's meaning in this thing? Learn it well: Love was His meaning. Who shewed it thee? Love. What shewed He thee? Love. Wherefore shewed it He? For Love. Hold thee therein and thou shalt learn and know more in the same. But thou shalt never know nor learn therein other thing without end. Thus was I learned that Love was our Lord's meaning In my book, this is the only safe and adequate interpretation of this unfathomable mystery that we celebrate today, the celebration of the Holy Cross of our Savior. It is of course a strange and awful love, a love which empties itself of all grasping, of all pretension, of all ego self so that in doing so it may give space for a cure, a remedy, a universal healing. And by its example it offers us a power to do likewise in this life and in the next. It is a promise and a hope ratified by resurrection. It’s no surprise that we want to understand this. And the work of unpacking and repacking this understanding will continue, as it has for centuries. But as the presenter from the Notre Dame conference reminds us about the parables: beyond explanation, our work is exclamation and proclamation. What can that mean? How do we exclaim the cross today? And how do we proclaim it? I think the short answer is this: we proclaim the cross by living lives that are themselves more and more self-emptying and less and less grasping and controlling and living into that difficult discipline or practice in thought, word and action. And we exclaim the cross when we notice such actions and such grace in the world around us, be they small or great, and acknowledge them. Oh wow. That seems so weak, doesn’t it? But if we start there, if we train our eyes to see how the power of the cross is still operating in us and around us and even occasionally through us, we will exclaim the cross, and its message will become self- explanatory. Explain, exclaim, proclaim. Brothers and sisters, we are doing this right now in a particularly concentrated and ritualized way as we once again offer, together with Christ and in Christ, this Eucharist which proclaims the death of the Lord until he comes. We exclaim it with our lips and in our hearts, in these or similar words: “Dying you destroyed our death, rising you restored our life, Christ Jesus come in glory.” May we proclaim it, this mystery of the Holy Cross of our Savior, with our very lives. Amen.

Holy Cross day - September 14, 2021

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

The Rev. Matthew Wright

Feast of the Holy Cross - Tuesday, September 14, 2021

Isaiah 45:21-25

Psalm 98

Philippians 2:5-11

John 12:31-36a

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

Today we are celebrating the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross—which is, of course, the feast of title for this community, the Order of the Holy Cross.  And as I’m sure many of you know, what this day actually commemorates is the dedication of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem in the year 335.  Tradition says that the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is built over the sites of both the crucifixion (Golgotha or Calvary) and the burial-place of Jesus, his tomb in the garden. 

 

It was at the site of Calvary that legend tells us the Emperor Constantine’s mother St. Helena unearthed the remains of three crosses.  And to discover which, if any of the three, was the True Cross on which Jesus died, she touched wood from each of them to a diseased woman.  And, of course, when this woman was touched with the wood of the True Cross she was healed instantly.  Or so the story goes.

  

Eventually it would become the practice of the Church in Jerusalem to bring out the wood of the True Cross each year on Good Friday, and the people would be invited forward to offer veneration.  This is recounted for us by Egeria, that holy pilgrim of the fourth century, and she tells us that the wood was placed on a table before the bishop, who would grip and hold one end of it, with deacons standing on either side to guard it.  She writes:

“There is a reason why it is guarded in this manner.  It is the practice here for all the people to come forth, one by one… to bow down before the table, kiss the holy wood, and then move on.  It is said that someone (I do not know when) took a bite and stole a piece of the holy cross.  Therefore, it is now guarded by the deacons standing around, lest there be anyone who would dare come and do that again.” 

 

Nevertheless, splinters did spread over the centuries, becoming relics in churches around the world, including in this church here, thanks be, perhaps, to some now unknown biting bandit.  And now, two millennia later, the strangeness of this act of venerating, kissing, a cross, an instrument of state-sanctioned torture and death, has mostly worn off for us.  We wear crosses around our necks, hang them in our homes, and place them above our altars; we mark ourselves with the sign of the cross.  And little by little the reality of this symbol has been softened, perhaps even cheapened, and worse, commercialized.

And so it’s good now and then to remind ourselves that if Jesus had died in the twentieth century we’d all be wearing little electric chairs or lethal injection devices around our necks, or a couple of centuries earlier, little miniature sterling silver guillotines.  

My father was killed by a driver who was on too much medication and should not have been behind the wheel of a car.  The driver swerved out of his lane and struck and killed my dad and a fellow Department of Transportation coworker.  What would it be like if I kept a broken piece of the bumper of that car that killed my dad, and brought it out every year to kiss on the anniversary of his death?  

It is a strange thing that we do with the wood of the cross.  The power is in fact in that strangeness.  We need to not lose, to not dull, how odd and shocking and counter to our natural emotional instincts it is that we reverence the holy cross.  It would be much more intuitively emotionally normal if we rather spat upon the unholy cross.

But to exalt the holy cross—this is not something to pass over lightly.  What is happening here?  I often pray the rosary, which cycles through three sets of mysteries, or events, from the life of Mary and Jesus: the Joyful Mysteries of annunciation, birth, and childhood; the Sorrowful Mysteries of suffering and death; and the Glorious Mysteries of Resurrection and renewal.

I’ve prayed those mysteries countless times, but a few weeks ago, as I moved through the Sorrowful Mysteries—from the Agony in the Garden, to the Scourging at the Pillar, to the Crowning with Thorns, to the Carrying of the Cross, and finally to the Crucifixion—when I reached that last mystery, I suddenly felt like I was going to throw up.  I found myself saying “No, no, no, no…”  I didn’t want to pray it.  I didn’t want it to happen.  I didn’t want him to die.  Not like this.  And then with tears in my eyes I took up the beads.

I can’t make his death on a cross not be a part of the story.  I can’t make my father’s horrific death on the roadside not be a part of the story.  It’s the claiming, owning, and transforming of such a terrifying and heartbreaking symbol as the cross that makes it so powerful.  The Cross is the horror of Empire on full display.  The violent normalcy of what we call “civilization” on full display.  When early Christians took up the cross and claimed it, it was not so different from any oppressed group today who has taken up the language of their oppressor and re-appropriated it, as we’ve seen done with the n-word or words like queer.  By taking up the evil thing and kissing it, rather than spitting on it, it loses its power; we change the nature of its power; it becomes truly powerful.

What had been the Empire’s symbol, used to strike fear into the hearts of revolting peasants, instead becomes a strange symbol of resistance, of nonviolence, a symbol of new life and of love poured out to the fullest.  St. Paul says in our Epistle reading, “May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.”  Rather than be embarrassed by the vulnerability and powerlessness revealed on the cross, he embraces it and so it becomes true power.

Not that this symbol would not be coopted yet again by Empire, and used on banners charging into war.  But that brings us to another important part of the story of this feast day.  The feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross entered the calendar of the Western Church in the seventh century after Emperor Heraclius recovered the Cross from the Persians, who had carried it off in 614, fifteen years earlier. And the story goes that Heraclius intended to carry the cross back to Jerusalem himself, with full imperial pomp and regalia, but when he went to lift it, it wouldn’t budge; he could not move it, until he took off all his imperial garb and carried the wood as a barefoot pilgrim.

The True Cross always resists and subverts the forces of Empire, unmasking them for the violence they in fact always are.  One of the greatest theologians of the Cross, in my opinion, is the 14th century English mystic, Julian of Norwich.  In her Revelations of Divine Love she struggles to reconcile a good, loving, and omnipotent God with the harsh realities of sin and evil.

Denys Turner, in his book Julian of Norwich: Theologian, suggests that Julian ultimately finds the solution to this paradox in the Cross.  He writes: “This solution, the Cross, is itself a riddle.  Yet for all its irreducibly paradoxical character, it is the only story that to Julian could be credible.  It is paradoxical that the Cross’s demolition of the intellectually mediating space that explanations seek to occupy is exactly where our salvation is to be found.  There are only two realities for Julian: sin and God’s love.  Nothing mediates between these realities except sin’s defeat of love, that is, the Cross.”

He continues: “...the conflict between sin and love is the final conflict, and the Cross is the final outcome of that conflict.  It is perhaps Julian’s central theological insight that sin wages war against love because sin is of its own nature violent, but love wages no wars at all, not even against sin, for love is absolute vulnerability.  For that reason, then, neither is any subsequent reversal of the Cross’s violent defeat necessary, for it is precisely in that victory of sin over love that sin is defeated.  In its victory over love sin defeats itself.  Sin’s failure to engage perfect love in a contest on sin’s terms of violence and power is sin’s defeat, its power being exhausted by its very success.  For killing is the best strategy that sin can come up with; it is sin’s last resort.  The Resurrection, then, is the meaning of the Cross, the meaning that the vulnerability of love, its refusal of the sword, is stronger than sin’s power to kill.  That is all we know.  That is all we can know.”

And so we kiss the Cross.  Even as it churns our stomachs and breaks our hearts, because the Cross shows us that Love wins by refusing to be anything other than Love.  It is by this Love lifted up on the cross, Jesus tells us in our Gospel reading, that he will draw all to himself.  Our English translation says “all people”; but in fact, the Greek simply says pantas—all.  He will draw all to himself.  

Mother Virginia Brown, a mentor of mine who died last year, loved this passage.   Another friend, Lisa Inman, writes of her, “‘When I am lifted up,’ Virginia quoted John’s Gospel in sermons more than once, ‘I will draw all to myself,’ and she would go on to explain that the passage arguably meant that Jesus would draw not just all people, or all nations, but all: every crumb, every atom, every speck of the dust of stars, everything, into the embrace of God, so that nothing is left over or lost.”

In Jesus’ drawing all to himself through his death on the cross, I imagine his death much like the death of a star in space.  When a star dies sometimes it actually implodes, collapsing in on itself and opening a black hole, a tear in the fabric of space and time that draws things into itself.  Perhaps we can see Christ’s death on the Cross in a similar way—the implosion of his love at that moment so great that it opens a hole in the fabric of the universe and of history that draws all things back into God’s love.

Again, Mother Virginia writes: “The Cross is the true center, drawing all to him who hung there, reshaping all space-time by a kind of gravity of love… and we, as we choose to love in return, are immediately taken up into the Paschal Mystery which surrounds it, rather like a ‘white hole,’ a true Mystery which can’t be comprehended fully, a wisdom looking like folly from the outside of its ‘event horizon’…”

On this Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, may we reclaim that seeming folly, reclaim the strangeness and subversiveness of what we celebrate today, kissing the evil thing, and thereby allowing it to defeat itself, the now Holy Cross opening in the world and in our hearts a love so great that all, every last speck of creation, is drawn back into the Heart of God.

Amen.

Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost - Proper 19 A - September 13, 2020

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Josép Martinez-Cubero, OHC

Exaltation of the Holy Cross (anticipated) - Proper for Holy Cross day - September 13,.2020

Isaiah 45:21-25

Philippians 2:5-11

John 12:31-36a

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

Back in July, I led an associate’s retreat (a Zoom retreat, as we have been doing during this time of pandemic), during which one of the topics was Christianity as a religion of paradox. Christianity is not a set formula of holy propositions. We cannot live a healthy Christian life without embracing paradox, ambiguity and mystery. 

God is One and Three. Jesus is human and divine. The Scriptures are God’s Word and written by flawed humans. God’s Creation is good and broken. To give is to receive. To gain your life you must lose it. To reign is to serve. We are saved by grace, and faith without works is dead. We are in the world, but we are not of the world. The Reign of God is coming, and the Reign of God is here within us. 

Without these counterintuitive and irreconcilable truths Christianity cannot be true to the world we live in. Our world is complex, messy and full of contradiction. God will lead us to more truth and more wisdom if we have the courage to look at uncertainty without avoidance and to embrace mystery, which is that which cannot be apprehended by reason, but once apprehended, is not contrary to reason.

So today we celebrate the paradox of the Holy Cross, the instrument of a cruel, violent execution, and the symbol of our salvation, in other words, “mundi medicina”, the medicine of the world. 

Mortality is part of what it means to be human. God does not rule creation by capricious suspensions of the laws of nature. Natural death is part of created reality. Most cultures in the ancient world, including Israel, accepted this reality. But the violent and premature death of the righteous presented a challenge to Israel’s faith in a just and loving God. How could this just and loving God be reconciled to cases in which the virtuous died violently while the violent lived in prosperity?  The Book of Wisdom serves as a transition to the New Testament’s confrontation with the quandary of unjust death. The author’s distinction between natural death and evil death is crucial for the understanding of Jesus’ struggle against the “death that should not be”.

Do not invite death by the error of your life,

or bring on destruction by the works of your hands;

because God did not make death,

and God does not delight in the death of the living.

For God created all things so that they might exist;

the creatures of the world are wholesome,

and there is no destructive poison in them,

and the dominion of Hades is not on earth.

For righteousness is immortal. 

But the ungodly by their words and deeds summoned death;

considering it a friend, they pined away

and made a covenant with it,

because they deserve to be in its possession.

(Wisdom 1:12-16)

According to the writer of Wisdom, God did not create evil. God created all things good. There are two intertwined realities in human experience, God’s originally intended world of love and justice, and a world of evil whose primary result and manifestation is violent death and is made operative in the world through human choices. Physical death, in other words, is not truly evil, no matter how painful, because it is neither ultimate nor final. So the death the writer of Wisdom is referring to is the death seen as being brought into the world by “the envy of the evil one”.

But the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God,

and no torment will ever touch them.

In the eyes of the foolish they seemed to have died,

and their departure was thought to be a disaster,

and their going from us to be their destruction;

but they are at peace…their hope is full of immortality.

(Wisdom 3:1-4)

The righteous, whether living in this world or deceased, are alive in the hand of God and the wicked, whether before or after natural death, are dead because they belong to the devil. In John’s Gospel, Jesus confronts this final and definitive death that God did not create. By his crucifixion, Jesus enters the death brought about by the perversion of the persons, systems, and structures of the world, that is, the first century political structures of imperialism and institutional religion, in other words, law and order allied with religion. He was executed because by his teaching and saving acts of power, he announced and communicated eternal life. This was a threat to a domination system that used the violence of crucifixion to terrify, repress and strip its victims of all dignity. In John’s Gospel, God sent Jesus into the world because God loved the world and willed that humans not die the final death but have eternal life (John 3:16). This divine life, lived personally and communally, is what the Synoptic Gospels refer to as the Reign of God. By his direct confrontation with death as evil, Jesus addresses the realm of what in the Gospel of John is referred to as the Prince of this world and brings it to an end.

In her book, “Buying the Field”, Sandra Schneiders writes, “The central struggle in John’s Gospel is not defined primarily as a struggle between good and evil (although it is certainly that) but specifically as the struggle between life and death. Jesus did not come primarily to defeat evil in order to restore some kind of cosmic or ontological order to a damaged Creation. Rather, Jesus came primarily to give life, God’s own life, in all its fullness (cf. 10:10), by giving the power to become the children of God to all who believe in him (cf. 1:12-13). The life Jesus comes to give, which will cost him his own natural human life, is not immortality either as indefinite survival in this world or as a disembodied soul-life in some vague world outside of time. It is the indestructible and super-abundant life of the Trinity lived in our own bodily human mortality. Jesus, expiring on the cross, is glorified in the presence of God by the divine life that is revealed in his death.” 

“And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw everything to myself (John 12:32).” The Greek word is “pantas” – everything, not just people, but the whole of all that is. That Love that draws everything to oneness is the body of Christ. That Love that draws everything to oneness is what we commemorate every time we stand around the altar, when past, present and yet to come become the here and now. That Love that draws everything to oneness is what we receive at communion. Its symbol is the cross and as our Father Founder wrote in his Rule, it is not “the symbol of an event which has its place in the distant past, while only the memory of that event belongs to the present. Rather it is the witness of a fact of the eternal order…” The cross is the symbol of that Love that invites us to abundant and eternal life with a kind of consciousness that illuminates our experience of God, ourselves, the world, and human history with an entirely new understanding. May we glory in the mystery. ¡Que así sea en el nombre del Padre, del Hijo y del Espíritu Santo! ~Amen+  

 

Holy Cross Day - Saturday, September 14, 2019

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br.  Bernard Delcourt, OHC
Holy Cross Day - Saturday, September 14, 2019

Isaiah 45:21-25
Galatians 6:14-18
John 12:31-36a

Click here for an audio version of the sermon.

In the death of Jesus of Nazareth, we witness the first act of a new creation which the Apostle Paul refers to in his epistle to the Galatians.

The second and third acts of this new creation are the resurrection and then the ascension of Jesus the Universal Christ. And I want us to focus on Act 1 of this new creation for now.

It may be nigh impossible, but I want us to focus on the crucifixion for a while without looking at it much from the perspective that the resurrection and the ascension give us nowadays.

Today, I remember Jesus’ passion and the place of the cross in his life. What meaning can we give to the cross from the perspective of a fully human Jesus coming into his passion?

To me, Jesus’ crucifixion achieves two important things that are often overlooked:
-First, it is his most powerful lesson in non-violent resistance to evil,
-Second, it fulfills the mystery of the Incarnation.

Of course, the crucifixion, and the cross as a symbol carry many more meanings than those. But I will focus on those two today.

*****

First, Jesus’ crucifixion is his last lesson in non-violent resistance to evil. In Jesus’ case, the evil is the combination of the Roman domination system, on one hand, and on the other hand, the religious authorities’ use of, and participation in that domination system.

In getting Jesus condemned and executed, the religious authorities ensured (or so they thought) the longevity of their institution (Temple Judaism). They felt they were protecting the religious and cultural identity of the Jewish people by sacrificing nothing more than a bothersome and vexing troublemaker. They had cut a coexistence deal with the Roman authorities and didn’t want it subverted by a wonder-working itinerant Galilean preacher.

The Roman authorities decided that the alleged claims to political power made by Jesus were enough of a threat to the Roman Peace in Palestine.

They also wanted to keep public quietude at the emotionally charged time of the Passover festival. And that was worth sacrificing a possibly innocent man.

Further, terrorizing the populace by showing what destiny awaited (even alleged) opponents of imperial supremacy was worth doing to consolidate their dominance.

But what about Jesus? Why didn’t he run for the hills when there was still time? Why did he not choose to continue his teaching and healing ministries in less menacing environments than Passover-bound Jerusalem? He had a faithful support base in Galilee. Why not go back and deepen the ministry there?

I suspect Jesus knew his ministry had reached a perilous tipping point (whether in Galilea or Judea). Jesus taught that the Kingdom of God was close at hand, indeed that the Kingdom of God was present.

He worked many wonderful signs that spoke of divine power. Many of his listeners, informed by centuries of hopes and expectations about a Messiah thought he would take the next step in their version of Messiahship and claim political power.

That would have involved rebellion against the Roman occupier. And such rebellion could not happen without extensive violence and bloodshed.

Many of Jesus’ followers may indeed have wanted him to be King of the Jews and a conquering and victorious King at that.

Earlier in this twelfth chapter of the gospel according to John, we have a report of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem. The crowds chanted: ‘Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord — the King of Israel!’

Jesus probably understood that the claim to kingship would lead to violent repression and suppression if he encouraged his followers to act out any further in this direction.

Indeed, this triumphal entry into Jerusalem very likely was enough to make the Roman authorities fear they had a risk of rebellion on their hands.

In effect, Jesus’ spiritual leading and teaching were at risk of being hijacked by an unstoppable political momentum. The populace wanted him King. He was not interested but knew it could no longer be stopped.
Jesus intuited or fully understood that his non-violent resistance to the political and religious authorities of Jerusalem would lead to martyrdom. I think that he chose to face this martyrdom to cut short the germs of violent insurrection amongst some of his followers.

In order to cement the non-violence of his ministry and maintain the spiritual nature of his teachings, he chose to remove the temptation of making him King of the Jews from the movement that supported him.

His death at the hands of the Roman occupier and his resurrection and ascension would compel his movement to focus on the signs and teachings he had given them rather than elaborate political liberation plans.

By choosing to face martyrdom, he preserved his movement from turning political and violent. He saved them from themselves and from massive retribution from the Roman authorities.

As John the Evangelist wrote: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13).

*****

Second, Jesus’ crucifixion fulfills the mystery of the Incarnation. Christ is also fully human and trod this planet, as a poor Galilean itinerant preacher.

God chose to accept all of the human experience, up to and including the shame, the pain, and the injustice that is the fate of too many of our brothers and sisters.

Looked at from the point of view of the resurrection of Jesus the Christ, the cross is a promise that God will not abandon us. It is a promise that God will somehow, someway, work to bring life out of death. 

From the point of view of the ascension, it is also a promise that the trinitarian Godhead knows what it means to be human, fully human, in all its wonderful and dreadful variety and woe.

The cross makes it clear how human Jesus was and is. He did not call upon his divinity to sweep the passion away and skip carefree to the inclusion of his humanity in the Godhead.

In his passion, the very human Jesus of Nazareth did not have the benefit of hindsight on what the cross would come to mean after his death.

Jesus suffered doubt, fear, anxiety, and abandonment in the leading up to and suffering on the cross. I don’t think Jesus knew he would be resurrected. I think that would defeat the fullness and authenticity of his humanity.

Facing death as any one of us was essential to his human experience. He died as any human; taking nothing with him and with no cognitive certainty of what awaited him.

But on top of that, the cross did put a horrible fulfillment to his incarnation. There is no human trauma or tragedy that Jesus cannot relate to. In Christ, God has a fully experiential human empathy towards even our worst predicaments.

Maybe the fullness of the mystery of incarnation meant that Jesus couldn’t die peacefully of old age in crumpled sheets and surrounded by praying friends and relatives. In any case, it would have been a very different incarnation.

*****

So in our exaltation of the Holy Cross, let us remember Jesus’ teachings which he wanted to preserve to the point of accepting death.

Let us remember love of God, love of neighbor, and even, yes, love of enemies which he so beautifully demonstrated in his passion. Let us remember his preferential care for the poor whether economically and/or spiritually poor.

God became human and died on the cross, that we may hear these teachings, take them to our hearts, and embody them in our lives, regardless of how relevant the dominant culture around us finds those teachings.

“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” (1 Corinthians 1:18).

Amen.

Holy Cross Day , Year B: Friday, September 14, 2018

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Randy Greve, OHC
Holy Cross Day-  Friday, September 14, 2018

To hear the sermon in its fullness click here.

Br. Randy Greve, OHC 

“And I”, Jesus says in the gospel reading, “when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”  Jesus also says, “I lay down my life.”  “You have no power over me.”  “No one takes my life from me.”   In our tradition, from the office for Noonday from the Book of Common Prayer: “Blessed Savior, at this hour you hung upon the cross, stretching out your loving arms: Grant that all the peoples of the earth may look to you and be saved; for your tender mercies’ sake”.  And from Eucharistic Prayer A in the Prayer Book: “He stretched out his arms upon the cross, and offered himself, in obedience to your will, a perfect sacrifice for the whole world.”  

This is active voice language in the face of a means of death that was designed to render the condemned victim powerless and humiliated and voiceless.  Jesus does not say “people will be drawn to me in my broken state”.  The prayer does not say “his arms were stretched out by the executioner, yet he is a perfect sacrifice.”  Neither the scripture nor the liturgical language which gets its imagery from the Bible will countenance the crucifixion as an event in which Jesus is a helpless and docile victim.  By all appearance, a crucified person does not draw anyone to himself.  And it is the Romans who do the arm-stretching, not the condemned.  So this language is not spiritual sentimentality, it speaks of a great reversal.  In a total indictment of the domination system’s use of power and violence to subjugate and repress, Jesus declares that his dying hours on the cross will be a raising to glory, the very sight that attracts and woos the world to him.  And this is what his death was and is from those at the cross through time. 

A death intended by the crucifiers to enact a stripping of all dignity, even annihilation, is for Jesus an emptying that is the fullness of life.  The worst that the empire can dish out is no match for his infinite capacity for forgiveness.  Jesus is put to death, of his own free will, but he is not conquered, not broken.  He is numbered among thousands of victims of Roman torture, but he does not surrender nor despair.  His saving work continues even in dying; and dying in a way and with a power that makes this active language of laying down, drawing, and stretching the acts of love, through sweat and blood and the horror of forsakenness, is his complete and eternal giving of himself in love to the world. 
Jesus as the one executed absorbs the violence inflicted on him – takes it into his very flesh, thereby exposing once and for all the illegitimacy of the belief that violence can ever be the best or final or even a good response to evil without the violent one becoming the thing being destroyed.  The cross is the world’s sign of future hope, the event of love and victory that prefigures the world that Christ will one day rule in glory.  It is also our present sign of prophetic resistance.  On this Holy Cross Day, we are witnesses to a way of life and death that regards as foolishness and futility much of how the world thinks and speaks and acts. 

Systems, movements, and impulses to evil act within and around us just as they did in Jesus’ day. Our response is to be like Jesus’.  An active, present tense way of speaking and living that proclaims the new reality of reconciliation on this side of the cross and resurrection.  We are not defined by what happened or is happening to us, by the ways others define or malign us.  To live as victims is to deny the power of Jesus’ active resistance.  We are defined by being within the stretched out arms, the loving embrace of the crucified which puts down the mighty lifts the lowly.

Some preach God’s regard for humans as a clinched fist of wrath or a pointing finger of accusation, but Jesus reminds us that we are seen with eyes of compassion, with arms stretched out in an all-encompassing embrace.  So many do not know Jesus in this way.  Many even in the church are caught between the false choices of running from the crises of the world into a spiritual bubble or turning the church into a humanist society that is merely concerned with fixing what it can.  We are drawn to a savior with whom we enter into compassionate solidarity with the suffering – a savior who is also redeeming and will ultimately undo the suffering that is so much a part of our world.  The lifted Jesus, drawing us, is inviting us into a way that faces the pain of the world, of our neighbors, with empathy and hope.  As we draw near the cross, we draw near one who knows and experiences our joys and sorrows, blessings and losses even as he is conquering and bringing to perfection and peace all that would prevent us from knowing the fullness of that love.  Stretch out your loving arms upon us, gracious Christ.  Forgive, restore, and heal us.  Use us, use our arms, stretched in love to our neighbors, to bring peace and hope and justice to our fractured world. Amen.

Holy Cross Day-September 14, 2017

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Robert James Magliula, OHC

Holy Cross Day - Thursday September 14,2017

Robert James Magliula 

In 1098 St. Anselm wrote his treatise Why Did God Become Human? In it he posited the first systematic articulation of the Cross as payment for sin. His purpose was to provide a rational argument for the necessity of the Incarnation and death of Jesus. He did so with a cultural model drawn from his time and place: the relationship of a medieval lord to his peasants. If a peasant disobeyed the lord, compensation must be made. He then applied that model to our relationship with God. We have been disobedient and deserve to be punished. And yet God loves us and wants to forgive us. But the price for sin must be paid. Jesus as a human, who was also divine, and thus without sin, paid the price.

A few hundred years later, in response to this theory, John Duns Scotus said that Jesus wasn’t solving any problems by coming to earth and dying. Blood atonement was never required for God to love us. The great mystery of Incarnation was not a problem-solving technique, or dependent on human beings messing up. The Incarnation was motivated by love. God’s love was infinite from the first moment of creation. The Cross was to change humanity, not a necessary transaction to change God. The Cross was a pure gift so that humanity could witness God’s love. Even though Anselm’s theory of atonement was not central in the first thousand years of Christianity, it became the primary lens through which the Cross, the Hebrew Scriptures, and the New Testament were read. This violent theory of redemption legitimated punitive and violent problem solving all the way down to our own day.

For all authentic spiritual teachers, their message is the same as their life; their life is their message. This strong emphasis on being saved by Jesus’ death allowed us to largely ignore Jesus’ way of life. All we really needed Jesus for was the last three days or three hours of his life. We still resist seeing the Cross as the pattern for life and a path for our own liberation. If we would imitate Jesus in practical ways, our consciousness would move toward love, nonviolence, justice, and inclusivity. Immature religion actually stalls people at early stages of magical and tribal consciousness, while convincing them that they are enlightened or saved. We generally prefer heavenly transactions to our own transformation.

The way of the Cross looks like failure. In fact, you could say that the Cross is about how to win by losing, how to let go creatively, how the only real ascent is descent. On the Cross, Jesus came to give us the courage to trust and live into the divine within us. He modeled it for us in his life and death.

The cross validates the centrality of paradox at the heart of Christianity. There is a cruciform pattern to reality. Reality is not meaningless and absurd but neither is it perfectly consistent. Reality is filled with contradictions, and so are we. Our faith is not a belief that dogmas or moral opinions are true, but a trust that God is accessible to us—and even on our side. Jesus was able to touch and heal people who trusted him as an emissary of God’s love, not people who assessed intellectual statements and decided whether they were true or false. Rational certitude is exactly what the Scriptures do not offer us. They offer us something much better: an intimate relationship, a path where we must discover for ourselves that grace, love, mercy, and forgiveness are absolutely necessary for survival in an uncertain world. God is to be found in all things, even and most especially in the painful, tragic, and sinful things—exactly where we do not want to look for God. We are all participating—with varying degrees of resistance and consent—in the faith journey that Jesus has already walked. All we can do is make what is objectively true fully conscious for us.

Jesus agreed to carry the mystery of suffering and not to demand perfection of creation.
Those who hold the contradictions—and try to resolve them in themselves—become agents of transformation and reconciliation. The insistence on the perfect is often the enemy of the practical and good. Perfectionism becomes angry righteousness. It contributes to intolerance and judgmentalism. In society, it creates ideologies that tolerate no compromise or ability to negotiate. We must try to be peace and do justice, but not expect to find perfection in ourselves or in the world. Jesus was a realist; he was patient with the ordinary, the broken, the weak, and those who failed. Following him is not a means of creating some ideal social order as much as it is a vocation to love the way that God loves.

To bear the mystery of the cross is to agree to find God in a clearly imperfect world. Unfortunately, we would much sooner have order and control. Most prefer beliefs, dogma and perfect objective morality to biblical faith, because certitude allows us to predict and control outcomes, and to justify rewards and punishments. That is not the message of the Cross or the Gospel.
     
The only things strong enough to break open the heart are things like pain, mistakes, unjust suffering, tragedy, failure, and the general unpredictability of life. Life itself will lead us to the edge of our own resources through such events. This reality was brought home to me again and again in our work in South Africa. We must be led to an experience or situation that we cannot fix, or control, or understand. That’s where faith begins. We hear it when Jesus called out on the Cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me” and then totally surrendered into the hands of the living God.

The Cross embodies the way of descent and mature spirituality leads us to enter willingly, into the dark periods of life. Transformative power is discovered in the dark—in questions and doubts, seldom in the answers. Our cultural instincts and ego prompt us to try to fix or change events in order to avoid changing ourselves. We must learn to stay with the pain of life, without answers, without conclusions, and if we are honest, some days without meaning. Grace leads us to a state of emptiness, to that momentary sense of meaninglessness. It seems some form of absence always needs to precede any deepening experience of presence. Desire makes way for depth.

Thomas Merton expressed the doubt and uncertainty we all face in this familiar prayer:

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always, though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

+Amen.

Holy Cross Day - Sep 14, 2016

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

The Rev. Matthew Wright

Holy Cross Day, Wednesday - September 14, 2016

Isaiah 45:21-25
Philippians 2:5-11
John 12:31-36a

The finding of the cross - from the icon cross in our church, by John Walsted

When I was in college I worshiped at an Episcopal parish named The Chapel of the Cross.  The original congregation, started in 1842 without a church building, had been named The Church of the Atonement.  An actual church building would not come until 1848, and when Bishop Ives of North Carolina arrived to consecrate the space, because of its small size he called it a “chapel” and declared “We’ll name it for the deed, not the doctrine.”  And so the congregation was renamed, and the new church became The Chapel of the Holy Cross, later shortened to its present form.
 
“We’ll name it for the deed, not the doctrine.”  Today we celebrate Holy Cross Day, or “The Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.”  A feast day named for the deed, not the doctrine.  What this day actually commemorates is the dedication of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem in the year 335.  Tradition has it that the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is built over the sites of both the Crucifixion (Calvary or Golgotha) and the Burial of Jesus, the tomb.  And it was at the site of Calvary that the Emperor Constantine’s mother Helena unearthed the remains of three crosses.  To discover which, if any of the three, was the True Cross of Jesus, she touched wood from each of them to a diseased woman.  And, of course, when this woman was touched with the wood of the True Cross she was instantly healed.

And so the wood of this Cross was broken up, divided, and spread around the world as relics.  And it’s said that if all of these various fragments of holy wood were gathered together to reconstitute the one True Cross we would find that not only was the Cross of Christ outrageously massive, but also made from the wood of about 15 different kinds of tree.  Such are the miracles and the mysteries of our Lord.
 
“We’ll name it for the deed, not the doctrine.”  We have built a lot of bad doctrine, bad theology, around the Cross.  I imagine that most of you have struggled at some point in your journey of faith with just why this death on a cross occurred, and whether or not it had to happen this way.  Of course, there are the straightforward, historical reasons—Jesus was a threat to the Roman Empire and to the Temple hierarchy.  They saw him as a revolutionary and a blasphemer, and so he was executed.

We could ask Why? and simply stop there.  These are good enough and true answers.  We could stop at the deed and forget the doctrine (and in some ways we might have been better for it!).  But as Christians, we are not let off the hook so easily.  We’re forced to ask the question, “Where is God in this Cross?”

One route that some of our theologians have taken is to think of Jesus’ Cross as a transaction, a payment to placate God’s wrath against us, so that we end up with God the Son dying to save us from God the Father — which sets up a pretty schizophrenic dualism within the life of God.  And it places violence, blood lust, and, as Dom Crossan so eloquently put it, “cosmic child abuse,” right at the heart of God.  This is one route our theologians have taken.

Another route is found in one of my favorite books, the 1933 novel "Peter Abelard" written by Helen Waddell.  If you haven’t read it, put it on your list.  There’s a scene in the novel where Abelard and his friend Thibault find a rabbit dying in a hunting trap.  As Abelard carefully removes the rabbit from the trap and holds it, it dies in his arms.  Heartbroken, he asks Thibault if he thinks there’s even a God at all.  How could God allow the suffering of this little innocent one?

“I know,” Thibault says, “Only, I think God is in it too.” […] “All this,” he stroked the limp body, “is because of us.  But all the time God suffers.  More than we do.” […] “Thibault, do you mean Calvary?”  Thibault shook his head.  “That was only a piece of it—the piece that we saw—in time.  Like that.”  He pointed to a fallen tree beside them, sawn through the middle.  “That dark ring there, it goes up and down the whole length of the tree.  But you only see it where it is cut across.  That is what Christ’s life was; the bit of God we saw.  And we think God is like that, because Christ was like that, kind, forgiving sins and healing people.  We think God is like that forever, because it happened once, with Christ.  But not the pain.  Not the agony at the last.  We think that stopped.”

“Then, Thibault,” he said slowly, “you think that all this,” he looked down at the quiet little body in his arms, “all the pain of the world, was Christ’s cross?”

“God’s cross,” said Thibault.  “And it goes on.”

This is another way of writing our doctrine of the Cross.  Not as a transaction or a payment, but as a sacrament.  As an outward sign of the way God is with-us-in-all-things, down to the depths and the dregs of life.  The etymology of our English word atonement, our word for the doctrine, is literally at-one-ment.  And our beloved 14th century English mystic Julian of Norwich writes of this at-one-ment, following a vision she was given of the Cross: 

“Here [in the Cross] I saw a great one-ing between Christ and us, to mine understanding: for when He was in pain, we were in pain.  And all creatures that might suffer pain, suffered with Him… The love of God creates in us such a oneing that when it is truly seen, no person can separate themselves from another person… In the sight of God all humans are oned, and one person is all people and all people are one person.”

Christ then becomes that One Person in whom we are all held, and in him, all of us oned to God.  Christ on the Cross shows us that God is at-one with the suffering of the whole universe—at-one with my dad dying on a roadside, at-one with the rabbit caught in a trap, at-one with our bodies as they wind down and wear out, at-one with us in everything.  That is the doctrine to which the deed points.

Today, Holy Cross Day, is also the titular feast day of the Order of the Holy Cross.  And every day as I walk through the main door of the monastery here, I see those words above the entrance, “Crux est Mundi Medicina”—“The Cross is the World’s Medicine.”  How is the Cross medicine?  There’s a line from the Sufi poet Rumi that says, “The wound is where the light enters.”  Can we see the Cross as our collective wound through which the light can enter?

The Cross is not only a comfort given to those of us in pain — it’s also the reproach we need, the shock we need, to wake us up — it’s the sign of our own violence, domination, and misuse of power. Huston Smith puts it this way: “Every time we abuse the poor, every time we pollute our God-given planet, indeed, every time we act selfishly, God dies naked on the cross of our ego.”  And so the Cross as our collective wound is also our medicine, our salvation, our opportunity to wake up.  That, also, is the doctrine to which the deed points.
 
There is a Wisdom document that has been important in my own spiritual life, and I’m certain in the life of many of you.  And I want to take our final word on the Cross from this text.  The Master writes:

“The cross is not the symbol of an event which has its place in the distant past, while only the memory of that event belongs to the present.  Rather, it is the witness of a fact of the eternal order—the self-oblation of the incarnate Son to his eternal Father, as full of love and power today as […] on Mount Calvary. […] The whole love of the passion burns in every Eucharist, and we, [Christ’s] servants, are to be kindled with that love…”

These are words from the Rule of James Otis Sargent Huntington, founder of the Order of the Holy Cross.  The Cross is our comfort, the Cross is our medicine, but finally the Cross is the truest symbol of that Love beating at the Heart of the Universe.  A Cross present in every act of self-giving—a fact of the eternal order.  This is what we celebrate today.  This is the doctrine, the Love, to which the deed points.

And if the pieces of this True Cross were to be gathered together, it would be as immense as the universe.

Amen.