2023-09-11
Brooke Strong
Sermon Text...
September 10, 2023 Hamilton Coe Throckmorton
I Corinthians 1:18-25 The Federated Church, UCC
We live in a world inundated by logos and symbols. There’s the Nike swoosh of victory. The apple with a bite taken out. The distinctive arrows of Amazon and FedEx. All of them conveying hopefulness and progress and happiness. With these products we’ll run faster and compute more easily and have endless merchandise delivered to please us. Energetic, productive, encouraging. What’s not to like!
And then there’s the symbol at the heart of Christian faith. The cross. The foolish cross! The apostle Paul’s word, not mine. Who wants it as the centerpiece of anything? Defeat, ignominy, death—that’s what it’s about. Nobody’s idea of a good time. I suspect most of us would jettison it in a second if we could. Find something more uplifting, more elevating, more inspirational—a butterfly, maybe, or a rose, or a rainbow. Something that doesn’t reek of defeat and disgrace. Something that makes us feel better. Something that doesn’t have the stench of death emanating from it. The cross: such a foolish symbol of faith!
And yet, there it is, the focal point of our worship space, the adorning design of much jewelry, the unavoidable image that pops up all over. And while you might think it would be fine to reflect on this cross on any other Sunday, isn’t it just a tad tone-deaf to do so on Rally Day, of all days—this day of hope and joy and new beginnings? Ugh—not the cross, not today!
And yet, maybe there’s something in that foolish symbol that reminds us of what’s really at the core as we gather again to begin a new church year together. Something that draws us back to who we most truly are as people of God. Something that upends some of our common assumptions and calls us back to the center.
Because the odd and disconcerting fact is that, as human beings and people of faith, we seem to have an unnerving proclivity for going off the rails in both our daily priorities and our sense of who God is. As football season begins again, it’s tempting, for example, to think that the meaning of life lies in victory and defeat. At the level of our games, of course, rooting for victory may be an innocent enough endeavor. Maybe we’re at least marginally happy with a Buckeyes victory yesterday. We’re hopeful about a Browns win this afternoon. We appreciate the excellence that goes into a well-played game. We have a sense of connection with other fans. Achievement and community matter.
The competition that thrills us on the gridiron, though, can seep so easily into other realms of our lives and sometimes poison the waters in which we figuratively swim. We may think of our business as a place whose success demands defeating others. We take SATs hoping to be better than other high school juniors and seniors. We hope to beat other home buyers when we make an offer on a house. At work, we angle for a position that we know others want, as well. A sibling seems to get way more attention from our parents than we do and it irks us. The terms of a parent’s will make us feel second-rate. Our own investments haven’t panned out the way a friend’s have. Our garden or our boat or our ski vacation doesn’t stack up to our neighbor’s. Our children haven’t racked up the honors that our co-worker’s children have. This sort of competition is insidious and it can infect nearly every dimension of life. Who of us is immune to the fear of getting the short end of the stick and the desire to make out better than everybody else?
In countless arenas of life, we want to win. And the cross is, in a sense, God’s way of saying, ‘All those victories that you crave are not really what I’m about. I didn’t rescue Jesus from death, and I’m not going to make your team win, or ensure the success of your business or give you stellar SAT scores or guarantee any other victory you may be pining for.’ From one angle, the cross is a huge let-down. It’s the place of massive defeat. It’s God’s way of saying, ‘I’m not in the business of making your wishes come true.’ The sobering truth of the matter is that we have so often thought that was God’s work—to heal us when we ask, to save our rocky marriage, to give us the promotion we crave, to let us win the bidding war on the house. So the disappointment among so many people is that God apparently doesn’t answer their prayers and give them their hearts’ desires. The cross is effectively the end of that dream of God’s manipulating the victories and the results we want.
The cross, though, is nevertheless full of incalculable wonders. It isn’t just the symbol of the thwarting of our desire for a thousand magic rescues. While God may not be intent on checking off everything on our “Honey-do list,” the cross is instead God’s little love note to us. It’s a reminder that God isn’t sitting in some heavenly command post picking winners and losers. God doesn’t pat us on the back when we win and turn a cold shoulder when we lose. God isn’t busily trying to decide if we measure up enough to give us a reward. God is in the business simply of love. Among an unfathomably rich panoply of assurances, the cross is God’s way of saying, ‘Through the worst that life can do to you, I will never leave your side.’
When Jesus dies on that cross, the shocking scandal is that God doesn’t rescue him. God doesn’t pull a Hail Mary and scoop Jesus up from death just in the nick of time. For Jesus’ contemporaries, this was a massive let-down. It was utter foolishness. Which is why the apostle Paul calls the cross a scandal. This was, to all appearances, a travesty, a betrayal of what people thought was God’s proper role. God’s supposed to be the victor, we think. God is supposed to make everything right.
Instead of a rescue, though, what God does is walk with Jesus through that dying and death. That sort of divine accompaniment may sound on the surface pretty paltry and inadequate. But it’s actually the most radiant gift God could possibly give.
What God wants for you and me isn’t victory, as tempting as that may be to us. God isn’t eagerly calculating how to reward the winners and punish the losers. God isn’t sending us a list of all the ways we need to measure up and then checking off our progress on some divine spreadsheet. What God wants for us is only to wrap us in arms of tender love. That is it! That is it! Did I mention that that is it!
Most of us think being right with God is about our measuring up, our toeing the line, our meeting the holy expectations. “I was a good boy, so God should be good to me.” “I bombed on that important task, so I may well be punished.” That’s what makes sense in our world. We think we’re rewarded or punished based on our successes and failures.
The cross, though, says, ‘That’s lightyears away from the way God actually operates.’ God’s affection is based not one little iota on anything we’ve done or not done. Some 700 years ago, the great mystic Meister Eckhart said, “It is a lie, any talk of God that doesn’t comfort you” (quoted in Gregory Boyle, The Whole Language, p. 1).
The Jesuit priest Gregory Boyle says, “If our God makes us feel unworthy and in debt, wrong God. If God frightens us, wrong God. If God is endlessly disappointed in us, wrong God. . .. God roots for us more than calls the shots. . .. This God says, ‘You got this’ more than ‘Do this.’” (Boyle, p. 4). The God of the cross is the God who encourages us, who affirms us, who gazes at us with unrestrained affection and joy. All of us. All the time.
The deepest truth of the matter is that, with the cross, God says essentially, ‘It is not my way to extract you from your misery. I have no intention of magically removing all pain and challenge. This is what I will do, though: I will be right there with you as you go through it.’ Just as God never left Jesus during that gruesome scene of crucifixion, so God never leaves us when life falls apart and all seems lost.
Boyle tells the story of when his ninety-two-year-old mother was dying. She was ready, even eager, to die. “The day before she died,” says Boyle, “I was alone with her, . . . and she was asleep. When her eyes opened and she saw me there, she scowled. ‘Oh, for cryin’ out loud.’ And she closed her eyes. She was [ticked] . . . that she wasn’t dead yet. . . [T]he next day . . . I was alone with her again, sitting at the foot of the bed. At exactly noon, she opened her eyes, lifted her head some, let out a glorious, wondrous gasp . . ., and she left us. And no one within earshot of the sound would ever fear death again.
“During those last weeks, one or two or six of her kids would be keeping vigil around her bed, and she’d be in and out of consciousness. When she came to, she’d lock [her gaze] onto one of us and say with breathless delight, ‘You’re here. You’re here.’”
And Boyle says this is the way God is with us. God says to us, “‘You’re here.’ God meets our intensity of longing with [God’s own] intensity of longing. Turns out, the Tender One whom we long for, longs for us” (Boyle, p. 2). As contemporary mystic Mirabai Starr says, “Once you know the God of Love, you fire all the other gods.” And Gregory Boyle adds, “It is always hard for us to believe in the nonjudgmental, loving, and merciful God, and yet, that is the God we actually have” (Boyle, p. 7).
That nonjudgmental, loving, merciful God is One who comes to us not as the genie assuring our every victory and granting our every wish, but as the One who accompanies us through the “valley of the shadow of death” (Psalm 23:4). God stays with Jesus throughout that whole terrible ordeal of the cross. And it’s that accompaniment, that allyship, that redeems the suffering and shines forth in resurrecting power.
When we stop to take it in, I suspect this is what many of us know at our core. When we know ourselves to have been accompanied in our agony, we know the beauty of God’s power to make whole. Many years ago, when I was just out of college, my longtime girlfriend and I broke up. I was devastated by the end of that relationship. For reasons I can no longer remember, my father came to pick me up in Boston, where I then lived, to drive me to my parents’ home in Maine. Shortly after we got in the car, as we drove along Storrow Drive heading north, I started to cry. And my father, sensing my pain, reached his hand over and gently grabbed mine. And he just held it. Silently we drove out of the city. And I knew that he knew my pain. He couldn’t solve my problem, and didn’t try. But he could accompany me. In the sorrow of my own cross, my father was present with me. And it was just what I needed. Walking with me through the sorrow.
So as we gather here on this Rally Day, looking at this cross that is the architectural and theological centerpiece of Federated and Christian faith, we’re being greeted by God at every moment with those lovely, inviting words: “You’re here. You’re here.” And our job, as precious children of this God, is to embrace everyone we meet in a love that will not let them go. It’s to look at them with eyes that say silently, gleefully, “You’re here. You’re here.” At the heart of our life together this year is the opportunity for us to be vessels of that love, in our families, at our workplaces, and here in this beloved community of faith. May it always be so.