Sermon for September 14th
Sermon for September 14th
The world is burning. Every day we hope to wake up to the news that things are beginning to steer back the right direction and every day, the news gets worse. There is still no resolution to the conflict in Gaza and because of that, a people are tottering on the brink of extinction. An entire tract of land has been so badly damaged that it would take years of intense reclamation work just to begin to rebuild. Wars in Ukraine, as well as other parts of the world rage on and instead of ending, more simply flair up. How long until the whole world is engulfed in the flame of war?
Our natural world continues to disintegrate, and we can’t seem to stop ourselves from aiding in its destruction. We know, on some level, that more must be done. The whole world needs to re-shift our thinking and change how we live, but we resist change if it means that sacrifice will be required of us. Meanwhile, the beautiful world around us continues to die and soon, there will be no resuscitation.
Our social fabric is badly shredded. Fewer and fewer resources are being made available for those who most need support. We cry out against the growing homeless population, wondering why it continues to grow, but we don’t petition those with the powers to change anything to make the necessary adjustments. We step over the body on the sidewalk, and like the priest or the Levite from the parable of the Good Samaritan, we walk the other way from one of our siblings in need.
We lose hope. We lose motivation. We hunker down and hope it will pass or that the days of old, when things still made sense, would return. But as each day passes, and there is no improvement, the despondency deepens. Or perhaps we sink into denial, as we pretend that nothing is wrong with the world. It may well be our last coping mechanism, so we cling to it with all our strength. Better denial than the truth. The world is burning and there is no part of our life or the life of this world that is not affected.
Into that void of despair, we do the only thing that we can do. We pray. We ask God for a miracle. Make things right. Make things good. Bring your justice to the world, dear Lord, so that your kingdom may indeed come. Take away the horror and the pain and the fires of hate. Take it all away so that we can live in the kind of world where true peace, justice, mercy, and love can exist. Please God, please.
God responds. God has always responded, with something that, as Paul says, is complete foolishness. In fact, one may even say that God’s response is downright offensive. God responds with the cross.
We ask for a miracle and God gives us the cross. We ask for God’s kingdom, and God gives us the cross. The cross, which is an ancient form of torture and horror. It was a horrible and barbaric way to execute someone. It was as much a state sanctioned instrument of control than an effective execution method. It was meant to inspire fear in the heart of the population and to deter them from action as much as it was used to kill a criminal. Perhaps God should just show us the electric chair, or a hang man’s noose, or some other modern, horrific means of state sponsored execution. How would any of those inspire hope? How does the cross?
It is not the cross that inspires hope, it’s the absence of Christ dangling lifeless from the cross that gives hope. It’s the reason I can never really get on board with a crucifix. The power of the cross is that its power has been broken. Christ, who was nailed to that cross and drew his last breath on that cross, is now alive. He is alive because God brought him out of the tomb, out of death and back into God’s life. The cross is powerful because its power has been broken. It now shows us that God triumphs over death. First, Jesus bore our sins for eternity so that we could know love and life and then learn to serve into that love and life, and then Christ broke the power of death by walking out of that tomb. No empire could destroy him. No regime could execute God’s love. It won on that day and made a symbol of state power and horror into a symbol of God’s love, first as a means that set us free and then as a means to give us life.
For anyone who did not know this, the cross would be the most foolish and offensive of symbols. But for the one’s who know, we can see what it truly means. Love. God’s love. Triumphant.
And it is an answer to our prayers. It shows that no matter what regimes might be in place, they will never outlast God. No matter the horrors, no horror can take the innocent from God. Not a single person lost in Gaza, or on the streets of Leduc during a cold winter, nor a person who lost their lives to a fentanyl overdose, is lost to God. Their lives may not have been how God intended, due to a whole host of factors, but they never stood outside God’s love. The man on the street or the innocent child laid to rest in a war zone are equally children of the God who will never be defeated by empire or army. God’s way is the way of love, not the sword, and the way of love, like a river, will find its way forward.
It is an answer to our prayers not just for the future hope and the glimpses of hope in the present, but because we have been made agents of that hope. That love, which we profess to know so well, is ours to share. We may hear that and think we have to tell people God’s story to win their souls, but Jesus, who we are asked to follow and emulate in our lives, was concerned about the immediate, the real, the brass tacks of life. He healed the sick, cured the blind, without caveat, and without any strings attached and we have been “deputized” to do the same because that same love that first claimed us is still inside us. It is still ours to share and for the sake of the world and the hope of all, we need to share.
Bound up in the image of the cross is all of this. No longer a symbol of horror, it is now a symbol of our hope. What it once represented is gone. What it represents now is God’s triumph, God’s will for something better for us all, God’s demand on our lives that we go out as agents of that love to share it to a broken world. It represents that evil does fall, regimes never last, and above all that is wrong and twisted in this world, God will rise, and things will be made right. We have a part to play in this and that t0o is something we cannot forget.
Amen