Sermon notes from 3/13/22
Every day, there are new stories and new images from the war in Ukraine. Every morning, the newspapers run fresh pictures of terror, the latest timestamped video footage of explosions, perhaps a merciful portrait of someone’s unique courage or resilience, but always in over against another terror of the day. There is an image from the war from last week, maybe the week before, that I cannot unsee. It is a picture of a town square in the Ukrainian city of Lviv. It shows the gray cobblestone of the open walkway in front of the cathedral there. There is a newsstand in the background. An archway. Two people walking together. The edge of a parked car. But in the center of the image stands a crucifix. There is a cross built from massive, simple wooden beams, and upon the cross is a corpus - the figure of Jesus, broken in crucifixion and gazing downward at the stone below. The whole of the cross is about four times the height of a grown adult man, and one can know this because in the picture, the Cross does not stand in the cobblestone square on its own.
There is a man there. We cannot see his face because it is bent forward, resting upon the beam. His forehead presses up against the wood. But we can see that the man has white hair. His clothes are simple - black pants, a black jacket. And his arms are stretched out into a circle, embracing the whole of the beam. A grown, adult man, presses the whole of his body against the wood of the Cross, clinging to its base as a small child clings to a mother’s knees. His hair is white, but his posture - his need and his love and his sorrow - is a posture beyond age and space and time.
It is this image that I find burning behind my eyelids as I read the words of Saint Paul to the Philippians this morning. He warns them: “For many live as enemies of the cross of Christ; I have often told you of them, and now I tell you even with tears.” Now, when you read the letters of Saint Paul and think about them in aggregate, looking at them all together, it becomes clear that when Paul writes to the Philippians, he is writing to beloved friends with whom he is well pleased. Philippi was like many of the places where the earliest churches took root: diverse, centrally located along trade routes that connected the major cities of the Roman Empire, marked by conflict, division, and interreligious dispute. But the Philippians, we know from Paul’s letters, were generous of spirit and resources. Even though many of their number were poor, they sent money along to the even poorer church in Jerusalem. Paul delights in them, even here calling them marvelously “my joy and my crown.”
But Paul worried greatly about those he called “the enemies of the Cross of Christ.” It is important to note that he is not talking about pagans here. Everybody knew that the pagans were enemies of the Cross of Christ - there was no pretense there, that’s a whole separate situation. But here Paul warns his hearers about a distinctly different problem popping up among those who allegedly hope to follow Jesus. Because in the first century of the church - not unlike all other centuries of the Christian faith since the very beginning - there were some people, calling themselves Christians, who liked very much what Jesus had to say about many things but did not want to think about the Cross. Some denied that Jesus was truly resurrected, believing him only a moral teacher, perhaps a prophet. Some wanted to forget the Cross entirely, focusing only on the resurrection and hoping to ignore the means by which it was achieved. The Cross was difficult to think about. Messy. Devastating. A sign of weakness and a mechanism of terror. Not exactly material for happy evangelization and tidy invitations to come on over to the church in Philippi and submit your pledge.
These philosophies are enemies of the Cross. Paul’s warnings are not about judgment or hopeless condemnation, but about a passionate love for the followers of Jesus to whom he writes. And - I like to think - his passionate love for those who read him still, including each of us. He wants them to know the truth. He wants them to recognize that they deserve the fullness of the Gospel. He wants them to know and believe in the extraordinary plenitude of the paschal mystery, and this plenitude can only be seen and known and believed through the reality of the Cross. When Paul warns of the “enemies” of the Cross, he is exhorting those who hear him to instead become friends of the Cross.
We think sometimes about being friends of Jesus who tells his disciples, “no longer do I call you servants, but friends.” But Lent is as good a time as any to remember, too, that our Christian call to friendship with Jesus is a call to friendship with his Cross.
The Gospels tell us that when Jesus died upon the Cross, the veil of the temple was torn in two. The veil separated the innermost chamber - the Holy of Holies - the resting place of God in the Arc of the Covenant - from the rest of the temple. The veil marked the dividing line between the human and the divine, the earthly and the heavenly. It was only the high priest, and only on one day of the year, and only after rigorous ritual purification, only he could move beyond the veil.
And then the veil comes down. The Cross was the end of the barrier, both material and cosmic. The Cross is the repairer of the breach. The Cross is the place where even the most unimaginable depths of human failure, sin, and terror are brought within the perfect and unutterable mercy at the heart of God. The beams of the Cross extend beyond Golgotha to plunge even unto the greatest darkness: grief, death, our gangrenous human proclivity to cling to the mechanisms of our own destruction, even hell itself - all of it purged by this wooden hinge upon which the whole of history turns and turns and turns - always, irresistibly, towards God.
The Cross stretches out across every impossible thing. It is the bridge between hatred and forgiveness. It is the flowered path that spans the distance between condemnation and mercy. It is the arms that reach down over the cliff and pull us back to solid ground, arms that fold around us - even in our most wretched guilt - and wipe our tears and smooth our hair and clear our eyes and rock us gently, sweetly back to sleep. The Cross is the bridge between life and death. It is the ultimate, unconditional assurance that there is no terror beyond God’s triumph.
And so we are called to be friends of the Cross. We are called afresh during Lent to draw near to salvation: all of it. The whole thing. Jesus in his life, his teaching, his Passion, his death, his Cross, and the fullness of the Resurrection that came all the way through the annihilation of iron, wood, and blood.
The Cross is not our stumbling block, but our gateway into the fullness of the Gospel of Christ. We are meant not to fear it as an enemy, but to embrace it as a friend. To stand below it, with Mary and with John, trusting in the One who gazes down upon us. We are meant to fold our own arms around it. We are meant to press our foreheads to its surface. We are meant to let it hold us up - in our mornings of exhaustion, in our midnights of worry, in our secret heartbreak and hidden shame - even in the middle of a cobblestone courtyard in the shadow of a cathedral in a city under siege.
The Cross stretches out across every impossible thing.
Preached by Mother Brit Frazier
13 March 2022
Saint Mark’s, Locust Street, Philadelphia