Unlikely Heroes

Some have greatness thrust upon them...

Proper 16a 2014 • SJF • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other Puah, “When you act as midwives to the Hebrew women, and see them on the birth stool, if it is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, she shall live.” But the midwives feared God; they did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but they let the boys live.

One of my favorite television programs is a British program that is broadcast on PBS — no it’s not Downton Abbey, though I enjoy that one too. No, my real favorite — in fact one I have to number among one of the best TV programs I’ve ever seen — is the series Call the Midwife. If you haven’t seen it, I commend it to you as it is well worth viewing. Just remember to have the box of Kleenex handy. It is powerful and moves me, every episode. The series tells the story of a group of Anglican religious sisters and the lay midwives who work in the impoverished east end of London in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Watching the program has been made all the more poignant to me as I learned that our own dear Monica Stewart — God rest her soul — served as a midwife in London during just that time. I had always known her as a registered nurse working in Harlem at Metropolitan Hospital until she retired, but I didn’t know of her earlier career as a midwife working in London until I read her obituary. She delivered over 8,000 children in her career. Who they are and where, now— who knows? But that’s 8,000 world-changing possibilities in whose coming to be Monica played an important part. Blessings be upon her!

Back to the television series: the thing that moves me most about it is the basic goodness of the characters; none of them are great or famous — although Princess Margaret does appear in one episode — and all of them have their foibles — probably including Princess Margaret — but there is a deep and prevailing goodness about them, a goodness that forms their lives as they go about their work of bringing life and saving lives. Their lives are framed towards the good, even if they sometimes falter; and sometimes they reach greatness. They are unlikely heroes.

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So too are the midwives in today’s reading from the opening chapter of Exodus. Things have changed since Joseph served as Pharaoh’s right-hand man. A new Pharaoh has come along, one with a deep resentment towards the Israelites. For these aliens have prospered in Egypt as the Lord had promised Jacob and Joseph. And so the new Pharaoh institutes a wicked plan to keep their population in check — he orders the midwives to kill all the little boys as they come to birth.

This is a haunting foreshadowing of another order by another wicked king, Herod the Great, an order ironically evaded by another Joseph, with his wife Mary and the child Jesus, by escaping to Egypt rather than from it.

Pharaoh gives his horrifying command, and the midwives respond out of their fear of God; for they fear God more than they fear Pharaoh and they have the courage to disobey the king. These women, whose task in life was to assist in the most natural process possible — a woman giving birth to a child — become unlikely heroes. And as the story continues, more unlikely heroes appear: the Levite’s wife (Moses’ mother), who hides her baby for three months before turning him over to his older sister; and then that sister herself as she places him in the river, in that little ark made from a basket sealed with bitumen and pitch, placing him in the river there — and here’s the big surprise — Pharaoh’s own daughter finds the boy, and even recognizing that he is a Hebrew child whose death has been ordered by her father, she chooses to protect him and have him brought up in her own household — ironically giving him to his own mother to nurse — but also in the end giving him a name, a name that will resound through Jewish history and even up to our day, Moses.

Who would have thought that this unlikely cast of characters — and I hope you will note that all of them are women, young and old — who would have thought that they would be the means by which God’s chosen deliverer of his people would be himself delivered from certain death. Without these women, each and every one of them, the people of Israel would have remained in their slavery in Egypt. These women and their heroism is unexpected and unlikely, but marvelous.

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Perhaps, though, we shouldn’t be so surprised. Heroism is not always what you think it is going to be. Who, after all, turn out to be the real heroes? When it comes to warfare, the great heroes aren’t the generals with their famous names; the heroes are the privates and the corporals and sergeants out on the front line risking their lives in the thick of battle, sometimes losing their lives to save their comrades. And I’ve been around hospitals long enough to know — nothing against doctors, mind you — but many of the real heroes are nurses and EMTs and technicians, the anesthesiologists, the nurses aides — all those others who work, quietly, but sometimes find that they are the ones who end up saving a life.

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In the church as in the world there is plenty of room for heroism — there are, as Saint Paul pointed out to the Romans, many different gifts that differ according to the grace given to each. Not everyone is called to be a hero — yet, who knows when the opportunity for heroism might arise. Those Hebrew midwives studied the art of helping women give birth — a noble task in itself — but they never imagined that they would help save the future savior of Israel. They thought their job was birthing babies — not saving nations.

There is a line in Shakespeare’s play, Twelfth Night: “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.” It is the same with being a hero: most truly heroic acts are not performed by those who set out to become heroes, but by ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary situations in which a heroic act is required — and who then respond. Who knows when the gift that is given by God according to the grace of God for ministry, for teaching, for exhortation, for generosity, for diligence, or even for cheerfulness — who knows when such gifts might not, given the opportunity, blossom into heroism given the right place and time.

For there are ministers who serve in dangerous circumstances. Priests and ambulance drivers serve on the front line of battle; there are teachers who persist in teaching what they know to be right even when the authorities want to persecute or prosecute them for teaching science when what those authorities want is a dumbed-down refusal to teach what science offers; and there are students like Malala Yousafzai who persist in gaining an education even when there are some who would kill her — who tried to kill her — because they think girls are not supposed to go to school. Those who persist in doing what is right against such opposition are unlikely heroes, but heroes they are.

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One last unlikely hero appears in our readings today — Simon son of Jonah. Who would have thought that a simple fisherman would become one to whom the Lord of heaven would entrust the keys of heaven? Who would have thought that the man who just two weeks ago sank into the water instead of walking on it, when his fears outweighed his faith; that this man who would go on to deny his Lord three times before the rooster crows — who would have thought that this unlikely and wavering candidate could be a hero? Yet when the Spirit descended on that great day of Pentecost, when the Spirit came down on Peter and the apostles, that is just what he did: he is the one that stood up and would go on to face down the High Priest and the authorities and to proclaim the Gospel, even though in the end it brought him to the cross himself, crucified head-down in Rome.

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And so it is for all of us my friends — none of us here are born great. I doubt if any of us will be called to achieve greatness — but, who knows, who among us may have greatness thrust upon us — by being put in the right place at the right time to make use of the gift which we may have thought was purely practical, purely a useful trade, purely a way to make a living, suddenly transformed by the situation in which we find ourselves into something marvelous. Who among us may find some gift transformed into a way to be a hero and perform an act of heroism?

That’s what makes it grace, my friends. To become a hero is not something any of us should expect or even desire. Let us rather hope that if we are ever placed in the position to make such a use of the gifts that God has given us that we will have the courage so to do — to become unlikely heroes. Glory to God, whose power working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.+

Who Is Your Master

SJF • Proper 20 2010 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.+

In this morning’s reading from the Old Testament, the prophet Amos describes a stampede of greedy merchants who are ready to trample on the needy. So eager are they to sell their wares that they can hardly wait for the new moon to be over or the Sabbath to end, so that they can offer their goods for sale. And even once they begin to sell, they cheat — with false measures and false weights, and doctoring their grain with the sweepings off the floor.

This short passage evokes many memories for me. The first, brought to mind by the verse about the sweepings of the wheat, is of my grandmother’s refusal ever to buy tea in tea-bags — she would only buy loose tea — because she insisted that the people who made tea-bags only used the sweepings off the floor instead of good quality tea. I can vividly recall her shaking her head and clucking her tongue at this minor villainy by the tea-merchants of the world. So it was always loose tea in her home! The irony is that she really didn’t drink that much tea, and far preferred coffee. And the further irony is that the brand of coffee she preferred was actually a mix of coffee and chicory — which itself was originally a root roasted by those who couldn’t afford coffee, and later as a cheap way to stretch your coffee budget! My grandmother, it seems, rejected one economical adulteration only to embrace another.

Second, and more importantly, I have lived in New York long enough to remember the day when stores decided to remain open on Sunday; under the Blue Laws dating back to colonial times — and I don’t go back quite that far! — the merchants were not allowed to trade on the sabbath; fancy that! It was in the early 70s that one of the big department stores — I think it was Macy’s — until then like all stores except pharmacies closed on Sunday, announced that they would be open for half a day on Sunday. The other department stores expressed indignation — but they quickly followed suit — and shirt, and tie, and a second pair of pants! In very short order all of the stores were open on Sunday; and not just for half a day, either. And now, 40 years later, you will even find liquor stores open on Sunday — the last of the old Blue Laws has faded like a pair of old jeans, colorless and threadbare, and torn at the knees — and I can guarantee you not from praying.

The third memory I have is not of merchants but of customers — not sellers but buyers. And here it turns really serious: a matter of life and death. It is the image of that crowd of over-eager shoppers who trampled someone to death a few years ago when a big Costco or Wal-Mart opened its doors for a sale — in this case it wasn’t the merchants who were in a stampede, but the customers trampling on each other — you would have thought they were refugees in flood-ravaged Pakistan fighting over a bag of rice, to see those people desperate to get the latest sale item off those well-stocked shelves in the big box store.

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Now, what do all of these — from the prophet’s curse on wicked merchants, through my grandmother’s rather milder distaste for the cheapness of the tea-companies, to the impatient sabbath-breaking retailers, and the mad rush of customers trampled and trampling in that big box store— have in common? The key is our gospel text, which speaks to the impossibility of trying to serve two masters, and that pointed aphorism, “You cannot serve God and wealth.”

The way I pose the question today is, Who is your master? By “master” I don’t man a literal slave-owner — though some of the forces at work in this fallen world can practically enslave us if we let them. What I’m getting at is, “Who or What controls your life?” What person or institution or entity do you find yourself spending your time serving? “Whom do you serve?” Let’s look at the examples I cited earlier.

Starting with the Scripture: the wicked merchants cursed by Amos are only interested in serving themselves. They care nothing for the poor, from whom they will squeeze the last penny they can get, and sell them adulterated goods at that. They worship at the shrine of the false god wealth, or to use the old Aramaic name, Mammon. Surely, the true God, holy and righteous, will never forget their deeds, as Amos says, nor forget whom they chose to serve instead of God.

And my grandmother, God bless her, whom did she serve with her somewhat unreasonable belief that tea in bags was necessarily inferior to tea in a tin, or that coffee dosed with chicory was better than coffee pure and simple. Was she a slave to these mistaken notions, these fears of being cheated, and by paying a premium price both for tea and supposedly “fancy” French coffee (which was really part coffee and part chicory, and went back to the days of the Franco-Prussian war when the French couldn’t get coffee imports and so roasted the roots of chicory plants instead) in the long run wasn’t she only serving the tea and coffee companies?

And those department stores that first dared to break the Sabbath — of course they might have said they were merely serving their customers; of which they certainly had plenty! But weren’t they in fact serving themselves, by creating more opportunities to reach into the pockets of those customers? Remember, the classic pitch of the con-artist or the scammer isn’t, “I can help you” but rather “You can help me. I need your help.” As indeed you can, if you fall for the scam-artist who tells you she is a poor widow stuck with millions of dollars from her late husband in Ivory Coast and needs your help to transfer the funds!

And what of those who trample each other to death in that mad rush in the big-box store? Who were they serving but the merchants, almost literally human sacrifices to the great god Discount, the golden calf of the cut-rate special — and that cost-cutting yellow Smiley Face begins to look more and more like a leering skull smiling down on the chaos and rampage below?

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“Whom do you serve?” You cannot serve both God and money, God and wealth, Jesus assures us, as a simple statement of fact. A life fixed on bargains, a life spent worrying and being anxious about the things that are passing away, as the collect says: attaching your heart to the things that are passing away; a life spent worrying, “am I being cheated,” even worse a life spent cheating in order to amass gain at the expense of others, or being so cheated, or so set on capturing the last toy on the shelf or the biggest flat-screen TV that you don’t care that you crush another person to death under your feet — what kind of life is that? Whom do you serve? Who is your master?

Ask yourself that question every day of your life, every step of your journey. Whom do you serve, who is your master? Whom do you serve with all your heart and mind and soul and strength? Into whose hands do you want to commit your life, your future, and your hopes? To whom do you owe your very life, your soul, your being, and your strength? Such a one is worthy of your service, and will, at the end of days welcome you, you who have been faithful, even in little things, into the eternal homes.+

Beyond the Call of Duty

SJF • Proper 18c 2010 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Though I am bold enough in Christ to command you to do your duty, yet I would rather appeal to you on the basis of love.+

Some years ago, a mother sought to teach her daughter about stewardship. Before the worship began, she gave her daughter a dollar bill and a quarter, and told her, “It is up to you which of these you put into the offering plate.” All through the sermon, the mother watched her child considering the possibilities seriously; holding the dollar in one hand and the quarter in the other, looking back and forth between the bill and the coin and furrowing her tiny brow in concentration. Finally, when the collection began and the ushers passed the plate into the aisle, the child nodded to herself vigorously. Then with great deliberation she placed the quarter in the offering plate, and sat back with a contented smile. After the worship ended, the mother asked, “Why did you decide to put in the quarter instead of the dollar?” Her daughter responded, “Well, I was going to put in the dollar; but then the priest said, ‘God loves a cheerful giver,’ and I thought I’d be more cheerful if I kept the dollar.”

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Much Christian stewardship, and many Christian stewards, take this subjective view about giving to the church: how does giving make me feel? This is the “If it feels good, do it” school of Christian giving. Problem is that while some people may feel a glow of discipleship when they give generously to the church, too many others — like the child in the story — feel instead a glow of satisfaction at having held on to as much as they possibly can.

Our gospel this morning presents us with another view of stewardship, a view based not on feelings but practicalities: the examples of considering how much it costs to build a tower or to wage a war. This is the “Balance the Budget” school of Christian giving. It does have one particular advantages over the “Feel Good” theory. It is more engaged with the reality of what it costs to maintain a church. But it has a down-side too, in that giving to the church can be commercialized. Just as with the feel-good giver, this view is focused not on God or the church, but back on the giver, as it appears to say, “Yes, I support the church, for what I get out of it.”

In the nineteenth century when this church was built congregations often raised their funds through a true “Balance the Budget” technique. The annual cost of running the church was figured out, divided up, and if you wanted to be a member of this church, you paid a fee based on your share of that divided total cost. And this fee was in a very practical form of pew rental — you couldn’t just sit anywhere you wanted in the church, as we do today. If you came to Saint James Church in the nineteenth century, you sat in the pew you had bought with your annual pew fee, the pew your family rented — that’s why they have those little brass tags at the end of each pew, with a number, and a few of them still with the names of the families. And in those days the church-wardens were the ushers and “warden” carried as strong a sense it does in a prison. If you hadn’t paid your pew rent the wardens would know it; and you would be shown to the back of the church to stand until after the sermon, at which point you would be ushered up here to the seats on the side, where pews used to be before our remodeling; that was the “Peanut Gallery.”

Eventually people realized that this commercial approach wasn’t really Christian stewardship. It was more like the behavior of the Pharisees, who took the best seats in the synagogue. And there was also a growing sense that if people began to think of giving to the church simply as exchange for what they got, a kind of “give and get,” they would come to see the church as if it were just another shop on the street where you paid your money and took your choice, as if the church were a kind of vending machine that dispensed spiritual satisfaction to those who put their money in the slot. Such an attitude transformed believers into customers.

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Ultimately both of these views of stewardship run aground on the astounding statement with which today’s gospel passage ended: Jesus said, “None of you can become my disciples if you do not give up all your possessions.” How shallow both “feel good” and the “balance the budget” look in contrast to that astounding claim that Jesus makes upon us! While some of us here in this church devote a significant portion of our income to the church — the ten percent of the biblical tithe, yet how shallow even the most generous giver must feel in light of that astounding charge from Jesus: “None of you can become my disciples if you do not give up all your possessions.” What is five or ten percent compared to all! Even after we do our part with what we give, most of us are left with ninety or ninety-five percent — or more! So what could Jesus mean by this astounding, ultimate demand?

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We will find our answer to this hard question in the second reading we heard today — one of the longest Scripture readings we have in our worship — almost an entire book of the Bible in a single reading: all but the last four verses of Paul’s letter to Philemon.

This letter tells a deeply personal story of how important this young man Onesimus had become to the elderly Paul as he suffered in prison. And it also shows Paul trusts that when this runaway slave returns to his master with this letter in hand, he will not suffer the penalty imposed on runaways. No, Paul trusts that Philemon will welcome Onesimus back no longer as a slave, but as a brother in Christ; for the slave has become a Christian while with Paul, perhaps even a deacon — as Paul’s words suggest when he describes how Onesimus has served him. Now it is also clear from this letter that Onesimus had not been a very good slave — in addition to having run away, he had been, as Paul says, “useless” — making a bit of a joke out Onesimus’ name, which in Greek means Useful. Upon his return, he will live up to his name and be “useful” indeed as a brother in Christ; he will be more than a slave, not less. Paul assures Philemon that he is not demanding this: he wants Philemon to do a voluntary good deed, not something forced — even though Paul reminds him that he owes him more than he can possibly account for, in that wonderful flourish at the end, “I say nothing about your owing me even your own self” — echoing the teaching of Jesus.

You see, what Paul is saying is that Philemon can have his cake and eat it too! He can have the free service of a good and useful brother in place of the half-hearted work of a useless slave, by giving up the control of being a slave-master over him, in exchange for the cooperation of working with him as a brother in Christ.

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And it is that “giving up” that connects us back with that hard saying of Jesus: “none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all of your possessions.” We don’t just owe God our possessions, after all, but, as Philemon owed Paul, our very selves! Yet Jesus does not say, I’mtaking your life — he wants us to live our lives in service to him, not throw our lives away. So too he doesn’t ask us to “give away” all of our possessions, but to “give them up.” And the difference is suggestive: this is about surrender, not commerce. He wants us to “give up” to him, to “surrender all” to him! It is about our learning how to loosen our grip on what we have, treating it not as something controlled by us, but as ultimately coming to us as a gift from God — as indeed our very lives come as a gift from God’s endless generosity, and he wants us to give them up to him as well. We are called to treat what we have been given, what we have been blessed to possess, with the same kind of liberty with which Paul counseled Philemon to treat his former slave Onesimus, and to do so voluntarily, not under compulsion or solely as doing our duty, but as going truly beyond the call of duty into the realm of the freedom of the children of God — where there are no more slaves, but we are free — free because we have given up, we have surrendered all to God.

We are not called simply to balance the books and pay our share so that we get what we pay for and what we think we deserve. Friends, I can assure you that if we all got what we deserved we would be neither cheerful nor proud!

But when we treat all we have been given — including our very selves — not as “ours” to control any more but as the free gift of a generous God, then we too can find ourselves going beyond the mere call of duty to maintain the church, to the mission of spreading God’s kingdom, the kingdom of freedom, in which all are God’s children.

Yes, it is our duty to maintain our little corner of the God’s kingdom here on Jerome and 190th Street, to do what it takes to financially support this building But we are called to do so much more; we are called to be God’s servants, not slaves working only because they have to, but children of God who work so hard because they love their Father in heaven, and love their brothers and sisters so very much, knowing that everything comes from him as well.

If this spirit of generosity and freedom can fill us all who knows what might happen? Let me tell you one thing. Onesimus the runaway slave remained a Christian. He became so useful in the church that decades later he shows up again in Christian history — as the bishop of the church of Ephesus! Who would have thought that a useless runaway slave could become such a useful servant of God?

When we give up and surrender all to God, who knows what he might make of us? When we go beyond our own contentment and merely feeling good about ourselves; when we go beyond just the call of duty to balance the budget; God will surprise us with his amazing grace, doing infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. To God be the glory, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.+

The Uplifting Low-Down

SJF • Palm Sunday 2010 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
He humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend.+

Some years ago, I heard a voice speak through a window in time. It wasn’t a supernatural experience like that of St John the Divine. It was on National Public radio. It was part of a broadcast of historic recordings — not recordings of famous people, but of ordinary folks like you or me. The recording was made almost sixty years ago, and the man who made it was 102 years old at the time he recorded it — so his voice spoke through a window of time into the middle of the century before last — the time of the Civil War.

Joseph Johnson had been a slave in the American South, already in his teens when slavery ended. He, and his family before him for three generations, had been slaves — his grandfather, Mr Johnson said with a mixture of pride and resentment, had belonged to Thomas Jefferson.

What most struck me about this recording wasn’t the reminisces of this elderly former slave, but the attitude of the man who was interviewing him: his great-grandson. In spite of the number of times he must have heard these stories at his great-grandpa’s knee — you could tell he wasn’t grasping the meaning that they held.

His old great-grandfather kept trying to give him the low-down on what it meant to be a slave, but the younger man just couldn’t get it. When the old man said, “We all belonged to Mr Smith,” the young man asked, “What kind of work did you do for him?” With some irritation, the old man replied, “We didn’t work for him — he owned us! Like he owned his horse or his mule.” The younger man couldn’t grasp what it meant to be a slave. He heard the words, but their weight escaped him. He couldn’t feel the soreness of bent and aching backs, weary, bone-tired arms, the crack of the whip, the cutting curses and insults, or more importantly the total lack of the ability to say, “I’m going to quit this awful job!” — and the deep, deep pain of humiliation summed up in the single word: slave.

He asked further, “Once you were free, did you ever want to go back to being a slave again?” With astonishment audible in every syllable, the old man replied, “Well, some folks might to have wanted to, but not me; to be a slave is to be a dog. You can’t be a man when you’re a slave.” The old man had summed up well what the philosophers say of slavery: it is the loss of self-determination that means so much to what it is to be a full person, it negates humanity by converting a human being into an object, an appliance, a tool to use until it is of no more use, and then to discard. “You can’t be a man where you’re a slave.” And maybe then that young man finally understood what his great-grandfather was trying to tell him.

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Most of us are like that young man. It is hard for us to get the full implication — the ultimate low-down — on what it means to be a slave. And so, when we hear the Scriptures today, especially Paul’s words to the Philippians, the word slave tends to slide over our ears instead of sinking in, like butter on cold toast. Paul said that Jesus, the Son of God, took upon himself the form of a slave — but we don’t grasp the full significance of these words.

So let’s refresh our memories, based on Mr Johnson’s testimony. To be a slave means to have no control over your own life: to be owned by someone else — not just to have to work hard, not just to have to follow orders — lots of people have to do that — but to have your very being rest in someone else’s hands, to have no power of self-determination: to be an object whose very existence is at someone else’s discretion.

To be a slave is to be the lowest of the low — to be at the very bottom of human society. It is to be even beneath human society: to be one step over the edge at which human likeness disappears even in one’s own eyes: as Mr Johnson said, “When you’re a slave, you are a dog.”

To apply these expressions to Jesus Christ sounds scandalous. And it is. This is the scandal of the Incarnation — that the Son of God took that step down, down to the very bottom. It is not simply that the word was made flesh, that God became a human being, but that the Son of God became— among human beings — not the highest, not a king or an emperor, but the lowest and the humblest, one not even considered human by many: a slave, treated as you or I might treat one of our appliances: something bought and paid for, valued while serviceable but dumped out on the sidewalk for collection by Sanitation when it is of no further use. A slave is one with no control over his or her own life, one who is placed at our mercy — placed himself into the hands of fallen humanity — our hands. We just said together those words said by our forebears — our hands were reached out, to “crucify him, crucify him.”

This is a great mystery: that Jesus accepted all of this willingly — for us, for our sakes and for our salvation. At his final meal, Jesus knew that his hour had come, that he was about to be betrayed into human hands by human hands, the very hands that would dip in the bowl with his. Believe me, you don’t want to fall into human hands.

But, as they say in the TV ads, “There’s more!” Jesus would go beyond the mere humility of a servant, even the humiliation of a slave. As the old language of Apostles’ Creed said so bluntly, “He descended into hell.”

Paul describes the step-by-step process in Philippians. The ladder of humility led from God’s majesty, at his right hand, to humanity (just below the angels), to slavery — that so distorts human beings that they are no longer seen as human beings, even by themselves — and then to that final step of death, where being — human or otherwise — altogether ceases. Jesus voluntarily takes these steps, even the final step into the abyss of non-being, the step into death, even death on the cross — for us.

And this is the glory of the cross: that the cross which marks the lowest point to which the Son would descend — that it should be the very means by which the Son would be lifted up, and draw the whole world to himself. This is the glory of the cross: that the abyss of death into which he was willing to descend should be forever patched and sealed by two beams of wood laid crosswise.

The cross is the mark of paradox: that He who Is should cease to be; that the death of one should bring life to all; that the slavery of one should bring freedom to all; that the highest should become the lowest. Only from that lowest point — only from the grave, the pit of death and hell — could Christ in rising again bring all of humanity back up with him from the grave. Only by getting completely under the burden of fallen human nature could Christ lift and carry it. Only by descending to the grave, the place of non-being, only from that lowest point, could he place the lever of the cross against the fulcrum of his death, and raise up a fallen world. Only from the grave could Jesus raise us to new life.

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And all the while the means of this great miracle, the means of our salvation, the cross, stands before us, there above the altar, a representation in brass instead of dark and bloody wood. This is a representation of the ladder on which the Son of God climbed down from heaven so he could be lifted up on earth, and bring the whole world to himself. This is the instrument by which a slave was revealed as the king in disguise; the one deemed no longer human, revealed to be humanity in perfection. This is the tool by which Christ, who took a slave’s form in order to bring freedom, died so that we might live again with him after our own deaths.

We are called to lift high that cross, our standard and our rallying point, the sign of victory in the midst of seeming defeat, the crossbeams that seal the portals of death, the lever the lifts a fallen world, the ladder of salvation. As we go forth today from this place at the end of our worship, to a world enslaved by riches that cannot make one free; to a world that cheapens human nature through injustice, sexism and racism, that enslaves the children of God and binds them in chains of hate and pain; to a world that refuses to recognize and honor love unless it fits its narrow understanding; to a world that is hungry for the good news of Christ but doesn’t know bread from heaven when it sees it; to a world that is dying of thirst while fountains of grace pour from the wounded side of the Lord of glory — as we go forth today at the end of our worship in the power of the Spirit let us lift high the cross upon which he was lifted up, to draw the whole world to himself. +