Broken Gods

Scripture: Holyrood, A.D. 2014 A

Sermon:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  AMEN.

You all should know by now how very excited I get when we have the opportunity to lift up a Church holiday that used to be a big deal but which, for whatever reason, has been left by the wayside and largely forgotten.  Holyrood is one of those days! It’s a great story.  See, way back in A.D. 326, when the Church was just getting used to not being burned alive or thrown to lions by the government, the Emperor’s own mother, St. Helena, made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land—arguably the most successful pilgrimage of all time! There she found the cave in Bethlehem where Mary gave birth to Jesus.  She found Golgatha, the place of execution outside the walls of Jerusalem where Christ suffered His Crucifixion.  She discovered the tomb in which Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimethea laid Jesus’ Body, and from which He rose on the Third Day.

In addition to all of this, Helena supposedly found the True Cross of Jesus Christ. Skeptics later laughed and the empress-mother’s naïve discoveries, imagining that locals were having a bit of profitable fun with the royal family, offering everything from sponges to thorns while claiming that they all dated back to Jesus’ time. Yet as it turns out modern research has validated Helena’s claims to have found the sites of Jesus’ birth, death and Resurrection.  These latter two were close enough to one another that Helena managed to erect one large church building to encompass the both of them: this became the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.

Holy Cross Day marks the consecration of the Holy Sepulcher and procession of the True Cross in A.D. 355. And despite wave after wave of subsequent invasion, conquest and persecution, it remains to this day the holiest pilgrimage site in all the Christian world. As for the True Cross, it served as Christendom’s holiest relic for centuries, though it consisted primarily of splinters (having been made, after all, of wood).  Today scores of congregations throughout the world claim fragments of this True Cross. Holy Cross Day—Holyrood, in Old English—is a time when the Church ponders the wondrous mystery of the Cross: this tool of cruel execution, used to murder not just the only perfect human being but even God Himself.

Astonishingly, amazingly—through the miracle of Christ’s Incarnation, through His acceptance upon Himself of the consequences of our homicidal sin, and through the glorious Resurrection in which Christ brings life up out of death—the Cross has become for us no longer a sign of terror and destruction but of hope, life, love and promise. Through it, God turns our entire world upside down.  Where the world sees death, we now see life; where the world sees weakness, we discover holy strength; where the world sees brokenness, we proclaim the perfection of God’s self-sacrificing love for us all.  The Cross forever reveals to us an ever-surprising God Who consistently comes to us in the last place we would think to look for Him. As the Israelites in the wilderness looked to the bronze serpent lifted high upon the rod of Moses and thus were cured, so now we look to the Cross upon which our Savior was lifted high for all the world to see—and we are saved.

The Cross even upends our understanding of the Church’s own history.  So often, it seems, we read of Jesus’ miracles—walking on water, curing the sick, calming the storm or raising the dead—and we imagine that these are the basis of our faith. Surely, we think, no one would have paid attention to Jesus were it not for the mind-boggling wonders that He performed!  If somebody walked up to me today and turned vast quantities of water into wine, I might well sit up and pay attention! But in truth we find just the opposite to be the case.  Greeks and Hebrews, as it turns out, were not terribly impressed by miracles.  Miracle workers in the ancient world were a dime a dozen.

Take, for example, Apollonius of Tyana.  He was a philosopher, orator, and wonderworker around the same time and locale as Jesus Christ.  It was said that he had the gift of farsight, could predict the future, and he was even rumored to have been assumed bodily into heaven upon his death. Or take Simon Magus, that old arch-rival of St. Peter, who in great public displays struck men dead with but a word, raised otherworldly spirits, and flew through the air above the heads of an astonished crowd! The Old Testament itself witnesses to witches, necromancers and pagan prophets.  Why, one need look no farther than the Book of Exodus, in which Pharaoh’s palace sorcerers manage by their magicks to replicate several of Moses’ godly miracles.  Why don’t any of these men have religions dedicated to them?  Why don’t we celebrate their births in the winter, their deaths in the spring?  Because, brothers and sisters, the miracles are not the point.

The Early Church was quite blunt about this entire matter: the only difference between miracles and magic, declared the Church Fathers, was their source.  Miracles come from God; magic comes from, well, not God—other, lesser, darker spirits. For the last four thousand years, from Abraham in the ancient Middle East to missionaries in modern Africa, the saints of God have constantly done battle with magicians, sorcerers, and wonderworkers of every stripe. It doesn’t matter if we as skeptical, postmodern Westerners don’t believe in wonders: what matters is that everybody else does.  And though the miracles of God have always outdone the pale imitations of the Devil, nevertheless, the miracles, as it ends up, aren’t what win converts.  They serve merely as signs pointing to a deeper Truth.

In classical Greece, in the time of Jesus and the 12 Apostles, many learned pagans and unbelievers who were otherwise rather well-disposed towards Christianity actually shied away from the miracle stories of Jesus. This wasn’t because they disbelieved them or thought that they were silly: quite the contrary.  They absolutely believed in miracles and magic.  What they shied away from was the idea that Jesus was just another wonderworker, just another sorcerer. “Oh, great, somebody else who can banish demons; somebody else who can quell the storm.  Like we haven’t had enough of those.”  Likewise, the Jews weren’t terribly impressed either.  They had lots of rabbis who could raise the dead and heal the sick. Jesus was just one more Hebrew holy man with a bag of hoodoo.

No, brothers and sisters, what set Jesus apart—what gained for Him first the ears, then the hearts, and finally the bodies and souls of Jew and Gentile alike—was not His miraculous power but the scandalous love of His Cross. Everybody preached a God of power!  Zeus was a god of power; Thor was a god of power; Osiris and Marduk and Baal were gods of power.  But no other God put all that aside, out of love, and took up for us the Cross. No other God wept with us, suffered with us, died with us, even when all of us put together were not worthy of a single divine tear.  No other God ever loved us even when we struck Him, scourged Him, nailed Him to a piece of wood. The Cross is what makes us Christian.  The Cross is what pulls us to Christ.  The Cross is what reveals to us the deepest, truest, godliest love that mankind has ever known.

Now, if I were smart, I would probably end this sermon here and now.  I’ve preached exactly what I wanted to preach: the Good News of Christ and of His Cross. But there’s something more I should mention, even though I don’t particularly want to. And that’s the fact that we recently passed the anniversary of 9/11. I do not like to talk about 9/11 because I remember it quite well. Oh, that I did not. I would’ve hoped that 13 years after the fact America might have healed and moved on.

Yet things are more terrible than ever, aren’t they? Now the world faces a foe far more savage even than Al Qaeda: a foe who has reminded us all what it looks like when innocent men are nailed to crosses and children are put to the sword. 13 years later, and it’s back to Iraq, Round Three. Not to mention Boko Haram in Nigeria, Al-Shabab in Somalia, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in the Gaza strip, the Taliban resurgent in Afghanistan, and utter chaos in Libya. God help us all.

For all that has changed since we watched those towers fall, this much remains the same as it ever was: there are still people, after thousands of years, who think that a true god shows his power by knocking down buildings, by shattering families, by burning the world in stuttering rage. But that sort of god couldn’t make a world.  That sort of god couldn’t even make a friend. It should go without saying that there is a world of difference between a god who crucifies and a God Who is crucified.

Thanks be to Christ, we know Who God really is; we know because He has revealed His true self upon the Cross. God comes to us now as He has always come to us: not in the fire but in the rubble; not with the brutal but with the broken; not aloof in the heavens but down here on the Cross—a sign for us in the darkest of times that Love has conquered death and hell.

Thanks be to Christ, a broken God for a broken world.  In Jesus’ Name.  AMEN.