Upside-Down

Scripture: Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 24), A.D. 2015 B

Sermon:

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

You don’t often see the image of a cross turned upside-down. In some circles it’s considered sacrilegious, even satanic. In reality, however, it is an ancient and rather highly regarded Christian symbol. Indeed, the inverted cross is one of the oldest signs we have for St. Peter the Apostle.

After the Resurrection of Jesus, Peter went on to become one of the most prominent Christians in history, preaching, teaching, and healing the sick. He is also considered the first bishop of Rome—the city that killed him. Around 30 years or so after that first glorious Easter Sunday, a great fire ravaged the heart of Rome: a fire which, some suspect, might have been set by the mad Emperor Nero himself. Not that he was about to take the blame, mind you.

No, no. What he needed was a scapegoat, a sacrificial lamb. And who better to take the rap than the Christians? Christians were pacifists, after all, and nobody ever stepped forward to defend them. Indeed, he’d be stupid not to blame them. And so the Christians under Nero were burned, beheaded, thrown to lions, all that.

Now the story goes that Peter, being no fool, managed to see the storm coming and slipped safely out of the Eternal City. Yet on the road of his escape, whom should he come across traveling back the other way, but a vision of the Risen Christ! And this is when Peter asks his famous question, “Quo vadis, Domine?” “Where are You going, Lord?” And Jesus says to Peter, “Why, I’m going to Rome to be crucified again.” Realizing what this means, Peter immediately turns around and runs back to Rome, rejoicing and singing songs! 30 years after Peter denied the Lord and abandoned his God to crucifixion, 30 years after that horrible cock’s crow, Peter will not deny Christ again. No. This time, Peter will join his Lord in both death and Resurrection.

And so Peter is seized by the authorities and nailed to a cross—but for whatever reason, he is crucified upside-down. At his own request, apparently! Now why, do you suppose, would Peter choose to be executed upside-down? Some say it’s because such a death would have been quicker. The blood rushes to your head, you lose consciousness, and all that. Others claim it’s because Peter did not consider himself worthy to share in the same sort of martyrdom as Jesus Christ. But traditionally, that’s not why he did it.

Traditionally, when Peter was nailed to that cross, he said to those around him: “Every man, from Adam to this very day, has entered this world head-first, so that left seems right and up seems down. But the pivot of this cross is the repentance, the turning point, of humankind, and now I see the world aright.”

The whole world is upside-down! Peter said. And only in the Cross can we see as Christ sees, as God sees—only in the Cross can we see Creation set right!

The whole world is upside-down. Lord, if that isn’t the truest thing I’ve heard in years.

In our Gospel reading this morning, brothers and sisters, Jesus asks His disciples who they say that He is. And Peter steps forward on behalf of the Twelve and boldly proclaims: “You, Lord, are the Messiah, the Christ, the Anointed One of God!” Now keep in mind that at this point in history, the Jewish people have been waiting nearly a thousand years for God to send the Christ to His people.  They have been expecting the Messiah to free them from their bondage, to reestablish the greatness of Israel, and to cast the heathens and the pagans out of the land! Every good Jew knows Who the Messiah is and what He’s going to do when He gets here—or at least, they think that they know.

But when the Apostles confess to Jesus that they know He is the Messiah, Jesus reveals to them exactly what is going to happen to Him, and it is not what they want to hear. Jesus does not speak of glory or honor or great righteous battles. He does not speak of deliverance or salvation in any terms with which they are familiar. Instead, Jesus tells them what He knows to be true: that humanity won’t be able to handle the Truth of God’s mercy and forgiveness; that the Christ will be rejected and ridiculed and made to suffer horribly; and that, ultimately, God’s own people, God’s own beloved children, will nail their God to a Cross and murder Him.

Just imagine if this were how great leaders and prophesied generals spoke today: “All right, men! Here’s what we’re going to do! We’re going to find the enemy! Hunt him down! And then we’re going to tell the enemy that, in fact, we love him, we forgive him, and wish to reestablish a godly relationship with him! At that point, as you can imagine, the enemy is going to bayonet us but good and gut us like a fish! But don’t worry; it all works out in the end. Now who’s with me?”

Peter, at this point, is still a young man in his mid-thirties. And he knows crazy talk when he hears it. He pulls Jesus aside and rebukes Him—scolds Him! Tells Him to get His Messianic head on straight, because the boys are going to think He’s nuts. What’s with all this talk about suffering and dying? That’s not what we waited a thousand blasted years to hear! Nobody wants to hear about a suffering God, a broken God, a cripple-God. Who the heck would want some lousy God Who up and dies on them anyway?

But Jesus whirls on Peter and slaps him right out of his prideful delusions. “Get behind Me, Satan!” Jesus snaps. Who are you, to think that you define what God is like? Don’t you see that everything you think is divine—power, battle, honor, glory—that’s not what matters, that’s not what God values. Up is down, Peter! This world of yours is so broken and so twisted that you can’t even tell the difference between what’s human and what’s truly divine.

Peter just doesn’t get it. How can he? He hasn’t seen the Cross yet. He hasn’t seen the flog and the nails. He hasn’t seen a God Who so loves the world, so loves His children, that He’s willing to let them murder Him rather than resist their evil. Peter hasn’t seen the Love that overcomes thousands of years of hatred and brokenness. He hasn’t seen the Life so pure, so selfless, so impossibly holy, that it will rip apart the walls of Hell and break the spine of death itself. Peter hasn’t seen the Resurrection. But he will. And for him—for all of us—it will change everything. It will flip the world on its head. It will turn that Cross upside-down.

The world believes that our God has things backwards. The world puts no value on the poor or the broken or the weak. The world views the elderly as a burden, the crippled as useless, and children as primarily a source of pollution. The world values strength, power, industry, independence, and wealth. And the world wants a god who lives up to those values—a god whose priorities include gold and guns and victory in battles, be they economic or cultural or kinetic. The world measures success in the size of your house or the degrees on your wall or just in how mercilessly and mockingly you crush your opponents.

But the world is wrong. Our God—God of the slaves, God of the poor, God of the weak—the God Who forged the stars and pulled up the mountains and poured out the sea—is the same God Who comes to us in weakness, in suffering, in failure. Everybody wants a Thor or a Zeus or some other barbaric god of strength when they think themselves heroes or conquerors or captains of industry. But those things aren’t divine. True divinity is the God Who lays aside His crown out of love—lays aside His glory and imperishability and loftiness to meet us in our suffering and to promise us that we are not alone, we are not forgotten, and that our God will not let tragedy or loss or pain or despair ever have the last word.

That’s the God we need when we have cancer. That’s the God we need when our families are troubled. That’s the God we need when our kidneys fail or when our jobs disappear or when the doctor tell us we have Parkinson’s: the God Who says, “I AM with you in this. I will not abandon you to this. And I swear, by My own sacred Blood and Life, that this is not the end. I will set it right. I will bring you, healed and whole, to the Resurrection in which I have shared.” Now that, brothers and sisters, is a God—the only God, in my book, worth worshipping.

Today we celebrate something that the world might think is small and silly. Today we celebrate our children, and the promises God gives to them. I don’t know that Sunday School is taken too seriously in the halls of power or of industry. But God, dear Christians, takes nothing more seriously than our children and the love He shows to them through us. And if we, as parents or as teachers or simply as beloved children of God, pass on nothing else but this, let us teach the next generation what Christ taught to Peter:

“The whole world, dear children, is upside-down. But in Jesus’ Cross, we are set aright.”

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.