This Week's Sermons

Sermons for the Month
"Cross Friendly Christians"
DATE: March 8, 1998
SERVICE: Lent II
TEXT: Philippians 3:17-14:1

"To all of you Saints here this morning, grace and peace to you from God our Father, from His Son, Jesus Christ and His Holy Spirit. AMEN

One of my favorite things to do while walking along a stream or a river like the Cuyahoga, is to watch for a certain type stones. As I walk, my eyes automatically scan the shoreline for the smooth, flat variety, the kind that can be sailed out along the surface of the water, hydroplaning in a bouncing, skipping fashion until only inertia allows it to slip into the water and sink to the bottom.

Sometimes it becomes a game to see how far I can throw the stone, or how many "skips" I can achieve when I toss it. Yet, every time I have this experience, I am fascinated by the rings created by the impact of the stone on the water. They flow out from the point of impact, and theoretically, the effect of that little pebble is felt on the opposite shore no matter how far distant it may be. One small pebble, one tiny change, one very minute difference effects changes in an entire life system. Call this the "El Nino" effect, if you will. One current of warm water in the Pacific in September can put a car in California under two feet of water or a house in Florida under two feet of rubble. Weather people call this the "pebble in the lake" or the "butterfly effect." In theory, the air disturbed by the wings of a butterfly can and does change the weather around the world.
Little movements mean a lot in these flowing patterns. In her book Cloudhand, Clenched Fist: Chaos, Crisis and the Emergency of Community (Luramedia, 1996) Rhea Y. Miller, explores the cloudhand movement, a new approach to understanding change and chaos in partnership with the new physics and the new biology. The old science, or clenched fist, is a concept of rigidity; the cloudhand is a concept of reflexity, representing more of what the new science thinks things really are. At the basis of matter, the new physicists tell us, is flow, movement and "crossing." Indeed, it is fundamental to change that there is crossing, and crossing and crossing.
History has shown there is nothing static about the cross of Jesus Christ; it is dynamic, flowing and continual. It moves us between states of suffering to gladness, between creativity to the functional status quo, between participative community and energizing solitude. The startling reality of which Paul speaks in our Philippians text is that chaos, change, the uncertainty principle, the butterfly effect--call it what you will--is the very nature of the cross. The cross is not a static, rigid, fixed, clenched fist: it is a pebble in the lake; it is a crossing and a crossing and a crossing.
Yet, as we all know, our first reaction to change is resistance. And, of course, the cross was no exception. Even Jesus' own disciples resisted the idea of his going to a cross. Peter tried to stop him from going to Jerusalem. Peter knew going there would mean confronting a host of enemies. And that he did. They nailed him to a cross. Resistance won. Or so they thought. Three days later, Jesus rose from the dead. But the resistance did not go away. Indeed, Paul, writing several years after the resurrection, goes on to say there were still many "enemies of the cross" (v.18)
We Christians know, however, the cross is anything but to be resisted. Jesus encouraged the disciples, his followers, US, to take up our own crosses and follow him. We who accept Jesus as our Lord and savior know we have nothing to fear from the cross to the point we can even embrace the cross. Which brings us to the question before us this morning, "How can we make the cross a meaningful experience in our lives? How can we befriend the cross."
According to Miller, Jesus was a "paradigm buster" (116). Jesus spent his whole short life preparing for and then doing all he could to get people to see, hear, think and then do in new ways. He used parables, which depend on paradox, to break through the conventional thinking of his time. "Parable is paradox at work," Miller argues (117). His purpose was to break open the world-view parameters.
Principle among those paradigm shifts that Jesus broke was the idea that suffering and death were final. For him, suffering was simply a gate to another kind of world, another citizenship. For Jesus, when we "cross" into suffering, (I'm not talking about the physical kind here) we are simply preparing for the next move out of confounded suffering into comprehended suffering.

For Jesus, we give up to get.

We release to contain.

We hang on to let go.

We stay prepared for the cloudhand, not the clenched fist.

We cross, to cross again.

We imitate Jesus in entering difficulty with hope. Jesus repeatedly tries to show us that our anxiety about suffering in fact makes us suffer all that more than we need--whereas, the befriending of the cross, and its insecurity and our imperfection, is precisely the highway to heaven.
Too often, we live life by the wrong directions. We go the wrong way on the road. When Jesus says he is the "way" and the "truth" and the "life," he is offering a map. The way is to bust the old matrix and bang in the new. The cross is the way to cross to our "citizenship which is in heaven" (v.20). The cross is "the permission and commandment to enter difficulty with hope" as Canadian theologian Douglas Hall puts it.
Paul invited his readers to imitate himself as an imitator of the cross. He alerts his readers to those who are enemies of the cross. One way to be an enemy of the cross is to deny it altogether. Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the great Russian poet, says that "crosslessness" is the real problem. "Not a cross--it's crosslessness we carry ..." (The Collected Poetry of Yevgeny Yevtushenko, [Premourning Press, 66]). The poet is right. Our problem is not so much the fact of the cross, as our fear of the cross and the change that it brings. We try so hard to be safe that we make ourselves dangerous. We try so hard to have things go just right that we make them go wrong. Paul invites us to go beyond crosslessness to the cross, and then beyond the cross to citizenship in heaven.
The people who live on the corner of Revere and Market are often heard saying things like, "My life is like a soap opera" or "My house resembles the Mir Space Station." Others refer to our presumably normal community as "just another little Peyton Place." We don't need cancer to know the cross. We can know the cross by paying attention to the incompleteness of our own community. The corner of Cleveland Massillon and Copley Roads is rarely as dull as it pretends. When people stand in line at the Acme and hint that " my house is a mess," they may be telling us something more than a housekeeping detail. They may be trying to see if we are capable of knowing their suffering. If we respond to them with love, and grace and openness in depth, we can soon enough find ourselves overwhelmed by the levels and depths of life that are going on. If we act as if we are open to human vulnerability, it will knock on our door. Even if our lives are absurdly dry and clean, those of others are not. We can share a cross if we don't have one of our own. Nothing scares me more than scared people. People who don't face their tears over hungry children or weeping widows, don't face themselves. They can only think about their fear of what they might lose in loving or caring for another. Thus they turn from Jesus, turn from the Way and turn from heaven. "Their destiny is destruction" (v.19 NIV).
Paradoxically, we suffer more when we try to avoid suffering. Denial is a dirty scheme to get us out of life, away from Jesus and into a fictional safety. It is dangerous. It is lethally dangerous--because who then takes up the touch of Mother Teresa, who brings the widow a cup of coffee? Instead of being "touched" by life, we are untouched. Not being touched, or not touching, hurts. We eventually dry up as does the world around us. Without the cross, citizenship in God's kingdom is impossible. Crosslessness hurts us as much as it hurts others. Imitating the way of the cross helps us and goes on to help others. The cross is the road to heaven. The cross is high-touching life.
There is a quirkiness to life and suffering which we cannot control. A sign outside a long established dry cleaners says, "38 years on the same spot." A lot of people are more bored than are suffering. They're like Walter Mitty, hoping God will tap them soon for an important assignment, only to live between dry cleaning pickups and school plays. Where is the cross for those of us who know we are a little dull, those who have been on the same spot for 38 years, trying to get clean or at least insignificantly dirty? Have we forgotten to "crossover" to our true citizenship?
An Akron policeman is accused of killing his doctor wife. A young woman gives birth in a bathroom. A indigent has been convicted of criminal trespass in several schools in the area looking from something to steal. A ninth grader died of a heroin overdose, obtained as he did his after-school job at a local diner. A white university student shot a black university student over the weekend.
I don't say this in a "tsk, tsk" sort of way, which is another kind of denial and avoidance and fence building against the power of the cross. I say this (or try to) with compassion: what compelled them to throw their own lives away? What hurt them so that they could hurt so many others? These sentences are the cross speaking. They are the kinds of things Jesus said to prostitutes and thieves. They can be our words on the corner of Exchange and Main.
First, as cross-friendly Christians, let us accept our own vulnerability. Let us own our scabs and warts. Our own wounds. We are not that much different from the kid who needed approval so much that he took the wrong drug, or the priest who abused his office or the teacher who crossed the boundary between what was his and not his. We are not as good as we probably like to think we are. When we get in trouble, we are going to count on the people who can bear the cross. We may as well put some money in our account now.
Second, let us discipline our eyesight. We can let our hearts be open. The more we avoid knowing or seeing the people on the side roads, the more we associate with the up and coming as opposed to the down and out, the colder and harder our hearts get. We can do what Jesus did: we can purposely walk on the other side of the street, and tracks, from time to time, just to guarantee soft and open hearts, just to discipline our eyesight. Third, let us see the world the way Jesus saw the world. Jesus saw connections between now and later, eternity and today, heaven and hell. Jesus saw the world the way the new physics sees it. He saw it as flow; he saw the cross as flowing between heaven and hell, joy and suffering. He understood the effect of the pebble in the pond, the quiet brush of butterfly wings, the healing of touch, the impact of love, the power of sacrifice and the virtue of kindness.
Finally, let us learn to bend. Yevtushenko said that the problem of crosslessness comes from our being stiff and unbending. "We bend so miserably ..." We can learn to be wrong. It is our habit to be crossless. We are almost adapted to crosslessness. We can learn to look at the world as transformed by the cross of Jesus Christ. When we think that strong is best, we can consider weak. When we think that big is best, we can consider small. When we imagine power as best, we can consider the powerless. These are the routes to heaven. This morning I would invite you to journey with Jesus on his road to heaven. We get there by the cross, and by crossing through life, until we cross over into God's eternal presence.

AMEN