The Exaltation of the Holy Cross
Isaiah, 45:21-25
Philippians, 2:5-11
John, 12:31-36a
+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
In many ways September marks the beginning of a new year. Everything starts back up after the lull of summer. I've been re-committing myself to Jesus' ministry and mission and re-focusing on our shared vision.
One of the things that got me thinking last week was an article I found while leafing through the latest edition of The Atlantic Monthly. It had some excerpted remarks from a talk ‘on kitsch and the crisis of the West.' The speaker spoke not only about kitsch, but also about how Americans tend to approach religion, and some of it rung true. In our culture, he argued,
religion is . . . about uplifting my religious feelings – I want to be in harmony, I want to be in peace with myself, I want to be in peace with nature, I want peace, blah, blah, blah. But it is not the encounter with God … go to the Old Testament, read a little bit about the prophets. They had an encounter with God, and they can tell you, it's not a very pleasant one.1
Important point for us: encountering God is not always a soothing, rapturous delight. One of the reasons I love this parish is our worship, a place where I encounter God, where I feel peace and calm, but I'd be a fool to limit God's activity in my life to the moving, prayerful grandeur of our worship. When the prophets encountered God, he roughed them up and gave them challenging, stern tasks, things that stretched them, things that forced them to move beyond themselves, things that ran counter to what they knew, understood, experienced, believed. God told Hosea to marry a whore. (Hos 1:2) God told Ezekiel not to mourn when his beloved wife died. (Ez 24:15-18) God told Jeremiah to say and to do things which caused people to treat him as a traitor and heretic; people taunted him and plotted to murder him.
Religious life, faithfulness is not about what we want. It's what God wants. And sometimes God wants things beyond our ability to conceive. God challenges us to think big. God told Abraham, who was childless, whose wife was beyond child-bearing, to leave his family and his country. God promised to make this childless man into a great nation with more descendants than there are stars in the heavens. (Gen 15) God told Moses, a poor shepherd minding flock of his father-in-law, to leave his safety and comfort and to lead Israel out of bondage to the mighty Egyptians. (Ex 3) God told Paul, a zealous Jew, a Pharisee, who had persecuted Christians, to take the gospel to the Gentiles, to become the leader of his mission to the Gentiles. (Acts 26:16-19)
Incredible commands. Incredible promises. This is what God wants – Abraham, you'll be a great nation; Moses, you'll free your people from slavery and lead them to freedom, to milk and honey in the Promised Land; Paul, you'll take the gospel to all of the nations and lead the conversion of the world. Mind-boggling, difficult commands of what God wants.
In Paul's letters, we see him obeying God, asking what God wants, letting God work through him to build up the Church. As for today's epistle, Paul had planted this Church in Philippi, and he was full of gratitude, warmth, prayer, affection, and even yearning for these people; he declared his love for them and called them his ‘joy and crown.' (Phil 4:1)
But all was not well in Philippi. Paul was writing to a community in which there was internal dissension, external opposition, and doctrinal challenges. Church members were pushing their own agendas, their own interests; there was self-serving behavior and pride, and it was distracting them from a strong, unified witness to Jesus. They were also feeling some persecution, suffering injustice from non-Christians. And, they were confused by people challenging Paul's teaching.
This was extremely frustrating for Paul, who was sitting in prison hundreds of miles away in Rome. But Paul didn't despair. He was always hopeful, always confident that difficulties and problems present opportunities for the gospel. He trusted God, trusted that God uses things we count bad for good.
Paul's aim was to strengthen this dear community, to draw them back together, and he did this by quoting an early Christian hymn – the content of today's epistle. Twice a year – Palm Sunday and today – we get this soaring vision of Christian identity. In effect, Paul says, "Let this mind be in you. The cross is the focus of our hearts and minds, what defines all our relationships – with self, with one another, with God." The hymn is about obedience, mutual care, humility, service. It's turning from the grasping of the world to the giving, self-emptying of God. Paul says, "See things in the light of the Cross." That defines Christian faithfulness.
When we look at the Cross and hold Jesus in our heart and know God's love for us, we fill with gratitude, and gratitude casts out pettiness and smallness, the things that hurt Christian communities like Philippi. We look at the cross, today we'll venerate it, and filled with thanksgiving we pray, "God what do you want from me? What do you call me to"?
Over the years, my understanding of what God calls me to has evolved enormously. This week will mark thirteen years here, thirteen years of transformation and growth for me, and I thank God and each of you for that.
My sense of what God has called me to do here has expanded tremendously. I came here thinking that this parish was primarily about worship, and a pretty narrow, limited understanding of worship. I thought other things – like outreach into our community, learning about the faith, building friendships – were secondary, nice ornaments, but not of the essence of spiritual health. How wrong I was!
My understanding of priesthood has expanded dramatically, and it continues to grow. God has blessed all of us so that in recent years we've all learned enormously about becoming a more spiritually healthy church. We now understand that each of us is a minister of Christ, that it's not just the parish priest.
Last Wednesday evening, the master plan committee met to select an architect after a long, intense series of walk-throughs, meetings, presentations, reference checks. On Wednesday evenings, of course, I celebrate mass. When I came in to the meeting about half an hour late, the committee had already made its decision. I hadn't had a word in the deliberations. Three years ago, no way would I've missed that meeting. I was involved in everything, but that's not the way it ought to be. I'm learning to trust and to see God working through every one of us. I've learned from you that we've all got spiritual gifts. We've all got ministries. That's why the vestry cooked up the idea of having a ministry fair today at coffee hour.
Parishes are supposed to be communities where we encounter God and experience transformation together. What God wants from us, where God wants this parish to be five years from now, is to be continuing along this path of encountering him, being transformed by him, growing in spiritual health. God wants us to be deepen our relationship with him and with one another, and that's what's been happening here.
As we become more mature Christians – individually and corporately, we are beginning to grow numerically. In five years, if we're twice our size, we're not going to say, "We've done great. Now that's enough now. We can level off." We don't have a specific goal about growth in terms of numbers. We have a goal about continuing growth for our spiritual lives, and part of our spiritual growth involves spreading good news to more people. It's sharing these joyous gifts of faith and purpose. It's making new friends.
I don't have a twelve step plan about how we're going to grow. I don't know how it's going to happen. Some of it we'll have to work out together, but mostly we have to trust God, to look for his guidance and support, to ask what he wants. It's God that gives the growth. Paul told the Corinthians about their growing church: "I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth." (1 Cor 3:6)
We're here to plant and water, and we do that by living with godly values. We authenticate our worship in our relationships with one another, in the way we live out our Christian values – otherwise our worship is insincere, vain, empty – merely a show. Here's five points about what we're doing, and what we need to continue to focus on.
First, we're outward looking. We don't ask, "What can the church do for me?" We ask, "How can I serve the church? How can I serve Jesus, my friends, strangers?" If we're ministers of Christ, then we're going to make known his love and care for all people. If we were to shutter this church, and no one outside of our parish cared, then it would be a just thing to close the church. Matthew 25 has to be our inspiration and our touchstone. Do we see Jesus in the lost, the vulnerable, the hungry, the stranger, the sick, the prisoner? Are we making a difference?
Second, we're growing in commitment. I am sometimes bowled over by how much time, talent, and treasure people give here and by how much we've grown here. I think of all the training and preparing and investing people have done to get going the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, our superb new child formation program. We are expecting more of one another. We are becoming more accountable to one another. We're willing to take some risks, and we're willing to fail. We're more and more focused on ministry, on service. But we're not doing it for ourselves, but for God.
Third, we're united. And maybe I should just say "we're building strong friendships, a strong community." When Paul says "let this mind be in you," he unfurls a broad banner. There's plenty of room for differing opinions and preferences and styles. I hear people on the left and on the right in this parish telling me how grateful they are that because of this parish they are dear friends with people of different views, different backgrounds, different experiences. It's our humanity that matters, and Jesus unites us. Jesus prays that we are all one, "even as thou, Father, art in me and I in thee, that they may be in us, so that the world may believe that thou hast sent me." (John 17:21, cf. 17:23) Being united witnesses to the gospel.
Fourth, we're open to the different and the new. We can't have much unity or many friends unless we look beyond ourselves. God wants us to look beyond our own experiences so we can be open to others. For many people, church is far beyond their experience; churches can be unnerving, intimidating. You have to be bold and open to walk into a church. We want them to come here and feel safe and welcome. We need them. And how can we understand what it is like for them, unless we're willing to try new things as well?
And, fifth, because we're outward looking and committed and making friends and open to the new, we're full of joy. Staying focused on the big picture, having faith helps us laugh, lightens us up. Being joyful doesn't mean being free of sorrow and sadness. Hardly. It does mean being grateful, appreciating and enjoying the abundant blessings of life, knowing our purpose in life.
The world says we attain joy by grasping. The gospel says joy comes from giving. It's not getting; it's sharing. God exalts us when we give ourselves away. That's the big picture. That's the Christian vision. That's the Cross.
+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
1. Rob Riemen, ‘The Aspen Ideas Festival,' ‘On Kitsch and the Crisis of the West,' The Atlantic Monthly, October 2006.
© 2006 Lane John Davenport
