A Tale of Two Forces: The Feast of the Holy Cross
This sermon focuses on the Feast of the Holy Cross, Grace’s feast day. The living symbol of the cross challenges us to reflect on the transforming action of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. In a time of such uncertainty, we long to find belonging, and the cross invites us to belong to the life of Jesus, who calls us to empty ourselves.
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Transcript
The gospel of the Lord. Praise to you, Lord Christ.
Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast. Save in the cross of Christ my God, all the vain things that charm me most, I sacrifice them to his blood.
Amen.
So when we were children back in Arkansas, there was a county fair. I’ve talked about this at other times, the county fair that came through, and the quality of any county fair that came through our particular county was not high. These were… it was beyond the A and the B team. This was getting way down on the alphabet.
But our parents still, this was, you know, the 80s. This is what you did in the 80s. You just turned your kids loose. And so they would give us money and they would drop us off at the county fair, and we would go and we were just left out in the middle of this cow field, what at the other times of the year literally was a cow field, and they would clear the cows, bring them all of these things, and the poor cows had no idea what was going on. But we would go and we would save up our money, and we would go, and we would eat enormous amounts of cotton candy and all of that, and all of the things that you do. And there was this one ride that I want to talk about this morning, and I want to do a straw poll and see who has been on it.
It was called the Gravitron. Have you ever been on something called a Gravitron? Are you as scarred as I was having ridden the Gravitron? So the Gravitron, for those who don’t know, was a room, like a circular room, and we would get on there mostly with strangers that we did not like, and we paid money to do this. I’m going to keep going back to that. We paid money to do this. We paid money and we crawled and got in this room and you would stand along the wall, and then this person sitting in the middle who was flipping the levers… let that set there… he would flip the levers and watch all of us flung on top of each other at a high rate of speed. The more adventurous ones would try to, what? Remember? Turn themselves completely upside down? Because those were the ones you needed to beware of, the ones who said “this is great!” But this person sitting in the center would sit there and watch all of us and have joy coming from watching everyone flung against each other. Sounds like a metaphor for what we feel a lot in our lives today, this Gravitron.
But then we would get off of the…. And you could always tell the people who had ridden it because they all walked like this. [Grapevine stepping sideways and back.] They all walked sideways and not straight and back. So I’ve thought about this. This is the image that came to me because I thought about physics class. And there’s a particular… that’s such a wonderful example of centrifugal force. You get in there, you’re spun at a high rate of speed, and based on the high rate of speed, it flings you out, it flings you out. Hold that image in your mind, and then I want you to contrast it with the image that’s listed in today’s collect. Open up your prayer, your bulletin, if you will, and look at the collect, the opening prayer, on this Feast of the Holy Cross.
Almighty God, His Son, our Savior Jesus Christ, was lifted high upon the cross that he might draw the whole world to himself.
So this sermon, if it has the title, is called A Tale of Two Forces. And the Gravitron force is that particular warped view of life where everything is thrown out at a high rate of speed. Everyone’s pressed into the wall, but we have this image that we’re given on this feast day somehow of asking ourselves, what does it mean that when Christ was lifted up on the cross, somehow there’s another force at work, and this force draws all life inward, not outward? That’s what I want to look at, what I feel called to look at.
What does it mean? How do we understand this cruciform centripetal, which is the opposite, for those who are more of a science persuasion. There is a centrifugal force that pushes out and there is a centripetal force that draws in. So what this feast day invites us to look at is this cruciform, centripetal force and to ask ourselves what’s going on and how do we understand it, that somehow, in the mystery of what happened on the cross, Christ is drawing all of life to himself?
Now, there’s one way to think about this. There is a certain school of thought that is out in the world that says being drawn in means having a uniform way of thinking about this. It means ascribing on a rational level to a set upon, agreed upon set of doctrinal frameworks. And this is coming from a priest in a church that for a while was the established church. There was a point in time, whenever anyone who came over to the colonies had no choice about what church that you would go to. And at a certain point, when we allowed other denominations to meet, being the gracious Anglicans that we were, we charged them a fee. So you paid a fee. So this is speaking for someone who is the inheritor, in a lot of ways, of an establishment mentality. We know where that road goes, where everyone is expected to sign-on to a certain agreed upon doctrinal framework. And you adhere to that, and that is what belonging looks like, then, is to have to conform to those external doctrinal frameworks. And then the slippery slope, speaking from our own history is that you fuse that with the power of the state. You fuse it. Where the way it is enforced is through the power of the state, and the power of the state enforces it. So you see a fusion there.
Over time we like to think that we have stepped beyond that. But that pressure, that particular way of understanding an inward force still exists in the world. And we’re challenged to name it out loud and to wrestle with it and to ask ourselves “what then does it mean, with this prayer we have this morning, how do we understand Christ drawing all people to himself?” If we’re stepping outside of that framework to say “that is operating on a shallow level,” on the deeper level, we see what it looks like in the text from Philippians. So look at that text. Open up your bulletin to the New Testament reading.
We see what Jesus Himself meant by this in this text. Saint Paul takes the time to write his own experience and reflects on his own encounter, which, think about Saint Paul’s own life, right? He had been Saul, the persecutor of the faith, and had a moment in his life where he was literally knocked off his horse and the way that he saw the world shifted, and he was challenged and had a conversion moment in himself. And out of that, Saint Paul writes this, which, the fascinating thing about this text: this is the earliest hymn that we know of. So when we talk about what did the early followers of Jesus do when they would gather in homes, they would sing this hymn. So if we want to know what the inward force looks like, what it means, what it feels like for Christ to draw all people to himself, it looks like this: that we pattern our lives after Christ’s own life, and Christ’s own life was marked by emptying himself. That’s what it looks like.
It is not adherence to some doctrinal framework that is asserted in the pursuit of power. That is never what it is. What it looks like is to empty yourself, to dare to reflect in your own life and ask, “what about me has an impulse to grasp, to try to control, to try to coerce, force, all of those egoistic levels of our way of being in the world? What does it look like on a personal level and a collective level to empty that? That’s what it means to follow Jesus in terms of the pattern of his life. And that’s what got him ultimately to the cross, where we find ourselves this morning, reflecting in our own life of how we patterned ourselves after that.
So if there is to be a battle, if there is to be a battle, the battle exists on the level of our inner selves. To constantly ask ourselves, “what is it about me that wants to grasp and assert and control right now, and why do I feel that way? What is it in my own life that has stirred this up for me, so that I feel the best thing to do is to assert my way of being onto someone else?” That’s the inward battle that the cross of Christ always calls us to reflect upon. And that’s why it’s so difficult. And that’s why, being the humans that we are, we constantly struggle with that, and we revert back to more shallow ways of belonging, what it means to belong to a group, and our sense of wanting to make meaning in our lives, wanting to find meaning, being drawn to those spaces, to have our own sense of self reinforced.
But that’s not the message Jesus teaches. Jesus teaches that we’re called to empty ourselves. So our challenge always as followers of Jesus, is to ask ourselves this, in this urge that we have to belong, to ask ourselves, “what does it mean to belong to a thing whose essence is to empty itself?” Riddle me that. That doesn’t sell well. What sells well is the more shallow expressions of it. Group-think. Community oriented in a way that you focus on grasping and asserting power. But the cross of Christ challenges us always to name those tendencies within ourselves, to become aware of them. And that’s what we say when we keep going back to these images and saying “our life is our practice.” That’s why we say that our life is our practice. Where we find ourselves, how we order our days, what our rule of life is, how we make the choices that we make, how we where we invest ourselves, what it looks like to share compassion in a world that is so focused and caught up in the assertive power. That’s what the deep soul-work looks like these days. And that’s what we’re called to reflect on.
So to close with this. When it comes to the question of what our soul is, and how we strengthen those muscles of our soul so that we practice our faith more fully, here are words that I would offer:
We have not lost our soul
It is just that our hands
are full, and we needed
to set something down
to hold all we felt
we needed to hold.
We made a choice
as to what we would worship,
and our knees have bent
to the idols we thought
would satisfy our yearning.
Our soul lies on the cool grass
while we dance with anger,
a partner who is never satisfied
until we are consumed,
leaving only ash.
The cruel spirits of rage and revenge,
whose thirst is never quenched,
have no temples for themselves,
but seek out the soft spaces
in our hearts that we must guard
so they never possess
that which is most precious.
Beware their acolytes who only seek
to fan flames of division
for their own profit.
Yet each leaf that rustles,
each crow that calls,
each stranger that smiles
is an invitation to pause
and love once more.
The soul is a muscle
that connects us to everyone
at once, and it must be
strengthened over time
lest we forget who we are.
The paradox is the only way
to make our soul stronger
is to yield our grasp
and listen to Wisdom’s song,
resting in the embrace
that holds all life together.
The Spirit speaks once more:
I set before you life and death.
Choose life.
Amen.