| Rev.
Aman Abhishek Prasad
St. Paul’s Church, Agra
We’ve not only kept a cross in our
sanctuary, when Lent arrives we take out
the stylized brass one and bring in an old
rugged cross. It fills up the front of alter.
We drape it in purple for the days of Lent,
change it to black on Good-Friday then surround
it with flowers and go to a white bunting
on Easter to remind every one that out of
death came new life, from the cross God
brought about resurrection. As you may know,
some of the young, mostly suburban, non-denominational
churches have removed the cross from worship.
In efforts to appeal to the new American
sentiment, according to this line of thought,
they have worship centers not sanctuaries,
victory centers not churches, stadium seating
instead of pews and a podium and movie screen
instead of a chancel with a cross. The cross
is “out” from that perspective;
it is an old symbol and one with a rather
nasty history, what with the days of the
Roman’s crucifying bandits, dissidents,
murderers and religious leaders labeled
dissidents. Who wants to remember that ?
George Carlan used to make fun of Christians
in one of his routines, wondering if we
would be wearing electric chairs around
our necks if Jesus had come at a different
time and a different place. He meant it
as a joke, a bit of biting humor at the
absurdity of turning an item of capital
punishment into jewelry. I’ve always
thought that the point is well taken: the
cross was in fact a sign of violence; it
was a tool for torture and execution, intentionally
public as a way to scare the masses into
submission. Then Christians turned
The symbol on its head and the crucifix
became a sign of sacrificial love and the
empty cross (common in Protestant churches)
a subtle sign of the resurrection; the reality
of death yet Jesus not present but risen
not held down by death, God, not Rome having
the last word.
We’ve kept the cross. Jesus said
that he would travel that road and Peter
better not stand in his way. He also said
that his followers would have crosses to
confront, crosses to bear and that life
somehow travels through death not around
it, that losing a life is part of gaining
one. Yes, we’ve kept the cross in
our church, the cross that towers over the
wrecks of time. Welcome to a church, to
a faith that can deal with death and proclaim
life.
Jesus said that he would suffer. He also
said that following him would include a
cross. The Apostle Paul announced that we
preach Christ crucified noting that this
was “a stumbling block to Jews and
foolishness to Gentiles.” (1 Corinthians
1:23).Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who we are inviting
into the sermons this Lent, wrote, “When
Christ calls a man, he bids him come and
die.” All a bit tough; hardly, at
first glance, what one would call good news.
As you might well expect, I am asking you
to take a harder look.
First, let me offer a word of what this
emphasis on the cross is not about. It is
not about the glorification of suffering
and it is not about any form of self-destruction.
God knows, there is plenty of suffering
to go around and the broad sweeping story
of the Bible is one of freedom and life
for the people of God. Jesus spent an inordinate
amount of his time healing and freeing,
relieving hurt and eliminating suffering.
The cross is not about the glorification
of human suffering. What it is about is
a confrontation with suffering and the promise
that God brings life out of death.
We are near the heart of faith. For the
Christian faith is all about new life, life
emerging from death. It all spins on Easter,
in fact, every Sunday is a mini-Easter for,
on the first day of the week, while it was
still dark, the women went to the tomb.
They went, expecting death and they found
life. It is all about new life, life emerging
from death.
A related theme is the grand story of the
Hebrew Bible, namely that God moves people
from one life to a new one. From Abram to
Abraham, from slaves in Egypt to free people
in the promised land, from no people to
God’s people, from no one to some
one, the some one found within the mercy
of God. So Abram caught religion and took
on a new name. And Sarai got a new name
and a baby to carry on the name. And, just
to make the story all the better, their
ages are wildly exaggerated so that we could
imagine the walker being traded in for a
baby carriage. Talk about new life; God
gives it in dramatic ways.
But the new always means a shedding of
the old. That’s why death is part
of the story, part of the experience. When
Bonhoeffer wrote: ‘When Christ calls
a man, he bids him come and die.”
He continued:
It may be a death like that of the first
disciples who had to leave home and work
to follow him, or it may be a death like
Luther’s (he is speaking of Martin
Luther, the 16th Century reformer), who
had to leave the monastery and go out into
the world. But it is the same death every
time-death in Jesus Christ, the death of
he old man at his call .(The Cost of Discipleship,
P.89-90)
You know this, I’m sure. Throughout
life you have needed to die and to say goodbye
to one phase in order to enter into the
next. We say goodbye to childhood and enter
into adult lives. In our culture this is
all a bit vague for children come to age
biologically speaking around 13 but many
don’t get out of school until their
mid-twenties. As cultural anthropologists,
sociologists, counselors and every parent
knows, this is a rather long and awkward
transition. In ancient cultures it happened
rather quickly and many had a ritual to
announce the death of childhood and the
arrival of adulthood. It is about dying
to one way of life and being raised to a
new one. We give up being single in order
to be married, we give up marriage at the
time of the death of a spouse and enter
into a new life. Sometimes the transitions
are painful, they feel death like. In terms
of faith we give up seeing the world through
the eyes of our own life and see the world
a new through the eyes of faith. That is
why the baptism liturgy speaks of death
and new life within the aters of baptism.
In his excellent, short book The Heart
of Christianity, Marcus Borg writes about
this eighth chapter of Mark with warnings
of trouble, mention of the cross and the
instruction that those who want go gain
life must loose it. Borg concludes : “For
Mark ( and for Matthew and Like, who repeat
and amplify this pattern), the way, the
path of personal transformation, is the
path of death and resurrection.” (The
Heart of Christianity, p.109) The path of
dying and rising is what it means to be
born again. As Borg writes, “To be
born again involves dying to the false self,
to that identity, to that way of being,
and to be born into the identity centered
in the Spirit, in Christ, in God. It is
the process of internal redefinition of
he self whereby a real person is born within
us.” (p.117)
This death and resurrection can be tough
stuff, marvelous and life giving but also
tough at times. I remember an African American
pastor in a poor Buffalo neighbourhood saying
that we white folks just don’t understand
their worship. He said, “We gather
and sing for 20 or 30 minutes just to warm
up. It takes that long to sing the slave
out of our spirit in order for us to be
free people to worship God.”
For some it takes years of therapy and
help to work the death out of life in order
to have the ability to embrace the life,
waiting to be born. For others prayer is
the key. The Spirit is at the center of
it all, working with each of us, labouring
to the ends that life may be born from all
the dead places of our existence.
We shake off death to make room for life.
With God’s spirit we move through
fear, let it go and embrace hope. We wrestle
with the death of insecurity, let it die
away so that we can embrace confidence for
living. Yes, we take on death. We face the
death of anger and hate, choosing to live
instead in a new way. We shake off the death
of greed in order to live generously. We
face the corporate death of blind, uncritical
nationalism so that we can live within God’s
kingdom. And we gather her to lose our lives
within the story of Jesus, the story of
death and resurrection. We lose ourselves
within this story in order to take on new
life, losing life in order to gain it.
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