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Reformation SundayOctobeer 25, 2009 |
Reformation Sunday Reforming towards the Gospel: The Lens of the Cross October 25, 2009
From an email Bible Quiz sent from one among us –
Q: What kind of man was Boaz before he married Ruth?
A: Ruth-less.
Q: Who was the most flagrant lawbreaker in the Bible?
A: Moses. He broke all 10 commandments at once.
Q: Which area of Palestine was especially wealthy?
A: The area around the Jordan River. The banks were always overflowing.
Not a real Bible Quiz like the Quizbowl at Confirmation on Wednesday nights, but a fun one. What’s real and what’s just for fun got the better of us in the past weeks. Many of you read or heard about the Balloon Boy where the news had us worrying about a 6 year old who might have been caught in a flying balloon. We know now it was an unfortunate hoax.
I read an article on it recently entitled “We’re all Balloon Boys Now.” Its point was “it’s gotten harder to know what’s real and unreal in a world that seems to be slipping slightly out of focus.” (Wall Street Journal, Daniel Henninger, Oct. 22, 2009) It asked how are we to know when something is a hoax and when it is for real.
When Pastor Elidard was with us from Kagitumba, Rwanda, he may have wondered about more than the garage door opener and toaster. Was that seemingly endless variety of food he kept eating for real? Was it possible that the Combine he rode on at the farm really did all he was told it did? Can there really be trees as wide as the one he stood next to at Deer Creek? He wanted pictures of everything because the people back home might think he was pulling their leg.
Christianity can look like a hoax to some – and even to us sometimes when we lose sight of what it’s really about. Reformation Sunday reminds us that we are to be reforming always towards the Gospel – countering both hoax and heresy. What Luther did 500 years ago is what we need to do today. It is good for the church to ask ourselves how well we are reflecting the truth of the Gospel. John’s Gospel tells us it is the truth of Jesus Christ that sets us free. So it is good to ask, as Luther did, what it means to truly follow Jesus. And Luther helps us by giving us a visual aid that moves the question from our heads to our eyes.
Luther called himself a theologian of the cross. To be a Christian, from his perspective, was to see everything – all of life – even death – through the lens of the cross. Can you remember your last optometrist appointment where you were put behind a machine to look through lenses and see how much you could see? That’s what calling our theology a theology of the cross does for us. It gives us a lens through which to see how God is at work in the world and in our lives. To help us picture this, some from Jr. High Sunday Morning Live made a wonderful poster collage of human faces. That poster is then covered with a large cut out of a cross so you see the faces through the shape of the cross. The cross is the lens through which Christians see the clearest.
Today we wear crosses as necklaces and earrings and decorate them and hang them on walls. We do this because we are trying to get at the truth about the cross. We know the cross didn’t originate as such a lovely thing. It was a horrible means of capital punishment – used out in the open for all to see. The intent was to shame the person – make them a spectacle and example. “If you do what this person did, this will happen to you.” The cross was meant to scare people from following the ways of the crucified.
But today, Christians mark crosses on the foreheads of adults and babies at baptism and we hang crosses from our necks and we give crosses as gifts to Confirmands. We do this precisely to say that there is no more life-giving way to live than to live as Jesus lived and died and rose again. This art piece helps us catch why the cross is so important and what it has to do with our lives.
We look at ourselves and each other through the lens of the cross because the cross tells us of God’s love. Kelly Fryer writes in her book Reclaiming the “L” Word, (meaning the Lutheran word): “There are a lot of different ways people understand who and what Jesus is. He is a great teacher, a good example, a powerful healer, an important prophet, a wise counselor. And he is, in fact, all these things. But before Jesus is anything else, the emphasis Lutherans give, is that Jesus is the One who meets us at the cross.” (36)
To say Jesus meets us at the cross says God comes to us in the least likely places – through letting go and even dying in order to follow God’s will. God meets us not just when everything is going great, but most intimately where there is suffering. Jesus said we will see him in the hungry and sick and imprisoned. Jesus spent time with the ones others rejected. The truth is that Jesus was and is, full of surprises.
That is a theology of the cross. But what is all too clear when we look at the way of the cross is that our human perspective is often different from God’s. We might not choose to pay attention to the poor. We might not naturally love those who don’t love us back. We might not be able to put our heads around what it means that God dies for our sake. The way of the cross usually doesn’t make sense until we experience its grace in our lives.
A real human being, who was God’s very presence of love, was killed on a cross. But God responded to that violence by doing an even greater good which is what God does over and over again – even for us. God responds to brokenness with grace and surprise and love. Has something bad ever happened to you or to someone you love? If God can turn Jesus’ crucifixion into the glorious cross of Easter, God can make good also out of the painful realities of our lives. To be set free by the truth is to trust that God’s healing grace touches all in God’s good time.
Christians are given the gift of seeing people, problems and possibilities through this good news that God overpowers death and evil through the cross. A torture instrument becomes the symbol that gathers us – and we know it is no game or hoax. It is the power for life. Evil is transformed by good; jealousy by love; despair by hope; brokenness by healing; alienation by homecoming; death by resurrection. This is as real as it gets because all this brokenness makes its way into real life. And Jesus too is real, whose life, death and resurrection alters these. He is an historical person through whom God comes that we might know God’s love.
In addition to Reformation Sunday, today at Faith Lutheran is Confirmation Sunday. Michelle, Jamie, Lauren, Kendall, Allen, Melanie, Philip and Kelsey will come to the font and altar to confess their faith and commitment to grow as Christ’s body the church. If there is one thing I hope the Confirmands will take with them/you from this day it’s that you’ll never forget this picture. My hope for you and for all of us is that we will grow to trust more and more what it means to see life through the lens of the cross.
In our baptism we were promised that as Christ is raised, so too are we – today and every day. And the risen Jesus enlists us to tell the world of this good news. Think of someone you know who is in pain or fear or loss or brokenness. Maybe it’s you or a loved one or someone you’ve read about or work with or see only occasionally. Close your eyes and picture them.
The cross says God meets you or them with transforming love wherever you or they there. That is grace. Might you tell them of that in some creative way? Might you give them a cross of some sort to remind them that, if Jesus’ awful death wasn’t too much for God, neither will their problems be – no matter what!
May our eyes be “+ - eyed” and see life as God sees it – grace-filled and beaming with the potential for renewed life, today and everyday!
Amen
+Pastor Peg Schultz-Akerson, to the glory of God
Faith Lutheran Church, Chico, CA