Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
March 23, 2003

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Last week I asked the question: "Where is our hope?" I gave the answer: "In God alone." That is indeed the correct answer to the question; but as we find our nation yet again at war this morning, unleashing immense destructive power against Iraq, we really cannot help but ask: "Yes, but where is God?" After all, when we humans once again resort to war to solve our problems we must admit, whether we support the resort to war or not, that we have once again failed to heed God’s call to another way, to the way of peace, to Jesus’ alternative way of creative, assertive, even aggressive but always non-violent waging of peace. War, with its violence, death, and destruction seems to be the absence of God rather than the presence of God.

When we resort to war it is easy to believe that God has deserted us, that God has withdrawn from God’s world out of despair, disgust, or maybe just out of indifference. Certainly those on the receiving end of a GPS guided bomb must find it impossible to believe that God has not abandoned them. Even those of us fortunate enough not to face any significant threat of personal harm from the war but who had hoped and prayed so fervently for peace find it easy to conclude that God has turned God’s back on us and on our prayers. If, as we believe, God calls us to peace not war, to nonviolence not the slaughter produced by modern weapons, where indeed is God when once again the wisdom of the world has overwhelmed the wisdom of God and let loose the dogs of war?

Christian people have faced this question again and again over the centuries, at least since our faith became the official religion of the Roman Empire in the early fourth century CE. Before the official establishment of the faith the church’s answer was invariably that God was on the side of peace and nonviolence. Since Christianity became the official faith of empire the answer Christian people have given again and again to the question "where is God" has been: "On our side of course!" We have given this answer even when the people we have been fighting and killing have been other Christians!

This morning, however, I want to give a different answer to the question of where God is when we resort to war. My answer to that question comes from, or at least is suggested by, the passage we heard this morning from Paul’s first letter to the church at Corinth. That passage is Paul’s powerful proclamation of the Christian theology of the cross, by which I mean, as I’ll explain better in a moment, the cross as the symbol of God’s solidarity with the victims of the world. The theology of the cross has always been a minority voice in the Christian tradition. We’d rather talk about a theology of resurrection or, as the theologians call it, the theology of glory. After all, resurrection is a lot more fun than crucifixion. We’d rather talk about Christ risen than Christ crucified. And yet there is this one little problem that we have as Christians, a problem followers of Jesus have had almost from the very beginning of the movement. The one whom we proclaim to be the Christ, God’s Anointed One, our Lord and Savior, that one was in fact crucified. His life ended in what by the standards of the world was abject and total failure. It ended in the most painful and shameful way imaginable.

It wasn’t supposed to be that way, or so the world thought. The fact that Jesus was crucified in fact made the Christians’ profession of him as the Messiah sound like utter foolishness to most Jews. The Messiah was supposed to restore the Kingdom of David. He was supposed to put an end to foreign occupation and oppression. He was supposed to inaugurate a golden age of peace and prosperity right here on earth, right there in Judea in fact. The idea of a crucified Messiah was, to the ears of most Jews (and most Greeks for that matter), an oxymoron. The phrase "crucified Christ" contradicted itself in the minds of most who heard it in Paul’s time. That’s why he says here that Christ crucified is "a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles." A crucified Messiah was, and is, something that needs some powerful explaining.

And yet Paul calls Christ crucified the wisdom of God. What in heaven’s name can that mean? I suspect that most of you think that it must have something to do with the forgiveness of sin. Most of us have been taught that Christ died to save us from sin. Now, I don’t want to suggest today that the death of Christ is not related to God’s forgiveness of sin. It is, although exactly how that works is something we need to talk about some time. I want, however, to focus on something else, on an interpretation of the cross that perhaps you haven’t heard before but which I think gives us our answer to the question where is God in times like ours.

To get at this understanding of the cross, we need to start with who we say Jesus was. We say that he was Immanuel, God with us. To use the most common term our tradition has for this understanding, we say that Jesus was God Incarnate. He was God become human. He was God in human form. He is the person God became when God became a person.

Because Jesus was God become a person, we know that in him God experienced in God’s own person what it means to be human. The Statement of Faith of the United Church of Christ puts it this way, speaking of God: "In Jesus Christ, the man of Nazareth, our crucified and risen Savior, you have come to us and shared our common lot." He shared our common lot in every way, save that although tempted as we are he did not sin as we do. What does that mean? It means that in Jesus God was, and is, with us in every aspect of human life. That certainly means that God is with us in our joys, in the good times, in our celebrations and our feasts. There is no need for us to deny that fact. It is true.

The problem, however, is that abominable cross that just won’t go away. That obnoxious cross keeps reminding us that God in Christ Jesus didn’t just share our joys and celebrations. When the Empire that his followers would eventually conquer through the power of the Word nailed Jesus to that cross, God shared with us a whole lot more than our joys and celebrations. On that cross, God shared with us the depths of human pain and suffering. On that cross, God experienced our sense of abandonment that gives rise to this sermon. He cried: "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" On that cross God Incarnate suffered pain, shame, and scorn. He was mocked, lashed, nailed, stabbed, and abandoned. And he died. On the cross, God experienced in God’s own person human death.

And that abominable cross, Paul tells us, is the wisdom of God. And so it is. How can we possibly understand that? All I can tell you is that I understand it this way. On the cross of Jesus God demonstrated to the fullest God’s solidarity with us humans in every aspect of human life and most particularly in all of the painful and mortal aspects of human life. On that cross, God demonstrated God’s solidarity with the victims of the world, for on that cross Jesus was a victim. He was a victim of the wisdom of the world, and particularly of Empire, that said, and still says today, that the will of the powerful should be imposed on the powerless by force and violence. We know that ultimately Christ was victorious. That’s why in our Protestant tradition our crosses are empty; but that came later. On the cross Christ was the ultimate victim, the innocent one whose innocence the world could not abide, the innocent one destroyed by the force of arms, the might of Empire. And what does that tell us about where God is today? It tells us that in this world God is with the victims, all of the victims. God is with those who suffer because on the cross God did not reject our suffering but embraced it and entered fully into it with us. Therefore we know that God is with all persons abused, manipulated, exploited, maimed, and killed by Empire, by the powers of the world.

And that answers our question about where God is when we humans once again resort to war. God is with the victims. God is in Baghdad and every other Iraqi city as our bombs fall. God is with all the soldiers, on both sides, in their fear and in the spiritual anguish that I know many of them feel over what they must do, for most of them are in this sense victims too. God is with the wives who lose their husbands, the children who lose their fathers, with all the people whose lives are destroyed or turned upside down by the violence of war and its physical and psychological aftermath. God is with us as we mourn the losses, as we grieve for our country as once again we resort to violence to solve our problems. God is on our side, but not only on our side. God is on the side of all who suffer--physically, emotionally, and spiritually--because we have once again drawn our swords in anger. God will be with us as we pray for peace, as we seek strength and comfort in our suffering and in our sorrow. Our hope is in God. And where is God? On the cross, with the victims-all of the victims, even us.