Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
March 19, 2006

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.

As you know, we’re about half way through Lent. I imagine that we all have certain understandings or impressions of what Lent is. It is a somber time in the church calendar. The liturgical color is purple, not exactly a festive shade. The hymns of Lent tend to be pretty depressing. The mood of Lent is confessional. We’re supposed to be penitent, and we’re supposed to give up something we like. Our worship in this season is not supposed to be particularly joyous. There’s a custom that we do not say Halleluiah during Lent, for example. All in all, if we really pay attention to it, Lent probably is not our favorite season of the church year.

And yet we’re told that all this gloom and sacrifice is preparing us for Easter, the most joyous day of the Christian year. Easter is the great Halleluiah. Easter is joy beyond all measure. Easter is God’s gift of eternal life abundantly given to all people. It’s colors are white and gold, the colors of the Spirit and of life. It is the greatest celebration of the people of God. So if that’s what were’ preparing for, why is the mood of Lent so somber? Why aren’t we celebrating? Has the church just gotten it wrong all these years?

No, the church hasn’t gotten it wrong. Rather we, that is, most mainline Protestant Christians, get it wrong. We get it wrong because we want to go straight to Easter, skipping over the thing that is necessary for us pass through--as it was necessary for Jesus to pass through--before we get to Easter. We get it wrong because we insist on going straight to Easter without going through Good Friday first. We want to revel in the joy of resurrection while avoiding and denying the agony and death that come first. We use the cross as our central symbol; but our Protestant crosses are empty, and we find the Catholic crucifix morbid and unpleasant. We use an empty cross, but the real symbol of faith for most of us ought to be not a cross at all but an empty tomb. We are Easter people; and that would be good and appropriate if we were also Good Friday people, but we aren’t. If you doubt that ask yourself: How many Good Friday services have I been to in my life, and how many Easter services? For a few of you those two numbers may be close to the same, but I’ll bet that for most of you the Easter number is much higher than the Good Friday number. Many Protestant churches don’t even hold Good Friday services. We at least participate in an ecumenical Good Friday service, but how many of you come to it? Clearly, most of us mainline Protestants want to skip right over the grief and pain of Good Friday and go straight to the joy of Easter.

Yet the undeniable historical and theological fact is that there is no Easter without Good Friday first. Jesus couldn’t rise from the dead without first being dead. More than that: The central Christian confession from the very beginning of the faith has been "Christ died for us." Our Christian faith is unique among the world’s great religions precisely because it worships a savior whose central saving act was dying, dying a miserable and unjust death for us. Our central Christian story of the Son of God who became flesh and died for us forces us to pay attention to that death. Sure. Resurrection is a lot more fun, but we miss the meaning of the Resurrection altogether if we don’t first live into and understand the Crucifixion.

Paul got that. Paul’s writings are the basis for a strand of Christian theology called theology of the cross. I’ve preached it here before and taught it in the adult education forum. It’s central to my own faith, but it has always been a minority voice in Christianity and one that has been, in the words of its principal contemporary proponents Jürgen Moltmann and Douglas John Hall, "not much loved." One of the foundational texts for this theology of the cross is the passage we heard this morning from Paul’s first letter to the church at Corinth, so you’re going to get some more theology of the cross this morning.

In the passage we heard from 1 Corinthians, Paul makes a number of truly astonishing, outrageous, even absurd claims. One of the key ones is this: "For Jews demand signs, and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified...." I don’t know if it is even possible for us to recapture the sense of how ridiculous that statement must have sounded to the mid-first century Jews and Greeks to whom Paul first proclaimed it. It’s become a commonplace to us that we follow a crucified savior, but in Paul’s day no one had ever heard of such a thing. Certainly no one had heard of a crucified God. Saviors, especially ones who are God incarnate, don’t get themselves brutally executed as political criminals. Saviors give signs. They perform miracles, but Paul never says anything about the miracles attributed to Jesus. Or they bring divine wisdom. They teach people God’s ways and show them how to live. But Paul never says anything about the wisdom Jesus taught. Either he didn’t know it or it wasn’t what was important to him about Jesus. Paul didn’t proclaim Jesus the miracle worker or Jesus the wisdom teacher, although we know him as both of those things. Paul proclaimed Christ crucified as the one who brings salvation.

The Paul goes on to make an even more outrageous claim. The crucified Christ, he says, is nothing short of "the power of God and the wisdom of God." Can you hear how utterly absurd that is? Ask yourself: What does Jesus look like from the world’s perspective? Try for just a moment to set aside everything you know about him as God Incarnate or about the meaning of his death. Try to look at him through the eyes of someone who has never even heard of any of that, much less believed it. What do you see? What I see is a fool who got himself crucified for no apparent reason. I see a man who is foolish at best and delusional at worst, a total and abject failure, a disgrace to himself and his whole family. That’s certainly how all but a small handful of the people in the first century who heard of him at all saw him. And yet here’s Paul proclaiming that this defeated, crushed, executed criminal is nothing less than the power and the wisdom of God. At first glance this claim is nonsense at best and blasphemy at worst. No person in his or her right mind could possibly believe it. Surely the power of God could stop a crucifixion! Surely the wisdom of God would know how to live a peaceful and successful life! Surely Christ crucified is weakness and folly, not divine power and wisdom--isn’t he? Well my friends, it will probably come as no surprise to you that I agree completely with Paul here. Christ crucified is not weakness and folly. Christ crucified is nothing less than the complete revelation to us of God’s power and God’s wisdom.

But we don’t get it. We don’t get it because we insist on projecting our human ideas of power and wisdom onto God. We want our God to be the god from the machine, the deus ex machina, who intervenes in the world in power and glory to make everything all right. We want God’s wisdom to be demonstrated in the world by leading us to lives of wealth and power. The problem is, it just doesn’t work that way; and I am continually puzzled by how people who call themselves Christians can continue to think that it does, given the central Christian story. That central Christian story is of the Son of God made flesh and rejected, despised, tortured, and executed by the very people to whom he came. That quite simply is not a story of earthly power and success, and we do violence to it when we try to turn it into one.

But the story isn’t false. There is powerful truth in the story, although not by the world’s standards. The truth in that story is not a truth about power and success. Rather the truth in that story is that God is with us, God shares with us and feels with us every aspect of human life, up to and including suffering and death. None of it is alien to God. None of it is beneath God. God scorns and rejects none of it. Rather in the person of Jesus Christ on the cross God takes all of human sin, suffering, and even death itself into God’s own being and sanctifies them. God sanctifies all of it--the good and the bad. God is with us in all of it, the very good and the very bad. Jesus Christ on the cross demonstrates God’s absolutely unshakable solidarity with each and every one of us. Jesus Christ on the cross demonstrates that suffering and death do not separate us from God and God’s love because God is right there with us in the midst of it all, holding us in the unfailing arms of grace every step of the way and bringing us out the other side into new, eternal life.

And we don’t get it. We don’t get it because we want to skip Good Friday and go straight to Easter. Easter fits our human view of how God should work so much better. God should look death right in the eye and say: You have now power over me! Where O Death is now thy sting? Where they victory, O Grave? That’s the good stuff. None of this Good Friday pain and death for us! Ah, but here’s the thing. The only reason God could overcome suffering and death on Easter is because God first entered fully into suffering and death with Jesus Christ on the cross. Without Good Friday, Easter is impossible. Without Good Friday, Easter has no meaning. You simply cannot get to Easter without going through Good Friday first. Jesus didn’t, and neither can we.

So what are we waiting for? Easter, to be sure, but not only and in a way not even primarily Easter. We’re waiting for Good Friday, the most tragic and solemn day of the Christian year--and in many ways the most important. We are waiting for Good Friday to show us once again how much God loves us--so much that God will not abandon us even in our darkest hours and even in death. We are waiting for Good Friday to show us once more God’s presence and solidarity with us in life and in death, no matter what. That, my friends, is something worth waiting for indeed. It is the best news there ever was or even could be. So this year, let’s not skip it, OK? Amen.