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LENT 2013 SERMON SERIES: The Theology of the Cross This is the first of four in a series on the Theology of the Cross. It includes some basic theology, but I fear that many or most of our people do not have even a base model to work from. My hope is to name the issues and then over the next few weeks, unpack and update them so that in the end we will have a more fully developed THEOLOGIA CRUCIS, and a common language to share in discussion. Please note that my own thinking is not fully formed yet; we’re all pilgrims on this journey. If you would like to respond, you are welcome, but please sign your response and tell me where you are; the Web is not always the best forum for open communication! Respectfully, Rev John Gregory Smith, at Leaside United Church, LENT 2013. My grandfather’s favourite hymn: The Old Rugged Cross ( George Bennard, 1912) 1. On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross, The emblem of suff’ring and shame; And I love that old cross where the dearest and best For a world of lost sinners was slain. o Refrain: So I’ll cherish the old rugged cross, Till my trophies at last I lay down; I will cling to the old rugged cross, And exchange it some day for a crown. 2. Oh, that old rugged cross, so despised by the world, Has a wondrous attraction for me; For the dear Lamb of God left His glory above To bear it to dark Calvary. 3. In that old rugged cross, stained with blood so divine, A wondrous beauty I see, For ’twas on that old cross Jesus suffered and died, To pardon and sanctify me. 4. To the old rugged cross I will ever be true; Its shame and reproach gladly bear; Then He’ll call me some day to my home far away, Where His glory forever I’ll share. I can remember him singing this song to himself as he sat in his old chair smoking his pipe. It was a source of comfort for him for sure. BUT, my grandfather would be turning 112 this year on his birthday, and it starkly reminds me that the theology of this particular hymn, full of atonement and the notion of Christ’s sacrifice for personal sins, is very much that of the early 20th century. (written in 1912). The fact that so many people today still cling to this kind of theology, suggests to me that theology around the cross changes very slowly, and probably will take a few generations to pass by before we really notice the difference. For some of you staunch conservatives, that will be a good thing. But my sense is that much of mainline Christianity is uncomfortable with atonement theology, but is just too afraid to say so out loud. So today I am saying so out loud! 1 LENT 2013 SERMON SERIES: The Theology of the Cross I’m wondering when it was you last heard a sermon preached about the cross. Can you remember? It’s rather ironic that such foundational theology is for many, unfamiliar territory. A wilderness of sorts. In this wilderness, we find ourselves thirsty and desperate for life-giving signs in the time in which we live; we look at the cross and without taking time to ask about it or seek deeper understanding, we discount it. We feel bad about that but we can’t help it! To be sure, the cross does not offer the same kind of comfort as my grandfather took from it! I’m going to start with two assertions, just to get us rolling on this very complex topic: 1) Post-Modern people are generally ashamed of and humiliated by the cross, because they do not understand it and what it means, and don’t want to be associated with the guilt it induces. Despite the fact that much of our current understanding of the cross is an 11th century invention, it still has profound resonance in our culture. Postmodern people, in my view would rather not deal with it. Some churches display crosses on the front lawn, or on the tops of their buildings. In others, you have to look hard to find them. Here in our sanctuary, I put ours away for a whole year, and it was almost the full year before anyone spoke to me about it. My personal opinion is that post-moderns like us feel that the cross gives the wrong message, and seems out of step or counter-productive to our ministry. But frankly, I think if we were honest: what this really reveals is that we are lazy theologians. To set something aside just because we don’t understand it anymore is not a good reason to set it aside. In fact, an undeveloped Christology, and a therefore undeveloped “theologia crucis” (to use Luther’s famous term) is not just a sign of theological laziness, it also greatly opens us up to the workings of the secular modern age in which we live, with all its attendant and inherent manipulations and rationalizations. Depending where you stand on theological issues, this may be good or it may be bad. The fact that we know little or nothing about it still leaves us open. The second assertion: 2) we have a well developed theology of glory (or Empire), but we do not have a balanced view of the world when we omit the theology of suffering, pain, or forgiveness. The theology of glory has been around since Constantine, when the church, itself a fledgling institution, gained the acceptance of the state, and thus became co-opted by the powers of the world, by empire, by status. Much like the story we have of Jesus fending off the temptations of power in the desert, only in reverse, the Church lapped up the power it found in the cross, and the Christian religion became a tool of power, an effective and reliable way to control the masses. You know when Constantine accepted Christianity, it was in the early 2 LENT 2013 SERMON SERIES: The Theology of the Cross 300’s, so by then, 300 years of church history and theology had evolved. Much of THAT was turfed!!!! (Douglas John Hall presents this theology of glory in his book The Cross in our Context, 2003. It is primary reading for understanding this matter from the Reformed tradition of Christianity.) What I mean by this second assertion is that our theology in this present day still has its form and gains its power from the theologies of the Constantinian era. There’s a sense (and you find this in most fundamental churches, but also very much in the corridors of power), that God, however construed, is “still in his heaven”, and that the world is still very much unfolding as it should. This widely-held notion implies however that God is omnipotent and omnipresent in the world, and is based on the assumption that the world will eventually be righted, the inherent sinfulness of humanity will eventually be overcome, and the end point of humanity will be found when the whole world gets it. And by that we mean, the whole world gets it, the Christian way. I submit that this is ecclesial theology more than it is Christic theology. Douglas John Hall calls this triumphalist theology. David Korten: theology of Empire. Many of us lived through the greatest recent example of this in the 8 years of George W. Bush’s reign as president of the largest power in the world. While there were oodles of choice quotes coming from his lips, some of the most absurd ones involved his invocation of the power of God in the performance of his job as president. Example: (2005) “I am on a mission from God. God tells me: George, go and fight those terrorists, so that’s what I do.” Here’s why this matters: The THEOLOGY of the greatest superpower on earth flows directly from a view of the world that promulgates the notion that God vanquished evil and death on the cross, such that their country’s mission in the world is therefore to vanquish evil and death in the world, BY THE VIRTUE of Christian righteousness. You may or may not agree with this claim. But the problem we have in Christianity today is that a large wing of the faith associates Christian religion with white North American economic, cultural and military imperialism, which “could in fact be the single most insidious cause of global peril.” (see Hall, page 4 – 5 for this.) Once the state decides who its enemies are, then it loads up its guns and exterminates them. (Think Rwanda). Some might even argue that the militancy of the Muslim world in our time is a reaction to this theological notion of power, an extreme reaction of course, but a reaction to its humiliation by the west, especially as the west is primarily embodied in one large superpower – which just happens to be the most avowedly Christian of all the nations on earth. Not to mention the fact that a lot of the theology of Empire was devised during 3 LENT 2013 SERMON SERIES: The Theology of the Cross and through the 11th century, the time of the Crusades. In those days, the enemy was to be killed, literally, and the martyrs, those who died in the process, were promised heavenly paradise as reward. (see Abelard and others from the 11 century: I actually just googled Abelard and Anselm and got reams of material on this) Douglas Hall makes this hard claim: A religious community that believes itself to be in possession of the Truth is a community equipped with the most lethal weapon of any warfare: the sense of its own superiority and mandate to mastery. (page 5) My sister lives in South Carolina. She married a guy there (and he’s nice, I like him!) who is a bona fide Southern Baptist republican, and proud of it. I make the above claims confidently, as I have heard these words come straight from his mouth, echoing these thoughts, just not in theological terms. Isn’t it fascinating the in our day the institutional church, especially as we know it in modern North America, is still astonished that it has been so quickly relativized, marginalized, and silenced??? This is because the church still lives with the worldview that OUR belief system is inherently superior to all the alternatives. We’ve been forced into submission by the dominant secular post-modern culture now, which keeps putting us in our place. We look around to blame someone for this. The Jews have for many years been targets of this blame, but haven’t we really done it to ourselves? It’s really unfair to blame another whole religion for our own ills, and I submit, it’s time for us to grow up! This, for us, is unfamiliar territory. Wildnerness! That’s why I chose Lent as the time to raise these issues with you. The United Church is very much a Protestant denomination. We are Protestant people, from the Reform tradition. The Reformation began of course with Martin Luther in 1517 or so. (It was in 1517 that he nailed the 95 Theses to the cathedral door) Luther was disgusted with the imperialism and triumphalism of the church, which was selling salvation to the masses through writs called indulgences, which were basically a written promise that the soul of the deceased would not go to hell but to heaven and have eternal life. This too was based on a theology of the cross. Salvation through the death of Christ on the cross. 4 LENT 2013 SERMON SERIES: The Theology of the Cross Later on, reformers like Calvin and in particular some of Calvin’s disciples, would strip the churches of any sign at all of Christian triumphalism, removing every piece of goldedged furniture, any kind of icon, any pictures depicting the Christ, and most important, the cross (more specifically, the crucifix). But what they didn’t jettison was the atonement and sacrificial theology of the medieval church, and that theology still lives and rests within our faith, even if most modern people have absolutely no understanding what it means. Let me tell you: (Sidenote: Calvin of course didn’t like crucifixes or the notion of the atonement sacrifice theology, but he sure did approve of guilt. He thought that we should revere the cross, and that it should make us feel guilty for our sins, and lead us to repentance. To a modern ear, it doesn’t seem all that different to atonement, but it was for him. These theologies came after years and years of hotly debated finer points of the faith. I’m not exactly sure whether his lifting up of guilt was a better option; that will have to wait for another sermon.) On the first Good Friday, when Jesus was crucified on the cross, it was devastating. No one could have predicted that such a moral, decent, truly spiritual man could be killed in such a way (though we have many contemporary examples: Ghandi and MLK as two good examples). But to the Jewish people of the day, this crucifixion story is absolute nonsense: because no God would ever allow the true Messiah to be killed. Even a God of vengeance would never allow the Son of Man to die at the hands of the Roman execution squad. (the later idea that Jesus was in fact God himself, made even less sense to the Jewish psyche: how could a God of creation and power, allow himself to be killed?) And so began 20 centuries of questioning this particular historical fact: that Jesus, the one we worship as the Christ, the Son of God, could be sacrificed on a cross. Jesus never suggested this would happen to him, although the later writers of the gospels, were able to drop hints into their writing. There’s one in our Luke reading from today: the devil tempts Jesus to build a kingdom, Jesus says he can rebuild the kingdom in 3 days, an illusion to the Good Friday-Easter three day triduum. Jesus never would have said that, unless of course you believe that he had the power of reading the future, the power of predestination of his own fate. My problem with that is that if he really did know what his future entailed, why would he choose it? The traditional answers to that require a LOT of twisting of fact to make them sensible, the most important being that in 5 LENT 2013 SERMON SERIES: The Theology of the Cross order to know this, you have to remove Jesus’ humanity from him. Frankly speaking, if Jesus is portrayed as only a God-man with God powers, then the story of the crucifixion makes even less sense to us. Paul was the first to write about the cross, but his theology is only partially formed and didn’t answer all the questions that would arise in the centuries later. It really wasn’t until Augustine, the great Catholic theologian, (he was born in 354 so you can see that it was quite a while, even after Constantine) began to interpret the cross as a payment for sins, that our current understanding of the cross began to develop. In short, the belief is not necessarily biblical. The biblical notion of sin does not imply that a ransom blood sacrifice had to be made in order to set us right with God. Those two notions do not necessarily have to live together. What is most important is that Jesus did not ever link the two together!!!! He did not seem to speak of his life as an atonement sacrifice. I can’t find any evidence of it. But in the early 11th century a monk by the name Anselm of Canterbury came up with something called the “satisfaction” theory, the theory of God that goes like this: God requires justice, and since God is a vengeful God, the horrible sins of humanity must be paid, or atoned for. Humanity’s sin has piled up and become so great, that a huge payment is due in order to “satisfy” God. THAT which was given up was the sacrifice of the SON, as a SUBSTITUTE for us, the blood sacrifice of the Christ being the requirement of God, in order to release us from God’s judgment, and free us to live in the grace and love of God. This is why Roman Catholic priests must enact the mass every day. Because the ongoing sacrifice of Christ is required to atone for the sins of the people, especially those of us born after this notion came into play. That this theory STILL has us in its grip is kind of shocking, not the least because for many reasons, which I don’t have time to go into today, it is an abhorrent theology that makes God out to be a monster; AND it actually denies the validity of the human nature of Jesus, AND keeps God more distant from Christ, therefore more distant from the rest of us. Do you understand what I am saying??? I’ll state it frankly,: this is not the God we believe in. I also don’t think this is the God of the Bible. This is a triumphalistic notion, couched in theological terms. It leaves people out of it. It absolves us of responsibility for the world in which we live. It’s not freeing. It’s constricting. It’s not life-giving. It’s defeating. 6 LENT 2013 SERMON SERIES: The Theology of the Cross No one can live up to the notion of a guilt sacrifice; it means none of us is worthy to stand before our Maker, if that makes any sense today. It doesn’t offer hope. It offers despair. And at the end of the day, it posits A GOD NO ONE CAN LOVE. When our kids were growing up, we had a copy of Franco Zeffirelli’s sumptuous but overly literal take on the story of Jesus of Nazareth. It was a beautiful movie nonetheless, even though it was 8 hours in total. I vividly remember the first time our daughter Laura watched it with us, which was in fact, the last time she ever watched it. The crucifixion scene is graphic. As those nails were driven into Jesus’ hands and feet, our daughter wept. She couldn’t bear it. I’ll never forget her saying: “but why did he have to die?” Over and over. The story then, and now, still makes no sense to her. How, we still wonder, can the death of one person, in such a cruel and ignoble fashion, possibly make us love God, or make us right with God, or right with one another? For me, the test of any theology is this: am I afraid to tell it to my children? So we’re going to try to find new ways to understand the cross over the next few weeks. You know, it is Christian to believe torture and war have nothing to do with saving the world, and they should not be endured by anyone. We should be working to stop them. If Christians reject the imperial designs of crucifixion, we must break silence whenever violence is used to shame, instill fear, fragment human community, or suppress our work for economic justice, health care, and peace. Does the cross as we understand it traditionally, help us or hinder us in this project? I think it does not. Crucifixion became a tool of the empire. Without an empire to support anymore, do we still need the tool? Or are there better ways of teaching our people to be good, to find the goodness in everyone, and to bring goodness to bear on this dark time? Is this story of a crucified man, a help or a hindrance, in the lives we lead every day? Does this story, as it did for my grandfather, provide comfort and hope for a release of ones’ pain and suffering, in the afterlife? Or are there better stories? Better images and narratives that can inform our lives, and provide not just hope, but reason and purpose for the human life of today? And, what notion of God must we have in order to appropriate these stories for our modern world? Once we begin to answer some of these questions for ourselves, then we’ll be able to walk through some of this unfamiliar territory together, and come out on the other side with a glimpse of the depth of the heart of the Creator. I invite you to take this journey with me this Lenten season. 7