Community Church Sermons
First Sunday in Lent – March 9, 2003
“A Cross In Every Direction:
I am told by no less an authority than Bob Puckett that it was originally intended to place two crosses atop the roof of the Community Church. One was to be where the current steeple is, and the other was to be on the roof of the Narthex. Two crosses. That was the idea.
But, according to Dr. Puckett, the idea of two crosses was nixed when none other than our founding Pastor Carl Burke realized that we would probably be called “the church of the double-cross!”
So they settled on one cross.
But have you noticed? It is a cross in every direction! When you leave the building today, take a look! In fact, you might challenge your children or grandchildren to try to count how many crosses are in the cross of our steeple.
It is a cross in every direction!
In the same way, our Christian faith finds a cross in every direction. No matter how often we celebrate Christmas, the church calendar always leads us to Good Friday. No matter how much we relish thinking about the teachings of Jesus, we eventually come to the dying of Jesus.
All roads in this faith of ours, lead to the cross.
That’s why St. Paul teaches in many places that you can’t really get to the deepest and most important experiences of our faith until you come to grips with the cross.
You know, we live in a culture that is scared to death of death. They say there are two things you can’t avoid in life – death and taxes. But the truth is that while few of us would ever dare to be tax resisters, most of us put up a pretty darned good fight against dying. We run. We walk. We exercise. We take pills. We eat food that doesn’t even taste all that good in hopes of squeezing out a few more weeks, or months, or years of living. Someone recently sent me an email with a story about a low-fat, low-cholesterol couple who died and went to heaven. Because of their exemplary faithfulness, they were rewarded with a fine place to stay, and all their favorite foods to eat. When they mentioned to St. Peter that all that food was rich in fats and not good for their health, he reminded them that, in heaven, none of that was true anymore. They could eat everything they wanted to eat, and as much as they desired.
And that’s when the husband turned to his wife and complained that if it wasn’t for her heart-healthy cooking, they could have gotten to heaven a lot sooner!
Someone once said that even health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing!
Everyone dies.
And the Bible tells us God hates that.
If I were to ask you who is God’s greatest enemy in the Bible, who would you say? You might be tempted to say that God’s greatest foe is the devil. God and the devil, after all, are sort of like the Lady Vols and the Lady Huskies of UConn. They are strong adversaries! Now, I would caution fans on either side of that struggle on the basketball court to not go too far in seeing it as the epic struggle between good and evil. I mean, it IS only a GAME, after all!
Yes, some might say the devil is God’s greatest foe. But the Bible tells us something else. In 1st Corinthians 15, we are told that the final enemy – the ultimate enemy of God – is death.
And 1st Corinthians 15 offers us the promise that God’s love for us is so great, and God’s disdain for death is so complete, that God offers us a salvation that has the power to not only set us free in life, but even to set us free in death.
Through what happened on the cross, there is now a living that can be found in dying! There is a resurrection that can overcome crucifixion!
And the cross is the pledge.
A man I know, whose son died in
an accident at a very young age, once told me that when he sat in church and
looked at the cross, he took comfort in it as the sign of God’s promise that
said to him: “Just as you lost your son, remember that I lost My son. And
what I did in death for My son, I will do for your son, too!”
What a beautiful way of understanding the cross – as a constant reminder of the promise that what God did for His child, He will do for our children – that what God did for Jesus, God will do for us!
The greatest of God’s enemies is death! And the story of death conquered is the message of the cross.
So you and I are invited to a way
of life that is not afraid of dying anymore. In fact, we are invited to a way
of life that believes that it often takes a dying to start living!
In today’s Scripture reading, a group of ordinary people like you and me are struggling with the fact that living as followers of Christ in the world is tough!
In the opening verses of First Peter 3 which precede our text today, we read that its tough for married people! All married people know that! Isn’t it amazing how a couple can meet and early on in their relationship see each other in pure fantasy mode. She is a living Cinderella. He is the embodiment of Prince Charming. But then they get married. And one day he awakens to find that overnight, Cinderella has been transformed into something…well, LESS than Cinderella! And she finds that he has become much less a Prince and much more a Pee Wee Herman – just a boy who loves his toys! Oh, marriage is one of life’s great challenges! Husbands and wives don’t always see eye to eye. We have different values and different ways of looking at things. Men can rationalize how buying something like an airplane will be good for the whole family while his partner thinks that maybe it would be better to have a house!
How silly! Of course an
airplane is more important than a house!
As the book says, men are from Mars, and women are from Venus!
And because we are different – different in background, in genetics, in life-experience, in hormone-production, in the way we see and understand reality – we clash and struggle with each other. And sometimes don’t understand each other. And sometimes let each other down. And sometimes hurt each other. And often, the simple process of living in partnership with another person becomes so conflicted and filled with pain that its hard to imagine that things can ever become better.
Well, our Scripture passage doesn’t provide any easy answers. No quick fixes. But what it does say is that, if you want to have a chance at building a strong, healthy and lasting relationship, it will take some dying by both partners. You will need to die to putting yourself and your own needs first. You will need to die to pride, and learn to recognize your own faults. You will need to learn to say, “I’m sorry” and “I’m wrong.” You will need to die to those parts of you that stand in the way of you and your partner being happy.
Healthy marriages require some dying!
And 1st Peter 3 doesn’t limit the discussion to just marriage. All our relationships, all our human endeavors require some dying. And most especially, living as a Christian in the world requires daily dying. That’s why Jesus said, “If any would come after me, let them deny themselves, lift up their cross daily, and follow me.”
Think about how challenging it is to be a follower of Christ. You know, it’s not easy to put God’s will ahead of your own will. It takes some dying to do that! It’s not easy to put others’ needs ahead of your own. It takes some dying to do that! It’s not easy to stand up for what is right in the eyes of God, especially when the world laughs at you for doing it.
To live as a follower of Christ,
you have to learn to die to self and yield to God!
And to believe with all your heart that God will not leave you there in the grave.
So 1st Peter 3 points us back to what happened to Jesus. Yes, like us, Jesus suffered. Like us, Jesus had to give up things. Like us, Jesus died. And then verse 18:
“He was put to
death in the body, but he was made alive by the Spirit!”
In other words, whenever we are willing to die to self, God’s promise is that the Holy Spirit will rush into that dying to create new life!
This is true even of beginning a relationship with God.
You know, like many of you, I grew up in the church. And then I left it. As soon as I went out the door and off to college, I left behind that simple, easy, answer-rich religion of my childhood to go off in search of a more sophisticated faith. A faith I could get my increasingly cynical mind around.
You see, I found I had a lot of questions. A lot of doubts. A lot of ideas that were much different than what I’d been hearing in the church. Life seemed to be turning out a whole lot more complicated than I had been led to believe. I was finding my black-and-white religion of childhood to be inadequate for living in a world with so many shades of gray. And I just didn’t understand God.
So I did what many people do. I held God off at a distance. And I went off in search of a more palatable, more understandable, more acceptable God. Maybe there are some here today who are holding God at a distance, too.
But the most important crossroad of my life arrived when, having searched high and low for a faith I could get both my head and heart around, I found myself back at square one. And it occurred to me in that anxious moment that the only way I was ever going to get to the truth of God was to stop treating God as though He was applying for a position in MY life. It struck me that I had to let go of all my preconceived human ideas about what and how God ought to be, and open my life to being taught about who God really is, and what God is really like. I was learning that the only way to get to a true relationship with God was by dying to my need to control God, and to take a leap of faith into the arms of God.
And in the thirty-five or more years that have passed since that moment, I have never regretted the decision. And God has become for me the most interesting, life-giving person I have ever met! And this faith has become for me far more intellectually stimulating and mind and heart-stretching than I could ever have imagined! I am a long, long ways from that simple Sunday School faith I started with. And I am a long ways away from that pseudo-intellectual attempt to make God fit my own ideas. You see, in the dying, I have found a living!
And so will you!
It takes a dying to come alive to God. It takes a dying to reconcile a troubled relationship. It takes a dying to make a friend. It takes a dying to be the kind of parent your children need. It takes a dying to build a marriage. It takes a dying to make a difference in the world. It takes some dying to become a Christian and live as one every day.
But God’s promise is loud and clear.
In dying to self, God’s Spirit comes.
And you will be brought to life!
As you leave the sanctuary today, take a look at the cross on our roof. It’s a cross in every direction! A reminder that no matter where you go this week, it will take some dying to really start living!