Dear Faith Family,
Have you ever felt like you missed? Missed the opportunity to say something to a friend or family member which would have made a difference? Missed nailing that presentation at work? Missed out on saying clearly and simply what was on your heart?
Sunday’s sermon felt like a miss for me. Now before those of you in kindness and pitty email me to say it hit somewhere on the board, misses are a part of life, so I am not overly upset. Like anyone, I would prefer not to miss, but misses are not the end of the world. So thank you in advance for your compassion, but no need to console!
Nevertheless, this week’s note is an effort to say more plainly what I had hoped to say on Sunday: because of the cross, we are meant to view the world through faith, not sin—because of the cross of Christ.
Sin shrinks our view of ourselves, one another, and God by creating distance. The more mired we are in sin, the further divided we are from the fullness of life in “righteous” or whole relationships. Ironically, our well-intentioned and religiously approved attempts to overcome sin only perpetuate the ever-widening gap, tearing apart and distorting details. Yet, when the image of Jesus Christ dying and dead upon the cross (the story we looked at in Matthew 27:45-54) sinks deep into our consciousness, becoming the lens by which we view our everyday world, our vision expands—the depth and details of life become vivid. We see ourselves and one another and even God, not through the blurring fractals of sin but with the clarity of faith in the moment of most powerful grace.
Malcolm Guite says contends that,
“One key to the mystery of the Gospels is the truth that everything that happened ‘out there and back then’ also happens ‘in here and right now.’ Christ is the second Adam [I Cor. 15:21-22], the second human being in whom we are all gathered up [Heb. 2:14-18]. What he does for us, he also does in us. Just as hidden in us somewhere is the Eden we once inhabited and have lost, so also somewhere in us is Golgatha.”[1]
We were both born for more than the world as it is, and at the same time, born into the world as it is. We cannot escape the midden that humanity produces nor the polluted heart. No matter how desperate we are to wash off the refuse, we are soiled at the cellular level. But what is both surprising and powerful at the moment of Jesus dying and dead upon the cross, is that he met us in the filth, the worst gunge of society’s oppression and the worst grime of our hearts’ rebellion; so that we might be made clean. “For our sake he made him to be sin, who knew no sin, so that we might become the righteousness [the pure, the holy] of God.” (II Cor. 5:21) Counted righteous, made clean, because we have been crucified with Christ, and live today by faith that what was polluted has been purified.
To live freely and lightly, unbound by the shrinking nature of sin, we must let the image and story of Jesus’ end be our beginning and future. The trash heap of Golgatha is the place where the world started anew—the curtain forever removed and the sleeping saints alive again. We must, as the poet, John Heath-Stubbs[2] describes, cry out as “first Adams,” ‘Create me.’ and hear the second Adam upon the cross,
From lips cracked with thirst, the voice
That sounded once over the billows of chaos
When the royal banners advanced,
[reply] through the smother of dark:
‘All is accomplished, all is made new, and look –
All things, once more, are good.’
When this story seeps its way into our bones and the depths of our souls, when this image becomes the lens through which we view the world—God, neighbor, ourselves—then the world is opened to us, becoming the “land of the living,” rather than the garbage heap of the dying or the survival of the purest. And then, as we prayed on Sunday, we can, together, “cross our broken land/And make each other bridges back to heaven.”
Love you, faith family. God bless!