Meditations on the Crucifixion and What It Means for Us: Crucified with Christ

Preached at Silverton Friends Church, November 10, 2024

Last time I was here, I talked about the Law being crucified with Jesus. I made the point that human behavior is no surprise to God, that God in the moment of creation knew that the crucifixion was necessary. I mentioned that God not only created but intervenes in creation, and not in a particularly predictable way. I also want to repeat the point that God exists outside of time; this means all times are present to God, the crucifixion is continually visible to God.  

This eternal present of God helps us understand why, even though God warned Adam not to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, because “in the day you eat of it you will die,” the story goes on for Adam and he dies physically much later. To God, the death is present in God’s now, as is every death of every creature. There was and is only one remedy, and Jesus is that remedy.

Likewise, in God’s now the resurrection of Jesus is always present. In this stunning event, a body entering decay was raised from the dead and united with the spirit of that person for eternity, a new body that cannot decay and is glorified in ways we can only guess from the resurrection—recognizable by scars and mannerisms and relationships, that can eat our food, but also can walk through locked doors and materialize at will. The Bible teaches us that this is our destiny as well, because we have died with Christ.

St. Paul tries to explain the cosmic proportions of the resurrection in Romans.

 

Adam is a prefiguring of Jesus Christ in his effect on those who came after.

And if Adam involved all humanity in sin and death, how much more does Jesus involve all humanity in the grace of God. Adam’s trespass brought a condemning judgment, but Jesus’s free gift brings many trespasses into favorable judgment. 

Just as through one human, sin, error, trespass, disobedience came into the harmony of the cosmos, with sin came death, and death passed through all humans because all sinned—to repeat: if by one man, Adam, death ruled over humanity, how much more will life gain the upper hand, and people will receive abundance of grace and the gift of being set right with God and will reign in life by the one man, Jesus.

Therefore, as by the disobedience of one man all were condemned, so now by the obedience of one man all are set right with God and brought into life.

So just as sin has ruled through death, even more grace rules because grace makes people who they are meant to be even into eternal life. 

So in our history, the crucifixion is a one-time miracle that redeems us from sin and death. But in God’s eternal now, Jesus is dying on the cross.  

At the same time, if we can call it time, Jesus is harrowing hell, and leading the powers and principalities as captives, and rising triumphant over sin and death. Jesus is redeeming us in the eternal now.  If it is possible to imagine, there is no past and present in God’s now.

So how is it that Jesus accomplished this redemption? He includes us, God includes us, in the crucifixion, and in the resurrection. Jesus didn’t only die for us, he died with us. 

Rom 6:4, 5 

For if we have been united together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection.

 Paul writes the following in Galatians. 

Gal 2:16-21 We are justified by the faithfulness of Christ, we believe in the character and work of Jesus Christ; we are dead to the Law so that we may live to God; we are crucified with Christ, and now Christ lives in us and we live by the faithfulness of Christ who loved us and gave himself for us. We do not reject the grace of God by saying that righteousness comes through the Law.

As a Christian I want to find out what it means in my mortal body and time to be crucified with Christ so that it is no longer I who live but Christ in me.  I have been a Christian since childhood, and my commitment to God has become more complete as I have increasingly understood God’s commitment to me.  Significant milestones included having several experiences that made the crucifixion vivid to me; finding that my sense of who I am was almost totally wrong and allowing God to rebuild me as God sees fit; realizing that just as the glory of God is most clearly revealed through the visible wounds of the risen Jesus, so it is revealed in my own brokenness more than in my strengths; understanding that God is closer to me than the air I breathe and more necessary to my continued existence; realizing that God does the loving of God’s own free will and nature, not because I am so lovable. 

I’ve had at least one spiritual experience that depends on this eternal now of God.  I recovered memories of abuse and the misery of despair and grief and self-blame and aloneness that inhabits that experience came along with the flashbacks. I went to my friends, Howard and Margi Macy, and asked them to pray for healing of my memories. In this instance, they invited me to remember as vividly as I could bear, and as they prayed, I felt in my whole self that Jesus entered into my body for that experience to bear it with me.  This memory is as vivid as any I recovered. I was able to know experimentally that the Jesus on  the cross enters entirely into human suffering and feels it with us, whether we can see that or not. But seeing this truth personally healed the feeling of being alone and abandoned to misery. I came out of that saying to myself, “I am crucified with Christ, which also means Christ is crucified with me.” And I heard more in Jesus’s statement that what we do to the least of these we do to him.  This is not a figurative statement.  

Because I cannot deny the eternal redeeming work that is God’s now and also in our now, though for us sequentially, I listen for and try to obey the promptings of the Holy Spirit; this is often humbling and healing.  I pray in order to get to know God.  I read the Gospels to get to know Jesus better.  One of the best things I ever did for my faith was to read Mark three times in three weekends and fall in love with Jesus.

Julian of Norwich lived in the 1300s, the century of Black Death, which carried away 2/3 of Europe’s population. In Norwich, she would have known about the Peasants Revolt in 1381, not least because the Bishop of Norwich led armed forces against the peasants’ army, caught and executed one of the leaders on his own authority.  This makes fascinating Wikipedia reading, especially if placed in comparison to our own attempted revolt in 2021 and the ensuing unrest and now election of that party. And she would have known about the burning of followers of John Wycliffe, who translated the Bible into English. These folks were derogatorily called Lollards, and the Catholic Church considered them heretics. The Bishop of Norwich was keen to keep this heresy down, perhaps because they argued that people in positions of religious authority should not also hold positions of power in the government.  And Julian, despite living alone in a two room cell off the church building, was often sought out for spiritual guidance, so would have counseled many folks whose lives were disrupted by disease, revolution, and religious persecution.

So we can listen well to her when she says that Jesus said to her, “iI is true that sin is the cause of all this pain, but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well” This was said so tenderly, without blame of any kind toward me or anybody else. . . .

…our Lord showed two ways of understanding his meaning. One was the bliss to which we are to be brought and how he wants us to rejoice in it. The other is the comfort of our present pain by our knowing that it will all be turned to honor and our gain by virtue of his passion; and we should know too that we never suffer alone but with him whom we should see as our ground; also when we see his own pains and his own emptying, this so far exceeds anything we might suffer as to pass beyond our understanding.

Beholding this much, we will be saved from grumbling or complaint in time of pain. And though we see truly that our sins deserve it, yet his love excuses us; and with his great courtesy, he does away with all our blame, beholding us with compassion and pity like children who are innocent whom he can never reject.” (pp. 55-57).

Meditations on the Crucifixion and What It Means for Us: The Law

 (Note: some of this sermon was posted earlier as The Law Is Dead. This version is the first in a series of what the crucifixion of Jesus and his resurrection means to us in our daily lives.)

Preached at Silverton Friends Church, October 13, 2024

When God created the universe and set time in motion, God made a place for us humans to live and love and make choices.  God made us so that we start as infants absorbed in our own needs and ready to absorb the sights and sounds and relationships around us into our frames of reference. God was and is unsurprised by our capacity for selfishness and our capacity for generosity, and God was prepared from the beginning to do whatever it takes to make it possible for us to know God personally and positively.  God is not a human parent, limited as we are. God is, as St. Paul wrote, the one in whom we live and move and have our being.  Without God, we simply are not.

In a mystery that retains our fascination, God not only created but intervenes in creation, and not in a particularly predictable way. But the point I want to make today is that, because God exists outside of time, and all times are present to God, the crucifixion was visible to God from the beginning of our time.  Furthermore, it was implicit, not because of what we call the “Fall” but because of the words, “Let us make human beings in our image.” The entry of God into our time, which we call the Incarnation, was inevitable.

It is possible to see  that from God’s point of view, human beings in time have been moving through stages, like the stages of an infant, innocent and testing boundaries, to childish lawlessness, to the adolescent understanding of Law, to disobedience, to consequences, culminating in the personal God in Jesus making a way forward that is different in substance from what was in place prior to his birth, life, crucifixion, and resurrection.

*****

In recent weeks, I’ve been drawn to consider the crucifixion of Jesus and what the Bible says that means to us and for us.  Today, I’m focusing on what it means for us with regard to the Old Testament Law and to law as a general concept. To people like me who were raised in the church, it can be a challenge to understand and live into what the apostles James and Paul call the law of liberty and the law of love. We may also have wasted significant time trying to figure out what parts of the Law apply to us today. I remember a number of these discussions from my time as NWYM superintendent. We may even have turned parts of the message of grace and love into a new law for Christians. 

Some of you know that I’m a missionary kid. My parents went to Burundi, in central Africa, right at the end of WW II. I was born in Kansas, but went back with them at 6 months old. Eventually, they put me in the School for Missionary Children, a boarding school. I was seven. 

At boarding school, I had to make my bed, tidy my drawers and surface spaces, dust and sweep my room every morning. While I was in classes, my dorm mother inspected the rooms, and if they were not up to her standards, we came back to find our names in the doghouse. We had to clean it to passing standards right away. 

If we got put in the doghouse three successive days, we were confined to our rooms for the time between school and supper. I can’t remember what happened if our tidiness still didn’t meet standards, but I’m guessing it involved more of the same.

It was embarrassing to be put in the doghouse and have the fact posted in public. But even worse was the consequence for wetting the bed. My roommate was a chronic bed-wetter, and every morning she had to drag her soiled sheets up to the laundry room and wash them out by hand. Again a public event. One night I had a bloody nose and had the same consequence. I told everyone who would listen that it was a bloody nose, not wetting the bed. This public humiliation was hard to bear.

And that same year, I deliberately broke a rule by reading a Nancy Drew mystery under my covers with the flashlight after lights out. My roommate told on me, and my dorm mother confiscated the book and I got into significant trouble. 

This is vivid to me because at seven, I left the somewhat lawless existence of childhood. I doubt if I knew how to make my bed, and I certainly didn’t know that I should make it. I was unaware of obligation, to a large extent. And since at home we had to turn off all our electricity at 9 p.m. or so, I may have been reading by flashlight without penalty before I went off to boarding school. I entered a system of law.

Now the apostle Paul has some interesting things to say about sin and law in Romans 5:12-21:

I need to make some things clear, says Paul.

Before a command was given, sin was in the world, but it wasn’t counted against anyone. 

(To connect this to my story, my not making my bed was not a disgrace before I went to a school with rules.)

Paul says: Sin is not part of the reckoning without law. However, until God gave the Law to Moses, death had the upper hand even over those who did not directly disobey God’s command as Adam did. 

(For me as a little girl, even though I wasn’t punished for messiness before I went to school, I did in fact cause messiness, and someone had to clean it up. Messiness does rule if no one cleans. And when there is a rule against messiness, shame arises. And shame is a kind of death.)

In fact, the Law came in so that we humans could see how sinful we are, how prone to error; but where sin increased, grace hyper-increased, grace filled and overflowed the deficit caused by sin.

(For me, the rules made clear to me just how messy I naturally was and am.)

The Hebrew and Greek words we often translate as “sin” have in them a number of pictures that help us understand this theological concept. 

Sin is To Miss the Way, to Stumble, to Wander, to Misstep, to Slip.

Sin is To Miss the Mark, to Miss the Goal

Sin is To Fail at the Assignment, To Avoid, to Neglect, to Overstep

Sin is To Run the Wrong Way when Terrified, To Lose Oneself

Sin is To Bend, to Make Crooked, to Distort God’s truth

Sin is To Overturn God’s truth, To Trespass, to Rebel, to Break Away From, to Defect

You can see that “sin”—or trespass, or iniquity, or transgression, or other synonym—is a living word that works on several levels of intentionality. We can try to do right and end up messing things up even if we have given ourselves to God, and we can decide to do wrong, and we can deliberately assert that we belong to ourselves, not to God. All are kinds of sin.

The fact that we can’t keep the Law, in other words, creates in us the awareness of ourselves as sinners, and this is a hopeless position to be in.  So it is very good news that the Law died with Jesus on the cross.

John 1:17 The Law was given by Moses; grace and truth came by Jesus Christ

Colossians 2:8-14

Jesus blotted out the handwriting of ordinances [ the Law] that was against us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross.

Gal 2:16-21 We are justified by the faith of Christ, we believe in the character and work of Jesus Christ; we are dead to the Law so that we may live to God; we are crucified with Christ, and now Christ lives in us and we live by the faith of Christ who loved us and gave himself for us. We do not reject the grace of God by saying that righteousness comes through the Law.

Romans 3:20-24, 28 Keeping the Law does not justify, but we are justified freely by grace through the redemption accomplished by Jesus; justified by faith in Jesus, not by works of the Law

As John says in the first letter, if anyone says they are without sin, they lie. But if we confess or own up to how we have messed things up and gone the wrong way and avoided what we know God wants from us, God is faithful and just and will forgive us our sin and clean us up and set us straight. This verse is about how those who want to belong to God can keep themselves moving with rather than against God. 

There is a path God wants us to travel through our lives; there is a purpose toward which God wants us to aim; there are things God wants us to do; there are things God wants to make plain to us; there are principles God wants us to live by. What are these?  Jesus said the two great commandments are to love God and to love our neighbor as ourselves. How do we do this? We live out of love as much as we can, we ask God how to live out of love and we do what God puts before us to do, and we try not to harm our neighbor or ourselves. And when we fail, we confess it to God and let God work to help us do better the next time we have an opportunity to show love. We live under the law of liberty and we count on our gracious God to help us use our freedom lovingly.

James 2:12 speak and act as those who will be judged by the law of liberty, 

Gal 5:5-9, 13-25 For in Jesus Christ all that counts is faith working through love.

James 1:18-25 God chose to birth us through the word of truth; we need to humbly accept that word which is planted in us and which can save us, and obey it, the perfect law of liberty; be quick to listen and slow to speak and slow to become angry

1 John 1:7-9 But if we really are living and walking in the Light, as He is the Light, we have true fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ the Son cleanses us from all sin and guilt. If we say we have no sin, we delude and lead ourselves astray, and the Truth is not in us. If we admit we have sinned and confess our sins, He is true to his own nature and promises and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

The Law helps us realize we have missed the mark and are sinners in need of grace. However, when the Law brings us to the point of trusting Jesus, it has done its work and has no more to say to us. It is an eternal truth that the Law is dead because of Jesus’s death.  “I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live, and the life I now live in this body I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”

We know that Jesus is the answer to our frailty, our imperfect attempts to do the right thing, our mistakes, and even our deliberate wrong-doing. We know that when we come to Jesus, he does not condemn, even when he does instruct. Sadly, we can also turn our backs on God and insist on owning ourselves, of earning our own way, and when we do this, we cannot grow in grace and we rely on keeping rules rather than obeying the Holy Spirit of God.  This kind of active rebellion can occur in church-goers and in atheists, and it prevents the rebels from knowing that God is Love.

Let us give ourselves to God, accept the grace Jesus gives, and live guided by the Holy Spirit. Let us embrace our freedom from the Law in order to live out love for God and neighbor.

The Consuming Fire of God's Love

 Preached at  North Valley Friends Church

September 22, 2024

The Consuming Fire of God’s Love

When Leslie asked me to consider preaching at NVFC, I told her that I think I am always preaching one sermon in different guises, namely that God’s love must have an object and God’s creation is that object, that God loves you and me. Often this is a consoling message. As Jesus said, perhaps with a bit of wry humor, “are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and yet not one of them falls to the ground without my Father knowing. Fear not, for you are of more value than many sparrows.” Here is a bit of the flavor of Micah 3.  "Listen, pray, chieftains of Jacob and captains of the house of Israel. Is it not yours to know what is right? Haters of good and lovers of evil . . . who devour My people's flesh and strip their skin from them and crack open their bones.  And they cut it like flesh in the pot and like meat in the cauldron" (The Hebrew Bible, "Prophets," tr. Robert Alter, 2015).

It was a surprise to me to find that it took only a few hours to see that this message too is about the fact that God loves us, you and me.  This is a message about God’s grace.

But first, I want to respond to Micah. I notice that he addresses three classes of people with power in their culture: priests, judges, and prophets. These define morality for the rest of their society. They tell other people what is right and wrong. But Micah accuses them of cannibalism towards other people, skinning them, breaking their bones, sucking out the marrow. To bring this into non-figurative terms, they destroy the lives of those for whom they define the rules, those in their care, under their influence; they take away their lives in order to enrich their own. They are predatory. 

We can look at those in our own society’s leadership who also cannibalize others, who remove from them the means of life; who destroy others to add to their own abundance; who ruin others’ chances to live fully and freely. 

And while it is comforting to point the finger at corruption above us in the power structure,

it would be a mistake to hear Micah talking only to those at the top of his culture. For this to have relevance to us, we need to consider that power includes greater physical strength, greater prestige and social capital, greater ability to decide who gets in and who must stay out—gate keeping. We need to recognize our own power over others, whether it is coercive or manipulative or accidental. We need to admit when we have misused our power, our privilege, depriving others of the ability to thrive and become their whole selves.

We can hear echoes of Micah’s message in the words of Jesus, first to the religious leaders, but then to everyone who has ears. I won’t rehearse all of the condemnations of the actions of the scribes and Pharisees, but I’ll remind you of this one: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside they are full of dead men’s bones and uncleanness. You bind heavy loads on others’ shoulders but you are unwilling to lift a finger to help them carry those loads.”  I will remind us, remind me, that Jesus also said, shockingly, that anyone who makes it hard for a little one to trust God would be better off drowned, and that whatever is done to the “least of these” is done to Jesus Himself.  And also that not everyone who says Lord, Lord will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only those who do what Jesus’s Father and our Father says to do. And further that those who look on their hungry, thirsty, ragged, imprisoned neighbors and do nothing to alleviate this distress are not part of God’s sheep, not among God’s people. How much worse to actively contribute to or even cause another’s misery.  Jesus is not less demanding than Micah, and perhaps, given that he is talking right to us, is even more so. No wonder the liturgical confession includes both what we have done and what we have left undone.  

When Jesus was asked the greatest commandment, he said, “Love God with everything you are and have, and love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus knew he had to add the second, which he said is like the first, because we can talk ourselves into believing we love God while we are doing harm to our neighbor. But also, this contains in it the truth that when we harm others we also harm ourselves, and conversely that love for others and love for oneself go arm in arm.

We have seen that Jesus shares Micah’s outrage about the misuse of power and influence. So how can we move from admitting our selfishness and apathy and self-indulgence at others’ expense to a better understanding about God’s love for us, God’s grace toward us? We need to recognize that God’s grace may look a lot like judgment, God’s grace is surgical, and our response to this intrusive grace of God makes all the difference.

I owe much of my understanding of God’s intrusive and uncomfortable grace to three writers: George MacDonald, Flannery O’Connor, and Julian of Norwich. George MacDonald was a novelist and preacher in the 1800s whose writing was hugely influential on C.S. Lewis.  He writes in one of his Unspoken Sermons, “The Consuming Fire”:

Nothing is inexorable but love….Love has ever in view the absolute [the potential] loveliness of that which it beholds. Where loveliness is incomplete, and love cannot love its fill of loving, it spends itself to make more lovely, that it may love more…Therefore all that…comes between and is not of love’s kind, must be destroyed. And our God is a consuming fire. (18-19)

Let us have grace to serve the Consuming Fire, our God, with divine fear; not with the fear that cringes and craves, but with the bowing down of all thoughts, all delights, all loves before him who is the life of them all and will have them all pure. (20)

…the fear towards God will be one with the homeliest love. Yea, the fear of God will cause a person to flee, not from God, but from the self, in terror lest that person do [wrong to ] God or [to] a neighbor .… (21)

In sum, God will love us into our best selves, and whatever we carry around with us that prevents us being that best self will have to go. This is the work of grace for us.

I learned a similar view of God’s grace from Flannery O’Connor, a mid 20th century writer of novels and short stories. Her self-satisfied characters are often jolted awake by God’s grace in a way they would never have chosen. Their casual American Christianity is not enough. I’ll mention one character and how God’s grace destroys in order to redeem.  In “Revelation,” a good solid Christian woman named Mrs. Turpin is attacked in the doctor’s office as she is making banal conversation about who is and who isn’t trash. A young woman throws a book at her, raising a bump on the forehead, and shouts, “Go back to hell where you came from, you fat warthog.”

What makes this traumatic moment redemptive is that Mrs. Turpin turns immediately to God and complains about being treated like this, while all the while wondering why God would send her this message. And because she turns toward God instead of away, and in recognition of her willingness to learn despite her anger and humiliation, God gives her a vision of the redemption of humanity, beginning with those she places at the bottom of the heap and ending with her kind of people. She sees the vast stream of human beings moving into glory, and her own kind of people are at the end of the line.

She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were [singing] on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.  She lowered her hands and gripped the rail of the hog pen, her eyes small but fixed unblinkingly on what lay ahead…In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah. (The Complete Stories, Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 508) 

And finally, to Julian of Norwich, a mystic and anchorite from the 1300s. She had a near-death experience in which she had a vision of Jesus. She meditated on that vision for the rest of her life and gained profound understanding about God’s love and God’s intention to redeem and make all things well.  Along the way, she hears Jesus say this:

“For I will wholly break you of your vain affections and your vicious pride; and after that I shall gather you and make you meek and mild, clean and holy by oneing (uniting) you to me.” ( The Revelation of Love, tr. John Skinner, 86)

So what can we take of comfort and consolation from Micah 3? We can rejoice that God’s love always intends what is best for us and always builds up what is best in us; we can trust that God will make us good, and we can welcome the intrusion of God’s grace when we are not good as we face the both the consequences of doing harm and the divine surgery that will save us.  We can understand that God’s grace is not about excusing but about remaking, about healing, about redeeming what is perverse, wounded, and lost.  We can take heart, even as we tremble, that God’s love is inexorable and will do us good.