The Heart of the Matter*

This past week near the end of Sunday worship, I had one of those moments so aptly captured by the advertisers for a certain vegetable juice.  I had a moment of clarity, and the feeling that I should have seen this all along.  I was overcome by the realization that for all the years I’ve attended, all the sermons I’ve heard have centered on just two pronouncements: Christ crucified and life transformed.

Pastors, as you know, come and go.  Their preaching can be exciting, intellectual, full of anecdote and illustration, or maybe there are times when it’s not so exciting or stimulating at all.  Sometimes that’s the preacher (and given my limited experience preaching, that can certainly be the case) or sometimes it is me: bored, preoccupied, mind drifting or whatever.  Yet through it all, I (and ‘we’ at Stony Creek) have been graced to hear week after week, well-crafted or not so well-crafted, messages that center on Christ crucified and life transformed.  

When you get right down to it, that is the Gospel, the Good News; Christ has died and life will never be the same.  You see, in each of the four gospels the crucial moment in the story is the moment Jesus goes quite voluntarily to offer himself for crucifixion on the Roman cross.  God’s good work of six days has been attacked by sin.  Sin is so powerful that the very creation is distorted by it.  St. Paul says the creation “groans” under the burden of sin (Romans 8:22).  Sin inspires us, the crown of the good creation, to neglect love and think of ourselves first.  In so doing we are capable of monstrous cruelty to one another and do ourselves tremendous damage in the bargain.  Sin’s greatest weapon is death.  God’s greatest good is life.  God Himself, in Jesus the Jew, attacks sin by attacking sin’s greatest strength: its power to destroy life, its power to kill.  All that we fear, all the reasons we cling to ourselves instead of God and each other, all of it is born in the power of sin.  So Jesus walks meekly into sin’s hands and takes the worst it has to offer.  That moment changes everything.  The Gospel writer John says that when Jesus is “lifted up” on that cross, we see most clearly God’s face.  God lifts the veil between us.  There is nothing hidden anymore.  God loves us, becomes us, and comes to us to live what we fear most: death.  And God lives through it.  The stone is rolled away.  Life is victorious over death.

That story is the uniquely Christian story.  But it doesn’t end there.  Coming out of Jesus’ struggle with death is the possibility that we too may live in the power of death defeated.   Our lives, our families, our world, and the good earth itself are being transformed into new life--- abundant life.  For Christians, the story comes to a climax in Christ crucified, but it continues on in a new community of love, established around a table laden with bread and wine.  At that table, together, we feast and grow strong to carry the news of Christ’s victory over death, to live the reality of a world without fear, and to be transformed into folk who love and serve each other and our neighbors.

So I had this moment on Sunday.  I was startled to recognize something that has been present all the time.  Each week, whether I am ready to listen or ready to move on with my day.  Each week, whether the message is well crafted and well delivered or if maybe the pastor isn’t in top form. Each week, week on week, Christ crucified and life transformed has been, and with God’s grace, will continue to be, proclaimed from the pulpit at Stony Creek.  Is the service and the preaching always everything I could ever hope for?  No, but sitting among a congregation I love and who love me in turn, each week, week after week, it is certainly enough, just enough, because it gets to the heart of the matter: Christ has died and nothing will ever be the same.

*The painting is, The Crucifixion, by El Greco (around 1596 or so).  It hangs in the Prado in Madrid, Spain.