I was surfing the net this week and came across a website, the world’s largest things.com, which list the world’s largest things that are in the United States. In fact it officially says “What’s Large Where? What’s large where in the United States?” It lists classics like the biggest ball of twine in Minnesota and Husky the largest Musky also in Minnesota. In fact, Minnesota has 51 large things listed, second only to the very largest of states in terms of people, California. So what is large in Arkansas you say? Well, we are close to having the largest waistlines, but that is not on the list, and rightly so. And no, we are not listed as having the biggest hair, that honor goes to Texas. But we do have the largest spinach can in Alma, Arkansas, at the Popeye Spinach plant– although the world’s largest Popeye is in Illinois. I am surprised he hasn’t visited Alma. You probably have seen the big spinach can, but have you seen the world’s largest King Kong statue in Beaver, Arkansas, at the largest dinosaur park in America? And Alma’s neighbor town Ft. Smith is not to be outdone by any old spinach can–it has the largest Mr. Peanut. I can only guess that he is wearing the world’s largest monocle, and perhaps the world’s largest top hat. He also carries a walking stick, so he may have the world’s biggest stick. That would be a great big Mr. Peanut Sir, to you. Yes of course we have the world’s largest Razorback in Berryville, and the world’s largest watermelons in Hope. But did you know that we have the world’s largest sundial in Little Rock? And if you knew this, can you tell me where the heck it is? I have lived in Little Rock for almost 30 years, not sure how I could have missed the world’s largest sundial. Rounding out the Arkansas list includes the world’s largest Raven in Ravendon (where the heck is Ravendon? I went through there once, but– nevermore), and the largest Riverboat Restaurant in Des Arc, the largest tunable Windchimes in Eureka Springs (and I’ll bet they charge you to see them up there), and the world’s largest orange in Redfield. Now why would they have the largest orange in Redfield anyway? Maybe the world’s largest catfish or maybe the largest redneck, or even the largest chunk of coal from the power plant, but an orange? Must be a story there.
I also was sure that I saw the world’s largest cross near Amarillo, TX, once, but it seems that honor now goes the Cross of the Crossroads in Effington, Illinois. This cross took five years to build and cost more than one million dollars. The Cross is 198 feet tall which is equal to a 20 story building. Anything taller would require a red light atop according to FAA regulations. There are 180 tons of steel within the Cross structure. Forty, two-inch thick bolts were inserted at each of the four corners of the Cross-support making a total of 640 bolts in the structure since there are four sections in the completed Cross. The folk in Illinois intentionally built their cross two feet higher than the one in Texas, because shoot, you don’t spend a million bucks for the second largest cross in the world. I am sure all those engineers in Texas are already figuring how they can get three more feet added to their cross. Maybe they could airlift a giant crown of thorns atop of it to regain bragging rights for the faithful who make the pilgrimage down I-40. Otherwise the only thing there is to do in Amarillo is eat that biggest steak at the Big Texan or visit the biggest Cadillac windbreaker where all those caddys are buried half in the ground.
Now there is a move a foot in Nazareth, as in Nazareth Israel, to build even a bigger cross. It will have a church in the bottom and be covered with 7.2 million tiles that can be purchased from 80 – 300 bucks each and you can add your names to or a simple inscription such as “My Jesus is bigger than your Jesus.” I don’t know if the tiles at the top are more expensive or not. But why does this seem like the world’s biggest target for terrorist to me?
Well, a big cross seems to fit our religious culture as our culture is infatuated with iconic crosses. There are all sorts of one’s made into jewelry, there are decorative ones we use in our homes and offices. There are even a number of persons with cross shaped tattoos. Crosses are in the logos of many churches and religious groups. It is the most recognizable universal symbol in the world, even more so than the Golden Arches.
Our own church has the Chi-Rho cross for our logo, with the Greek alpha and Omega out to the side. Of course, one problem with us meeting in a Catholic church that people who visit might have is if they are Baptist is the crucifix, and the stations of the cross on the wall here that portray the crucifixion of Christ. Many Baptist react strongly to such symbols, for we say that we are an Easter people, and that Christ is risen from the dead and is no longer on the cross. It is obvious from the way most Baptist do church that they would rather avoid the death of Christ all together. If you were caught wearing a crucifix around your neck, people would wonder about you Baptistic nature. After all, most Baptist ignore the season of Lent. The biggest majority never have Maundy Thursday or Good Friday Services, they just have Easter Cantatas, and oddly largely before Easter, which is the ultimate diss of the Lenten traditions.
But no crucifix for us. The truth is, we like a sanitized cross, shiny with clean lines. We want no bloody bodies like the one depicted in this week’s bulletin cover. We are however, are willing to sing somewhat bizarre hymns such as there is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Immanuel’s veins. And sinner plunged beneath that flood lose all there guilty stains. A fountain filled with nothing but blood? And we are plunged beneath a flood of blood? That’s pretty graphic, and metaphors like it have led some critics to characterize Christianity as a blood thirsty religion.
So in this season of Lent, what are we to make of the cross? Do we have a shinny one or a bloody one? Obviously bloody ones do not make good jewelry or decorations, and I’ll bet one 200 feet tall would make a poor roadside attraction as well, so sure that one needs to shine to bring ‘em in. But what about theology, do we prefer a bloody cross or a shinny one? I believe that there are shinny cross Christians and bloody cross Christians, and maybe during this reflective period of Lent we ought to find out which camp we are in. And the question is much deeper than it sounds.
During Lent especially we preach Christ died for our sins. He no doubt was bloodied and bruised and died a gruesome death that he did not deserve. I know this is so because I saw the Mel Gibson movie. But what does all that suffering mean? I ask honestly this morning, because you may not know that there are many theories of atonement, of the meaning of Christ’s sacrifice. Nathan Nettleton in his book “Why Did Christ have to Die? Historical Explanations,” explains it thusly:
For a thousand years the mainline church saw His suffering and death not as salvation’s critical tragedy, but as just one more step in God’s triumphant campaign into the human world and the devil’s domain. The Church Fathers saw Christ’s incarnation and resurrection mainly as a necessary means of overcoming Satan’s hold on and claim to humanity and essential to reconciliation and a new start for humanity. Eastern Orthodox Christians still hold this view. According to writer Fredrica Mathewes-Green, it’s like the firefighter, who comes out of the burning building with the baby in his arms. People tend to ignore his wounds and scars. Christ’s victory was that He snatched everlasting Life out of sin and death. Other scenarios from the early Church fathers had Christ paying the ransom to the devil for lost humanity. Then, St Augustine likened the devil to a mouse, the cross to a mousetrap, and Christ to the bait. Christ’s mission was to somehow rescue humanity from the legitimate claims of the devil. As others decided to leave the transaction a mystery, they were certain that there was a supernatural battle ongoing in a dimension beyond our direct perception. This conception survives in Martin Luther’s hymn, “A Mighty Fortress is our God”. However, the theory developed by Anselm, the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1098 in his work Cur Deus Homo (Why God Became a Man) came to define Christianities majority understanding of the meaning of Christ’s death. He read in the New Testament that Christ’s death was a ransom, but he could not believe that the devil was owed anything, so he restructured the cosmic debt. He posed that humanity owed God the Father a ransom of “satisfaction” for the insult of sin. The problem was that this debt was unpayable. We lacked the means, since everything we have already belongs to God, and we lacked the standing, like the lowly serf in his feudal world was helpless to erase an injury to a great lord. Anselm initiated the concept of substitutionary atonement. Everlasting damnation was unavoidable, except for the miracle of grace. God “recast” Himself somehow into human form (the mystery of the incarnation), who was both innocent of sin and also God’s social equal. As a human Christ could then suffer Crucifixion’s undeserved agony and dedicate it to the Father on behalf of humanity. Thus Anselm wrote that, “Christ paid for the sinners what He owed not for Himself. Could the Father justly refuse to Man what the Son had willed to give him?” This concept has been restated in many ways since and it has been extended to cover everyone’s transgressions for all of human history. Later, John Calvin in the 16th century replaced Anselm’s feudal king with a severe judge furious at a deservedly cursed creation. He also introduced the concept that only the “elect” would be saved and they were chosen from before they were born. Here man has no free will, and many are thus predestined to burn in hell without hope that they could ever change that. They can do nothing to secure their salvation and they can do nothing to stay their damnation, so an eternal torture chamber in hell awaits them. Most Christians find this concept, ridiculous in that it casts God as a furious dictator, who would create humans just to burn in hell forever.
It seems that there are many who question the penal substitutionary view of Christ’s death, even though it is the bread and butter of our evangelical heritage. Many see it as divine sanctioned violence or some even say cosmic child abuse. There are those who suggest that the Jesus who preached love and forgiveness was victim of a God who could do neither for no other reason than the sake of his own honor. After all, God made all the rules and created us to always lose the game. If you think that is harsh, no one has won yet. And besides, God asks us to forgive, but he himself is unwilling to do so without someone paying dearly because his standards have been violated, which is disrespect to his honor. How Christ death satisfies God’s honor is problematic on some levels. One can certainly see its roots in Anselm’s medieval world dominated by the feudal system where the honor of the feudal Lord was the cause of many wars. Blake Ostler states the argument this way:
“The Penal Theory Posits a Conflict between Father and Son. . . . The angry Father did not pay the price of sin himself but sent his son to do his dirty work for him so that he could be convinced to forgive us when he otherwise refused to do so. Others are free to call this love if they desire, but it is a perverse sense of “love.” . . . The Penal Theory Is Unjust. . . . Anyone who rejects original sin because it is unjust to punish someone for something that he didn’t do personally must also reject the penal substitutionary theory for the same reason. . . . The Penal Theory Erroneously Assumes that Guilt Can Be Transferred. . . The Penal Theory Limits God’s Power to Forgive. . . . Why can’t God simply forgive us the way we can forgive one another?
Father John Mabry states it this way: “how can a God who in Jesus told us that we were never to exact vengeance, that we were to forgive each other perpetually without retribution, demand of us behavior that God ‘himself’ is unwilling or unable to perform?…why can God not simply forgive as we are instructed to do, rather than mandating that some ‘innocent and spotless victim’ bear the brunt of ‘his’ reservoir of wrath? The ability of humans to do this when God will not or cannot logically casts humanity as God’s moral superior. This is of course absurd! (Religoustolerance.org)
You see, penal substitutionary atonement ironically makes the law the supreme power and authority in all creation. That Adam and Eve sinned greatly, that God was plenty mad about it, and that he resultantly desired to condemn every human he ever created to the fires of hell until his beloved and innocent son appeased his wrath, which was the only way he decided that he could love and forgive, the only way. Somebody had to pay and pay big in this get even scheme. The letter of the law becomes bigger than grace, bigger than peace, bigger than love, bigger than acceptance, and bigger than forgiveness, all qualities that were at the heart of Jesus life and message. Is this the Good News?
So the question is difficult but it is relevant – do you have a shinny cross or a bloody one? The truth is the other theories of the atonement are all lacking as well. The ransom theory gives Satan more power than scripture affords him. The moral theory of Peter Abelard simply suggests that the death of Christ was an example to inspire us to wholeness; and the Christus Victor Theory that suggests that suffering of the one is justified if it is for a greater good and frees many in exchange. One might argue that the essence of the Christus Victor Theory is that violence, suffering, and punishment of one or more innocent people is justified, if it produces beneficial results for other people. Many find this concept offensive and profoundly immoral. They regard punishment of the innocent for the sake of others to be inherently evil. It is this concept that partly justified the Burning Times (the extermination of Witches during the Middle Ages and Renaissance), the Armenian genocide, the Nazi Holocaust, the genocide in Bosnia Herzegovina by Serbian Orthodox Christians, and other recent genocides, religious oppression, and mass crimes against humanity.
The truth is we do, after all, like our crosses clean and our religion neat, and maybe for good reason. Because we have good news, and good news avoids the painful and the ugly. We are the glass is half full kind of Christians and not the glass is half empty kind. We prefer an upbeat, inspiring, high energy and motivational message, whose pragmatism helps people with real problems in everyday life, we say. That is the type of message that is popular today, the one that gives us “principles” for dealing with our jobs, our families, our relationships, the chicken soup for the weary soul kind of religion. The churches that are growing are those whose message is relevant to the 21 century, whose message is good news and sometimes just what people want, uh need to hear. We sure don’t need a cross with a defeated Christ hanging on it; we need a clean one to symbolize the power of a God who lives. Because the truth is, traditional theories of atonement don’t really require a resurrected Christ anyway to make sense. We are in a shinny Christ kind of world. The bloody one only offends our sensibilities.
It is as William Willimon says, “We human beings live by the pleasure principle. We can do no more than avoid pain, whatever its source — other people, finitude, failure, risk, truth. We are all practical hedonists to the core, asking no more of ourselves than that we have a nice day. So what can we understand, intellectually speaking, of a twisted body hanging from a cross?”
So what about the cross, is yours shinny or bloody? Maybe it is not by understanding that we are saved. As Karl Barth, probably the greatest theological thinker of the 20th century says, “Here is a truth we cannot understand — we can only stand under this truth.” Here is a Savior who came among us “with loud cries and tears” (Heb. 5:7), a Messiah who, “although he was a Son, learned obedience through what he suffered” (Heb. 5:8). John’s Gospel in our Lectionary text today implies that the cross is not to be understood; it is simply to be seen. It is to be lifted up high, forced upon our myopic view of the world, placarded before any procession which attempts to move toward God (Gal. 3:1).
Truthfully, I prefer a shinny cross. Sure, it looks better as jewelry, but it fits my theology better as well. I find it less troublesome, less disturbing to my postmodern, emergent thinking and my peace loving non violent inclusive theology. So for me, the question is settled. I have no trouble believing that Jesus died on the cross; I can sure see the religious people of his day mad enough to kill him. And that his message saved me from a system that would enslave me. That would be the shinny cross view. But . . .
There is a reality that I cannot escape, and it has nothing to do with my fundamentalist upbringing. Every day I see tragedy, and every day I see or hear about death and death stories, it is my world. I have worked in a major hospital for 28 years, and while I may not understand good news, I am an expert on breaking bad news. I can tell you that life isn’t fair and it doesn’t make sense. And I am not immune to bad news either as my family here can tell you this morning as we are still grieving a great loss, and in a little more than a week I will also remember the 5th anniversary of my mother’s death. And I will tell you something, a shinny cross does not satisfy me totally, at least not on an emotional level. It is too clean for what is a very messy and messed up world.
During those 28 years, I had several excellent mentors in the chaplaincy, and people who guided me. One, named Wilson Deese told me something early on that I have never forgot, but now know is true. He said that the chaplaincy does something to you. Day after day, week after week, year after year dealing with the problems that people have, the pain, the suffering the heartache, the grief. He said that it is easy to give up on the local church, its message seems so out of touch with where life is really lived. I thought that his statement was odd, but hey, he sometimes made odd statements. But now I know what he meant. Because being involved in the worst life has to offer day in and day our leads one to a state of skepticism, and leaves one helplessly with more questions than answers. Your perspective tends to get warped, and the “where is God” can overwhelm you. The good news of the gospel is reduced to a gospel of survival, a gospel of crisis intervention, a gospel of emotional support.
But what Wilson knew was what he was trying to tell me years ago and that was this: To never forget that I am a minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ. I am not a sociologist, although I do social work every day. I am not a psychologist, although I do psychology every day. I am not a teacher, or a mortician, or a counselor, or a manager, even though I do those things. I am not even a theologian. I am a minister of the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ. And whether it upsets our apple cart or not, a gospel that contains something that most of us don’t know how to deal with, and that something is a bloody cross. It is in the scriptures, it is problematic, it is disturbing, it is also a reality. An old rugged cross, not a clean one. The emblem of suffering and shame. I sometimes wish it were not so. But this I have also learned: even though we cannot understand this truth, we can stand under this truth. Because the truth is, when you are in pain, when you are hurting or suffering, when you walk in the valleys of the shadow of death, when the world turns on top of you and you were just on top of it the day before, I am sorry a clean cross doesn’t satisfy. A bloody one does. Because our lives are bloody ones. Because the one thing that we ought always remember, that what he did, whatever it means, the scriptures are plain and clear, he did it all for us. And when we figure that out, we won’t have to put our names on a tile on a great big cross somewhere. We will just have look at a lifted up cross, like Moses who lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, except this one contains a body. A man who draws all to God. And as bad as this sounds, it is anything but. It is the story of the Passion of the Christ, but it is more than that. You see while I have learned in 28 years in a hospital is that there is a thousand ways to get yourself dead, there is only one way to find life, and ironically that is through death on a cross. Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. For you see in all our heartaches and all our griefs there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother or a sister. And however you understand or don’t understand what he did for you, one thing remains: “when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” And I for one am ready to trade a lot of bad news for some Good news, and for a whole lot of death to eternal life. Amen.