This is an unusual sermon for me to preach. Rarely will you hear me talk about the power of the cross. By and large the cross stands for me as it did for early Christians – as a scandal. But unlike the early Christians, the scandal for me is not that God as revealed in and through Jesus could and was crucified by the Romans. Rather, for me the scandal is that through the years Christianity two equally wrong things. First, we deified the cross. We found the power of Christ to reside in the death of Jesus, through the blood that was spilled from him. We looked upon this instrument of torture and proclaimed salvation through sacrifice. And we deified the cross in a way that led to a deification of death. Through death we are saved. We created a theology of divine child abuse. While many today believe with their entirety that our sins are washed away by the once upon a time act of Jesus dying on the cross, I do not. And so, you will not hear me preach this message. The second thing that Christians did with the cross is that we abandoned it altogether. The story of the cross is scary and threatening, filled with stomach-turning images and necrophilic assumptions and so we walked away from the cross – particularly middle class, white Americans. We have been afforded a way of life that encourages us to deny and resist death of any kind, much less this death. We no longer kill the meat we eat. “Where does beef come from, Timmy? The supermarket,” Timmy replies. We artificially extend life. We rarely even attend funerals at which the person honored is present – we now have “memorial services.” Because we ourselves do not live in the same kinds of life and death situations as the early Christians or like most of the world today does, we have the luxury of abandoning the cross. The problem with this is that we live in exile; we abandon the heart of Christianity and we abandon the power of the cross as the same time.

We begin Holy Week with the procession of the palms. Jesus, clearly knowing the danger of entering Jerusalem, rides in – today in our scripture, he somehow manages to ride both a donkey and a colt. How? Because the writer of our scripture pulls the image of the coming messiah from two prophets, Zechariah and Isaiah, one of which calls for the messiah to ride on donkey, the other a colt. Matthew wants there to be no question that Jesus is the Messiah, so he rides both…at the same time. Jesus enters the city with palms waving. People shout, “Hosanna!” in his direction. He is hailed and revered as the Messiah. The moment is filled with heightened emotion and great excitement. Are these then the same people who cry, “Crucify him!” just days later? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But no one came forward and stopped the execution. But for a brief moment, mob hysteria or mass clarity rules. For a brief moment the one whose life embodied and teachings revealed the God of justice, love, mercy, and compassion is lifted high and his identity proclaimed.

How quickly the crowd hailed Messiah. How quickly they looked to him to meet all of their needs. But this messiah did not come to bring instant gratification. This messiah preached a very different message, one they did not like, and one we still do not like. He preached about a realm belonging to God, in which the lowly are lifted high and the high are brought low. He preached about a commonwealth in which righteousness is valued over self-promotion, and common good is valued over personal gain. He pointed out the hypocrisy of the religion he loved so much, and he chastised the leaders of his religious movement for not risking themselves to make the commonwealth a reality. He denounced the political oppression of the Romans and the appeasement of some Jewish leaders, and he called for simple revolt. He healed the sick so they could return to their communities as agents of change and transformation. In short, Jesus as Messiah brought a message of risk rather than a message of security. He taught about personal sacrifice rather than personal gain. And he encouraged political upheaval rather than submission. He called for salvation of the people, by the people, for the people. He did not ride in on a steed with a sword to force the Romans to abandon Palestine. He did not walk with the rich in their finery and tell them soft words of comfort and small encouragements. He walked among the stinking and the outcast. He ate with the prostitutes and the tax collectors. He stayed in women’s homes and he encouraged the ritually impure and the ethnic outcasts.

March Madness has begun. As I have confessed before you already, this time of year is important to me. Last night I had the privilege of watching Vanderbilt defeat Montana (sorry Montanans) in the women’s opening round. But, this week I received an email from the Vanderbilt Alumnae association inviting us to the hotel where the team was staying so that we could have a pep rally and then caravan over to the game en masse. We were given free gold pom poms to shake in their honor. How, on an insignificant scale, like Palm Sunday this seemed. I thought to myself that I hope the women win because coaches lose their jobs when winning teams done win all the way. It’s the closest thing to crucifixion in the basketball world. But then I caught myself. It’s nothing like crucifixion. It may be public castigation, but it’s not crucifixion.

Crucifixion was a political tool employed by the Romans not only to execute political insurgents, but to terrorize an entire population. Its function was to promote the oppression and subjugation of entire peoples. It was a political death… a slow, torturous one, at that. As if execution isn’t horrific enough, crucifixion was reserved for the most dangerous of society as a humiliation and a threat to others who may be participating in the same kinds of acts as the condemned. Many like Jesus were martyred and killed on a cross. Luise Schottroff writes, “The Jewish people growned under hunger and political oppression.” With this understanding, how could we ever personalize and individualize the cross? The cross cannot be spiritualized; it was a real and horrific death of real flesh and blood people. To get to the power of the cross, we must reflect upon its gruesome nature…not in a necrophilic way, but honestly. The one we follow died on a cross as a result of his teachings, because of his beliefs. Do we really want to follow him? The power of the cross does not reside in death, but in the willingness of Jesus to continue his message of love and freedom in face of death.

The cross today is the unavoidable consequence of belonging to God, of following the teachings of Jesus our Christ, of continuing the message of the one crucified, of surrendering to the will of God. Of course, we all “bear our little crosses,” but the heart of our faith is not about our individual disappointments; the heart of our faith is hope in the face of death, faithfulness to love and justice even when we are called into uncomfortable and dangerous places, revealing exploitation, injustice, oppression, violence, and hatred and doing so with love, perseverance, kindness, strength, and impatience. The cross today calls us to leave behind understandings of power that call us into systems of force and coercion. If we do these things, the cross looms before us. How ironic that Christians believe the way to salvation is through a cross. But, looked at as salvation for all of us, for all of humanity, for freedom for those who are oppressed, the avoidance of the cross leads us to appeasement, injustice, the tolerance of violence, and the cooperation with evil.

Today many people live in the shadow of real crosses: daring to vote in Afghanistan and Iraq; speaking of women’s rights in Saudi Arabia; defying the warlord in Nicaragua; refusing the gang life in the inner city; revealing corporate or political abuses of power in this country; professing a church inclusive of all of God’s children. People die today because of the call of the cross. This week marks the 25th anniversary of Archbirshop Oscar Romero’s assassination. Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed in Memphis less than 40 years ago. Those elected in Iraq have been gunned down, kidnapped, and blown up.

Dorothee Solle writes in “Thinking About God”: “We misunderstand the cross if we make it a necrophilic, death-seeking symbol…We are free to avoid the cross. The offers of most new religions are in the direction of avoiding suffering; the promise happiness, rapid fulfillment, but they avoid the reality of history. They interpret the will of God as private fulfillment; in other words, they attempt to creep around the cross…In the [exile] of the middle class we can easily avoid the cross. Or we take it one ourselves with all the difficulties with family, profession, society, that we find ourselves in when we commit ourselves seriously.

Love has a price. The cross expresses love to the endangered, threatened life of God in our world…The more we love God, the threatened, endangered, crucified God, the nearer we are to [God], the more endangered we are ourselves. The message of Jesus is that the more you grow in love, the more vulnerable you make yourself…If you share out your life instead of hoarding it, then the great light will become visible in you…In this process the cross, this sign of isolation, of shame, of abandonment, becomes the tree of life without which you cannot exist anymore.” This is the power of the cross – neither spiritualized and emptied of its gruesome history, nor necrophilic and death-loving, finding salvation in a torturous murder. The power of the cross is the choice of love in the face of death.

Please spend some time in Holy Week in worship and reflection on the cross in preparation for the triumph of Easter next week. Amen.