". . .Where There Is Forgiveness. . ."

Sermon by James W. Crawford

Palm Sunday, April 5, 1998

From Hebrews 10:1-18

Are you looking for God? Do you ever come to church wondering really if God really exists -- and if God does exist, does he, she, it really care about you and me, about this world of ours? When you learn of some utterly senseless human event, like those Jonesboro murders of a week or so ago, do you wonder if God is really good, if love in this creation does bear the last word? Or do you live in the shadow of some relationship, broken, grieved, a wound you just cannot seem to shake? Indeed, when you come to church, do you ask the question deep down, does anybody -- anyone -- really give damn? For me? For this world? And if they really knew me, could they possibly love me?

Those kinds of questions plagued the members of that church of the Hebrews week after week, year after year as they gathered for worship and service. The promises of God seemed down the drain. As time went on,  and as they looked out on and experienced an unfriendly and largely uncharitable world, increasing numbers of them concluded: God is dead; Divine love is a hoax; hope is no more than wishful thinking. And their church began to disband.

 "Hold it!" pleads our author to the Hebrews. "Wait a second! There is something you have to remember in this troubled world. Before you give up, before you let cynicism rule the roost, before you go away spiritually fatigued, religiously abandoned - listen to this!" And in those verses we read a moment ago, our preacher tells us the Cross of Jesus Christ provides the decisive clue to resolving the doubts dogging us. Here, at the Cross of Christ, writes our preacher, "through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once and for all" we see joined and aimed at us like a laser beam the core of our faith, the shape of our love, the power of our hope.

The Cross? The core of our faith, you say? How so? And just what is the core of our faith? O friends, listen: in face of wars and rumors of war; in face of a troubled, often heartless, merciless, dog-eat-dog world, in face of cancer, AIDS, the senseless slaughter of children by children; in face of our living precariously with the misunderstandings and self-deception, malice and conflict souring our lives together; in face of a world where our best intentions get turned inside-out, upside-down and used against us, where our boldest and most generous dreams can collapse and inflict injury; in face of cold, unheeding forces so often swirling about us, we confess our faith in a God who, through all life can dish out, loves us, hangs on to us and will never let us go.

Now that is our faith. And faith -- faith! -- it is. In many ways the observable, the objective facts of our lives deny a God who is loving, refute a God who is good, dismiss a God who gives a single whit for us. Indeed, the bare fact of the Cross of Jesus itself denies a loving God. If ever we see a place where mercy fails, where human and divine abandonment evidence themselves; if ever there exists an occasion where goodness loses, where innocence gets trampled, where the worst human beings can do to one another happens, it happens at the Cross. For anyone to say, in face of the hard, cold facts of the Cross, that we are loved by the Creator of the Universe is an act of faith -- a decision for trusting love at the heart of the universe when the facts belie it.

So why, then, why is this our faith? What do we see here at the Cross of Christ enabling us to trust in a loving and gracious God when much in the world says "no" to this conviction? Listen carefully: at the Cross of Christ we confess the lengths to which Love will go to restore wholeness to those for whom Love feels most tenderly. We confess here the risk Love takes when it seeks its wandering, lost, cantankerous, yea rebellious children -- when it seeks us. In the Cross of Christ we encounter, and are ourselves embraced by, Divine grace itself risking death to restore a broken relationship, to heal a gaping wound, to weave together again a harmony so that our scrapping, tangling fighting human race might become, in truth, a family of God.

Friends, you know Love does not calculate the cost when it goes after someone. You know Love is a spendthrift in pursuit of those it will not give up. Many of you in this room know the pain, the anger, the humiliation  involved when someone betrays you, slanders you, misreads your motives, walks out on you, turns your heaven into hell. What can restore the relationship? What can straighten things out? What can make for healing?  Revenge? Are you kidding? Revenge brings satisfaction, sometimes a smug narcissistic glee, but healing? Never. Is it requital? Will that bind a broken relationship? It surely makes for a quid pro quo and maybe something that passes for justice -- but healing? No way! What brings healing we can only describe as grace, as forgiveness: The risk love takes, though it may be battered and bruised, the risk for reconciliation claiming everything we have -- a reaching out that can be difficult and very painful.

Some of us, perhaps, know a mother, a father, a spouse who walked with us through some wounding, grievous, shameful episode. We know they passed through it as if they owned it. We sensed they cried "No," grasped for our shirttails, dug in their heels, yet, knowing the worst, trudged almost step by step with us to the very gates of the hell we prepared for ourselves and virtually camped outside, broken-hearted and grieving until we came out. They put themselves in our place; they stood in our shoes, they accepted, they shared, they bore the shame we engendered. They forgave us -- but tears wore furrows in their cheeks and inside hearts bled wildly in our behalf. This is forgiveness. It always includes self offering; it evokes identification with the other. Those who give forgiveness give themselves.  Love is ready to pay whatever personal cost to bridge the gulf, to heal the wound. Paul Scherer puts the matter succinctly: "The Cross is any place where a saving love goes out to undergird this life of ours, and comes back with the hot stab of nails in its hands." That is what we affirm when confessing those three astonishing words, "God is love," -- and it is shaped like a Cross.

So here at the Cross we trust God's love. But more: like that early Hebrew congregation we need desperately to be claimed by hope; to know, as our preacher puts it, the one we trust "sits at the right hand of God," and over time, "his enemies will be made a footstool for his feet." And just as this Cross invites our faith, and bears God's love, so here at the foot of the Cross, in this most hopeless situation, Hope is most powerfully at work.

How could this be? How does the Cross provide hope in this world where hope seems so precarious -- hope in this bloodiest of centuries -- a label haunting us even as we meet here this morning? How does the Cross proclaim hope in a world where we see children murdered in their own school yards, enlisted for genocidal Rwandan assaults, wasting away in inner city tenements taking their own lives; indeed, hope, where tragedy riddles much of our existence and death terminates it? Is there any hope? Is there truly a new future for us?

Again, I beg you, look at the Cross of Christ. See in the Cross our hope. This vast cross hanging before you is empty. As powerful a reminder as the Crucifix may be of our faith in the costly love of God, this empty Cross, hanging here in the heart of our nave, confronts us with Power taking the worst we can do to one another -- indeed, Power taking death itself and forging through it a new creation. I cannot explain it to you, I can only testify to this enthralling paradox: but an empty Cross means that the power -- the power of God -- lies not in preventing hopeless situations; it means the power of God lies not in preventing the likes of crucifixion, not in intervening to stop the Jonesboro boys, the Rwandan pogroms, the unending tragedies, senseless perversities and utter stupidities in this world. Our hope lies not in some cheap cinematic miracle. Hardly.

The ground of our hope can be seen in the empty Cross as it points to the power of God in taking the body of the crucified Christ and transforming it into new being. The Holy Week events reveal the essence of God's promise to us. There we see power alive and at work amid the most desperate situation, bearing with us, submitting to the worst; yet while participating with us in what may appear hopeless, working to bring triumph out of tragedy, promise out of peril, life out of death. Our hope can be seen in the empty cross because there, uniquely in our history, amid what appears to be the door slammed on the future -- there we witness the future most radically opened up. A radical choice confronts us. Again, Dr. Scherer lays it on the line: "The death of Jesus was either a tragic incident, which meant his kind of life was futile and impotent and would be broken at last by a world that was too much for it, or -- or -- it meant that mercy and justice and peace are so closely akin to the eternal

God, that they can be nailed to wooden beams and still win! -- wiped out and they will come back! -- buried, only to break death itself wide open." In a bloody Cross: Hope? By God, yes!

And so we ask again: Are you looking for God? In a troubled and frequently sorrowing world, do you wonder if God is really good, if love does indeed bear the last word, if anyone finally cares about you -- us? The poet's words of assurance come from the Divine heart itself. This is God's Holy Week promise:

The soul that on Jesus has leaned for repose,
I will not, I will not desert to its foes.
That soul, though all hell should endeavor to shake,
I'll never, no never, no never forsake.