“Many years ago,” my father said “I went to visit a school in the interior of Sarawak…”
A few months before my father died, I asked him if I could interview him. He agreed. For several days, I went to him after his afternoon nap, and sat with him in his spacious office. I set up the camera in an inconspicuous spot so that we could forget it was there, pressed record, and we were off. As the afternoon gradually aged, we settled into our old ways of talking – though I kept mostly quiet, giving him space to wander into the past.
“But when I landed in Kuching International, I was informed that the road to the interior had been washed out by recent rains…”
He paused, eyeing me for effect.
The evening light fell into the windows.
When I watch those videos now, I am filled with emotion, just hearing his voice. I did not know, when I asked those questions, that the evening light was deepening, and the shadows were lengthening on his life.
Perhaps he knew.
In the late 1960 and early 70’s, my father had an interesting job. He was the Dean of the Association for Theological Education in South East Asia – a group of sixteen Christian Theological Colleges. That sounds pretty impressive. It’s something to be the Dean of one school – but sixteen? You must know, though, that each of these colleges was quite small. At that time, Christianity was not widely practiced in that part of the world. With the exception of The Philippines, all of the South East Asian Nations were – and still are – majority Buddhist or Islamic. The old photographs of my father teaching in some of these colleges show him talking to a small group of students in what look like one room schools with an old blackboard and a single naked lightbulb. I imagine those colleges were not unlike the early ecclesia that the Apostle Paul planted in the ancient Near East – small communities of committed people gathered in a makeshift classroom, or in the humble precincts of a rural church.
“I called the head of the school on the telephone.” My father continued. “He already knew that the road was out, of course. He advised me to hire a boat. The school was beside the river anyway, and for a reasonable price, I could make my way inland without the road… he often did so himself.” So my father made his way down to the docks, and soon enough, knowing what he was about, a wiry old man approached him. The man could not speak English, and my father only knew basic Bahasa Malaysia, but they managed, through a peppering of words and a good deal more hand waving, to settle on a price for the journey upriver.”
At that time, my family lived in Singapore, the bustling island city centrally located at the base of the Malaysian peninsula. Ours was a life of air conditioning and motor cars. The pile drivers could be heard at all times of day, as they built an ambitious new city. But since he was tasked to tend to the needs of 16 tiny theological colleges spread here and there across South East Asia, my father often left the city for more untamed places where, as on this occasion, he had to think on his feet, and, with a mumbled prayer, get on with it.
As a child I knew nothing of any of this. It wasn’t until later that I began to understand the role my father played in scratching out a small foothold for Christianity in those equatorial countries. It wasn’t until those quiet talks, in the evening of his life, that he told me some stories from that time.
**
According to the liturgical calendar, today is the Feast of the Holy Cross.
Did you know that?
I did not.
You may say, “But Pastor Mark, feast days are a Catholic thing” – and of course you would be right. Part of the legacy of Protestant Reformation is that we – you and I – can go about our lives of faith entirely unaware of the calendar of feast days and the saints that they honor. As your pastor, it is my job, of course, to find ways to offer you spiritual nourishment – and I try to make the most of moments like Transfiguration Sunday, Pentecost, Epiphany – and of course, the big ones: Easter, Advent and Christmas. But when it comes to feast days, well, there are 365 of them, so they come and go without making a blip on our spiritual radars.
It turns out, however, that a couple minutes of internet sleuthing is all that is required to uncover some pretty interesting lore about the origins of Holy Cross Sunday. Unlike most other feast days, this one is not dedicated to a saint – it is a celebration of the “exaltation” of the cross upon which Jesus was crucified. In this case the word “exaltation” refers to the rediscovery of the cross. And, conveniently, it was a saint – Saint Helena – who is credited with literally unearthing it.
This Saint Helena, as it turned out, had another claim to fame. Besides being a Christian saint, she was also Flavia Julia Helena, the mother of the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great – who was, incidentally, the first Roman Emperor to convert to Christianity. In 335 AD this Saint Helena, the emperor’s mother, took a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and as legend has it, while she was there, she was pained to discover that Calvary – the spot outside the city walls where Christ was believed to have been crucified – was sadly neglected.
The sacred spot deserved a splendid church, but she found nothing of the sort. In fact, to add insult to injury, what did she find built there, but a temple to the Goddess Venus!
Being the mother of the emperor, she no doubt had some sway, because the temple was promptly torn down. When the foundations of the new church were being dug, Saint Helena was conveniently on hand to discover an underground crypt that contained three crosses.
It was clear to Saint Helena, these were the very crosses upon which Christ and the two thieves were crucified on Good Friday – but there remained a conundrum – how could she deduce which of the three was the cross upon which Jesus died? What if they inadvertently venerated the cross that was used to execute a thief? That would not do!
**
“The boat,” my father said, “was very small. Perhaps it was for fishing.” Before he could say anything, the old man grabbed his luggage and leapt into the boat. My Samsonite luggage looked strange in the boat. “Samsonite” my father said “is made for airplanes, not for fishing boats.”
The old man motioned him to step into the front of the boat, and seeing his hesitation, he helped in. He took his place beside the motor. He was a thin man, but beside him, the motor did not look like much. Neither man nor engine inspired much confidence.
Before he untied the boat from the pier, the man asked my father, using hand motions, if he knew how to swim. “This question frightened me, you know.” My father laughed. “I could see that the current was swollen from the big rains, and there were dangerous looking logs racing by. I nodded and he nodded but our eyes said more. We understood each other. He untied the boat and pushed off.”
**
John 3:16 – the second passage that I read for you this morning, is among the most famous passages in the Bible.
For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.
If you read this verse as a way of understanding God, it is disturbing.
You have heard me preach about this in the past.
I fail to see how “giving” an only son to a people who will torture and brutally kill him, in any way proves that you love those brutal killers? To me, this describes a cycle of brutality.
What can this have to do with eternal life?
But there is another way to read this verse.
If you read this verse as a way of understanding Jesus, it is different.
It’s one thing for God to “give” Jesus. It’s another thing, I think, for Jesus to give Jesus.
One sounds like abuse.
The other sounds like sacrifice.
Jesus was not up there. He was not calling the shots from some distant vantage.
Jesus was down here, with us.
If you think of the cross, Jesus was the horizontal part – the part of God that wandered among the people.
If you think of the cross, Jesus was the horizontal part – the part of God with open arms – the part of God that fell in love with the poor and the weak.
If this part of God so loved the world that he humbled himself entirely for our sake, showing us that nothing – not even death on the cross – could stop that love… then you begin to give me something I can believe in. Could this kind of unstoppable love lead us closer to God – or, as the passage says to “eternal life”?
**
The river was wide, and it was strong, but it was also strange and beautiful. As the hours passed, my father’s fear diminished – perhaps he came to trust the old man’s lifelong knowledge of the river – or perhaps he simply forgot himself, entranced by the great animal of the river – how it meandered through the landscape, shaping the whole world around with its curving body. There was something of eternity in this sinuous motion of the river. This roundness was, he felt, a kind of cosmological expression – nature’s way of folding us into its loving embrace.
And it was in this reverie – this surrender into the gracious roundness of all things – the swell of a mother’s womb, the arc of a crescent moon, the curl of an ocean waves, the sphere of a drop of water, and the orbiting of the planets – that, coming around a bend in the river, they saw impressed against the horizon before them, the vertical and horizontal lines of the cross.
My father’s destination had announced itself with the hard lines of the cross that, atop the pinnacle of the chapel, suddenly seemed jarringly out of place.
In that moment, the straight lines of the cross were a kind of foolishness to him, a human interruption among all the curvings of the cosmos. Stripped of the centuries of accrued religious significance, he saw it, in that moment, not as the proclamation that here stood the church of Jesus Christ – but as a Roman executioner’s tool, intruding upon his spirit with its violence.
**
But this, I suppose, is part of the resilience of the Christian faith – that it can take, as its central symbol, an executioner’s device, and transform its meaning, so completely, that its inherent violence dissipates and is replaced by love.
I suppose it is not surprising, since the central event of our faith is the resurrection – the moment when a brutal death is transformed into the risen promise of love.
God came to us. God became humble – humble to the point of dying on the cross…
Why was God so foolish?!
Why would the most powerful and the most sacred presence in the universe, surrender to our violence?
It does seem foolish.
But in this foolishness something altogether unexpected happened.
Death became life.
Hatred became love.
A man became divine.
I have one loose end to tie up… I’ve left it till the end.
You remember Saint Helena? She found three crosses, but she had to somehow figure out which one was the cross…
How did she do it?
The story goes, that Saint Helena found an old woman who was about to die, and brought her to the three crosses.
The old woman touched one cross, and remained sick.
She touched another cross, and still she was sick.
Finally she touched the third cross, and she was healed. This, Saint Helena knew, was the Holy Cross.
An executioner’s tool?
No.
Not anymore.
Amen