Sunday, Sunday!

March 22, 2015
Crossways
          
          Not everything is about death and salvation; some is about wine, women, and song - 
          and farming. – Uncle Albert
 

We go to church almost every Sunday though, in my case, not always for the most selfless, highest minded reasons. This Sunday, for example, I was less interested in my salvation than in what  the hell the gospel 

lesson was about.

No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks around . . .

     You can find my honestly confused take here. But, I was thinking Sunday morning: Let’s get unconfused, if that’s possible.

If you want to get unconfused about a passage of Scripture, there are places not to go – churches with M, P, or B in their names, for example. So, we went to Grace Lutheran, Axel Sundstrøm’s church.

     It would have been nice to slip in at the reading of the gospel and out at the end of 
the sermon. But it wouldn’t have been nice; so we stayed from bitter beginning to bitter end.

     That’s unfair: The liturgy is lovely; but much of it is sung, and I don’t sing well. I read music only approximately. And trying to juggle bulletin and book, I’m easily lost. I’m also frustrated listening to Roz glide along beside me. There’s a part of us that marvels at and a part of us that hates that what we struggle to do poorly someone we know does easily and well.

I know next to nothing about preaching, as many sermons as I’ve heard. I do know this, though not so much about preaching as about myself: it bothers me when preachers talk about themselves as if they don’t exist. Sundstrøm told a story this morning of this moment in his ministry, very early on, when a retired pastor on his way through wherever-Axel-was-then to wherever-the-old-man-happened-to-be going asked Axel after Sunday morning service if he could have a minute of his time. It was to tell him, it turned out, that if he (Axel) wanted to preach the gospel, he was going to have to get out of the way and make room – indeed, give all the room – to the cross.

     Axel was crushed – and immediately saw that the old man was right. So he said this morning: “If the choice of what to preach was myself – my thoughts, understandings, views – or the cross, what choice was that?” The choice had to – and has to – be the cross, because that is the lens through which the faithful must see everything. It’s not just that “all Jesus does points to the cross,” but that the cross changes everything that happens thereafter because now everything must be seen through it.

That’s what Jesus is doing, pointing to the cross, in the passage from John we read this Sunday (See here.) - especially when he tells his disciples, and all who will listen that “The hour has come for the Son of man to be glorified.” So, though his soul is troubled, he will not ask the Father to save him from this hour.” And in this hour, “is the judgment of this world”; in this hour “the ruler of this world will be driven out,” this hour “when I am lifted up from the earth” – meaning the ground, when he and the crosspiece he is nailed to is lifted up by his executioners and hung on its pole. We know that’s what he means because he says so: He has said all of this “to indicate the kind of death he was to die.” And to die for us, because in this death, he says, he will draw all people to himself.

     All people, Axel says, and all things. I like that.

But we must forget everything else.

     Yeah, but.

Yeah, but. I’m not a theologian and I’m never trying to play one here, but it seems to me that there are two problems with this.

     The first is in talking always about the cross, you forget that a particular human being is attached to it – you know, the guy that gives eyes to the blind, ears to the deaf, and tongues to the dumb, that cleans lepers of their spots and legs of lameness, the rabbi that tells odd stories about how what he calls the kingdom of heaven is like a farmer or a father, a bundle of smart and not-so-smart bridesmaids or a dishonest servant. Talk about the cross alone seems to me to ignore all that (and with it ¾ of the pages of the gospels). I blame Paul because he doesn’t really believe that Jesus, the Christ for God’s sake (he keeps saying), was human. I say that not because Paul denies that Jesus was human but because he (Paul) makes no attempt to reach into – he has no interest whatever in understanding – Jesus’ humanness.

     It’s no surprise that a Lutheran would follow Paul here. Luther was besotted with the Apostle.

The second problem: What the hell happens to the resurrection?

     Don’t ask me what I believe about the resurrection because I can’t answer – I don’t know. But whatever I do believe, I will not believe that its sole purpose is to authenticate the cross. You know: “The resurrection? Oh, it proves that the one that suffered and died truly was the Son of God, Trinity II.”

There’s a third problem. I don’t know where to go from here.

     Where Roz and I went was home. We walked from the church through downtown up the hill and home. We ate bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches. I opened a Guinness draught and, because I wasn’t frustrated enough, turned on the basketball.