“An Unfinished Cross”

You know, the Sunday after Easter is traditionally called “Low Sunday,” because it’s usually the Sunday with the lowest attendance of the year. Well. ... either your Easter services last Sunday were so wonderful that you’ve come back for more, or there’s something unusual happening this Sunday. I’ll assume it’s a bit of both.

I’m actually learning that something wonderful and unusual has been happening here at Pinnacle for 20 years. And Lynne and I are thrilled to be here with you today to experience it.

We’re here because you’re here. But I also know that at least in some small measure, you’re here today – in this one service – because we’re here. For the first time in the history of this congregation you’re being asked to vote on welcoming a new Senior Pastor. I’m humbled at being the one you’re being asked to vote on.

You were led by a remarkably able and faithful founding pastor. He had vision, savvy, and deep commitment. Larry Corbett handed something quite wonderful off, and he handed it off well. I also know that you’ve been served for the past couple of years by an equally able Interim Pastor in Mac Schafer. He’s very much his own man and I’m already convinced that he’s one of the real lights of our denomination. This is quite a pair to follow.

You’ve also been served by strong additional pastors along the way, including Duane Holoran, whose wife Nancy I met yesterday. And you’re served so well today by Fran and Kristin, with a great staff alongside them.

• • •

Several years ago, when I was serving as a college chaplain, the school I served still had a gym requirement for graduation. For those who didn’t want to break a sweat, they had a course called “Health and Wellness” to meet the requirement – seven guest lectures on seven topics. I was invited to be one of the guests. About 10 minutes in to my lecture I saw students writing furiously. I decided that they were so engrossed that they were taking notes, which just spurred me on. Not bad for a course that no one took very seriously. By coincidence, though, they were all writing on green sheets of paper. I ignored the curiosity.

Five minutes after my time was up and the nearly full auditorium was quickly cleared, the student assistant for the class handed me a stack of green sheets. It turns out that the students had been filling out the evaluation forms handed out for each lecture, before I had even rounded first base:

Did you like the lecture: yes/no?

Did you like the way the lecturer dressed: yes/no?

Should the lecturer be ridden out of town on a rail: yes/no?

Now if I notice any you writing on green sheets of paper slipped into your bulletins this morning, I promise you that I’ll tell myself you’re taking notes.

In a few minutes, Lynne and I, and my sons Andrew and Paul, will be escorted to a private room. We’ll pray together and talk a bit about what we’ve seen this morning. At the same time, you’ll be invited to remain in this sanctuary for a meeting of the congregation. I know that you, too, will pray together. I also know that you’ll speak together, and vote on whether you will accept the recommendation of your Pastor Nominating Committee that I be called, and my family welcomed, to minister the Gospel with you. We will jointly consider what has happened here. And a future, both for you and for my family, will be charted.

If you are visiting this morning, you’ve arrived on an interesting day. I hope you’ll spy the work of God through this very Presbyterian ritual. For I do know this is about so much more than green–sheeted evaluations, or some calculus by which I decide what’s in my professional interest. This is about what God might be doing at Pinnacle Presbyterian at this time, and in me and in my family. We all learn to trust God.

• • •

So let me tend to my topic this morning, which is “the unfinished cross.”

• • •

I told your search committee in one of our early conversations that I had been first drawn to Pinnacle because of the cross in your sanctuary. It was some months ago. I was perusing the list of churches with open pulpits around the country, as pastors often do – to get a sense of what’s happening in the denomination. I’ll also say that I was looking because of a growing sense that my role in my current call might be more transitional than I thought when I took it on. The church where I’ve been has had a history of long and stable ministries, followed by difficult transitions that turn into long and stable ministries. This time, however, a more difficult interim period than before left me with many challenges that an Interim Pastor might have normally addressed. So, predictably, this left open the strong possibility that my role would end up being just that, a more interim one than expected. I wasn’t in an active search, though. I just wanted to know what was going on around the country.

I saw Pinnacle listed. Lynne and I had taken our honeymoon in Scottsdale, and so I had good memories of the place (I better had!). And Lynne and I had enjoyed the area on other trips along the way. So I clicked to your website to take a look.

I was stunned by the image of the cross and sanctuary. That enticed me to read on. The more I did, the more I caught a sense of the congregation – your sense of yourself and each other, you anticipation of the future, the breadth of your ministries, and your great story. I kept reading, and I kept going back to that cross. Over a few weeks, every now and then, I’d pop over to your webpage just to look at the cross. Any congregation that can see itself in that kind of image must be an unusual place, I thought. And here we are today.

You an unfinished congregation.

And I am most certainly an unfinished pastor.

And we stand together, facing this unfinished cross.

Even on the Sunday after Easter, when we’re still telling resurrection stories, we know that we can’t see resurrection but through the lens of the cross. That cross. It’s still there.

• • •

During the first year of my ministry near Chicago, worship leaders decided to introduce the ancient practice of “stripping the chancel” at our Holy Thursday service. It’s a practice that dates to the 7th or 8th century, when the chancel area would be stripped bare of anything that moves at the end of a Maundy Thursday service. It was to allow cleaning before the Easter Vigil. It was also to show the barrenness of that night for Jesus and his followers. But our problem was this: there wasn’t much to remove. Take away a fern, the purple hanging over the pulpit, maybe a bible, and everything else was pretty much stuck in place.

Didn’t make for much drama. I looked around for something. I noticed the cross. It was a small brass cross that was attached to the wooden panels in the rear of the chancel by a post with a short screw. It could be loosened to be removed for cleaning or polishing.

I loosened the screw and made my plans. Come time to strip the chancel we took out what we could. Then I walked up to the cross and pulled it off the wall and walked it down.

That decision had its effect. Was the buzz for a week. Some liked it. Some didn’t. When challenged, I said that it wasn’t about the removing the cross; it was just about finding a way to help the congregation feel the barrenness.

As much as it did catch folks’ attention, I’ve come to agree with those who were disturbed. I now think that I should have taken a chain saw to the bottom of the pulpit before I removed the cross. For if everything, absolutely everything is removed from a sanctuary that has a cross in it, the cross should remain – unavoidable, enduring, unmovable. The emptiness should not be in its absence, but on its surface – no body; our Lord no longer on it; crucifixion and resurrection in a single symbol at the center of our attention.

• • •

The last time I was at the Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois, I saw no cross. Willow Creek is the parent church to a whole generation of megachurches around the country. I remember a figure of about 20,000 people every weekend at their South Barrington location. If you want to find a cross at Willow Creek you have to go very deep into the corporate looking complex, way back to the area that only the most devoted and involved know. There’s a small chapel back there that last I heard was used for a small Thursday evening service and a few weddings. There is a small cross back in that chapel, but in the auditorium where weekend services take place, no cross at all.

This is on purpose. The thought is that the cross is too much a downer in an age when self–esteem is king and we’re taught that we’re in charge of our own lives. The story the cross tells is bad for public relations, inhibits outreach, and confuses potential attenders. It’s too weak. It’s an image of suffering not glory, of sacrifice and not a God–giving–us–everything–we–want kind of spirituality.

And the Apostle Paul sits by himself up in the stadium seating, scribling a few thoughts to the Corinthians about his own ministry. He says that he doesn’t want to be believed because he is articulate, or educated, or successful, a good marketer, the leader of one faction in the church or another. He asks to be known for something far less attractive in the eyes of the world, far less sophisticated, and less successful. It’s even foolish, he says. And it is the cross.

Paul asks the Corinthians to judge him by how he points to the cross, to what the cross means, to what happened on the cross: Christ’s choice to be that weak, to undergo that kind of suffering and humiliation in order to be himself: God among us.

• • •

And you? As a congregation you too are committed to a cross. And not just to a cross you found in some catalogue of church furniture. You’re committed to this cross.

This cross. This tree of desert ironwood, rooted in the native stones, making its way to heaven. It’s like the road Isaiah imagines in the desert, reaching and stretching, and unfinished. I learn that the ironwood is meant to remind us how hard it can be for us to change as we become hardened to God’s touch. And so as the cross of Christ, this cross points to the power of God’s Spirit to transform, inspire, and make a way out of no way. Isn’t that what you see in the finished walnut extending into the other arm?

Sitting here studying this cross last Friday, I noticed the gap between the rough and the polished parts, between the ironwood and the walnut. Ever so small, but ever so important. And inside this gap, deep within, I saw texture, the texture that is the Holy Spirit filling the empty space between who we are and who God sees us to be.

Here you find an image of we undergo with Christ. And here you find an image of our hope. You find an image of two arms outstretched to hold us, like a loving mother holds us when we hurt, or when we worry, or when we just need to talk. There are arms that stretch around us all and make us a people.

This cross is for children, close to the waters of baptism at its roots. It is for youth, learning to understand who you are as followers of Christ. It is for adults as we become more and more aware of that gap in between, and more and more grateful for the Spirit who holds it together.

• • •

And beneath this cross? A pulpit, a table, and a space for gathering, playing, laughing, crying, dancing, marrying, committing people we love to the grave, making music, or maybe just sitting and praying. You gather round the table to remember Christ’s night of suffering and call it a Great Thanksgiving. You listen to words from the pulpit and know they’re imperfect, yet you also know they begin a Great Mending – pointing to the cross and echoing Easter’s music. And you do so much more beneath this cross and call it all Church.

In the Apostle’s Creed we say that after Jesus died on the cross he “descended into hell,” before rising on the third day. But the original meaning of the sentence in the creed is not hell, but the “places beneath.” This comes from a passage in the Letter to the Ephesians about Jesus descending to the lowest parts of all things as well as to the highest heights, “so that he might fill all things” (Eph 4:10).

There is no God–forsaken place. Christ has “filled all things.” In a wonderful introduction to Christian faith, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, describes this filling presence of Christ as “God’s willingness to accompany us through all the consequences of sin and finally to bring us back from the furthest point of distance from him that we could imagine.” It is an “open door that exists in the heart of every situation because of God’s freedom.”

• • •

And so isn’t that it? There is no human experience that is not already here, because of this cross. And so there is no human experience or human condition that is not in some way encompassed, even welcome, in the church. And once brought in, there is no human experience that is not invited into the unfinished, yet finished, work of transformation in Christ, and so also invited into praise.

The whole gospel, right here. The whole church, drawn in and around it. And, finally, the whole church sent out from it.

When Lynne and I first walked into this sanctuary, I turned to her and said: “The windows around the cross are shades of gray. I thought they were blue. They oughta fix their website. . .” She gently turned to correct me, as she often does, with the obvious: “Maybe it looks blue in the photo because you’re seeing the blue sky through the window.”

The sky through the window. The rocks moving from the inside out, with the water rolling over. Each one of us, coming in from the outside and going back out. This movement makes us a church, for the sake of the world. And you know that. You wouldn’t have grown as you have if you didn’t. You wouldn’t have created the pre–school you have, the theology center you have, the youth center you have, the outreach programs that grow every year, your developing connections to Haiti, your attention to the borders, your weekly prayer for the world, and more. You wouldn’t care for each other as you do, or enjoy each other. And there’s more yet to do.

The Holy Spirit is “filling all things” in the ministry here at Pinnacle, and opening your spirits as God’s people: an unfinished people before an unfinished cross, in praise to a finished and loving Lord. What a gift.

Amen.