John 3:13-17, 1 Cor. 1:18-24

A few weeks ago, I attended an event at the Wassmuth Center for Human Rights in Boise. The Wassmuth Center is named after Bill Wassmuth, a priest at St. Pius X Catholic Church in Coeur d’Alene. In the 1980s he found himself confronted with the misuse of theology for hateful aims by white supremacists in northern Idaho. He lived through a vindictive bombing of his home and built coalitions to battle the Aryan Nations as a chair of the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations. 

The presenter at the Wassmuth Center was a retired librarian and junior high English teacher who talked about literature being a mirror, a window, or a sliding door, using the seminal 1990 essay by Rudine Sims Bishop. Has a book or movie every transported you to another world, let you walk in the shoes of someone whose life is so different from your own? That’s a window. When the lighting is right, a window can become a mirror. Have you ever read a book or article and felt so seen, like you could see so much of your own story in it? A mirror, right? Some windows can become sliding glass doors, where readers just have to walk through in their imagination to become part of whatever world has been created.

On the best days, the clearest days, I think the cross at the center of our faith is both a mirror and window. Let’s start with where we all are. Take a few moments and consider what the cross means to you personally? Pause. And what do you think it means to others, those in this sanctuary and those a world away? Pause.

Before exploring further what the cross means to us and our faith, I find it helpful to rule out what the cross is not. One of my favorite scholars lists several of the most common and harmful false crosses: “The cross of Constantine for 1,700 years justified war in the name of God.” Other false crosses she lists are the the cross of “‘bear your suffering meekly, like a lamb’ which drives abused women and others back into the hands of their abusers,” and the “medieval cross that retains Jesus nailed to it, forever dead or dying.” (Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, “Being Church as, in, and against White Privilege”).

What then is the true cross, the life-giving cross, that we celebrate today? As John 3:14–15 insists, abundant life comes to believers this way: “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up.” 

In Numbers 21, poisonous serpents have been let loose in the camp of Israel as punishment for the people’s grumbling and unfaithfulness. The story tells us that the serpents bite the Israelites and many people die. Desperate, the people repent and ask Moses to talk to God on their behalf. Moses does so, and God commands Moses to raise up a bronze serpent for the people to look at. When they gaze upon the lifted serpent, the people who were poisoned live.

The word translated as “lift up” also means “exalt.” We are asked to hold these two meanings together simultaneously. As the serpent in the wilderness was lifted up, to the Son of Man must be lifted up on the cross. The double-meaning implies that physical act of lifting up is also a moment of exaltation. That is, it is in the crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension that Jesus is exalted. The God we worship shows saving power where we least expect, in the form of power’s opposite—a cross. 

When I see the cross, I am reminded that Christ is present in our brokenness and bondage to evil and draws forth power that we did not know we had. A favorite professor [Moe-Lobeda] writes, “This truth enables us to see the structural brutality of which we are a part without being destroyed by that knowledge. . . . In Martin Luther’s own words, when reality seems ‘distorted and sinful, and seemingly God-forsaken . . . a theologian of the cross is not afraid to recognize reality for what it is.’”

What does any of this mean in Troy, Idaho in 2025 after yet another week of violence in our nation and across the globe? I think sometimes we forget just how seemingly absurd the cross is in our culture. When Jesus walked on earth, the cross was an instrument of terror, torture, and death wielded by imperial power. It was used against all those who challenged the dominance and supremacy of the Roman Empire. In his love for the world, the whole world, including each of you, Jesus endured suffering and death on a cross.

This makes the cross a symbol of nonviolent resistance. Followers of Jesus respond to Jesus’ love by trusting in the non-violent love of God to work all things for good (even terrible things like suffering and death!). This is how God heals the world, and it’s the paradigm for how we work with God in the renewal of all things. When we gather for the Lord’s Supper today and eat the bread of life and the cup of salvation, we remember Jesus’ broken body and his blood spilled out for the life of the world, as we say during the distribution of Communion, “For you.”

The symbol of the cross and the name of Jesus Christ have been co-opted over and over throughout the centuries—Constantine, the Crusades, the removal of Indigenous peoples in this country under the guise of spread the gospel, and now in the form of Christian Nationalism. In this moment, communities of faith like yours which as faithfully passing on the abundant love and grace of Jesus through generations for decades, are needed more than ever. The world needs your welcome and hospitality, your rejection of evil, your care for those most vulnerable, your sharing of Jesus’ love for all people.

I’ve spent a lot of time here trying to help us think about what the cross means to us, to put up a mirror. I want to close with words from Reverdy Ransom, an African American Christian who lived in Ohio and Pennsylvania from 1861-1959. His experiences and those of the people he served as an African Methodist Episcopal (AME) bishop, were probably more like those of both Jesus and the Apostle Paul (whose words we heard in the First Corinthians reading) than our own. Let’s close with this window into another’s understanding of the cross of Christ:

“But our highest goal is not a unified church, a but a unified humanity in the bonds of brotherhood. The wise men from East were guided by a star, but wider men of our unfolding, coming from the four corners of the earth are guided by a higher vision. They seek not a manger but a cross where all men stand with equal footing on common ground. It is the final stand of humanity’s last retreat. All other meeting places have failed. For all ages men have tried the decisions of the battlefield, the prerogatives of kings, the decisions of courts, the enactments of parliaments, and union of great power seeking to underwrite the peace of the world. All these have left in their trail misery and chaos, division, and strife. But at the cross one man is lifted up so high above all other causes that divide, and his arms are extended so wide that they enfold in their loving embrace every tribe, kindred, tongue, and nation, to bind them together with his wounded hands in the everlasting bonds of brotherhood and love,” Reverdy Ransom, “The Coming Vision.”