Telling Stories About the Cross (Matthew 10)

            A couple of months ago, I attended a preaching workshop right after Easter.  Some clergy go into hiding.  Some of us go to preaching workshops where we talk about sermons, even after delivering more than a few the week before. 

I guess the trade is funny like that....

When you get a group of preachers together, usually there’s a little time where it’s not planned, but somehow stories start trading around the circle.  Sometimes they are “true to life” stories.  Other times, you realize that clergy can be like fishermen, always telling a story that you wonder about.  Is it fact or fiction? 

With fishermen, you know what it’s like, that guy with hands spread out generously, indicating that he caught a whopper.  You find yourself wondering, oh really, that 20 lb fish really just leap up on your hook, no questions asked? 

The preacher version that tends to raise eyebrows might be something similarly odd, like a claim that you baptized quite a few at Easter.  (Really?  You got forty-five people dunked and the service still finished on time?  Oh wait, your tradition sprinkles.  You lined ‘em up and just ran down the line with a hose….)

            When we’re not amusing each other with stories of church services gone awry or the meeting of a subcommittee that lasted three hours, debating finer points of church matters such as entrée choice at the annual association meeting (yes, I sat through a meeting back in Kansas where that conversation alone was twenty minutes by itself), clergy also like trading stories for “sermon material” purposes. 

Usually, preachers like to trot out one of those stories that you’ve experienced firsthand or found secondhand somewhere along the way.  And you want to tell a good story, resonant with theological insight and meaning.  Most importantly, it has to have a great punch line.

            One of those stories I like telling other preachers is one you may have heard before from the pulpit.  It’s a story that I think needs repeat telling, as it has resonant theological insight and meaning, and furthermore, that punch line—oh my!

The story comes from the ministry of Clarence Jordan, a Baptist preacher and ardent desegregationist.  Clarence was given a tour of a church just after a major building program completed. The church was a massive Southern Baptist “county seat” type church (i.e. in a town in the South where the Baptist church was expected to be quite a marvel to behold.)  As stories are wont to do when being shared around, the details of the church’s finery vary, though I have heard this fine church could seat several hundred, just in the choir loft.

Everything was made of the finest wood (mahogany this and mahogany that).  The gold and brass altar ware gleamed in the sun as light streamed into the sanctuary through stained glass windows. The building was honeycombed with classrooms, offices, and meeting parlors galore.

At the end of the tour, while showing Jordan the fountains out on the front lawn, they pointed to the new gold cross high atop the steeple. “Dr. Jordan, that cross alone cost us $10,000.”

Jordan looked up at the cross, looked back at his hosts and said, “You know, friend, there was a time when crosses were free”.

The story packs a good punch line, doesn’t it?  In the midst of a church swelled up with pride about what they had built, old Clarence brings things back into proper focus.  To follow Christianity is not about laying claim to the most spectacular facilities or record attendance numbers or the way that the gold cross glints in the morning sun.  To be a Christian means that you have a healthy respect for your place in the Kingdom/Reign of God, where the last are first and the first are last, and hearing the gospel properly means you don’t do it while seated in a pew so fancy it has built-in seat warmers.

When Jesus prepares the disciples to go forth in his name, it’s not to build mighty steeples or to reach a certain level of respectability and accrue the right amount of civic and cultural currency.  He tells it plain:  If you are going to follow me, there’s a cross, and it’s not optional for a disciple going along the way of Jesus.

A few years back, the American Baptist preacher Tony Campolo was speaking to a group of Kansas Baptists.  Campolo loves a good story, and his sermons are a string of stories about persons he has met and the way faith has made a difference in their lives.  Eventually, as proud fathers are known to do, Tony started speaking about his son Bart, who was working in inner city Philadelphia at the time. 

Also a minister, Bart was involved in a project where a Christian ministry deliberately found the worst place possible to set up shop. They looked for the least likely place you’d want to buy property.  And then they bought property there, rehabbing dilapidated homes to make them inhabitable again.

Why would Bart and his colleagues do this sort of thing?  Surely they looked around the neighborhood, didn’t they?  Who would live in such a place?

The ministry sought young adults looking for internships (field education for human services programs at colleges and “urban ministry” practicum for seminary students).  They were looking for “hands on experience”.  And Bart had just the place for them to live.

The students became part of the neighborhood, not just working a few hours and then going home.  They were home already.  Thus, the great experiment was underway: learning to live alongside people with deep needs:  drug addicts, prostitutes, the urban poor and other marginalized people. 

I remember there was a noticeable silence among the Kansas Baptists as Tony mapped out all of the details of his son’s urban ministry work.  These folks had shown up for the region’s annual evangelism conference, and for many, this did not sound like “evangelism” or “the work of the church”.  This was the buzz in the halls afterward the session ended:  What about saving souls with preaching?  How did these folks ever get to be fine, upstanding members on the church roll? 

Oddly enough, while folks came looking for tips on “how to reach out to people”, they couldn’t quite fathom that people living intentionally on the wrong side of the tracks had much to do with Jesus and the gospel.

I imagine some folks just muttered a bit and blanked it all out.  That doesn’t sound like “church” as we know it.  What good is this sort of story?

As Clarence Jordan said, there was a time when the cross used to be free, as the Romans used crucifixion as a way of intimidating and keeping order.  To get a cross was not an honor, nor eagerly sought out.  Then Christianity came along, the scrappy group of women and men, slave and free, Jew and Gentile, and turned that story around. 

The Matthew scholar Warren Carter observes, the cross in the hands of the gospel becomes a symbol of something else wholly (holy?) different.  Now the Cross is a symbol that

ironically indicates the empire’s limits.  The empire will do its worst in crucifying Jesus.  But God raises Jesus from death, thwarting empire’s efforts.  And Jesus will return to establish God’s empire over all, including Rome. (Matthew and the Margins, p. 244)

 The cross we take up is not for show or to be tamed by other forms of over-familiarity.  The cross is sign and symbol of a people who have felt the world at its worst, even believe Jesus himself suffered, even to the point of death upon that cross, and live like they can’t wait to tell about how the story of God at work in the world makes them a people of humble service and hopelessly in love with God and neighbor.  That cross is free—and freeing!, if we are willing to leave our self behind and follow.

The cross Jesus calls us to take up and follow may come in a variety of forms, but the cross is best known when the bearer aims to walk in the same pathways as Jesus.  When we settle down into our institutional comfort zone (local church, denomination, etc.), we mean well, but we forget that the gospel was told along a dusty trail, where the emphasis was about walking alongside those who were otherwise invisible or written off.  The gospel has to be “good news” first and foremost, and it can be translated many different ways through signs of care, love, compassion, presence, solidarity, witness, peacemaking, reconciliation, justice seeking, advocacy, and the list goes on. 

How could anything that keeps us to the task at hand, especially one that we sometimes wish was not asking us to stretch beyond our plans for the day, or the way we see life or upsets our sense of captaining our own destiny?

Why would Jesus gather together his followers, prepare to send them forth in his name, knowing that they would be rejected more than welcomed, scorned more than praised, and bearing witness to a message and worldview that inevitably leads them to a cross?

What sort of story would make you believe all that?