Sep 15 | “A lynched God,” (Sermon, September 15th)

Some of you might know that yesterday was Holy Cross Day, a feast commemorating the dedication of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, which was built on the spot where Helena, mother of Emperor Constantine, apparently found a relic of the True Cross.

It’s a strange day, about as strange as wearing a cross, an instrument of torture and humiliating death. It’s easy to forget the truly radical and world-breaking truth at the heart of Christianity: that, as African-American theologian James H. Cone writes, the cross was the lynching tree of Jesus’ day.

What does it mean to worship a lynched God?

And what the heck does that have to do with the infinitely more accessible and mundane image of lost sheep and coins?

Well, part of this thread comes from a sort of personal drought, as I thought, “What can I possibly say about this passage, which Christianity loves so very much, to St. Margaret’s Cedar Cottage, a parish I feel truly understands, and does its best to practice the lessons within – St. Margaret’s Cedar Cottage, which maintains Hineni House, a place of banqueting and refuge for searching hearts from (now we can say) all over the world, within which I am so, so privileged to serve?”

Clearly, this required a fresh look at the parable.

Back to James H. Cone.

In 2011, Cone wrote The Cross and the Lynching Tree, which expanded on the notion that Jesus, a brown man living in occupied territory, was not necessarily killed via Satanic supernatural intervention in order to accomplish a catch-all forgiveness blast for personal sins. Instead, Cone says, a direct parallel between crucifixion and the lynching of black people in the 20^th century United States (and beyond) can be drawn. Although lynching was usually extra-judicial – that, is outside the legal system – Jesus’ execution was legally sketchy enough that it’s still a fair comparison. And perhaps the most important parallel to be made is that both crucifixion and lynching are used by domination systems as “correctives” for oppressed peoples. They say, “This is what will happen if you disobey the order which the powerful have set in place.” Punishment is applied whether the victim misbehaved or not. The facts of the case don’t matter, because the purpose is social regulation.

Good Friday is and has always been the way of the world, and will continue to be as long as hierarchy exists.

The Way of Jesus survived Good Friday because there was an Easter Sunday afterward – but there was also something else that kept that lovely weed growing, and that was the way Jesus’ disciples responded to the whole painful, wonderful saga of Jesus’ death and resurrection.

What’s so remarkable about our faith is that the disciples not only managed to find a redeeming purpose to the lynching of their teacher and friend, but that indeed, they began to say that it was God who had been lynched.

We know this because contemporary Roman detractors like Emperor Julian, Roman orator Marcus Cornelius Fronto, and several others all mocked Christians for worshiping an executed criminal and his cross. What’s most interesting about Christianity’s early detractors is that the one common thread among them is elitism: all refer to Christians as a gang of misfits, losers, and poorly educated ruffians.

Right on.

So it could be said, then, that the disciples, in their grief and awe, did what Jesus had taught them, and went searching for God.

Where was God among the ruins of their former family of itinerants and prodigals? Where was God in their abandoning of their beloved? Where was God in the horror of Good Friday?

The answer, they discovered, was that God was here, on the lynching tree.

God was in the most unlikely place imaginable – and not just once, but for all time, present to us and suffering beside us.

Okay, so what about the sheep and coins?

Well, how we usually interpret this parable is to say that God or Jesus is the shepherd, and later the woman (awesome), searching diligently for lost things, and receiving them with joy. And that’s wonderful and so worth remembering, whether we ourselves are lost or whether we are annoyed at being passed over for the ones who were lost.

Earlier this week, Jesus even said that wewere to become lost, for him. We were to leave everything behind – including the ones we love most – for his mission.

And what is that mission?

No less than what he himself does for us: searching.

Perhaps, as Jesus teaches these religious scholars and elites who criticize his ragged family of sinners, he is not only teaching them that God seeks out the lost. He is trying to tell them that we too must seek out the lost.

We are the shepherd who must seek out the lost sheep of the world by hacking through treacherous brush and thick night to bring them home.

We are the woman who must sweep the house and light the lamp to make sure every speck of silver is discovered and polished.

And friends, see how discovery merits celebration in these parables. See how the bringing home of the lost ones, in a sense, brings a heavenly banquet to us – better than that, instils in us such joy that we instigate the banquet.

You might say that in finding the lost and bringing them home, we not only enter into but create the Kingdom of God.

You might even say that in finding the lost and bringing them home, we have actually found God Herself.

For the God of the lynching tree, the scourged, detested, desaparecido God strung up on the byways of the world for all to pass by with horror and derision is surely the most lost thing of all.

And so we are called to seek out the lost, knowing that when we do, we ourselves find God and, in our joy, create God’s Kingdom.

What does any of this look like here, today?

Who is lost in the world we live in? And who beyond God is looking for them?

Who is missing from among us? Who is alone and afraid? Who is perhaps a little unseemly or awkward? Who is the one who calls to us without knowing she calls?

Sometimes they look like us. Those who struggle with all of the everyday struggles of a human life: grief, poverty, illness, loneliness, social isolation, disability.

Sometimes they look less like us.

The Indigenous woman whose children are taken from her by the state.

The black transwoman who can’t find love without contemplating the possibility of violence.

The queer kid kicked out of his house and living on the street.

The hard-to-house, the elders with dementia, the nonverbal, the angry and abandoned, the disaffected and forsaken.

It’s about showing that there is an alternative to a world that seeks to divide us: a world where each one is held in the arms of a loving heart, a world where generosity is the order of the day, a world where reckless love is taken for granted, a world where kindness and compassion are spent freely rather than hoarded for those we love – knowing, of course, that we are human and we’ll fail sometimes and it’s okay.

Most of the time, when we read this parable, we see ourselves, or others, as lost sheep and coins awaiting discovery by a loving, rejoicing God.

So let’s contemplate what it would be like to step into God’s shoes, and be the ones who search. Let’s risk the frustration and struggle of walking up hill and down dale, calling out for that lost sheep. Let’s risk the necessary annoyance of getting down on our hands and knees in cramped places, shining a lamp for the glint of that lost coin.

In the hard moments of that journey, we may cheer ourselves by remembering that the one we seek is not merely a child of God, but our beloved, the God who is lost, or maybe just playing hide and seek, who will rejoice at being found, and whose discovery will fill us up with such delight that we ourselves will make manifest the Kingdom, right here, right now.