1 Corinthians 1:18-25

The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written,

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”

Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.

On Wednesday nights in Lent we walk the Stations of the Cross here at St. Paul’s. What this means is that a small group of us gathers here in the nave, and beginning with the first station, we hear about and pray at each of fourteen steps Jesus takes as he makes his way toward the cross, gets himself onto the cross and is taken down by others from the cross and is put in the tomb. It is a sad, sad journey in which Jesus’ suffering is exposed to us.

I have to admit that it’s always a bit of a jolt to the system to begin this practice during Lent. This is because it’s a devotional practice that is painstakingly, excruciatingly, and at times embarrassingly all about the cross.

Last week I got curious about how others were experiencing this devotional practice. And so I decided to talk to someone about it.

“Why exactly would you say you do Stations every week?” I asked one of our regulars. “I mean, what are you getting out of it?”

The person I had asked this question of paused, looked away and then looked back at me before answering:

“I don’t really know, she said. “But I do know that it makes some kind of difference in me.”

Today on the third Sunday in Lent, a day in the Byzantine Church devoted to the adoration of the Holy Cross, we hear Paul’s words to the Corinthians about the cross.

Corinth, founded by Paul, himself, was a Christian community fractured by many parties, groups of people attached to different teachers all of whom seemed to possess a certain kind of wisdom about God. For Paul, these different groups attached to different philosophical understandings of God undermined something more fundamental about what it meant to be a Christian.

Being a Christian, Paul maintains, has nothing to do with allying oneself to any conventional or highfalutin philosophical understanding of God that somehow settles the question. It has nothing to do with that. Instead it has to do with giving oneself over to a God who was foolish enough to get himself nailed to a cross.

The conventional or highfalutin wisdom of the world cannot save us, says Paul. What saves us, that is, what opens up a path of life for us, is the foolishness of the cross and I would add, the foolishness of our willingness to walk the path of the cross even though it can involve a sad, sad journey, even though we are uncertain about where it will lead or what we are getting out of it.

How to describe what this is about?

Ronald Rohlheiser’s book entitled The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality tries to do just this. In a chapter entitled “A Spirituality of the Paschal Mystery,” Rohlheiser describes what he rightly calls the central mystery within Christianity—the Paschal mystery, the mystery that: “in order to come to fuller life and spirit we must constantly be letting go of present life and spirit.”

We must, he says, while living, undergo many deaths, letting go of many aspects of our present lives in order to receive the gift of our lives as they actually are:

• We must undergo the death of our attachment to our youth in order to receive the gift of living fully at every age of our lives.
• We must undergo the deaths of our cherished notion of wholeness in order to live fully out of and beyond the wounds we have inflicted upon ourselves or others have inflicted upon us
• We must undergo the death of our dreams of completion and consummation in order to receive the beautiful and unfinished symphony that is our life.
• We must undergo the death of what Rohlheiser calls our “honeymoons” in order to receive the gift of the relationships we have actually been given
• And finally, we must undergo the deaths of our past notions of God and the Church in order to receive the God and the Church that are right in front of us today.

What are the parts of your life that need to walk the way of the cross in order that you might have fuller life and spirit? Is it your attachment to your youth? Is it your notion that you should be whole and untouched by the wounds of life? Is it your expectation that your relationships will always be on a honeymoon or that you will finish the symphony that is your life? Or does your notion of God or the Church need to walk the way of the cross during this Lenten season?

Whatever it is, to walk it will mean walking the same path of grief, uncertainty ad exposure that we walk each Wednesday night as we do the Stations. And, by the way, you would be a fool to do it, for dying to these important things in our lives will be a path of darkness and many tears.

But know this: that just as it was for our God who foolishly walked the way of the cross to meet us on there and to sanctify this path as a path of life, deep, deep down in it and under it, fueling it, guiding it, supporting it is God’s holy longing to give us the fullness of life that is our gift in baptism, a holy longing whose light will not be snuffed out by the power of any darkness, whose fire will not be drowned by our tears.

Rohlheiser opens his book with this poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe translated by Robert Bly entitled “The Holy Longing.” I close with it to remind myself and you that the foolish and tearful way of the cross lives within God’s holy longing for our fullness of life and our holy longing for the same.

Tell a wise person or else keep silent
For the massman will mock it right away.
I praise what is truly alive
And what longs to be burned to death.
In the calm waters of the love nights
Where you were begotten,
Where you have begotten,
A strange feeling comes over you
When you see the silent candle burning.
Now you are no longer caught in this obsession with darkness
And a desire for higher lovemaking sweeps you upward.
Distance does not make you falter.
And now, arriving in magic, flying
and finally, insane for the light
You are the butterfly.
And you are gone.
And so long as you haven’t experienced this,
To die and so to grow,
You are only a troubled guest on a dark earth.

Works Cited or Consulted

Ronald Rohlheiser, The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality

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