An Excerpt from My 9/11 Sermon
Whatever man builds to symbolize his wealth and power will fall, just like the Twin Towers fell. But the Cross towers over the wrecks of time. The old song had it right:
In the cross of Christ I glory
towering o’er the wrecks of time
all the light of sacred story
gathers round its head sublime.
Barb and I love old movies. Recently, we saw big John Wayne in The High and the Mighty. It was made in 1954 and told the story of a stricken aircraft carrying 22 passengers, each carrying so much emotional baggage it’s a wonder the plane got off the ground! But Duke and Robert Stack got ‘er home safely.
The movie climaxes with the pilots searching through the darkness for the runway lights. And then, they appear. The lights take the form of a cross. And the music rises. And you just know they’re going to get home!
I read a review of the movie this week. The fellow was rather patronizing, saying the vision of the cross was a powerful emotional trigger, evoking salvation, Jesus and the entire revivalist movement of the early fifties. He calls it emotional manipulation for the people of the fifties.
Well, I’m sure it did touch people emotionally in the fifties. I know a couple people who were quite affected by it in 2011. That song I quoted above was written in 1825. The reviewer either forgets or ignores the fact the cross has always been “emotionally manipulative.” It’s been doing that to people for 2000 years! You know why? Again, it’s not the cross but what it represents—the amazing love and mercy of God.
Crucifixion was the worst possible torture. The crucified were totally naked. In her book, Paul Among the People, Sarah Cruden describes the horror: “The victims died when they could no longer pull their shoulders back to keep their esophagus open and breathe. They were never reprieved. At most, they got a numbing drug or something to drink, or the leg breaking (a chop that might go straight through the shinbones) to prevent them from bracing themselves upward from the foot stand and surviving longer.”
The men who died, impaled upon the cross, were criminals, lost men, forsaken men. And God became one of them.
So here’s a backwards torture rack used to slowly kill the scum of the earth, a primitive form of execution we wouldn’t even remember except for one man, one out of thousands so executed. And because of that one man the cross was transformed from an obscenity into a symbol of hope. They give out iron crosses for bravery and the Red Cross plants itself in the middle of human suffering. Movie makers make crosses out of runway lights and dirt roads and people know what they’re looking at.
Yes, the Cross towers o’er the wrecks of time. It towers above America and Iraq, over Muslim and Christian and atheist. Above all kingdoms, above all thrones, above all wonders the world is ever known, above all wisdom and all the ways of man…is the cross. In the cross of Christ we glory. In the cross is our hope, our salvation. Millions have come, but there’s still room for one. There’s room at the Cross for you.
