Tag Archives: Theology of the Cross
Testify
But in Luther’s thinking, and in the life of the church, the cross is much more than that. The cross is the way we know God. The cross is the way God chooses to be revealed in the world. We do not know God by our own wisdom, by our own good deeds, or by our perception of God’s mysterious power and glory. All of those things become idols. When we chase them, when we look for God in greatness or power or glory, we only run into a magnified version of ourselves
And because we find ourselves when we look for God, God chose to hide his glory where we would never think to put ourselves: in suffering.
Healing
Naaman wants to be impressed and is bitterly disappointed. He wants shouting and magic words and hand waving and theatrics but all he gets is a simple command: wash in the Jordan seven times. All he has to do is trust the word of the prophet and he can’t do it. So it falls to his servants—the lowly people, so lowly they don’t even get names—it falls to his servants to persuade him.
Only a Suffering God
If God shows himself to us here, God can start to show himself to us anywhere. Through the cross, we see God in both the peaceful sunrise and the terrible storm. We can see God in both the beauty and the tragedy of childbirth. We can see God not only in the wonder we create, but in the suffering world. We can see God not only in our chattering world, but in the vast silence of the universe–filled with the same silence that answers Jesus on the cross.
Sermon: Holy Cross Day
I preached this sermon on September 14, 2014. Now, as I mentioned earlier we are not a society that is very interested in wisdom. The church in Corinth seems to have been divided over the question of who had true wisdom, which is not something we’re likely to lose friends over. We are, on the […]
Brutally Ordinary Things 