Someone asked the other day why the church continues to make the cross its central symbol when a fish, for example, might serve better in the modern world. Good question!

The cross anchors our faith in the world of political and social violence. It is about people paying the price of insight, vision and action.

The cross reminds us of the imbalance of power in life. The establishment has the weapons and structures to impose punishment and terror and those who dare to oppose them often end up as their victims.

The cross illuminates human feelings. In the face of it some people run, some hide, some ridicule, some taunt, some grieve, some laugh. No one person or cause is universally seen as good every time in every eye. We work amid both support and criticism.

The cross is a symbol of the ultimate damage to be done. Violent, degrading death marks the range. Before it, all shudder. Yet the cross is only page one of a three-page story. On page two is what happens next after the world has done its worst. The life lost, and the cause it championed, become other than dead, other than gone. They rise again in new ways which no weapon can now kill. Page three involves the heartened support of that life and cause given by countless others in new generations, given by us on ours. Death has “lost its sting”, for “from the ground there blossoms, red, life that shall endless be”.

The “crucifix”, the Christ-figure on the cross, is familiar on the Anglo-catholic side of the faith spectrum. It comes from an early period in the church’s long life and reflects a theology of human sin and alienation before the God.. The Christ, the perfect offering, the “lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world” breaks through the alienation and gives us access to the throne of God. At every Mass this sacrifice is re-enacted as we seek atonement time after time.

The cross in the Protestant Reformation churches is an empty one, signifying that the sacrifice has been made and accepted once and for all. The Christ and his passion for life are alive among us now to empower our own. Our Communion services, the equivalent of the Mass, focus on thankfully remembering the one-time gift, not on recreating it each time.

The cross is, at heart, a tool, a way of ordering and understanding reality. It is a light that illuminates a world view. These days world views are numerous, so the cross will have no meaning whatsoever for millions around us.

Personally, the cross grounds me in this life and its challenges. Faith is about how I live, what decisions I make, what stands I take. If we seek to move the world we will face formidable enemies and risk a cruel death. It has always been so. Yet crosses are not all. Social victories too are real and do change the world. Pages two and three of the cross story assure us that the risk is worth it and the power of new life is with us everywhere.

“Before I build a wall I’ll ask to know what I was walling in or walling out, and to whom I was like to give offence.” Robert Frost

This feels like a wide-open generation in which fast-moving things make sweeping changes. Old institutions like ours that are having credibility and usefulness problems right now feel they are compelled to keep the doors open. Anything in the net is better than nothing in it.

Twenty-five hundred years ago when the Jewish community returned home from years in exile they walked into an open society too. The first thing they did was to repair the walls around their sacred centre. It seemed to them vital to anchor themselves first and then to adjust to their times. They may have been correct. There is a distinction between openness of heart and cultic desperation.

My premise about this present generation may be incorrect. It may not be wide-open. People cling together by age, shared experience, ethnicity, social class, education, temperament, and geographic and cultural history. We are tribal by nature as always.

We fend off fast-moving things or make use of them through the walls around our cluster-groups.

Perhaps it is a mistake then for us to cast a wide net with little concern for our sacred centre and its wellbeing. Perhaps it is time for the wall repairs.

We need a wall around worship and praise. These are among the most intimate things we ever do. Those who do not understand or value them are not welcome to pass through the walls invited. Public worship always presumed a whole community, though perhaps widely scattered, that understood what worship is. Open worship and public worship are not the same. Our public selves and personal selves express very different things.

We need a wall around the Gospel. It is a precious jewel that needs time, contemplation, and adoration. Jesus, and the gifts of Messianic imagination and spirit are not fodder for galleries, malls and public stages. They are crown, orb and sceptre in the rule of eternal things. Repair the wall.

We need a wall around the intimacies of our testimony, our living and our dying. As we open ourselves to faith and let it work its ways in our lives we become different from other people. We discover and know things differently. Our witness is first for our own community. That is how faith is heartened. I will not whisper my secrets to strangers. Build the wall.

We need a wall around our integrity. We need not survive, or fit in, or flourish under a foreign agenda in a foreign land. Once we know who we are and why we do what we do, we must build a wall to protect us from lesser things and cheaper pursuits. It is too easy to be spread thin by trivial preoccupations.

Sometimes you get a great idea, a lecture series by able people on a pivotal theme. Hence the event called “Jesus, Priceless Treasure: Meanings in the Death of the Messiah”. The format is easy. We’ll meet in the chancel at Metropolitan on four Friday evening, February. 24, March 9^th, March 23 and 30^th, from 7:30 to 9:00 p.m.

We’ve got stimulating speakers. The first night belongs to the Moderator of the United Church, Mardi Tindal, the third Friday brings us Dr. David McKane, my great Irish friend. Dr. Peter Wyatt, one of our giants, closes it on the 30^th, and I want a shot at the theme on the 9^th. I’ve asked each speaker to tell us, as close to the bone as possible, what the death and resurrection central tale is about. All this, and there are refreshments too. It’s free and it’s important for faith. Please come if you’re nearby. We’ll post it on this site if you’re not.

STEREOTYPES!!!

Bring them on. I love such a fancy hiding place:

“Ministers”….odd, naïve, intensely sincere about non-issues, brittle, sitting ducks for cultural ridicule, those who perfect ceiling wax in the age of smart-phones.

“Churches”….old-peoples’ homes at prayer, mice-anonymous groups, makers of bad tea, under-pitched music, and long prayers lifted to an empty sky.

“The Bible”…drug-induced fantasy, a weapon for conservative-evangelical assault-parties, somebody else’s’ pipe-dream, ancient history bent by self-interest, a thin coat for a very cold night.

“Worship”…your mother’s lingering directive, head-games from a hidden,

central source, tiny-talent-time for people who can’t make it in the real worlds of show-biz, the arts, day-jobs or cultural leadership.

“The Gospel of Christ”….propaganda, imperialism, manipulation of weak minds, terror-tactic, buffer zone between hangers-on and death.

“Questions of Meaning and Eternity”….time-wasters in a culture desperate to succeed, stand and not fall, a weakness in a room full of armoured knights.

Ah, if you only knew.

Some of us are not stupid. Some of us are not afraid. Some are not brittle. Some are wide open to grace, truth and the hard, terrifying, amazing vicissitudes of our common life.

But we’ll hide under the stereotypes, like Robin and his merry men and women, darting out like bandits, now and then, with arrows straight and true, to take from the smug and give to those who are still awake and wild.

Next time you drive past a sleepy little church…remember!