We Christians used to have a better breed of
adversary
than
we do today.
We’d be better at understanding and
expressing our faith
If
we were playing in a tougher league.
But our current class of atheists substitute
sarcasm and contempt
for
thinking.
They don’t even understand us well enough
to
disagree intelligently.
I barely recognize the religion they are
attacking.
But the father of 20th Century
atheism, Friedrich Nietzsche,
understood
our faith – all too well perhaps.
He got it better than most of us do.
And he attacked us at our most vulnerable
point – the Cross.
He was appalled by the Cross.
He is not alone.
Jack Miles, author of Christ: A Crisis In The Life of God, writes:
“The
crucifix is a violently obscene icon.”
Nietzsche agreed.
At the age of 44, he wrote The Anti-Christ,
a powerful critique of Christianity.
Of the story we have heard today, he said:
God on the cross – are the horrible
secret thoughts
behind
this symbol not understood yet? All that suffers,
all
that is nailed to the cross, is divine.
All of us are nailed
to
the cross, consequently we are divine.
. . . Christianity
has
been the greatest misfortune of mankind so far.
He far preferred the Greek gods like Apollo
and Dionysius.
If they are what God is, then brilliance and
passion are godlike.
But if Jesus on the Cross is God,
then
suffering – your suffering and mine -- is godlike.
Do we want a religion that worships
suffering?
Most people are looking for something quite
different.
When I was in my early 30s,
freshly
returned to the Church,
I
went on a parish retreat at a beautiful Idaho lake.
One man there with our congregation was
successful building contractor.
His wife was a good Episcopalian but he
wasn’t buying it.
I remember his words as if it were yesterday.
“Where is the religion for kings?” he asked.
That was what he wanted – a winner’s religion
that would validate
his
success the way the market and society did.
Two years later he was bankrupt.
I don’t know what kind of religion he was
looking for then.
But Nietzsche was looking for the same kind
of religion,
a
faith for winners.
In The
Anti-Christ, he wrote:
What
is good? Everything that heightens the feeling
of power in a man, the will to power, power itself.
What
is bad? Everything that is born of weakness.
What
is happiness? The feeling that power is growing . . .
The
weak and the failures shall perish . . .
and they shall be given every possible assistance.
What
is more harmful than any vice?
Active
pity for all the failures . . . .: Christianity.
The father of 20th Century atheism
admired strength
and felt only
contempt for vulnerability –
or so he said.
But the most passionate expressions of hatred
are
sometimes a masque to conceal a secret love.
Could it be that the atheist, Nietzsche,
did
protest too much?
Just four months after writing The Anti-Christ,
Nietzsche was in
Turin, Italy.
He was not visiting the Shroud of Turin.
He did not intend to see the face of Christ.
He was there to eat gelato and enjoy his
favorite small city.
But one day Nietzsche was walking along a
Turin street
when a draft
horse collapsed from exhaustion.
The owner began flogging the horse
ruthlessly.
Nietzsche, whose writings abhorred all morality
but most of all compassion,
betrayed
himself.
He rushed to the fallen horse and threw
himself across its body
to
take the flogging in its place.
Sobbing, he held the fallen horse and from
that moment never regained
his
full sanity.
Nietzsche spent the remainder of his short
life in an insane asylum.
Was he truly mad? Had he discovered a
forbidden truth? Maybe both.
While in the asylum he wrote his last lucid
letter.
He signed it “The Crucified.”
Our image of God expresses what we most
admire,
what
we affirm, what we value above all else.
A god like Apollo with the perfect hair,
face, and body,
exuding
wisdom and power, that makes sense.
Apollo could land a leading role on a soap
opera
while
getting tenure at an Ivy League university on the side.
Who wouldn’t worship that?
But Jesus on the Cross?
What are we worshiping there?
The Gospel stories don’t help us answer that
question.
They just tell the story and leave it to us
to sort out.
The would-be atheist Nietzsche explained it
as well as anyone.
“All
that suffers, all that is nailed to the cross is divine.
All of us are nailed to the cross. . . “
A lot of religion tries to escape from a
basic truth.
Life hurts.
Next to Christianity, I most admire Buddhism
for teaching:
The
First Noble Truth is suffering.
We can think all the pretty positive thoughts
ever dreamed up
We can eat right, work out daily, read the self-help
books,
and practice all
the habits of highly effective people.
But we are still left with what Anglican poet
and theologian,
Samuel
Taylor Coleridge called,
“the
tears in the nature of things.”
There is a Buddhist story of a woman whose
only child died.
Disconsolate, she went to a holy man on a
distant mountain
begging
him to revive her son and end her sorrow.
He said he would do it -- on one condition.
She must bring him a handful of salt
from
a house in her village that had never known grief.
She went from door to door – every door in
her village –
but
could not find a single house that had not known grief.
So she returned to the holy man and said, “I
understand.”
There are “tears in the nature of things.”
Many people have tried to explain why it’s
that way.
I even wrote a book on it and some of you
were kind enough to read it.
But God didn’t explain it away.
God didn’t explain why we deserve it or how
it’s really for our own good.
Instead God did the most amazing and
inexplicable thing:
He
joined us in it.
He saw us on the cross and got on it with us.
Brothers and sisters, there is a balm in
Gilead.
There is an end to suffering and a birth of
joy.
But not here. Not yet.
Jesus said, “While you are in the world, you
will have troubles.”
I am sorry to tell you, it is true.
When God in Christ Jesus went to the cross,
he
did not end our suffering.
But he decisively changed the meaning of it.
He made our suffering a place to meet God,
and
a place to meet each other,
like
the Buddhist woman meeting her neighbors,
like Nietzsche
holding the fallen horse.
When we venerate the cross tonight, whose
cross is it?
Jesus’ cross? Your cross? My cross? Our
neighbor’s cross?
The Syrian refugee’s cross?
Brothers and sisters, it’s the same cross.
There’s only one cross.
Jesus turned our suffering into something
that will not destroy us.
Instead it is the basis of our compassion for
one another.
We do not suffer alone but together with God
and each other.
That’s what the word “compassion” means – to
suffer with another.
We live in a world that worships success.
We have little use for the old religion of
self-denial.
We practice disciplines of self-coddling.
The chaplain of a national Episcopal group
this year
actually
wrote a Lenten letter urging us
to
go to a spa and relax in sensual delight for our Lenten discipline.
Our society averts its eyes from the poor,
addicted,
handicapped,
and even those wounded in our wars.
A lot of so-called Christians are preaching a
prosperity gospel:
“Get
your religion right,” they say, “and God will make you rich.”
It’s the religion for kings, the faith of
winners.
But that isn’t Jesus’ religion.
The cross isn’t about that.
The cross is about “the tears in the nature
of things.”
And eventually, if we cannot escape the
thought of God
on the cross in
Christ Jesus,
we’ll wind up
asking,
“Must Jesus bear
the cross alone
and all the
world go free?
No there’s a
cross for everyone
And there’s a
cross for me.”
And if we cannot forget the story we have
heard tonight,
sooner
or later,
we’ll
find ourselves like Nietzsche,
overcome
with compassion for a someone,
ready
to weep with them,
ready
to shield them with our own bodies
out
of godly mercy and vulnerable love.
