Sermon Library
“The Finding of the True Cross”
Rev. Dr. Gregg R. Anderson
September 07, 2008
Service Theme: Pentecost XVII - 2008
Pentecost XVII-2008 September 7, 2008
The Finding of the True Cross
By Gregg Anderson
St. Helena
“The Finding of the True Cross” I have learned is a very specific phrase based on the life of St. Helena. Helena was born in the year 255 AD of humble parentage, yet she became the wife of Constantius, emperor of the Western Provinces of Rome in 305 AD. They had one son who was named Constantine. Constantius later divorced Helena to remarry Theodora, which was a political move as she was a step daughter to Emperor Maximinianus Herculius. Helena was abandoned. When Constantius died and Constantine became Emperor, he called for the return of his natural mother and conferred on her the title of Augusta, ordered that all honor should be paid her as the mother of the sovereign, and had coins struck bearing her effigy. Her son’s influence caused her to embrace Christianity after his victory over Maxentius. She became a devout and compassionate Christian. Historically, Helena spent time in Jerusalem in pursuit of the true and physical cross of Christ. We have no concrete evidence that it was found, but there exists a legend of St. Helena finding the true Cross of Christ.
The Legend
The legend states that the site of the crucifixion was covered over and a temple and statue of Venus was erected. When Helena learned about this she removed the temple to Venus and excavated underneath to discover three wooden crosses, but which was the cross of Christ and which were the crosses of the two thieves? Helena prayed for a sign. The sign was this: a certain woman of the neighborhood, who had been long afflicted with disease, was now just at the point of death; the bishop arranged it so that each of the crosses should be brought to the dying woman, believing that she would be healed on touching the cross of Christ. The first two crosses did nothing, but upon being touched by the third, the ill woman was instantly and miraculously healed. There over the place of the sepulcher Helena erected a church and named it New Jerusalem. There she left a portion of the cross. The other part she sent to the emperor, who privately enclosed it in his own statue which stands on a large column in the forum called Constantine’s in Constantinople.
In reality Helena did build other Christian churches and became a genuine follower of Christ serving many people and the poor. And, of course, her son made Christianity an official world wide religion. It is reported that her remains were transferred in 849 to the Abbey of Hautvillers, in the French Archdiocese of Reims, at the time of her veneration as saint. Her feast day was just this past August 18th. As far as scholars know, there is no factual evidence of the physical cross in which Christ was crucified. Even the location of Golgotha is debatable. I remember going to the church of the holy sepulcher. I also remember talking to an old guide in Jerusalem who had determined over his life time of research that Golgotha was up on that hill as he pointed to an old building that housed old busses.
Preaching While the Church is Under Reconstruction
The legend of St. Helena finding the true cross was retold in Thomas Troeger’s book Preaching While the Church is Under Reconstruction. This started when I was simply going to share some thoughts from Thomas Troeger in his absence on the Sunday he typically would have been at the Chapel. I have been enjoying his book a great deal and want to share it with you. The book is, after all, about preaching.
So, now Thomas Troeger takes this legend of St. Helena about finding the real cross of Christ as a metaphor for finding the real meaning of the cross while the church is going through constant reconstruction. He begins by reminding us that the meaning of the cross evolved over time. Troeger writes, “If we grew up in a church dominated by the cross in prayers, hymns, sermons, and architectural setting, we may shake our heads in disbelief. Our bewilderment is an occasion for seeing more deeply in to the constructive nature of religious expression: the revelatory power of the cross was something that grew through time. Initially, the sign for the followers of the Way was the fish. The Greek letters of the fish was an acrostic whose letters were taken to stand for ‘Jesus Christ, God’s son, Savior.’ The first known representation of Christ’s crucifixion only dates from the first half of the fifth century and was depicted on an ivory relief of Italian workmanship. From Constantine’s reign onwards, the Cross became increasingly prominent as a symbol until it eventually became the Christian symbol par excellence. The church was under reconstruction after Constantine accepted Christianity. It was being transformed from a marginal institution to one at the center of the culture. There was a need to interpret the meaning of Christ, his crucifixion and resurrection, in way that would make sense to vast new numbers of believers. Although Paul and the evangelists had written about the cross and the crucifixion, their words alone were not adequate to establish its centrality to the life of faith. That depended on visionary, poetic preaching, the imaginative creativity we find in the legend of Helena’s search. The legend reminds us that finding the cross involves a journey. We who preach are not to assume that we or our congregations have already arrived at the true cross.”
Quite frankly, I am more and more comfortable not arriving yet at the true cross. Finding the true cross or the real Jesus, for that matter, is a journey – wonderful, engaging and life evolving journey. Temporarily and conversely, I am a little suspicious of those who have claimed that they have finally found the true cross and the real Jesus. Most scholars are aware that Helena’s discovery of the true cross is a legend. There are others who believe it is not a legend, but literal reality. Troeger reiterates it is still a journey, a delightful journey, but a journey nevertheless just as the church is always under reconstruction.
Stuck in Sunday School
Sometimes we have been brought up with Sunday School lessons or stuck in Sunday School which taught Jesus was born on Christmas Day, walked on water, died on Friday, was raised on Sunday, the next day the church was born with the Holy Spirit and Christianity lived happily ever after. Okay, that was a little sarcastic, but what we keep learning about is the struggles, challenges, debates, deaths and evolving dynamics which have taken place within the Christian Church which has always had a hole in it and needing reconstruction in one form or another from the very beginning, through out its history and still true today. It is refreshing to be reminded of this reality and more importantly to know through it all, the church has survived and the interest in the life of Jesus has grown beyond even Constantine’s imagination. The church has, from time to time, reinvented itself, but it is still here. This is the larger theme Troeger carries forth in this insightful and well documented book.
Pilgrimage to the Cross
“As Helena made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, so we who preach beneath the God-shaped hole make a pilgrimage to find the meaning of the cross for our age. It is not an easy journey. Helena finds that the cross is buried beneath a statue of Venus. She responds by tearing down ‘all that was profane and polluted there.’ For us who live under the God-shaped hole in a pluralistic society, this is one of the most troubling moments in the legend. Helena’s destructive act appears to us an expression of religious absolutism. It fits with her son’s policy of Christianizing the empire, and it typifies the religious absolutism that has extracted a massive and tragic cost from God’s creation. Wars, hate crusades, inquisitions, and pogroms have resulted form the arrogance of rabid believers assuming that their faith was the only true faith and the others were ‘profane and polluted.’ For us who worship beneath the God-shaped hole, visionary preaching eschews the religious arrogance that destroys the human community: ‘It is this unrelenting argument within Christianity for its own uniqueness, i.e., for its own normative superiority over all other religions, that must be overcome in a pluralistic age, and in a pluralist pulpit.”
“There is a need to search for the true cross. If we will only hear her story to the end we will see how the cross can open Christians to a positive understanding of all people, even across the barriers of differing religious belief. The most faithful way of living in a pluralistic age is not to deny our tradition, but to consider how it opens us to the world of others. The best antidote for the abuse and distortion of the cross is not its abandonment. That will only leave it in the hands of those who continue to employ it for oppressive and prejudicial ends. The best antidote is to strip away the distortions of the cross in order to set free its restorative powers.”
“Helena suggests that we consider the depths that lie beneath the surface of the narrative details. The story reveals that one of the marks of a false cross is that it leaves people in their brokenness. The sick woman is not made whole by either of the false or thieve’s crosses. And the same is true of us. There are crosses that do not heal or restore but that leave us to die. We who preach beneath the God-shaped hole need to name these crosses. We need to describe them and make sure that in the church under reconstruction our sermons and worship do not press these crosses upon our congregations.”
The Cross of Violence and Cross of Passivity
“Perhaps the two most deadly distortions of the cross are the cross of violence and the cross of passivity. We are familiar with the cross of violence. It is the burning cross of the Ku Klux Klan. It is the cross stamped on a brochure that proclaims: ‘Death to homosexuals.’ It is the warped cross featured on a poster from Germany in 1934: a row of male ministers in full clerical garb are lined up like soldiers, each carrying a cross on his shoulder as if it were a rifle. The horizontal beam of every cross has been twisted so that the top portion of each cross forms a swastika.” The cross of violence can be illustrated in many ways in which we can all recall.
The cross of passivity is a little more subtle. It is like believing in a cross of a belief system which only requires a specific belief in a specific cross. If you bow before the cross, if you cross yourself with the sign of the cross, – are you covered by the cross? The cross is more than an icon; rather it is a message of carrying on our own cross for the sake of love, compassion and peace. Troeger states, “The passive cross can be as deadly as the violent cross. It does not bring the swift death of persecution, but it brings the long, lethal decay of failing to employ the gifts of rebellion and change that God has given us.” The cross can be worshiped, which it often is, but the cross can also be a catalyst to transform life now as much as it transformed life then.
The True Cross
Troeger reiterates that “Finding the true cross makes the woman a new person, possessing more life than she had before her illness. Her healing is a sermon about distinguishing the true cross from the false cross. The false cross is the cross of death. It leaves us dead in our sin whether our sin is the arrogance that leads to violence or the passivity that ends in fatalism. The true cross is the cross of life, restoration, wholeness, vitality, new being.”
“The singer/poet’s bold theological work is a parable about preaching beneath the God-shaped hole in our own time. It demonstrates how to become visionary preachers in the church under reconstruction. We cannot afford to abandon the cross to believers who want to wield it as a club. The cross of violence is a lethal weapon in the hands of those who hate religious pluralism and who despise other life styles who reach beyond the bounds of conventional taste, racial groups a society deems inferior, and families that do not conform to a particular pattern. We need the courage and imagination of the poet/singer who makes audible the humming of the soul in the presence of the true cross, who frees our lament in order to engage our energies to struggle for the liberation of all God’s creatures.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The worst cross in our history is the twisted cross of Nazism. The true cross was the cross of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Christian minister in Germany who gave of his life to defy the twisted cross of Hitler. From the very beginning he spoke out against the violent cross of Hitler’s Arian nation. He spoke out against the passivity of the other Christian leaders who did nothing and even signed the pact of allegiance which was specifically stated. “I swear that I will be faithful and obedient to Adolf Hitler, the Fuhrer of the German Reich and people, that I will conscientiously observe the laws and carry out the duties of my office, so help me God.” . . . Anyone who refuses to take this oath of allegiance was “dismissed.”
Bonhoeffer became so disillusioned with the church’s unwillingness to confront and fight the evil of Nazism that there was a period during 1933 to 1934 when he wanted to go to India and study with Gandhi, hoping that he might find guidance there in how to carry on the struggle in Germany. Instead he writes, “I must live through this difficult period of our national history with the Christian people of Germany. I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people.”
Bonhoeffer lifted up the life of Gandhi in Germany, hearing that this Gandhi kept
a picture of Jesus in his office. Bonhoeffer wrote, “Lately I have been occupied very intensively with questions relating to India and believe that one can perhaps learn a great deal there. It seems to me as if in their brand of ‘paganism’ there is placed more Christianity than in our whole Reich Church. Christianity did indeed come from the East originally, and we have Westernized it in such a way and permeated it with merely civilized considerations that, as we now see it, it is almost lost to us. Unfortunately I have hardly any confidence left in the church opposition.”
Bonhoeffer also wrote at the time, “Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church. We are fighting today for costly grace. Cheap grace means grace sold on the market like cheapjacks’ wares . . . Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Costly grace is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life.”
Today Bonhoeffer is mostly known for his great book which every minister has read entitled The Cost of Discipleship. In this book one can read the words, “The cross is God’s truth about us, and therefore it is the only power which can make us truthful. When we know the cross we are no longer afraid of the truth. We need no more oaths to confirm the truth of our utterances, for we live in the perfect truth of God.” “Who am I? Whoever I am, thou knowest, O God, I am thine.” Troeger adds, “This is the revelation that comes to one who has found the true cross. This is the revelation that allows one to say with redemptive trust: ‘Mother/Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.’”
The Nazi’s tried to convert this outspoken religious leader. When they realized they could not, they led him to the execution shed of Flossenburg concentration camp on April 9, 1945. A doctor who was present and who knew Bonhoeffer’s name but nothing else about him wrote on that day: “Through the half-open door in one room of the huts I saw Pastor Bonhoeffer, before taking off his prison garb, kneeling on the floor praying fervently to his God. I was most deeply moved by the way this lovable man prayed, so devout and so certain that God heard his prayer. At the place of execution, he again said a short prayer and then climbed the steps to the gallows, brave and composed. His death ensued after a few seconds. In the almost fifty years that I worked as a doctor, I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God.”
The last written words we have of Bonhoeffer’s are to Bishop Bell, a bishop in England with whom Bonhoeffer had worked earlier in an attempt to gather ecumenical resistance to Hitler. Bonhoeffer wrote Bell: ‘This is the end, for me the beginning of life.’”
Troeger writes, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer found the true cross. He knew that wisdom comes in many forms and bears many names. The true cross is the cross that marks the end of Christian triumphalism and Christian exclusivism. For a visionary preacher the true cross ‘opens truth to the soul’ wherever that truth is revealed and whatever religious or nonreligious label it bears. Bonhoeffer’s action reveals the meaning of finding the true cross: just as God through Christ does not remain aloof form the terrors of human life, so we who take up the cross and follow Christ will not remain aloof from those terrors.”
War on Terrorism
Terror still exists today. In fact, we in the United States are fighting a war on Terrorism in Iraq and other countries such as Iran and Afghanistan. It appears that the American consensus to resolve terrorism is a militaristic show of might, power and control. Military force has worked in the past because of the fear of losing lives. This terrorism seems different. The terrorist are not afraid of losing their lives. In fact, they are deliberately sacrificing their lives to take the lives of other innocent people. And, what appears to be in the name of their God or their twisted perspective of God.
I would like to make stronger statements to conclude, but I suspect I need to balance ideality with reality. What I do state often is for this country to establish a United States peace academy which has as much support as our military academies. We as a country need to think harder for other alternatives. If after being attacked on 9 – 11 we gathered the smartest people we know from different professions and put them in a room and handed them 2 trillion dollars to come up with a solution – what creative solutions could there have been? I would like to include in that room St. Paul, St. Helena, Mahatma Gandhi, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, the Dalai Lama, Jesus Christ and maybe Thomas Troeger, too. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Gregg R. Anderson
Aspen Chapel
0077 Meadowood Drive
Aspen, Colorado 81611
http://www.Aspenchapel.org