The world invites us to climb ladders; the gospel invites us to lift crosses.
What will it be? The Ladder or the Cross?
There are two contemporary works of art that have rare symbolic power: the Vietnam Memorial and the AIDS Quilt. Both address the mystery of suffering that has no rhyme or reason; both restructure reality to enable us to deal creatively with the mystery of suffering.
In the last half-millennium, a work of art which has exerted great symbolic power on a vast number of people is the "Isenheim Altarpiece," completed in 1515. (Note: It would add immeasurably to this sermon if you get a picture of this and either put it up on the screen or have a copy store copy it and include it in your bulletin.) One art historian has called it a "work of such tremendous and dismal grandeur of expression that nothing on earth seems to equal it." This awesome altarpiece, measuring 10 feet long when closed, 21 feet long when opened, and eight feet high, is now housed in a museum in Colmar, France.
The Order of St. Anthony commissioned the altarpiece for their monastery at Isenheim. They asked Mathias Grunewald he and Albrecht Durer were considered the greatest artists of the Italian High Renaissance to present their chapel with something that would bring healing and cleansing to the poor and diseased, something especially for those afflicted with one of the most horrible diseases ever recorded in human history, a disease that wreaked more devastation on the human body than even AIDS the gangrenous, putrefactive St. Anthony's Fire.
How did the Anthonite monks expect the sick to find healing and cleansing in front of this altarpiece? What kind of therapy was in this painting? The answer was in the successive revelations unveiled by the opening and closing of the altarpiece.
When the wings of the altarpiece were closed, the sick and the poor gazed at the crucifixion panel, the most gruesome, tortured, agonized, tormented, almost unbearable, crucifixion scene ever painted. There, under a monstrous crown of thorns, was a dangling, pitiful body with twisted limbs, covered with countless lacerations and rivulets of blood. The scene was one of unbearable agony. It was this crucifixion panel of the "Isenheim Altarpiece" that hung over Karl Barth's desk above and before him all the time he worked and wrote.
When the wings of the altarpiece were opened, however, the dark, deserted landscape and blue-black sky were driven away by a blaze of light. Suddenly, the poor, sick pilgrims stood in awe before three spectacular panels. The first panel contained the most unusual Annunciation scene in the world of art; the second depicted the Angel Choir with seraphs and cherubim celebrating the Virgin and newborn child; and the third revealed the most glorious resurrection scene ever portrayed, with Jesus exploding from the grave.
Where was the healing? As Jesus taught in today's gospel lesson, when a crucified body is entered, life and health are found. When the body is broken, when blood is poured out, community is born and healing is begun. Pain and suffering open to birth and resurrection. In the words of St. Augustine: "The greater the joy, the greater is the pain which precedes it."
Or in the lesson Jesus sought to teach his disciples in Mark, before he could reach "the joy set before him," Jesus had to pass through the pain of many "dark nights" and "shadowed valleys." The journey of Jesus' life teaches us, as it taught those with St. Anthony's Fire, that before resurrection sunrise, we must pass through ashes and lashes, spit and spear, thorns and throngs.
You may think you have it together. You may be successful, affluent, well-educated, respected. But until you understand the secret power of the "Isenheim Altarpiece" and why it heals, you are unprepared for being a disciple of Jesus. For the "Isenheim Altarpiece" is a sort of Rosetta stone, a reference source for understanding the meaning of discipleship. And the key to unlocking and unleashing the power of this Rosetta stone is the figure of Mary, the most pronounced and interesting figure, apart from Jesus, in the altarpiece.
The figure of Mary is the Mary of the Magnificat. The angel Gabriel brought Mary a message of authority, not love. To answer the question of your authority as a disciple, your calling as a "minister," you must come to terms with Mary. To be a disciple means you understand what it must have been like to be Mary, the mother of Jesus. Mary is absolutely central disciples of Jesus must come to grips with her.
You have heard the carpenter's call, you have been chosen to receive God's favor. You, the least, the last, the lost have been called, like Mary, to give birth to the Christ child, to bring Christ to this earth, to make Christ come alive among men and women.
There is a popular religious mentality abominating the air today. It says that to find favor with God is to find the perfect boss, the perfect spouse, the perfect child, the perfect colleague, the perfect bishop, or in the case of pastors, the perfect appointment (known in 18th century circles as the "sweet-scented parishes" those appointments where the pastors salary was paid in tobacco that was sweeter and more scented and thus more valuable, making clergy vie for transfer to these parishes).
In sum, to find favor is to be blessed by health, wealth and happiness. This is all that many Americans want in religion. They want a "Jacuzzi Jesus" an experience that will leave them relaxed, warm and bubbly and yet, at the same time, feeling fit and trim when they get out like they've just gotten in shape.
But the favor of a "Jacuzzi Jesus," as we called it in an earlier Homiletics sermon, the favor of Christian hedonism, is the death of the soul. The favor of a "Jacuzzi Jesus" turns the divine Word being born in you from Logos to logo from the incarnation of "God's reason" (the literal translation of logos) to the incarnation of the establishment's reason, the logo standards and symbols of the realm religion and temple religion, with all the attendant logos in our culture announcing who is in and who is out.
Some of the great crucifixion scenes in the world of art, from Rogier Van Der Weyden in the 15th century, Rembrandt in the 17th century, Chagal and Picasso in the 20th century, do not portray a cross with a ladder propped up against it. But a ladder is propped up against the cross only when the artists want to portray Christ's "Descent from the Cross." The ladder was used to take Christ down from the cross. And that is what the ladder symbol does to our churches today it removes Christ from the cross, and from our discipleship.
The gospel shows us in Paul's words, "a more excellent way," a way not of health, wealth and happiness, but of servanthood. Mary knew that crucifixion was not a fiction it was the structuring symbol of her life. Mary found favor, and ended up pregnant and unmarried. If you, if I, had been the Virgin Mary, how many of us would have said "No."
Mary was the first to realize that to accept the gospel is to enter a radically different plausibility structure. The grace of God takes me "Just As I Am." But the grace of God does not leave us just as we are. It turns our world upside down. The gospel is not the answer. ... The gospel is the power to become with one another the body of Christ, where the symbol of success is not a golden throne, but a wooden, rugged cross.
There is a very old pulpit story that tells of a customer who went into a jewelry store to buy a cross necklace. The clerk asked: "Do you want to see a plain one? Or do you want to look at the one with a little man on it?"
We want the plain one. We find it difficult to hear the word of the loaded cross, which says that any religious human being encounters suffering, and sees suffering, differently. We are hard of hearing when Christ's voice calls us to stay in our suffering, even as we become successful and powerful; and calls us to bear always a loaded cross, even when we can do more and go farther with a plain one. "Professionalism" has led us to the point where the central motivating symbol of ministry is the ladder, rather than the cross. A conversation with a prospective student who had decided to enter the ministry after a successful, six-figure-income career in corporate America illustrates the lethal power resident in the concoction of the careerist-clerical-managerial "ladder" paradigm. "Once I reached the top of the ladder and looked around," he reflected, "I realized that all the struggle, all the costs to my family and friendships, all the sacrifices I had made to reach the pinnacle were not worth what I found there the lack of meaning I felt there. Suddenly it hit me: I had propped my ladder up against the wrong building." Elmer Gantry's pilgrimage from Baptist to a Methodist because he wanted to become a bishop immediately comes to mind. Gantry moved up the ladder until the possibility of becoming bishop was in sight. But by that time, he saw higher rungs than that on his career ladder.
The only ladder the Bible knows anything about is Jacob's ladder. Jacob's ladder was pitched against the spiritual, not material; ladders should stand in the Garden of Gethsemane and the temple courtyard, not MadisonSquareGarden and Wall Street. Actually, Jacob had no ladder. He only had a vision and a mission. And he did not climb the ladder anyway. Angels did. When the theme song of a disciple becomes "We are climbing Jacob's ladder," Jesus' followers become better at climbing ladders than at lifting crosses.
Could Herb Caen, the San Francisco Chronicle columnist, have been right? He wrote in 1981: "The trouble with born-again Christians is that they are an even bigger pain the second time around."
But conversion, without immersion in the life of Jesus Christ, is perversion of the gospel. St. Augustine talked about "the costly grace" of God. Discipleship, servanthood, costs us everything. Everything must go. Genesis 2:25 conveys this powerfully in the image of nakedness: "And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed." In the words of Dorothee Soelle:
To be naked means to be without protection; it is to be unarmed. It requires our surrendering the "weapons" that we usually carry around with us. My credit card, my doctorate, the books I have written the whole fortress in which I live are all "clothes" that I have to get rid of in order to love (To Work and to Love: A Theology of Creation [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984], 136).
To find favor is to be called to disarmament, called to defenselessness, called to discipleship. God does not favor us with ease. God does not favor us with comfort.
One of my favorite signs is posted in an African game reserve: "Advance and be bitten." Paul posted the same sign at the entrance to the Christian life. These are his words to the Philippians (1:29): "For unto you it is given in the behalf of Christ, not only to believe in him, but also to suffer for his sake" (KJV). In other words, suffering for the sake of Christ is as much an honor and a blessing as believing in him. The apostles kept the counsel after being beaten, rejoicing that they were "worthy to suffer for his sake."
"Who do you say I am?" If your response is "The Messiah! The Son of the Living God," you are one of God's favored ones. But remember this: Your calling as God's favored one cannot promise you success. Your calling as God's favored one cannot promise you prosperity or popularity or a life passed only in pleasure. Your calling as God's favored one can only promise you hardship, weariness, suffering, rupture and ...
the rapture of "joy unspeakable and full of glory";
the privilege of hearing the music of angel choirs;
the presence of God who "giveth songs in the night";
the experience of walking barefoot on "holy ground";
the mystery of discovering the encumbering presence of a love as "strong as death" (Song of Solomon 8:6); and ...
the thrill of spending your life proclaiming to the ashes of dead stars which is what every human being is made of these old Welsh words from beyond live and beckoning stars:
Where'er I go the people say,
"What's the news? What's the news?
What is the order of the day?
What's the news? What's the news?"
Oh, I have got good news to tell.
My Savior has done all things well.
He triumphed over death and hell.
That's the news. That's the news.
That's the Good News of the gospel wanting to be born in you God's terms of endearment quenching St. Anthony's Fire through you.
Are you ready to say with Mary: "Let it be, to me, according to thy word"? Are you ready to say with Jesus: "Not my will, but thy will be done"? Nothing more. Nothing less. Nothing else.
Are you ready to pray the greatest prayer ever uttered, the simple but great Amen ... "So Be It"?
The symbol embodying the most fundamental meaning of discipleship is the cross, not the ladder. We glory in the cross of Christ, not the ladder of success, a ladder kicked away forever when Jesus slipped on the Via Dolorosa.
Remember this: There are no rungs, only nails, on the cross.