All Saints by the Lake, Dorval
September 14, 2025
And once again, I’m encountering a preaching situation that’s new to me, even almost 20 years into this career. In the US church that I come from, Holy Cross Day does not take precedence of a Sunday; today is simply the fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost. But the Canadian church has decided that this feast is important enough that when September 14 is a Sunday, we skip the regular readings and instead celebrate the Cross.
The readings, honestly, I find more than a little boring, not in and of themselves but because they’re almost identical to the readings for the fourth Sunday of Lent in Year B, and I wish we could have been given something a bit different.
Because it is very different, to come to the Cross now, in mid-September, than it is to encounter it in Holy Week, at the culmination of the pilgrimage of Lent and on the eve of the glorious revelation of Easter. Instead of seeing this symbol embedded in the long and complex story of the Passion, we are now gazing upon it in isolation, simply to honour it and reflect upon its meaning.
To celebrate the Feast of the Holy Cross is to acknowledge that the Cross is far more than a prop in a Passion play, far more than the method that happened to be used to execute one Jewish prophet in a backwater of the Roman Empire two millennia ago. The Cross is a symbol of what it is to be alive in a created universe; its roots go back to the beginning of time, and its meaning will continue to resonate even after God has made all creation new. The Cross is worthy of our meditation now and always.
And yet, it is a symbol that, on the logical level, makes no sense. Why should the two pieces of wood on which that Jewish prophet was put to death in 30 AD have become so central to the church’s life and belief ever since? Yes, one reason is the pattern is about as simple to draw as it could possibly be – just two straight lines crossing – but the ancient fish symbol is just two curved lines crossing, and that one has not endured with nearly the same centrality.
For the message about the cross, writes St. Paul, is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. … For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. … For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.
God could just administer a divine smackdown (strength) or could just blast the truth into our heads whether we like it or not (wisdom) but that is not how God chooses to engage with us, God’s weak, foolish, limited creatures. Instead, God meets us in our weakness and foolishness, and achieves our freedom and salvation only through his own suffering and death on the Cross. And so the Cross, with profound and divine irony, is where all wisdom and truth, all strength and courage, are to be found: in this place where, if you were seeking the wisdom and strength of the world, you would find only foolishness and weakness.
Contemporary theologians will often describe something as “cross-shaped” if it seems to reflect this pattern with particular focus and power. The witness of martyrs is cross-shaped. The costly forgiveness of marginalized communities is cross-shaped.
The cross is where all the opposites meet: wisdom and foolishness, strength and weakness, courage and fear, hope and despair, suffering and joy, pain and healing, beauty and horror, time and eternity, good and evil, death and life, heaven and earth, God and humanity. And those opposites don’t cancel each other out, but rather meet, and yield something more profound than where they began.
It is our calling as disciples to make our lives cross-shaped. To seek out the places of unbearable paradox, the places where wisdom looks like foolishness and strength looks like weakness, the places that demand everything that we have and then some: and to live in those places, modeling our actions on those of our crucified Saviour.
Sadly, right now we live in a world that seems more and more convinced that bigotry, brute force and sheer cruelty constitute strength, and that shouting nonsense as loudly as possible is an adequate substitute for wisdom; and that those who are suffering or in need must have brought it on themselves and should be abandoned to their fate. Christians must vigorously and determinedly oppose this way of thinking. We are people of the Cross, and it is in the Cross – and the Resurrection that lies beyond it – that we find meaning and hope. We know that it is precisely those who seem to have “lost” at life in the way the world defines it, who are most beloved of God.
It’s striking that now that we have the Season of Creation in September, Holy Cross falls squarely in the middle of it. Initially, they would seem not to have much to do with each other, but I think that there are two important ways they do connect:
One, that the current condition of God’s creation is one of the places where crucifixion is being played out right now, in real time. Humanity is inflicting in slow motion, on the world that God gave us to tend and care for, the same kind of torture that we inflicted all at once on the Son of God on a hill in Judaea in 30 AD. This slow-motion crucifixion must urgently, first, cease, and second, be atoned for. But at the same time, resurrection is in sight. Perhaps the most extraordinary story in the globe today, happening in plain sight, is the way that in just the last two to three years renewable energy has exploded – seriously, the graphs are basically vertical at this point – to the point that fossil fuels simply no longer can compete. Out of the wreckage, something new is being born. (Stay tuned for much more on this at the third annual midwinter retreat!)
The second way is more mystical and traditional. In this Season of Creation, I keep coming back to the images of nature, to tree and the snake: the tree in the garden at the beginning of humanity, and the snake that tempted the first people to try it before they were ready; the serpent lifted on the pole in the desert and the Son of Man lifted high upon the Tree of the Cross; the trees in the city of the new creation and the great serpent whose head will be crushed by the Saviour.
The symbol has its roots at the very beginning and it will endure even when God has made all things new and ushered creation into eternity. It is more than a symbol: it is an image that goes deeper than any meaning that can be put into words.
After the end of today’s reading, Paul closes the first chapter of the First Letter to the Corinthians thus: But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God. He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God.
The King of Kings is reigning from the glorious tree, overturning all the wisdom and strength that we can summon, and yet offering us, in its place, no less than than everything. It is not for us to understand, but simply to gaze, and meditate, and adore. Amen.
Leave a Reply