Today we mark the occasion of the Feast of the Holy Cross, also known as the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. Broadly speaking, this feast day commemorates two major events in Christian tradition: the legendary discovery of the so-called True Cross by St. Helena, the mother of Emperor Constantine, in the 4th century, as well as the more historical dedication of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem in AD 336.
Aside from the legend and the history, today’s feast day serves as an important reminder of the centrality of the cross in our relationship with God. It symbolizes the ultimate sacrifice of Jesus for our redemption and Jesus’ triumph over sin, death, and hell. The Feast of the Holy Cross is meant to inspire us to look to the cross as a symbol of hope, salvation, and God’s unmitigated, unremitting love. Unlike Good Friday, when we appropriately venerate the cross as the place of God’s love poured out for us, the Feast of the Holy Cross affords us a time to celebrate the cross—in a way reminiscent of Easter. For the cross is not a symbol of death, but of life—life given for us in love. And as something given to us in love, we rightly celebrate that gift. Today, consider the gift we receive through the cross of Jesus as we go forward, the gift of life lived with God.
Let us pray. May only God’s Word be spoken and may only God’s Word be heard; in the name of Jesus. Amen.
At the end of your rows, there are little baskets with stuff in them. There should be a few white envelopes there, unlabeled, not the weather appeal envelopes. Everyone take an envelope and open it. What’s inside? That’s right. Different logos. Some of you have the Nike logo. Some of you have the McDonald’s logo. What about the green one? You know that one? That’s Starbucks. The girl with the red hair in ponytails? That’s Wendy’s.
You recognize these companies by their logos. A logo is a symbol or some other design used by an organization to identify itself and say something about the organization. That is to say, the logo points beyond itself and conveys meaning about whatever it’s pointing to.
In some of your envelopes, you have the logo for the Toyota car company. Now, we instantly recognize that logo as Toyota, but did you know that the company put a lot of thought into what all those curved lines mean? The Toyota logo is made up of three overlapping ovals, and each oval means something. The two perpendicular ovals that form the T shape inside the logo represent the heart of the customer and the heart of the company. These two hearts coming together are supposed to represent the strong and mutually beneficial relationship between Toyota and its customers. The larger oval around the T represents the global world. It’s supposed to reinforce Toyota’s commitment to reaching out to people worldwide and providing quality vehicles and services to the whole world. The last oval, a thin-lined outer oval, circles around the whole logo. It’s supposed to represent the progressive approach to business and forward-thinking that Toyota strives for. Overall, Toyota’s logo embodies the company’s core values of customer satisfaction, global reach, and continuous technological progress. It reflects Toyota’s commitment to creating reliable, high-quality vehicles while maintaining a strong connection with its customers around the world. All this crammed into those few curved lines, not just a fun symbol to say: “This car is a Toyota.”
Perhaps the most recognized Christian symbol the world over, by far, is the cross. It’s everywhere. It’s on top of church steeples. People hang crosses on their walls. People wear them around their necks as jewelry. Pioneers would make simple wooden crosses out of sticks to bury people who’d died alone the way—these crosses alone marking the place where someone otherwise anonymous was put to rest. Here even in our sanctuary we have a giant wooden cross that takes center focus. When you walk into this space, you can’t miss the cross hanging directly above the altar. It says, “This is a Christian space.”
Someone wearing a cross necklace proclaims, without even needing to say a word, “I’m a Christian.” A cross or crucifix hanging on the wall of someone’s house where you’re visiting—that tells you, “This is a Christian home.” The cross is perhaps—no, let’s revise that. The cross is the most recognized Christian symbol the world over, by far. It says, of whatever it’s associated with, be it house, car, building, or person, “This is Christian.” You might say that the cross is the Christian logo. The logo for Christianity.
But what does it mean to be Christian? And more specifically, what does it mean to be Christian with regards to the cross? If the cross is our logo, and a logo is a symbol used to identify an organization and say something about it, what organization is the cross pointing to and what does it say about it? Put more simply, what does the cross mean?
In brief, the cross is the symbol of God’s power and desire to create, restore, and sustain life. At face value, that might seem bizarre, given that the cross, quite literally, was the most despised and terrifying means of death, of execution in the last few centuries before Christ and for the next several after. Yet, as St. Paul tells the Corinthians, and tells us, “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.” That is, God chose the cross, the very least, the very last thing anyone would’ve expected to bring about life. God chose the end of death as the beginning of life.
Yet the cross is more than simply a symbol for God’s power and desire. The cross is more specifically a real thing—the place where God died. The place where Jesus died. To be sure, the cross is a symbol, but it’s a symbol for us—a symbol of something far greater than simply a wooden stake and a wooden beam. The cross is a symbol, a reminder of God’s promise made real for us in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. And what is that promise? “Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord”—the whole of the gospel in a simple sentence. Today we are reminded through the iconic words of St. John that, “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
That verse, when it speaks of how God “gave his only begotten Son”—that verse contains within it the cross, the real, actual, physical, literal cross. The cross on which the Son of God, truly man and truly God, died so that we might come to believe that nothing, not even death, can separate us from God’s love. And to believe that isn’t merely an intellectual, mindly assent. To believe that means to live lives like God’s love matters. God sent Jesus into the world to show us just how radical, just how unexpected, just how different his expectations for us and for the world are over against the whispers, lies, slander, innuendo, shouts, and perversions of popular wisdom.
The cross symbolizes Christ’s sacrifice for us—a sacrifice that in its totality goes against everything that everything in our lives tells us. Look out for yourself first. If you don’t take care of yourself, no one else will. What about me? Yet Jesus, in his living and his teaching, tells us the exact opposite, quite literally saying, “whoever wants to save their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it.” The cross is by its very essence a symbol of life—in Christ. The life of Christ wrapped up in sacrifice, for us and for the world.
And this is where the cross as a logo for an organization comes to bear. We who are Christians, we who are disciples of Jesus, we who are followers of the Way—we are the church, the body of Christ in the world today, here, in this place and in this time. When we were baptized, we were united in Jesus in a death like his, so that just as he was raised from death to life again by the power and desire of God, so too do we live new, different lives according to the same power and desire of God. When we were baptized, we died with Christ and rose with him, and in that same baptism, we were quite literally marked with holy chrism, with blessed oil—in the shape of a cross upon our foreheads. We have been marked with the cross of Christ and sealed with the Holy Spirit forever—nothing can remove that from us, but it is the cross we bear.
Each of us, from the moment we are newborn Christians, bear upon our brows the seal of him who died—of our Lord and our God, of Jesus. Or, perhaps we might say in the words of St. Paul today, as he did to the Galatians, “I carry the marks of Jesus branded on my body.” We carry upon us the mark of Christ, branded—a mark seared indelibly upon us, but also a symbol that identifies us as belonging to someone beyond ourselves—to Jesus. And what’s more, that power…that’s the same power that raised Jesus from death to life again, the Holy Spirit. And she fills us and gives us her own strength to truly lead lives worthy of the calling to which we have been called—to the calling of sharing God’s creative and redeeming love with the world, to the greater glory of God.
Our logo, the cross of Jesus, reminds us of this. There’s a vertical stake in the cross, and it reminds us how for us and for our salvation God came down from heaven in Jesus. And there’s a horizontal beam, which reminds us how just as Jesus opened his arms to embrace the world with God’s love, so we who are spread far and wide, are sent just as God sent him—to embrace the world with God’s love. When we who are Christians see the cross, the cross of Jesus, we are reminded both of God’s promise to us and of God’s expectation of us—both rooted in love.
This is what it means to be Christian. This is what the cross points to and what it’s trying to convey. This is what the cross means. The cross of Jesus means to remind us we are loved by God to love for God.
Lift high the cross—the love of Christ proclaim!
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
The Rev'd Daniel W. Spigelmyer, Jr. 