Homily for the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, 2020

             If our nation has ever been more polarized than it is today, it’s not been in my lifetime. This year has been a perfect storm, with COVID, and George Floyd’s death, and now wildfires raging across the west. And did I mention the election coming up? Scott Adams captured it when he said that it’s like we’re watching two completely different movies on the same screen at the same time. Each side—and there are more than two---has lost the ability to even understand what people of other views are talking about.

           Look through the Scripture and you’ll see that times like this happen when God judges. In Babel, the people wanted to build a tower reaching heaven; but God came down and confused their speech, and the nations scattered. Gideon defeated the Midianites with only 300 men because God allowed confusion to come upon the Midianites, and they killed each other. We must face the facts, beloved: our nation is in a time of divine chastisement. When God turns away, everything quickly falls into the chaos from which it came: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was without form and void: “tohu vabohu” in Hebrew. When that happens, order gives way to chaos, and meaning gives way to vanity. Life is now a puzzle.

            As St. Paul says in today’s Epistle, God has made foolish the wisdom of this world.  “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the cleverness of the clever I will thwart.” It is liable to get a lot worse, too, before it gets better. But it will get better, in God’s mercy. And that change can begin, here and now.

            It can begin when we turn back to the word of the Cross. “We preach Christ crucified,” says St. Paul, “Christ, the power of God and Christ the wisdom of God.” You might say that the solution to our puzzle is a Cross Word—or rather, the “Cross Word.”

            What is this “Cross Word?” It’s simply this: that God the Son, in whose image we were made…when he saw that we had turned from God toward death, he came and took on our humanity, made like us in everything except sin. He entered our space and time; he made our history, his history. He freely choose to carry our sin, and embrace our death and when he died, he poured out his blood for the life of the world.

            Apart from Christ, “things fall apart,” as we see happening in our culture today. But in him, as Paul tells us elsewhere, all things hold together.

            The cross of Christ opens our eyes to see that all things in life are hidden under their opposites. We triumph in the Cross, but not the way the world measures triumph. We learn to glory in our weakness, that Christ might be our strength; we learn to be labeled as crazy, and bad, so that we might be in our right mind; we embrace sufferings, and hardship for Christ’s sake because we know that if anyone wants to follow Christ he must deny himself, and pick up his cross and follow.

            So in Christ, I don’t have to justify myself any more. Indeed, whoever justifies himself can’t be justified by God. In Christ, and in his cross, I have a “weapon of peace” to fight against my sinful passions. In Christ, I need not fear even death. For death has lost its sting through his cross and resurrection.

            Let the change begin here and now, beloved. Let the word of Christ dwell in us richly: Satan will be overthrown, we will be saved, and God will be glorified by the word of the Cross.