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Gail Partridge 14th September 2008 A Sermon for Holy Cross Day |
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Gail Partridge is a lay Reader, a member of the Parish Team in Leatherhead. William introduced her on 14th September as an old friend of Esher, having been part of the chaplaincy team at The Princess Alice Hospice for many years. |
| I heard of a young girl who went into a jeweller’s shop with her Godmother, to choose a crucifix for her confirmation present. ‘Do you want a plain one, or one with a little man on it?’ the jeweller asked her. For a large percentage of the population, wearing a crucifix has become a fashion accessory. It has lost any religious significance at all. |
| The cross is such a handy icon; which surely is why the Church, and just about every body else, it would seem, has latched on to it. It is easy to draw, simple to construct and instantly recognisable. Yet is it really the gospel message? Isn’t the truth we want to proclaim about what happens next: the Resurrection, not the death? But perhaps wearing an empty tomb around our necks might be a bit cumbersome! |
| If then, we insist on a cross, surely it should be empty. The meaning of Easter demands this. No little man! |
| Five years ago a terrible thing happened in our quiet little back water. A young mother, having collected her toddler from play group pushed him in his little buggy along the foot paths through the woods, as she did every day, in order to take the short cut home. But on this fateful day a crazed man whose girl friend had left him, taking their baby with her to Australia, saw in our young neighbour, a girl who looked very like his ex girl friend. Overcome with drug-filled vengeance, he followed her along the paths. When she reached the gate onto the lane she found the latch to be broken; by the time she had wriggled her hand through the bars to release it from the other side the man had picked up her little boy and was holding a knife to his throat. You may remember the rest of the story: the young mother was called Abigail, when she went to rescue her baby the man stabbed her in the neck, threw her on the ground and the baby and push chair on top of her. It was attempted murder. Amazingly, she survived, but is completely paralysed from the neck down. She and her young husband were just 26 when this tragedy struck. |
| My sermon the following Sunday was not about the Resurrection: it was about the cross. Never before had I understood so completely what the Cross is all about. Too often I, and many others too, skip quickly by it. We can’t take that much pain and move on to the happy ending. But it is there, right at the heart of the story, right at the heart of life. For Abigail, her husband, and my friend, her mother-in-law, not to acknowledge this would have been obscene. We must stop and grieve and share. We need to spend time in the darkness, the pain, the suffering. To feel the dark warmth envelop us, to lose God even, and cry with Jesus ‘My God, my God why hast thou forsaken me?’ |
| And this we are doing today; we are giving ourselves space to experience pain. To get close to the children starving in the Horn of Africa, close to innocent victims of wars and civil strife the world over, close to civilians whose homes have been destroyed and children killed by indiscriminate bombing raids. Close to the millions the world over who are sick, and in pain but who lack the means to receive medical aid. We draw close to the old, the frightened, the despairing, whether here or abroad, close to the many Abigails the world over; but above all, we take time to acknowledge our own little or large Calvaries; the disappointments, the failures, the hurt, the illness, the bereavements, our loss of youth, our fear of death. |
| These are our experiences and must not to be denied or brushed under the carpet, for they are part of the reality of life, and God in Jesus demonstrated on the Cross that he meets us here, and holds us and loves us. For it is this fallen world, this pain-riven world, this glorious muddle of a world that God loves and comes to share. |
| Many years ago now I was at Evensong in Guildford Cathedral when Peter Croft, the sub dean at the time, was preaching. His opening words were those we heard in our gospel reading this morning ‘God so loved the world’, but Peter repeated them three times, ‘God so loved the world … God so loved the world … God so loved the world … that he came; not the Church of England, not the Jews, not the righteous, but the WORLD’. I can’t remember the rest of the sermon. I don’t think it was very long. Peter had made his point. God so loved the world in all its pain, its failure, its hurt, its sorrow. |
| There is suffering out there. There is need, and we who have so much are challenged to become involved, not to deny the cross, but to share it, not to move too quickly towards the resurrection, but to spend time with those who are in agony on Calvary. And we call on our neighbour to do the same for us; to be with us in our darkness, to share our pain. |
| The little man does hang there after all. We do not overcome suffering by strength or denial. We have to swallow our pride, to humble ourselves, to accept the death of hope, for the cross IS the gate way to eternal life. |
| (We find suffering abhorrent. It is surely obscene that millions of the world’s poorest are dying of starvation, others have lost everything in recent floods, and many will die as a result of ensuing disease. If God is really all powerful why does he not intervene, send another Moses with a bronze snake on a stick, just do something? Why is Abigail still totally paralysed? Where is healing and resurrection in all this suffering? |
| (Sometimes it is hard to recognize healing, because it is not the cure we were looking for. We can forget that it is our vocation to be the healing love of Christ in the lives of the most vulnerable, we may feel impotent to affect a ‘cure’ but we can hold them and love them in their pit of despair.) |
| I’m sure like me, everyone here will have been horrified by the tragedy which played itself out in the news two weeks ago. When a millionaire who had lost his money and was deeply in debt could find nothing left for his family or himself to live for, so shot his wife and daughter, and then, having torched his property, turned his gun on himself. In his pride he could not face the future, he had no theology of the cross, no theology of defeat, no understanding of suffering, no little man on the cross. For if he had, if he could have let go of his pride, humbled himself, and he would have found that in the pit of despair into which he was falling were the arms of Christ, for Christ shares our crosses with us, and it is more often than not, in these black times of seeming hopelessness that we are caught and held and meet Christ face to face. So let’s not be in too much of a hurry to get to the resurrection: the cross is a blessed place too. Amen. |
| Gail Partridge |
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