Lent III (Mother Marisa)

The phone rings. A friend from work is on the line. She’s been going through a hard time, and all she wants is for someone to listen. So there you are, however you do these things, walking around your house or standing stock still in your kitchen, listening for your friend’s astonishing insight or dark secret — and then the signal cuts out. A beat goes by. And another. And then the voice of your friend abruptly returns. Maybe she’s laughing. Maybe she’s crying. Who knows why? Your ability to pay attention has practically disappeared as the internal monologue begins to roll: Do you admit that you have no idea what she’s talking about? Do you ask her to repeat whatever it was that she had said? The thought of doing so is excruciating — maybe only to me — because you wanted to listen. You picked up the phone for a reason; but you were unable at the critical moment to do so. And now! Now you’re miles away, wondering whether or not to embarrass yourself and your friend by confessing to the whole thing. But by that point the conversation is over, and you hope that whatever you missed doesn’t come back to bite you.

Communication can be hard. Maybe it always is! But then there are those moments when the message gets lost entirely. It could be the connection. It could be our forgetfulness. It could be our self-centeredness. Sound familiar? We’ve all had those experiences, when we were told to pick up peas for dinner and got pears instead or when we thought our spouse was angry when in fact they were only exhausted or when the kids’ bickering erupted into a tantrum because we were too busy looking at our phones to intervene. 

The subtle art of communication — of all that’s involved with discerning what’s true and acting in accord with Reality — is a skill that we as 21st-century Americans aren’t particularly good at. Though we are far from the only people to struggle. In fact, we are in good company. Although some would call it bad.

The Corinthian Christians weren’t exactly paragons of moral virtue. Empowered by the Holy Spirit and impressed with themselves, this congregation, which had been planted by St. Paul in one of the most diverse and depraved cities in the Roman Empire, was beginning to fall apart. Parishioners sued each other — in pagan courts, no less — after cheating on each other’s business deals. On top of that, an established member decided it was okay to sleep with his stepmother. And on top of that, the congregation had split up into various factions, each with their own preferred leader and their own preferred teachings and their own kind of preferential treatment. Even the people outside of the church who knew nothing about Christianity knew that what the Corinthian Christians were doing had very little in common with Truth or Virtue of any kind. These folks were behaving like the worst sort of pagans while also claiming Christ.

Things were bad. So bad that nearly 250 miles away in Ephesus, St. Paul hears about it — and writes. His voice full of concern and pain, St. Paul warns his spiritual children, “You think you are wise, but you are infants” — and behaving like them, too. 

Somewhere along the line, the Christians in Corinth had missed or mislaid the message. They had lost the signal; and they were now in danger of dropping the call. The echoes of their past and the sound of their present were drowning out the heartbeat that was what brought them to life in the first place.

“The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” 

That Word is no less incredible, no less “foolish” now than it was then. We are, after all, living in a world that looks more and more like an ancient port city, complete with a dizzying array of goods and ideas as well as a seedy and sordid underbelly just a few blocks away. You can see it if you look. You can hear it if you listen. The same kinds of idols, the same false gospels are there, are here — we encounter them every day. 

If you want to be happy, get rich. If you want to be respected, find power. If you want to be remembered — we’ve moved beyond constructing beautiful tombs. Now we just buy the latest cell phone or invest in virtual reality or dabble in AI because to do otherwise risks obsolescence, a premature metaphorical death in a world that’s moving so fast the human soul can’t keep up. 

And we are told this is good. But the fact is, it’s not. 

The life we are called to live is not one measured by our salary or our followers or our fame. It is one that begins and ends in the message of the Cross, where a love stronger than death died, so that even his enemies might have life. 

This may sound like foolishness. It may look like failure; but it is actually freedom. It is actually power, God’s power, God’s grace to make every moment — the good and the bad — a moment with him and a foretaste of paradise.
 
For God, our God was so zealous for his temple that he came down, he entered into our midst, was wounded for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities that we might no longer be pulled apart by the perceived needs and changing fashions of this world, but united with the one who can teach us a better way.

And that instruction, that message, that Word could, as the Apostle John said, fill many books and still have more to say because the message of the cross is Jesus Christ, the God who became man so that he might take up our cross and carry it through the wilderness, into the Temple, and beyond the grave — that we might be healed and made whole not by escaping the world or by escaping our selves but by following the one who lived as no one has ever lived before. His was the perfectly obedient, perfectly trusting, perfectly restful life lived in the presence of the One who is Love. 

What joy life could be if we took him at his Word, if we learned to listen past the noise of the world around us, to find that still small voice in the center of our heart that tells us what is True, that reminds us of the sound that has gone out into all the lands, and the message that rings even to the ends of the world: Someone loves us, and he is not far from us. Indeed, he draws near, he comes close, that he might speak and we might hear. 

And he never stops doing so. God never stops calling us. Not even when we are at our worst. Not even when we’re at our most ignorant. Not even when we’re distracted. Think of the cross and the message it proclaims: God will not leave us, not even though we kill him. 

This is the Word that is found at the heart of things, at the heart of everything. The Word that will not rest until all is united through Him with God. And that is happening now, as each of us beseech God to give us the grace to hear with his ears and to see with his eyes and to touch with his hands this glorious world, these glorious gifts that he has given us, that we might enter ever more deeply into his love, seeking him out and finding him in every moment of every day, learning to believe that he is leading us on into glory, no matter what we may encounter. 

That is the message we hear in every word of Scripture, the Word we taste in the Bread and the Wine, the Reality in which we live and move and breathe. "The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God." Take hold of it and live. AMEN. 

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