“In the shadow of the cross may your soul find
rest.”
Those words
jerked my wandering mind right back into the room.
She had been
telling us stories of women who had never known what it was to be loved, or to love
themselves; women scorned, “despised and rejected” by the world.
My heart hurt, a
bit, and I was angry – angry about a world where people can be treated as
objects, a world where help is far from people who are dying – spiritually or
literally – and so my mind wandered, until these words jerked me back.
“In the shadow
of the cross, may your soul find rest.”
I didn't like that a bit, because I don’t find the
cross at all restful. Do you?
Here is Jesus,
mocked, beaten, tortured, and now hung to die in the most public, shameful,
slow and painful way.
Here is a crowd
– angry, restless, stirred up by those who play on their fear and uncertainty: demanding
the death of this man, and now forced to witness the dangerous, crushing power
of the Roman state as their demands are met.
And here are
women, standing at the fringes; in danger, themselves, from being here; but
still, always, overlooked, pushed aside, ignored as they grieve.
I don’t want
that to be restful.
I want us – when
we see the cross, when we remember the cross – to be stirred up and restless
about that violence and fear and anger, loneliness and grief.
I want us to be
restless when we hear that story, and when we see the same things in the news
of our own day.
A day where it’s
normal to ask presidential candidates if they’ll continue policies of torture – and a “yes” to that
question can sometimes draw applause.
A world where
more than sixteen thousand women and girls in this metro area are currently
victims of sex trafficking: used, despised, rejected, objectified.
News that’s full
of bleeding victims, shattered rubble, and the constant stirrings of fear that
remind us that hate is easy, and bombs and guns go anywhere.
Life – for so
many of us – where death walks with us – in memories of lost loved ones,
threats to our own bodies and health, the pain of broken relationships.
“In the shadow
of the cross, may your soul find rest.”
It feels wrong
to me, and yet that phrase has haunted me since that speaker said it.
She was telling
a story of finding just one note in her father’s handwriting, her father who
had died when she was a child. Those words fell
out of his prayer book: “In the shadow of the cross, may your
soul find rest,” and she found comfort.
And then, at
last, I saw it, too.
A thin space of
shadow, cast by that
cross on the top of that hill in Jerusalem, a little slice of shade in the midst of the fierce, bright,
hard-edged emotions and realities of violence and death and division.
Space enough for
a bird or a heart to touch down for a moment’s rest: out of the glare,
cool in the heat, a small but real refuge.
That thin shadow, awkwardly
shaped - the shadow of
two trees stripped of their comforting branches and bound with the battered
body of Love Incarnate - is a promise,
then and now,
that even in the
very center of violence, grief, hate, anger, and fear,
in every center of such pain,
God makes a
space of rest.
It’s a promise
that when our lives come to a place of agony and destruction, God makes a slice
of shelter, and rest: not by denying
or diminishing the pain, but right in the
middle of it, making a sliver
of peace from the pain itself.
I need that
promise tonight, as we stand at
the foot of the cross and remember the nails, the mockery, the loneliness, and
the fear of that ancient hill outside Jerusalem.
I need that
promise, when the cross is planted again and again in the world you and I share
today.
And God makes
that promise,
two thousand
years ago;
tonight.
A sliver of
peace,
love that cannot
be conquered by hate.
Look for that in
the shadow tonight, in this space; in your life.
In the midst of
agony, a benediction:
In the shadow of
the cross, may your soul find rest.
Amen.
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