[A sermon preached to Hinckley Unitarians on Sunday 18th of September 2022]
(Readings: John 3:13-17 and Who Died To Save Us All by Arthur J. Long)
Wednesday marked the Festival of the Cross. This festival commemorates the finding of the supposed True Cross by St Helena, mother of the Roman Emperor Constantine. It also commemorates the founding of serval churches by Constantine, and the return of the supposed True Cross to Jerusalem by the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius (Her-rack-le-us) after a Persian Emperor apparently nicked it in the 600s.
All in all, it semes fairly obvious why most Unitarians do not regularly spend much time thinking about this particular festival. Unlike the festivals of Christmas and Easter that have arguably universal and timeless themes that appeal to all, the Feat of The Holy Cross seems to commemorate themes that would appeal only to those who have interests in Roman history or ecclesiastical history. Or of course those who are at least interested in the province of relics, otherwise known as nerds – people like me.
My interest in relics is a mostly secular one. I am fascinated by relics as objects and how people relate to these objects but I have to confess what relics I have seen have done little for me spiritually. Being a Unitarian, I do not think that is too surprising. Our renaissance, reformation, and enlightenment ancestors in faith treated relics with a fair amount of scepticism too. Erasmus famously said, “So they say of the cross of Our Lord, which is shown publicly and privately in so many places, that, if all the fragments were collected together, they would appear to form a fair cargo for a merchant ship.” Even John Calvin, not a theologian I often quote from the pulpit, was equally sceptical,
There is no abbey so poor as not to have a specimen. In some places there are large fragments, as at the Holy Chapel in Paris, at Poitiers, and at Rome, where a good-sized crucifix is said to have been made of it. In brief, if all the pieces that could be found were collected together, they would make a big ship-load. Yet the Gospel testifies that a single man was able to carry it.
John Calvin
We know that forged relics were big business in the Middle Ages, yet the debate around Erasmus and Calvin’s claims on this issue are still rumbling on.
For me though, the power of the cross lies not in its potential to have been preserved in the form of a few splintered relics, but instead as a symbol.
Many of the churches that followed Calvin’s line of scepticism on the issue of relics never the less make keen use of the cross as a symbol. I was honoured to speak at one of those local churches a while back and was trying to look for hymns that are common between our hymnbooks and theirs. They use Mission Praise a very common evangelical hymnbook and many of the hymns that I know from our books feature in Mission Praise with very different words from what I’m used to. Then I found something even better. Not just a shred hymn but a hymn by a Unitarian hymn writer, included with no changes of lyrics. It was John Bowring’s In The Cross of Christ I Glory.
Sir John Bowring was an interesting character, one Unitarian historian told me that Bowring was appointed Governor of Hong Kong, not because anyone thought he would be good at the job but because he was such an embarrassingly poor Member of Parliament that the then Prime Minister was only too keen to get rid of him by sending him as far away as possible! Bowring’s time as Governor of Hong Kong ended with his leadership, arguably, triggering the Second Opium War.
Fortunately for us if John Bowring was a lousy politician at least he was a good hymnwriter! In The Cross of Christ I Glory is actually one of my personal favourites. That said, I do find it odd how, what must be one of the most popular hymns by a Unitarian author, is conspicuously absent from the two most recent hymnbooks to have emerged from Essex Hall. How odd that this Unitarian hymn that features in almost every denominational hymnal I have ever picked up – except Unitarian ones.
Except it is not that odd, is it? Unlike many other churches, cannot think of any Unitarian place of worship that displays a cross that is visible to the public on the outside of their building. Although, I can think of one that used to but have taken down. Now, I’m not saying that all Unitarian congregations should erect crosses in their chapel yards. Not at all! I am merely observing that the trend in the past few decades has been one of fewer crosses outside our chapels and not more. The same is true for the inside of our buildings too. I have been told of one Unitarian chapel that shared its space with a Trinitarian congregation during the week. Sometimes this congregation would accidently leave their cross out on the alter which on Sunday, resulted in the interesting spectacle of a Unitarian Minister rushing to remove said cross before his service could begin.
So, what has changed to turn the cross from symbol of glory to one of avoidance or revulsion in the minds of many Unitarians?
I think part of this comes from our tendency to be a “featherbed for fallen Christians” to quote Charles Darwin. If we understand this to mean providing a place of sanctuary for those who have been spiritually damaged by small ‘o’ ‘orthodox’ expressions of Christianity, then a featherbed is something I am quite happy to be a part of and help provide. Sometimes the cross can become a symbol of the spiritual trauma our congregants have experienced in their former congregations. This has been the case for me too.
I can still remember attending my village’s Primary School in rural Sussex as if it were yesterday! One of the things I remember is that it was a Church of England school that was not afraid of showing its religious affiliation. I remember the crucifix hanging on the front wall of the assembly hall and I remember children around me, if they were caught talking during assembly, being made to go to the front of the hall, in front of the whole school, and kneel in front of the crucifix, as if they were begging for forgiveness for some evil act.
It was stuff like that that made me, quite possibly, the world’s youngest militant Dawkinsite atheist, and kept me as such for many years! For me, at that time, the cross was a symbol of oppression, one I was all to keen to be rid of.
In one sense at least, my former atheist self was quite correct on these matters. It is right to link the cross to oppression. After all, it was an instrument of torturous execution employed by the roman authorities for despatching the worst criminals and most dangerous political opponents while serving as a visual reminder to the masses of who was in charge.
Jesus’s story shows us that true path love will always lead us to the cross. The Dominican monk and theologian Herbert McCabe OP, when pressed to summarise the message of the gospel in as few words as possible said, “If you love then they will kill you, but if you do not love then you are dead already.”
However, the story of the cross does not end with death but ultimately transcends it. In the Gospel narrative the cross was the end of life but also the beginning of the process of resurrection. This is what makes the cross so subversive. A symbol foisted on the people as something designed to strike fear into their hearts, though the power of love, is transformed into the ultimate symbol of hope in the hearts of the oppressed. The symbol that defined oppression was dialectically transformed into its opposite, becoming a symbol of the fact that there exists a divine hope that the powers that be can never snuff out.
I wonder if any of us wear a cross on a day-to-day basis? I do. Not as a fashion statement – I wear it under my shirt – but I can feel it there none the less. It reminds me of the prophetic call and the reality of my mortality. It also reminds me to maintain hope. That whatever I encounter in my day is faceable. That God’s will shall be done. That, as Julian of Norwich said “all will be well, and all manner of thing will be well”. It also reminds me to be modest. My achievements mean little when compared to the actions of Jesus and what little I have accomplished by comparison, well, I’m happy to give the ultimate credit for that to somewhere else.
The story of how the cross I wear came to me also reminds me of others less advantaged than myself. In Kerala, India, there exists a house called ‘Robin’s Nest’. It was built with the help of funds raised by the South Indian Community Trust and donated by my grandparents who named the house after me. The house was built to house a family of Dalits (formally known as untouchables). They had no permanent house and had to rebuild their home after the monsoon season every year. The house that was built for them (and, indeed by them, the trust paid for the materials and tuition in how to build it) was basic but at least it was a safe place for their young son to grow up. He was about the same age as me and sent me a small wooden cross. It has been increasingly common for Dalits to convert away from Hinduism as a way of liberating themselves from the last vestiges of the caste system and it was obvious that he had done this.
I wear then a reminder of liberation. With any luck I will never have to face the struggles on the scale of the person who made it, or even the person of Jesus who we associate the symbol with most. Nevertheless, the cross, for this Unitarian anyway, is the ultimate symbol of hope.
Amen.
