Sept. 14, 2025 | Word Out!
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Sermon – Pastor John Michael Barish
Thinking about the Cross
September 14, 2025
1 Corinthians 1:18-24
18 The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. 19 For it is written,
“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”
20 Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scholar? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21 For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of the proclamation, to save those who believe. 22 For Jews ask for signs and Greeks desire wisdom, 23 but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to gentiles, 24 but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.
John 3:13-17
[Jesus said:] 13 “No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. 14 And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, 15 that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.
16 “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.
17 “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world but in order that the world might be saved through him.”
Sermon
So, even before I received this invitation to fill in today, I had been thinking about the cross, and what it means that so many of us have been baptized, and have baptized our own children and grandchildren over the years, and at some point, the pastor makes the sign of the cross on the forehead.
Personally, it’s hard for me to believe that six years ago, I baptized my godson when he was only three months old—while I could still get my hands on him!—baptized him, and took on the responsibilities of nurturing him in the faith, little by little.
What does it mean that our faces and fates have been sealed with the cross in baptism, and, some of us, in confirmation; that our foreheads are marked with the cross in yearly ashes; that our hands are marked with the cross in ordination; that our hearts are signed with the cross in absolution? What does it mean that the centerpiece of this place of worship is a cross?
Why do we concentrate our considerations of the cross in Lent and Easter? See this symbol as most appropriate to times oriented towards sin and suffering; patience; pitifulness, and death… by the cross is just as appropriate to the birth of Jesus as to his death.
The cross is the sign of mortality: the intersection and the tension of horizontal relationships, with one another and vertical relationships, with God. It is the intersection of life here in this earthly plane, and life with God.
And whenever we pray that we may have grace to “take up our cross and follow Him,” we get a little off, if we see within that prayer, a petition for grace, to shoulder our burdens and to suffer willingly the pains of life.
“Our bearing toward one another,” says Paul to the Philippians, is “to arise out of the life of Christ Jesus”—a life which is not characterized by a hierarchy or authority, but rather by mortality. “For this Jesus,” Paul writes, “though he was in the form of God. Did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of the slave, being born in human likeness.”
The greatness of God and the holiness of Jesus, Paul says, is manifest in holiness and human-ness.
I recall a wonderful story of a conductor who, while directing a large ensemble with a group of percussionists, raised his arms and signaled the huge core of timpanists to sound their instruments. The din lasted a moment, and then he raised his baton again and waved them off to silence. Addressing the percussionists, he reminded them of a principle he felt they had obviously overlooked: “The music,” he said, “is in the drum, not the mallet. One does not beat the music into the drum. One coaxes the music out of the drum.” And then taking a mallet, he struck the drum, and gently let the mallet rise off the skin, as if the mallet were pulling sound from the kettle. And the resulting sound was musical, full, and resonant.
The cross, and the music of the timpani: the experience is to be “coaxed out of us.”
The wearing of the cross is not an accessory to life, but rather it is the embrace of life itself. We Christians don’t wear the cross as an emblem of exclusivity or a talisman of spirituality; Christians bear the cross within, in the daily embrace of all that it means to be human. To be a Christian is not to take the cross upon oneself, but rather to have the fullness of life “coaxed out” of oneself.
Life was not imposed upon Jesus. Life was not beaten into Jesus, nor is life beaten into us. The life is in Him, and He is in us, even as the music is in the drum. And so since this is a Sunday of Welcome, to first-timers, to guests, to visitors: we invite you to be with us, to coax life out of each other, to ask challenging questions that we may not even have the answers to—but to do it together, as a community, under the cross of Christ, and in His name, which is Life.
In the name of Jesus, Amen.