Nothing But the Cross

Dear Kate,

How are you, since, about a year ago, as far as how we felt it in this part of the world, the COVID reality sank in and unsettled your life?  How has things been for us this Lent season, as we are walking closer and closer to the foot of the cross, to have all our judgements unsettled by the Judgement of God?

Today we will gather in church, for the most inconceivable, impractical, unreasonable reason, that to have a perfectly innocent victim hanged on a piece of wood is God's way to give us Light at the end of our tunnel, that by having us, fallen, sinful children of His nailing His Son on a piece of wood, lifting Him up high for the world to ridicule, to mock, to laugh at, is His way to say to us, Look at me, this is the kind of Father that I am to you.

This is why we are here, gathering today at "Church,"  a group of unreasonable people with absurd value judgement.  We are not here to learn from a good teacher who might have shown us a different way to look at things, to tweak our behavior just a little to get along better with others, or to have a more balanced lifestyle.  We are here to say, Jesus, we are here to follow you, to die to the world like you did, so that we can, for once, truly live.

And we are also here to declare, to proclaim the Good News, that humanity has turned a corner, because of what the Father has accomplished through the obedience of His Son on the Cross.  It is not just the way how we see the world, maybe a third or fourth or fifth way to look at things, but in fact the world has been changed, whether we see it or not.  With the Cross, God has acted most definitively, whether we trust in that or not.  Do we see what has been changed?  When the world look at how we live, can they see the change too?

So that's my prayer, just now, eyes wide open, for the Church, that we would come to each other in weakness, with great fear and trembling, and resolve to know nothing except Jesus Christ and him crucified.

Yours, Alex

PS. I'd love to learn the sign language Johnny Cash was doing in the video above.  It brings the song (and how we see the world) to a whole new dimension, like all good arts do.