Cries for Help
Stories
Contents
“Cries for Help” by C. David McKirachan
“Tremble” by C. David McKirachan
“It’s About the Cross Today, Not the Empty Tomb” by Frank Ramirez
Cries for Help
by C. David McKirachan
Psalm 22
I used to leave hospital rooms exhausted. Climbing into my vehicle, I would roll my head back and around, trying to relieve the stress in my neck and in my shoulders. It took me years to realize that I’d been trying to lift the person in the bed or their loved ones. Hospital beds are heavy. And as hard as I tried, they stayed sick, broken, frightened. My words didn’t solve their illness or their problems. Digging a little deeper, I realized that I often felt that way after counselling with people who came to my office with problems. And as hard as I tried, I couldn’t make everything work out.
Having come to these startling realizations, I thought back to my training in crisis intervention and suicide prevention. We were taking our training to equip us to go on the phones at a suicide hotline in San Francisco. Most of the students, including myself, were hot shot twenty somethings who figured we could ride into the battles of life with our armor shining, armed with the sword of truth and solve the problems of the world. As most people in their twenty’s, we hadn’t learned the wisdom to be found in losing and living through it. Our teachers did their best to pound it into our heads that we couldn’t save people, they had to want to move out of their crisis and choose life. All we could do was offer the opportunity to them. We couldn’t prevent suicides. All we could do was offer life.
When I was twelve, I told my parents I wanted to be a minister or a fireman, or both. They nodded. They knew I was a romantic fool who was going to go through life fighting dragons and slugging it out with demons. They were wise people. So were the teachers.
So, here I was with a stiff neck and a sore back, sore from wielding my sword. How’s it going Arthur?
With a lot of reading, journaling, discussion with some veterans of the spiritual wars, study of scripture, and uncomfortable prayer, I came up with a discipline to try to work on my attitude and my habits. I talked to some of the people in the hospital beds and in the counselling chairs about what was important to them. That means I listened to them. I learned from them and from wise people from former centuries and from around the corner, that what I was called to do and what they really craved was to find with me the non-anxious presence of Christ. I know somebody a lot wiser than I said that. But I can’t remember who. I wasn’t there to be strong and wise and solve their pain or their problems. I was there to remind them that God loved them by holding their hand. I was there to be present, to care about them. To know them.
I was stunned when that roof finally caved in on me. (I tend to be thick headed.) And when I was able to remember that and do that, I was much more able to help them, because I’m pretty good at caring about people.
We all have people in our churches who are hard to love. They’re afraid to be open, so they live behind walls with spikes on them. One of those people in one of my churches had a pain in the tukus husband. They made a matched set. One evening, he walked into a meeting, clearly distraught, and asked me to come into the hall. There, he told me his wife was in the car, in the parking lot. They had just gotten the news that she had terminal cancer. Six months to live. Could I talk to her? So, I excused myself from the meeting and went to the car.
Over those six months I spent a lot of time with her. About a week after her funeral her husband came in to see me and told me how grateful she’d been and how grateful he was for all that I’d done. He said that in spite of their behavior over the years. They trusted me, and when the rubber hit the road, they knew I would stand by them, even in the middle of the darkness.
Whew!
We don’t need healing as much as we need to know that we aren’t alone. The Lord’s desperate prayer during the hell of that horrible afternoon reminds us how human he was. He wasn’t wearing any armor and he couldn’t hold a sword. But he could cry out and beg. We’ve all heard such cries for help. Some of us have whimpered them ourselves, in the dark nights of our souls. We don’t need solutions. We need to know that no matter how bad it gets, we are important enough to remember.
That cry is the center of my faith, it is at the core of my call to ministry, and it is the bedrock of our hope even in the middle of the darkness.
* * *
Tremble
by C. David McKirachan
Isaiah 52:13--53:12
Jesus was a loser.
What is it that makes people attractive? Some would say an accident of genetics. Evidentially, people who have symmetrical features get noticed, are more pleasing to the eyes of beholders. Those of us who have had collisions with hard objects aren’t as pleasing to look at. Then there’s the gravitational pull of wealth. A poll conducted to discover what factors young women look for in prospective mates yielded wealth, ambition, and security as the top three factors. And then there’s the ability to win. There are many arenas to demonstrate this capability; physical, financial, professional, political, and the list goes on. As our culture opens and breaks glass ceilings, both sexes have opportunities to be winners. As one coach said, “Winning isn’t important. It’s everything.”
All of the above are very human traits, seen to be positive. Their opposites are to be avoided. They offer opportunities to have more control of our lives. They are attractive. It is hard to consider turning these attitudes on their heads. To upend our natural proclivities, to judge what is valuable by other standards is weird, even frightening.
So, we tend to try to make Jesus a winner. We have a hard time following a lord who violates so many of the normalities, so many of the categories that are natural for we very human beings.
Once, I was working on a sermon chasing down this line of reasoning and shared my thinking with a pastor friend. “You can’t go there.” I wasn’t used to that response from this particular person, and they went on. “Before you preach on something so viscerally difficult for people, you better not do it lightly. How do you feel about calling Jesus a loser? How would you react if someone tried to feed that to you?”
I realized I would get defensive. Rather than listen, I would make arguments, counters, attempts to find holes in what was being put forward. If we’re going to ‘attack’ not only the Lord, but basic values of the people listening, we better be able to wrestle with the angel. A very wise parent told me, “Don’t try to push a stroller through gravel. Pull it.” That image works in all kinds of situations.
If I was going to preach on this, I had to do it confessionally. I had to admit my own difficulty with it. This Jesus being a loser business is hard for me to swallow. It is for any sane human being. But unless we are willing to confront what God is doing with the crowd’s stupidity, the plotting of the rulers, the betrayal and desertion of his disciples, the trial, torture, mocking, and the blistering horror of the cross, we are avoiding the depth of our own sin and the extent of God’s love.
How many times have we heard this passage from Isaiah? How many times do we hear the suffering servant songs and still manage to dodge the blast of abasement dumped on the one chosen by God? If Jesus did this willingly it’s bad enough. But if he did this intentionally… If I had him in counselling, I’d recommend medication. This guy had some serious issues. If it was one of my kids, my heart would break. (Just imagine Mary at the foot of the cross.) This whole thing knocks down every category of power, beauty, and hope I can come up with. “Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.”
So, if we are going to preach on the cross, we need to be ready to embrace our own demons. Not demons of evil and corruption. Demons of mortality, of pride, of being human. Until we are willing to go there, into the horror movie of God’s purpose in Jesus’ agony, we will never face the extent of God’s love. Love that forgives even what we do to our Lord on a regular basis.
“Were you there when they crucified my Lord?”
Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.
* * *
It’s About the Cross Today, Not the Empty Tomb
by Frank Ramirez
The late Dr. Graydon F. Snyder, who taught for years at Bethany Theological Seminary (when it was located in Oak Brook, Illinois, and also at Chicago Theological Seminary) made some startling observations about the early Christian church and the cross in his book Ante-Pacem, which means “Before the Peace,” and refers to the three Christian centuries before our faith was made legal by the Emperor Constantine. He asserted that early Christian personal letters, graffiti, architecture, and art in the pre-Constantinian era, before Christianity was legalized, revealed that there was a tension between what the early Church fathers taught was the faith, and what people in the pews — only they didn’t have any pews — believed and practiced.
That healthy tension exists in all eras of church history.
One of the surprises of early Christian art is that Jonah and the Fish is the number one biblical story depicted, with Daniel and the Lion’s Den and the Three Young Men in the Fiery Furnace not far behind. These are stories about survival in a hostile environment.
What you don’t find is the cross. Considering that the crucifixion is a major motif in Christian art today, that people wear crosses and crucifixes around their necks, that hymns glory in that Old Rugged Cross, this is surprising.
The cross basically doesn’t appear in Christian art until after Christianity is legalized and Christians were no longer being crucified.
What else do we have? Larry Hurtado, in his study of Christian manuscripts, makes the assertion that in some early Christian manuscripts the tau and the rho of the stauros, or cross, depict a man hanging on a cross.
There are two other examples that were first brought to my attention by Ben Witherington III in an article in Biblical Archaeology Review. There’s this graffito of a man hideously flogged and crucified, and this gemstone depicting a crucified Jesus etched in the surface, with the words “Father, Jesus Christ,” etched in the front along with magical sounds, and on the other side the words “Jesus” and “Emmanuel” spelled in different ways. I think this example was, like Christian amulets (which drove the church fathers crazy) featuring Bible verses, used for the purpose of healing sickness.
And finally, there’s a lone example Dr. Snyder knew about. It is a graffito etched on the wall of the slave quarters in the Roman Imperial palace. We see a man with a donkey’s head nailed to a cross, with another man, presumably a slave, ridiculed for worshiping that man. There are the words: “Alexamenos worships his God.” The idea that Christians, many of whom were slaves, would worship a crucified person is mocked.
Well, this Lenten season it’s good to remember that this is who we stand beside. What we forget is that we ought not jump ahead to the ending, because the world doesn’t see the Resurrection. It does see the cross. There is power in the fact we stand beside that cross, with only our faith sustaining us.
Some of us Christians aren’t so good at this Lent thing. We don’t fast. We don’t wear ashes. There are no memento mori. We want to jump ahead to Easter.
But this is where our people live.
This past year a young woman in the Nappanee community in her late twenties married her high school sweetheart, a farmer, had a child, then tested positive for stage IV mesothelioma. She was taken to a hospital in Austin, Texas, fought valiantly, had a lung removed, and died.
That made the struggles of Kate Bowler very illuminating. A professor of religion at Duke Divinity School, the author of a respected book on the Prosperity Gospel, Bowler grew up in Canada and married a Canadian Mennonite. After some struggle she got pregnant, gave birth to the perfect baby boy of her dreams, and was diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer.
Her book, Everything happens for a reason and other lies I’ve loved is a must-read, if for no other reason than the two appendices in which she tells us what not to say to someone staring death in the face — and what to do.
In the midst of her Lenten life she attended a Good Friday service at a mega-church in which startlingly cheerful worship leaders gave short shrift to the crucifixion and quickly shifted the focus to Easter. Kate Bowler phrased her complaint to her friends in this manner:
Everyone is trying to Easter the crap out of my Lent.
Don’t Easter the crap out of Lent. Recognize that crucifixion, the broken lives of our parishioners, is so real that they need us to walk with them on the road to Calvary. When we discount their suffering with a premature Easter we cheat them of the validity of their struggles with a band aid.
Toward the end of her book Kate shares the most valuable advice she got, from one of her professors who were, ironically, those most in touch with her struggles against cancer. “Don’t skip ahead to the ending.”
Don’t skip ahead to the ending. As painful as it is to live the cross that the early Christians hated to draw because they knew what it really looked like, this is where we live. The resurrection is coming, but we can’t get there, except through the cross, the real cross, the one Jesus and so many tens of thousands died on. The cross that so many are carrying now.
*****************************************
StoryShare, April 10, 2020 issue.
Copyright 2020 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
“Cries for Help” by C. David McKirachan
“Tremble” by C. David McKirachan
“It’s About the Cross Today, Not the Empty Tomb” by Frank Ramirez
Cries for Help
by C. David McKirachan
Psalm 22
I used to leave hospital rooms exhausted. Climbing into my vehicle, I would roll my head back and around, trying to relieve the stress in my neck and in my shoulders. It took me years to realize that I’d been trying to lift the person in the bed or their loved ones. Hospital beds are heavy. And as hard as I tried, they stayed sick, broken, frightened. My words didn’t solve their illness or their problems. Digging a little deeper, I realized that I often felt that way after counselling with people who came to my office with problems. And as hard as I tried, I couldn’t make everything work out.
Having come to these startling realizations, I thought back to my training in crisis intervention and suicide prevention. We were taking our training to equip us to go on the phones at a suicide hotline in San Francisco. Most of the students, including myself, were hot shot twenty somethings who figured we could ride into the battles of life with our armor shining, armed with the sword of truth and solve the problems of the world. As most people in their twenty’s, we hadn’t learned the wisdom to be found in losing and living through it. Our teachers did their best to pound it into our heads that we couldn’t save people, they had to want to move out of their crisis and choose life. All we could do was offer the opportunity to them. We couldn’t prevent suicides. All we could do was offer life.
When I was twelve, I told my parents I wanted to be a minister or a fireman, or both. They nodded. They knew I was a romantic fool who was going to go through life fighting dragons and slugging it out with demons. They were wise people. So were the teachers.
So, here I was with a stiff neck and a sore back, sore from wielding my sword. How’s it going Arthur?
With a lot of reading, journaling, discussion with some veterans of the spiritual wars, study of scripture, and uncomfortable prayer, I came up with a discipline to try to work on my attitude and my habits. I talked to some of the people in the hospital beds and in the counselling chairs about what was important to them. That means I listened to them. I learned from them and from wise people from former centuries and from around the corner, that what I was called to do and what they really craved was to find with me the non-anxious presence of Christ. I know somebody a lot wiser than I said that. But I can’t remember who. I wasn’t there to be strong and wise and solve their pain or their problems. I was there to remind them that God loved them by holding their hand. I was there to be present, to care about them. To know them.
I was stunned when that roof finally caved in on me. (I tend to be thick headed.) And when I was able to remember that and do that, I was much more able to help them, because I’m pretty good at caring about people.
We all have people in our churches who are hard to love. They’re afraid to be open, so they live behind walls with spikes on them. One of those people in one of my churches had a pain in the tukus husband. They made a matched set. One evening, he walked into a meeting, clearly distraught, and asked me to come into the hall. There, he told me his wife was in the car, in the parking lot. They had just gotten the news that she had terminal cancer. Six months to live. Could I talk to her? So, I excused myself from the meeting and went to the car.
Over those six months I spent a lot of time with her. About a week after her funeral her husband came in to see me and told me how grateful she’d been and how grateful he was for all that I’d done. He said that in spite of their behavior over the years. They trusted me, and when the rubber hit the road, they knew I would stand by them, even in the middle of the darkness.
Whew!
We don’t need healing as much as we need to know that we aren’t alone. The Lord’s desperate prayer during the hell of that horrible afternoon reminds us how human he was. He wasn’t wearing any armor and he couldn’t hold a sword. But he could cry out and beg. We’ve all heard such cries for help. Some of us have whimpered them ourselves, in the dark nights of our souls. We don’t need solutions. We need to know that no matter how bad it gets, we are important enough to remember.
That cry is the center of my faith, it is at the core of my call to ministry, and it is the bedrock of our hope even in the middle of the darkness.
* * *
Tremble
by C. David McKirachan
Isaiah 52:13--53:12
Jesus was a loser.
What is it that makes people attractive? Some would say an accident of genetics. Evidentially, people who have symmetrical features get noticed, are more pleasing to the eyes of beholders. Those of us who have had collisions with hard objects aren’t as pleasing to look at. Then there’s the gravitational pull of wealth. A poll conducted to discover what factors young women look for in prospective mates yielded wealth, ambition, and security as the top three factors. And then there’s the ability to win. There are many arenas to demonstrate this capability; physical, financial, professional, political, and the list goes on. As our culture opens and breaks glass ceilings, both sexes have opportunities to be winners. As one coach said, “Winning isn’t important. It’s everything.”
All of the above are very human traits, seen to be positive. Their opposites are to be avoided. They offer opportunities to have more control of our lives. They are attractive. It is hard to consider turning these attitudes on their heads. To upend our natural proclivities, to judge what is valuable by other standards is weird, even frightening.
So, we tend to try to make Jesus a winner. We have a hard time following a lord who violates so many of the normalities, so many of the categories that are natural for we very human beings.
Once, I was working on a sermon chasing down this line of reasoning and shared my thinking with a pastor friend. “You can’t go there.” I wasn’t used to that response from this particular person, and they went on. “Before you preach on something so viscerally difficult for people, you better not do it lightly. How do you feel about calling Jesus a loser? How would you react if someone tried to feed that to you?”
I realized I would get defensive. Rather than listen, I would make arguments, counters, attempts to find holes in what was being put forward. If we’re going to ‘attack’ not only the Lord, but basic values of the people listening, we better be able to wrestle with the angel. A very wise parent told me, “Don’t try to push a stroller through gravel. Pull it.” That image works in all kinds of situations.
If I was going to preach on this, I had to do it confessionally. I had to admit my own difficulty with it. This Jesus being a loser business is hard for me to swallow. It is for any sane human being. But unless we are willing to confront what God is doing with the crowd’s stupidity, the plotting of the rulers, the betrayal and desertion of his disciples, the trial, torture, mocking, and the blistering horror of the cross, we are avoiding the depth of our own sin and the extent of God’s love.
How many times have we heard this passage from Isaiah? How many times do we hear the suffering servant songs and still manage to dodge the blast of abasement dumped on the one chosen by God? If Jesus did this willingly it’s bad enough. But if he did this intentionally… If I had him in counselling, I’d recommend medication. This guy had some serious issues. If it was one of my kids, my heart would break. (Just imagine Mary at the foot of the cross.) This whole thing knocks down every category of power, beauty, and hope I can come up with. “Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.”
So, if we are going to preach on the cross, we need to be ready to embrace our own demons. Not demons of evil and corruption. Demons of mortality, of pride, of being human. Until we are willing to go there, into the horror movie of God’s purpose in Jesus’ agony, we will never face the extent of God’s love. Love that forgives even what we do to our Lord on a regular basis.
“Were you there when they crucified my Lord?”
Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.
* * *
It’s About the Cross Today, Not the Empty Tomb
by Frank Ramirez
The late Dr. Graydon F. Snyder, who taught for years at Bethany Theological Seminary (when it was located in Oak Brook, Illinois, and also at Chicago Theological Seminary) made some startling observations about the early Christian church and the cross in his book Ante-Pacem, which means “Before the Peace,” and refers to the three Christian centuries before our faith was made legal by the Emperor Constantine. He asserted that early Christian personal letters, graffiti, architecture, and art in the pre-Constantinian era, before Christianity was legalized, revealed that there was a tension between what the early Church fathers taught was the faith, and what people in the pews — only they didn’t have any pews — believed and practiced.
That healthy tension exists in all eras of church history.
One of the surprises of early Christian art is that Jonah and the Fish is the number one biblical story depicted, with Daniel and the Lion’s Den and the Three Young Men in the Fiery Furnace not far behind. These are stories about survival in a hostile environment.
What you don’t find is the cross. Considering that the crucifixion is a major motif in Christian art today, that people wear crosses and crucifixes around their necks, that hymns glory in that Old Rugged Cross, this is surprising.
The cross basically doesn’t appear in Christian art until after Christianity is legalized and Christians were no longer being crucified.
What else do we have? Larry Hurtado, in his study of Christian manuscripts, makes the assertion that in some early Christian manuscripts the tau and the rho of the stauros, or cross, depict a man hanging on a cross.
There are two other examples that were first brought to my attention by Ben Witherington III in an article in Biblical Archaeology Review. There’s this graffito of a man hideously flogged and crucified, and this gemstone depicting a crucified Jesus etched in the surface, with the words “Father, Jesus Christ,” etched in the front along with magical sounds, and on the other side the words “Jesus” and “Emmanuel” spelled in different ways. I think this example was, like Christian amulets (which drove the church fathers crazy) featuring Bible verses, used for the purpose of healing sickness.
And finally, there’s a lone example Dr. Snyder knew about. It is a graffito etched on the wall of the slave quarters in the Roman Imperial palace. We see a man with a donkey’s head nailed to a cross, with another man, presumably a slave, ridiculed for worshiping that man. There are the words: “Alexamenos worships his God.” The idea that Christians, many of whom were slaves, would worship a crucified person is mocked.
Well, this Lenten season it’s good to remember that this is who we stand beside. What we forget is that we ought not jump ahead to the ending, because the world doesn’t see the Resurrection. It does see the cross. There is power in the fact we stand beside that cross, with only our faith sustaining us.
Some of us Christians aren’t so good at this Lent thing. We don’t fast. We don’t wear ashes. There are no memento mori. We want to jump ahead to Easter.
But this is where our people live.
This past year a young woman in the Nappanee community in her late twenties married her high school sweetheart, a farmer, had a child, then tested positive for stage IV mesothelioma. She was taken to a hospital in Austin, Texas, fought valiantly, had a lung removed, and died.
That made the struggles of Kate Bowler very illuminating. A professor of religion at Duke Divinity School, the author of a respected book on the Prosperity Gospel, Bowler grew up in Canada and married a Canadian Mennonite. After some struggle she got pregnant, gave birth to the perfect baby boy of her dreams, and was diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer.
Her book, Everything happens for a reason and other lies I’ve loved is a must-read, if for no other reason than the two appendices in which she tells us what not to say to someone staring death in the face — and what to do.
In the midst of her Lenten life she attended a Good Friday service at a mega-church in which startlingly cheerful worship leaders gave short shrift to the crucifixion and quickly shifted the focus to Easter. Kate Bowler phrased her complaint to her friends in this manner:
Everyone is trying to Easter the crap out of my Lent.
Don’t Easter the crap out of Lent. Recognize that crucifixion, the broken lives of our parishioners, is so real that they need us to walk with them on the road to Calvary. When we discount their suffering with a premature Easter we cheat them of the validity of their struggles with a band aid.
Toward the end of her book Kate shares the most valuable advice she got, from one of her professors who were, ironically, those most in touch with her struggles against cancer. “Don’t skip ahead to the ending.”
Don’t skip ahead to the ending. As painful as it is to live the cross that the early Christians hated to draw because they knew what it really looked like, this is where we live. The resurrection is coming, but we can’t get there, except through the cross, the real cross, the one Jesus and so many tens of thousands died on. The cross that so many are carrying now.
*****************************************
StoryShare, April 10, 2020 issue.
Copyright 2020 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
