The Cross Speaks
Selections from Mark 14-15
Sermon delivered Sunday, April 5, 2009
by Rev. Patricia Pearce
His blood is running down my body, staining my grain a dark red. I can feel his agony, and I understand. They came for me too.
Not so long ago I was thriving in the hills of Galilee, my roots reaching deep into the rocky soil. Sunlight shone upon my leaves, and the breeze, oh the breeze, how it danced though my branches, how I swayed with it, and sang with it. And the rain, such cool delight washing over me, cleansing me, running down my branches, my trunk, seeping into the soil. How I drank of that living water.
Many an exhausted traveler sought out the cool shade beneath my branches, leaned against my trunk and whispered quiet thanks for a bit of respite from the brutal midday heat.
I stood as a witness present to the dawning of each day, and at night I reached up to the Moon in her silent cycles, and the slow swirling of stars overhead. My body shuddered when the thunder cracked and I have known what it is to stand naked in a raging storm, bending with the tempest so as not to break. And when it passed, I held the singing birds in my branches and felt the return of the sun's warmth on my leaves.
I knew the breath of life.
But they came for me, too. Not with swords, but with axes. And I was silent, like a lamb led to the slaughter.
Half of my body is still there, decaying in the rocky soil of Galilee. The other half of me they dragged here, to use in this torturous display on this desolate hill. Golgotha, they call it. Place of the skull. As if it were only humans whose broken bodies hang here.
They came to this land because what Caesar already had wasn't enough for him. He wanted more land, more resources, more wealth, more power. It didn't matter if lives had to be sacrificed. It never does, and whole forests are destroyed because humans are never content with what they have, or what they are. You would call it genocide if the victims looked like you.
I have a question for you humans. Why are you always dissatisfied? Why is nothing ever enough for you? Why are you always striving for more? Why are you always roaming the planet looking for more to call your own?
I wish you could learn from us. I wish you could stop for once in your anxious striving and just let yourselves be still, to feel yourselves rooted in the Earth, to stop trying to prove yourselves and just let the miracle of the sunlight and the rain, the rich soil and the singing birds, the dance of the wind be enough for you. You call yourselves human beings, but you act as though you were human doings. Do you not understand that your task on this Earth is to witness its magnificence, to delight in the wonder of existence, to be the I Am-ness, that awake presence marveling at the unfolding of life?
You are living in an illusion, you know, believing your destiny is separate from all other life, separate from my own life. I am the other one sacrificed on this windswept hill, and I suppose that has never even occurred to you, which just proves my point. You seem to believe you can destroy us and not at the same time destroy yourselves. But this blood wicking its way into my grain carries the oxygen once breathed out by my leaves. Are you so blind?
He tried to tell you. He tried to show you a different way. He urged you to repent, to turn around, away from your path of destruction and violence. He tried to help you understand authentic power, not as the act of domination, but power as the act of bringing healing and acceptance and compassion. He wanted you to know a different reality where you don't need treasures because you are already enough. The way the birds of the air are enough and the lilies of the field are enough.
But you stayed instead in your dream of separateness and striving, and now the Earth itself is hanging on the cross of your empires and your egos, your craving for convenience and your insatiable need to accumulate all that doesn't belong to you. The creation is weary, so weary. We cannot endure your illusion much longer. Your empire dreams and ego drives, have already wrought their devastation upon the Earth.
It is right that you sing "Hosanna." It means "save us" after all. I implore you, sing it from your heart, sing it for yourselves, sing it for me.
Sing it for all of us.
© 2009 by Patricia Pearce
