We began worshipping in a movie theater and we’ve ended up in a symphony hall. Not bad. You’ve come a long way, Wilshire! A long way from popcorn butter sticking to your soles. A long way from a nursery in the women’s restroom. A long way from men’s Bible classes in a carpet store, the men sitting on rolls of rugs for chairs. A long way from worship in Cabell’s Ice Cream Parlor.

When our first pastor, Huber Drumwright, got up to preach at the ice creamery, there was a Cabell’s sign lifted high over the makeshift pulpit that read, Frozen Divinity10¢. Having listened to Huber preach on tape, I suspect the frozen divinity melted quickly under his hot-blooded preaching. I’ll try not to make your blood run cold today.

Our theme for this Golden Jubilee celebration is "Lifting High the Cross." It may seem an odd pairing– celebration and the cross. But I’m thinking it’s like Beauty and the Beast: there’s hidden beauty lurking in beast waiting to be revealed, and there is reason in the cross to celebrate. For 50 years Wilshire has tried to carry its cross in a winsome enough way that the world might see in this symbol of death the throbbing pulse of life. God knows people don’t always get it.

A few days ago our staff met for lunch in Lakewood at Angelo’s Italian restaurant. It’s not the food or service that made us go, God knows. We went to pay homage to the aforementioned spot Wilshire gathered on Sunday nights years ago. So after we put away a few plates of warmed-over pizza from the buffet, our young tongue-studded waitress came by the table to ask, How many for bread pudding? Feeling nostalgic, I asked her, Do you want to know why we are here today? Blank stare. Undaunted, I continued, as I do Sunday by Sunday when confronted with the same. We are the staff of Wilshire Baptist Church, I said. Rolling eyes. Undaunted, I continued, as I do day by day as the father of three teenagers. Well, fifty years ago our church worshipped right here in this place when it was an ice cream parlor. Polite smirk. Undaunted, she continued, So, how many for bread pudding?

Figure she’s known some not-so winsome Baptists? Figure she’s known some cross-wielding Baptists instead of cross-yielding Baptists? Jesus says if we are to be his followers, we must take up our cross, not as a weapon of war but as a promise of peace. There’s more to choosing this "Lifting High the Cross" theme than simply liking the hymn. It epitomizes who we have been and who we want to be. We are a church that wants to take up its cross in a way that gives cause to others to follow Christ too?

I suspect the waitress at Angelo’s was afraid we were going to lift high the cross and clobber her over the head with it. Lifting high the cross is an excuse for some Christians to coerce people into faith the way Conquistadors and Inquisitors once forced conversions on native peoples and Jews. There’s an old tendency in Christianity to use the cross a symbol that should strike terror in all who do not confess him.

A few years ago we joined with Temple Emanu-El for an interfaith Sabbath service. As we were dressing in the clergy robing room, Rabbi Klein looked at the stole I had brought to dress up my plain black robe. It was white, with gold embroidered crosses on each end. A little gold fringe, too. Quite lovely really, as Baptist vestments go! He suggested I might go without the stole. You know why, don’t you? Because Christians have for so long accused Jews of killing our Christ, they have come to see the cross itself as a symbol of secret hate instead of love. It wasn’t only Negroes in the South that were terrorized by burning crosses.

Even in our own church we have been ambivalent about crosses as symbols, although if you look a the magnificent blooming flower cross behind me you’d think we are getting over it nicely. The program cover today pictures the St. Andrew’s Cross that adorns our church steeple. When we lifted that up thirty-some years ago, some objected because it didn’t quite fit the Georgian Colonial architecture. And through the years, as we’ve become increasingly bold about putting crosses in the sanctuary and the garden, some have feared we were moving a little too close to Rome. Oh, Lord, we’ve left the Southern Baptists and we’re becoming Catholics! Before you know it, we’ll have crucifixes instead of crosses, and we’ll be genuflecting before the altar.

No, we prefer our crosses empty, thank you. We say it’s to show that we believe in the resurrection, but maybe it’s also because they make for lighter jewelry that way and aren’t quite so aesthetically offensive. Who wants to think about suffering and death, after all especially on a day like this? Bad form, George. But I tell you, when the cross becomes more decoration than declaration, it’s spiritual defamation. When we prefer to wear crosses around our necks instead of carrying them on our backs, we have turned from following the Jesus whose cross alone saves.

So what does it mean to take up our cross? The first thing to realize is that this phrase is a modifier of Jesus’ command to follow him. If you want to be a disciple of Jesus, you take his terms. And his terms are cross terms. You can’t make up your own. If we want to follow Jesus as a church, we must take up our cross. Period.

But the way we take up our cross and follow Jesus is qualified by what Jesus says before that–deny self, take up your cross, and follow me. To take up our cross means voluntarily to enter into a life of humble service that will involve suffering and ultimately even death. It means standing with those who cannot stand by themselves, lifting up the fallen and finding when we do that God is the one who is lifting us all up. This is what it means to deny ourselves and take up our cross. We take up our cross the way Jesus did: not to conquer the world with force but to serve the world with sacrificial love. We do not live for ourselves. We do not live by the world’s standards of success. We live by Christ’s standards of faithfulness, and we find when we do–and only when we do– that the joy of resurrection life is known. Carry the cross, find life.

Here then is the paradox of faith, the oddity of joining celebration and cross: Jesus offers us abundant life, yet he bids us come and die. Why? Because we don’t know what life is until he gives it to us. And we can’t receive it until we empty ourselves of all our notions of what it is. We have to die to earthly ambitions if we are to live by heavenly provisions.

The cross is an eternal judgment on the world of success. If the one and only sinless man should be condemned to die on the cross by a world of religious and political powers that should have rewarded him rather than killed him, then we must be wary of all systems and strategies, all powers and programs that seek to build the kingdom of God by our own wit and wisdom.

A church as much as an individual can gain the whole world and lose its own soul. And what can a church, any more than a person, trade for its soul? It doesn’t take God to build a big church; it takes only God to build a great church. The temptation churches face is to leave no room for God to work because they design their plans first and then pray for God to bless them. They take their cues from everyone but God. That’s getting it backwards. If a church first learns to deny itself, it will ask what God wants rather than what members or prospective members want. That will lead us again and again to the cross: to sacrificial service over superficial success.

The shape of obedience, Wilshire, must always by cruciform–cross-shaped. We love God (vertical arm of the cross) and we love our neighbor as ourselves (horizontal arm). We are not here to occupy America, conquering culture in order to rule the country on behalf of Jesus. We are here to serve it for Jesus’ sake. This is the way we serve Christ and the gospel rather than our own designs.

We have not, and we must not, worry about the future of our church as an institution. If Jesus had worried about his future, he never would have taken up his cross for the sake of the world. No matter what you think about his closeness to God, in the hour of his death Jesus had to trust himself by faith to the power of God. And so must we. We face the future as a faith-based rather than a fear-based people.

If anything has rightly marked the first fifty years of Wilshire’s life, it is a passion for missions. Mission-minded members have traveled at their own expense to all continents except Antarctica. (All penguins go to heaven, don’t you know?!) We have dropped everything and gone to help in disaster relief. We adopted the Albanian peoples and have worked for their welfare spiritually and materially. We have given millions in missions support. We are learning nowadays to add working for justice to evangelism and charity missions.

Some from among us have even found a call to missions or ministry as a career. They have found their lives by losing them for Christ’s sake and the gospel’s. They have learned that in their weakness they are made strong, and in their brokenness they are blessed.

The late Henri Nouwen was a remarkable soul, a quiet voice for the Spirit that speaks still. In his book The Life of the Beloved, written to a Jewish friend about what it means to him to be a Christian, he says: "As I write you now about our brokenness, I recall a scene from Leonard Bernstein’s Mass (a musical work written in memory of John F. Kennedy) that embodied for me the thought of brokenness put under the blessing.  Toward the end of this work, the priest, richly dressed in splendid liturgical vestments, is lifted up by his people.  He towers high above the adoring crowd, carrying in his hands a glass chalice. Suddenly, the human pyramid collapses, and the priest comes tumbling down.  His vestments are ripped off, and his glass chalice falls to the ground and is shattered.  As he walks slowly through the debris of his former glory –barefoot, wearing only blue jeans and a T-shirt–children’s voices are heard singing, Laude, laude, laude–Praise, praise, praise. Suddenly, the priest notices the broken chalice.  He looks at it for a long time and then, haltingly, he says, I never realized that broken glass could shine so brightly." [Life of the Beloved: Spiritual Living in a Secular World, (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1992, pp. 82-83.]

You’ve shown brightly for 50 years, Wilshire, not because you have kept it all together all the time, not because your pastors have been high and lifted up, not because they any more than you have been an example of spiritual perfection, but because you have allowed Christ to shine through your brokenness. You have found your life because time and again you have lost yourself in service to Christ and his gospel. This is the way forward, too.

We celebrate the cross of Christ today. We marvel at what God has done in us and among us. And now "lifting high the cross" for the next fifty years, we offer ourselves anew to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Benediction:

And now may the God of all grace

Strengthen our buckling knees,

Bow our hunched backs,

Nerve our tried spirits,

And support our weary arms,

As we lift high the cross of Christ

To the praise of God

For generations to come.

Amen.