Stepping Down to Heaven

Sermon for 9/11 Anniversary and Holy Cross Day, transferred
Philippians 2:5-11; John 12:31-36a
Sept. 11, 2022

Today is the 21^st anniversary of 9/11.  For many of us, this date takes us back to where we were that morning – how we heard the news, who we were with, how we grieved.  For some of us, especially first responders and those close to them, the day is harder than the rest of us can know, as the trauma of 9/11 reopens other wounds incompletely healed.

So here in church, how do we mark this day?  In our Episcopal tradition, 9/11 falls within a few days of the feast of Holy Cross, so we’re transferring that feast to today.  It seems right as we still find ourselves trying to come to terms both with the power of evil killing 3,000 people in a morning and the power of the cross to defeat evil and exalt Jesus as Lord.

But why would Christians observe Holy Cross Day in the first place, honoring an instrument of brutal death?  If it seems strange to us, it would have seemed offensive to someone of Jesus’ time and place.  Honoring the cross would have been like us wearing little electric chairs around our necks.  Crucifixion was how you punished the lowest of the low – slaves, murderers, thieves, insurrectionists.  Crucifying someone was the ultimate example of adding insult to injury.  Not only did the process slowly drown you with the fluid collecting in your lungs, and not only did the authorities break your body in the process.  The punishment was not just inhumane but inhuman, proclaiming that the person hanging on that cross was beneath the respect given to actual human beings.

Yet we know Jesus walked the way of the cross willingly.  Just before today’s Gospel reading, Jesus says, “Now, my soul is troubled.  And what should I say – ‘Father, save me from this hour?’  No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour.” (John 12:27-28)  And commenting on that reality, in the Letter to the Philippians the apostle Paul writes that Jesus “did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave….  [H]e humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (2:6-8).  So this was not simply justice perverted.  It was a decision Jesus made – the second person of the Trinity choosing to be counted among the lowest of the low.

Why would he have chosen that?  Because of the central paradox of our faith: that as we make our heavenly pilgrimage, we step down to step up.  Take a minute to visualize the pattern laid out in that Letter to the Philippians because it’s the map for our journey, too.  Jesus begins “in the form of God” but empties himself, stepping down into the form of a slave.  And “being found in human form,” he steps down again, humbling himself in sacrificial obedience.  And that step leads to another, down to the “the point of death” – and stepping down just that much further, “even death on a cross.”

But then, having taken that journey to the criminal’s grave, Jesus begins stepping up into exaltation.  He rises in triumph over sin and death, breaking the power of evil that sent him to the tomb.  Having risen in resurrection, he ascends back to the glory of the Trinity and receives “the name that is above every name” (Philippians 2:9).  And in God’s heavenly time, which wraps around our linear notions of days and years, “every knee [bends] in heaven and on earth under the earth,” the whole cosmos confessing that “Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of the Father.” (Philippians 2:10-11)  That title, Lord, meant something even more specific for the people of Paul’s day than it does for us.  Lord, or in Greek, kyrios, was a title the Roman Emperor claimed, the divine sovereign of the day.  But because of the victory over evil that Jesus wins on the cross, the cosmos instead proclaims he is Lord, the one who defeats the pretender to the throne in Rome.

And it’s this path of downward mobility that our Lord Jesus calls us to follow, too.  “Whoever serves me must follow me,” Jesus says before today’s Gospel reading, “and where I am, there will my servant be also.” (John 12:26)

What does that look like?  I’d say one example is someone whose face we’ve seen often in the past four days: Queen Elizabeth II.  As Episcopalians, members of the worldwide Anglican Communion of churches descended from the Church of England, many of us might feel a particular twinge of grief at her passing after 70 years on the throne.  The sovereign of the United Kingdom is officially the “Supreme Governor of the Church of England,” appointing archbishops and other leaders¹ and setting the bar for the pomp and circumstance many of us know and love.  Of course, the Crown has no real authority over the Church of England and certainly not a bit of authority over us.  But Queen Elizabeth did have influence.

And I think one statement we’ve heard many times since Thursday captures her royal servant heart.  On Elizabeth’s 21st birthday, this young woman who had served as a mechanic in World War II just a few years earlier² told the British Commonwealth that her generation was now tasked with leading the world out of the “terrible and glorious years of the second world war.”³  So she took on the mantle of servant leadership for her generation, saying: “[M]y whole life whether it be long or short shall be devoted to your service….”³  And when she died 75 years later, she’d refused to stop serving.  From the start and to the end, Queen Elizabeth followed the lead of her sovereign, the One who’d said, “I am among you as one who serves” (Luke 22:27).

Of course, as the English grieve their Queen, we’re marking 9/11 on this side of the pond.  It was a day of many sacrifices, but I want to remind you of one particular story of downward mobility.  You may remember the name Mychal Judge.  Fr. Mychal Judge was the first of the first responders to die in the 9/11 attacks in Manhattan.  He was a Roman Catholic chaplain for the New York City Fire Department; so when they were deployed, he was, too.  Now, I want to pause for a moment of full disclosure.  Remembering Fr. Mychal Judge this morning was not my idea.  It came from our own first responder, Adam James, who’s also preaching this morning about 9/11 and about Fr. Mychal, just down the street at St. Peter & All Saints where Adam is serving his internship.  But Adam and I agreed that we would both raise up Fr. Mychal today because his story deserves to be heard.

          Stepping into what would become Ground Zero was hardly Fr. Mychal’s first step down into glory.  He was a Franciscan friar, a spiritual descendant of St. Francis of Assisi; and long before 9/11, Fr. Mychal had become known as someone who would go to surprising places with his flock.  People in his New Jersey neighborhood remembered how he “had a knack for showing up at crucial moments.”⁴  When a man held his wife and child at gunpoint, barricaded in their house, Fr. Mychal climbed a ladder to the window where the man was hiding, so he could talk with him face to face.  In the 1980s, when most people were terrified of AIDS patients and his own Church condemned the sexuality of most the people suffering from that disease, Fr. Mychal went to AIDS wards and rubbed the patients’ feet.  After leading a funeral and consoling the family, Fr. Mychal could be found with the cemetery staff, literally stepping down into a grave to talk with them.  There’s a movement now to make Fr. Mychal a saint, though the fact he was gay stands as a huge barrier in his own tradition.  

But what we remember most today is the image from the reporting on 9/11, the image of other first responders carrying out the body of Fr. Mychal.  He’d been standing there praying as his fellow firefighters and paramedics rushed into the North Tower, and he was killed by cascading rubble when the South Tower fell.⁴

There’s nothing I can say to honor that sacrifice.  He and so many others have already consecrated that ground and this day “far above our poor power to add or detract,” as Lincoln said at Gettysburg.⁵  What I can say is this:  Fr. Mychal Judge followed his Lord on the paradoxical path of stepping down to heaven.  

And what can we take away from his example?  Well, in the midst of all the conflict and venom stirred up in our culture to distract us, it’s easy to forget the path we’re called to walk.  We are people of downward mobility.  We are people whose one true Emperor hung on a cross like a scoundrel.  We are people who dangle our feet in the grave, finding there the most unlikely stairway to heaven.  We follow a Lord who stood with the folks at greatest risk and touched those whom others refused to see.  Now, we may well think, “I could never be Mychal Judge.”  Fair enough.  But I imagine Mychal Judge thought he could never be Mychal Judge either.  Instead, he simply followed where his Lord went first.

And so it is for us.  Let the same mind to be in us that was in Christ Jesus, and let us walk in his way.  For, though it’s complete foolishness to the world, the cross is the only power strong enough to beat evil at its own game and lead all the world into God’s light.  

1.      https://www.royal.uk/queens-relationship-churches-england-and-scotland-and-other-faiths#:~:text=The%20Queen's%20relationship%20with%20the,and%20government%20thereof%2C%20as%20by

2.      https://www.newsweek.com/queen-elizabeth-ww2-service-reign-jubilee-1711694

3.      https://www.royal.uk/21st-birthday-speech-21-april-1947

4.      https://www.northjersey.com/in-depth/news/columnists/mike-kelly/2021/09/10/father-mychal-judge-911-attacks-fdny-catholic-saint/4939813001/  

5.      https://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/gettysburg.htm