A Red Letter Day

September 14th is a “Red Letter Day” on the Church calendar.  The term “red letter” comes from a Roman practice of making dates of significant importance red in color to make them stand out.  Most liturgical calendars use a different standard for coloring the days of the year, but September 14th is always red because it is the day the Church commemorates its biggest failure.  Yup, you read that correctly, a failure.  It is Holy Cross Day when the Church remembers how a terrible instrument of death and a horrible system of oppression sacrificed an innocent man for teaching repentance, love and hope.
And yet the Church celebrates with cross, because without it we would have nothing. The symbol of the cross has become a fashion accessory to some, an arcane novelty to others; however we Christians claim it as both a sign of awesome victory and shameful death. That duel reality is hard to rationalize and we need to live in the tension of those competing realities.
It probably isn’t as hard as it seems. I know I feel like I have victories and failures all the time.  Sometimes life seems to be going along fine and then disaster hits in the form of bad news or a problem that doesn’t have an easy answer – or not answer.  Other times when nothing seems to be going right, one encounter will change the way I see things and make my prospective change.
We live at the foot of the cross because it reminds us of the true gift we have been given, of just how much we are loved and nothing - NOTHING – will ever change that. Christ endured the cross, the shame and death in order that we might have life and have it abundantly.  There is no greater gift.
But most of us in the church don’t remember Holy Cross Day (unless you attend a church named Holy Cross).  There are not Hallmark cards for the event and I can’t quite imagine giving someone a cross to use for themselves. This red letter day has none of the marketing of Christmas or the joy of Easter, but it is just as important.  On Good Friday we recognize the wretchedness of the cross, but we don’t celebrate it. 

As the hymn goes, “Lift high the cross, the love of Christ proclaim till all the world adore his sacred Name.”  We celebrate the tension of hardship, loss, pain and suffering with the world changing event of Christ’s victory over death and the grave.  In those difficult times, remember the cross.  It will lift you high.
In Christ,
Rev. Valerie+ 

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