In the year 96 A.D., the churches in the great city of Ephesus, along with their sibling congregations across Western Asia, find themselves undergoing persistent, virulent, violent persecution. The boot of Caesar Domitian presses against their necks. These churches confess a first loyalty to Jesus Christ and to the world Christ promises of grace, justice and peace. They express their loyalty to this dynamic, loving community with the first Christian creed, "Jesus Christ is Lord." They articulate that belief in an empire ruled by a tyrant brooking no competition. The only Lord in that/I> empire resides in Rome. Citizens differing from that perception and affirming loyalty to anyone or anything else become fair game for arrest, imprisonment, perhaps execution. Caesar will crush those churches, disperse, silence, eradicate their members.

"Not so fast," insists one of those prisoners. John, banished to a prison island, Patmos, just off the coast of what we now call Western Turkey. John, refusing to bend to the tyrant's rod, writes a letter to those menaced churches. He reveals a vision illuminating a radical hope, promising that no matter how terrible, how bloody, how cruel, how brutal the assault of the Emperor's Gestapo on the life of those churches, no matter how ominous the fear, how intense the violence, how wild the chaos, John asserts the evil intent to ravage and desolate those churches I>will not have the last word. Indeed, the scene described for us in this morning's scripture, John's letter-the scene so brilliantly depicted on the front of your bulletins in the Durer woodcut-that scene basically showing disciples of Christ from many nations, tongues, peoples, and tribes celebrating with Palms denoting victory, beneath a lamb slaughtered--slaughtered, yet standing--on a rainbow, itself denoting hope, this scene, this image proclaims and illustrates for those threatened, oppressed, tormented Asian churches, that Caesar and his ruthless minions do not command the final say, but that God-and in crucial Jewish Passover imagery, the imagery of freedom, the slaughtered, sacrificial lamb-the crucified Christ proclaims the ultimate, final word on the value and destiny of human life and history.

Have you got that? The Crucified Christ: the ultimate, the final word on the value and destiny of human life; the Cross of Christ bearing truth embracing your life and mine. Here, for all the infamy and malevolence we confront during this next week, here in the Cross we encounter, in truth, the promise of Holy week. Here, concentrated in this one symbol, we see joined the substance and core of faith, of hope, of love.

"Faith?" you ask. Here? At the Cross? How see the substance of faith here? What could the substance of faith be? Just this: in face of wars and rumors of war; in face of a troubled, chaotic, often heartless, merciless, dog-eat-dog world; in face of cancer, AIDS, the terrible afflictions threatening and snuffing out our lives; in face of our living precariously with the misunderstandings, the self-deception and conflict souring our lives together; in face of a world where our best intentions turn upside-down and inside-out, where our boldest and most generous dreams collapse or inflict injury; in face of cold, unheeding forces so often swirling about us: we confess our faith in a God who, through all life can dish out, loves us, hangs on to us, never lets us go.

Now, we take that on faith. On faith! In so many ways the observable, objective facts of our life deny a loving God, a good God, a God who cares about us. Indeed, the bare fact of the Cross of Jesus itself denies a loving God. If ever there existed a place where mercy fails, where human and divine abandonment evidence themselves; if ever an occasion arose where goodness loses, where innocence gets trampled, where the worst human beings can do to one another happens: it happens at the Cross. To be able to say in face of the hard, cold facts of that Cross that Love grounds the universe, reflects a decision for faith when facts seem to belie it.

So why, then, does faith in a God of love flourish here? What do we witness here at the Cross of Christ enabling us to trust in a loving and gracious God when much in our world, most specifically the Cross itself, screams a shrill and rabid "No"? Oh friends, what, in faith, we see here of Divine Love is this: at the Cross of Christ we witness the lengths to which Love goes to restore wholeness to those for whom it feels most tenderly. We witness here the risk Love takes when it seeks its lost and rebellious children. In the Cross of Christ we encounter and are ourselves embraced by a divine grace risking death itself to restore broken relationships, to heal communal wounds, to weave together again a harmony so that this scrapping, tangling, fighting human race of ours might become, in truth, a family of God. In faith we trust this God of love.

But what about the love itself? How do we see that evident here at the Cross of Christ? Again, friends, you know love does not calculate the cost when it goes after someone; you know "love is a spendthrift;" in pursuit of someone it will not give up. Many of you in this room this morning know the pain involved in forgiving someone who betrayed you, slandered you, misread your motives, shamed you, walked out on you, crushed you, turned your heaven into a hell. You know how stark and loveless life can be. What saves the relationship? What brings healing? Is it revenge? No! Revenge brings satisfaction, maybe. But healing? Never! Is it requital? Are you kidding? Requital brings a measure of justice, perhaps, but never healing. What brings healing we can only describe as grace, forgiveness: the risk love takes that, though it may be battered and bruised, reconciliation overarches everything. Love finds itself ready to pay whatever the personal cost to bridge the gulf, reclaim the bond, heal the wound. Paul Scherer puts the matter succinctly: "The cross is any place where a saving love goes out to undergird this life of ours, and comes back with the hot stab of nails in its hands." That is what the fledgling church points to when it asserts those three astonishing words, "God is love."

Faith. Love. Hope. That's right, friends, hope. We witness here at the foot of the Cross, in this most devastating and hopeless of situations, hope most powerfully at work. How can this be? How does the Cross provide hope in this world, where hope seems so precarious, looking back on the bloodiest century in our history, waking up this morning to violence even yet stalking the earth. How does the Cross radiate hope in a world where as soon as one barrier falls, another is erected; where tragedy riddles much of our existence and death finally ends it? Is there any hope? Is there really a new future?

Again, I beg you look at the Cross of Christ. See in the Cross our hope. This Cross, hanging here in our church, is empty. As powerful a reminder as the crucifix may be of our faith in the costly love of God, this empty cross, hanging here at the head of this nave, confronts us with the power taking the worst we can do to one another-indeed, power that takes death itself-and makes through it a new creation. I wish I could explain this to you. I can't. I can only testify to a stunning paradox: an empty cross means the power of God lies not in preventing hopeless situations; it means the power of God lies not in staying crucifixion, not in intervening to stop the catastrophes, human tragedies and monumental stupidities in this world. Our hope lies not in some cheap movie miracle. No way! We see the foundation of our hope in the empty Cross as it points to the power of God in taking the body of the crucified and transfiguring it into new being. Divine power lies not so much in deterring tragedy but in transforming it.

The Holy Week-Good Friday-Easter event reveals to us the marrow of God's promise. There we see power alive and at work amid the most hopeless situation, bearing with us, submitting to the worst; yet, even then working to bring out of tragedy, triumph; out of peril, promise; out of death, life.

Do you want an illustration? Look around you. Why else would you-or the neighbor in your pew-why would anyone wear a Cross on their lapel, or drape one around their neck? Surely not because you want to show off an instrument of blood, torture and death, the ancient equivalent of an electric chair. Hardly! You wear it and it glows here at the head of our nave as sign of love that will never give up and hope that will never be daunted-power that transforms. As one observer explains the mystery, describes the paradox of the empty Cross: g"The death of Jesus was either a tragic incident, which means his life was futile and unimportant and would be broken at last by a world that was too much for it, or it meant that mercy and justice and peace are so closely akin to the eternal God . . .that they can be nailed to wooden beams and still win! . . .wiped out and they'll come back!-buried, only to break death itself wide open."

That Divine promise lies behind the epiphany John describes to his imperiled churches; that promise inspires the Durer woodcut on the front of your bulletins: that promise holds not only for Christians in the first century or Christians in the sixteenth, it holds for you and for me and our church as we seek to follow and serve Jesus Christ amid challenging conditions in the twenty-first. Indeed, how else could we understand this week but Holy?