I taught for a year at the School of Theology of the University of the South (Sewanee). During that time, and for the next year, too, I made a habit of attending Morning Prayer at the seminary. It is one thing to say MP for oneself; it is quite another to do it regularly in community. I quickly came to love one of the collects for mission that includes the phrase “you stretched out your arms on the hard wood of the cross that everyone might come within your saving embrace.”

At Eucharist last night, I talked about the meaning of the cross. The lessons were 1 Cor. 1 “I preach Christ crucified; a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” and Jn 12: “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”

It seems to me that so often the cross is a divider, a sign that is meant to create boundaries, to delineate who is in and who is out, but in the collect as well as in John 12:32, the cross is a uniter. I’ll be pondering the meaning of the cross more in the next days, and will probably preach on this in some way on Good Friday.