"Here's the Thing" - Sermon for Holy Cross Sunday, 9-14-25

The feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross has its origin in the fourth century, when the Emperor Constantine’s mother Helena oversaw the completion of sacred buildings in Jerusalem, proximal to what was believed to be the sites of Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection. During construction, workers unearthed a piece of what was believed to be the cross Jesus died on – the Holy Cross. The feast day itself first entered the church calendar some three centuries later, and here we are, keeping it today.

Authenticating sacred relics is an inexact science, and often was an opportunistic sleight-of-hand, a bit of branding to promote one church or another to curious pilgrims. But come now: Did this shinbone really come from Saint Tibia? Or is that hank of hair really Saint Rapunzel’s? Is the image on the Shroud of Turin really that of Jesus in the tomb? And does it matter, really?

Episcopalians, being rather fond of the doctrine of the Incarnation, argue that matter matters. The incorporeal God became flesh, became matter – the stuff of carbon and other elements on the periodic table – in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. In the beginning, God declared all creation good, and humankind very good, but something about creation shifted for the better when God’s Son took it on himself.

So, yes, the wood of the cross that Jesus died on matters, as did the sandals he wore roaming among the villages, as did the cloak he had on that the long- hemorrhaging woman dared to touch … to say nothing of the eponymous Holy Grail that Monty Python’s Arthurians sought and that Indiana Jones let slip through his fingers.

These things matter because they mattered to Jesus and to the people who knew him. The cross, especially, as that was the altar on which Jesus was sacrificed as victim and the altar at which he served as priest; an instrument of execution, expropriated to set us free.

But still, the cross was just an ordinary set of timbers. One set among far too many the occupying Romans used to strike terror into the hearts of the occupied peoples. Did the excavators find the true cross? Or any old cross? Or a piece of wood that had been a bench or a feed box? We don’t know for sure.

And it really needn’t matter too much. Every Good Friday Christians process with and venerate a cross, a copy of what we imagine the original to be, and say “Behold the wood of the cross, whereon was hung the world’s salvation. O come, let us worship.” The representation is enough, because, in the end, no matter how holy the true cross was, it was still just matter. A thing. If science could authenticate the Holy Cross, or the Shroud of Turin, or the Holy Grail, it would be interesting, exciting, maybe even faith-bolstering for the faint-hearted … and no doubt spur a wave of religious tourism. But it wouldn’t affect salvation.

What does matter for Christians isn’t so much the cross, per se. What truly matters is the Son of God who was offered and sacrificed there. Who gave us his Body and Blood from there.

And herein lies the major difference between matter that represents, and matter that is reality. The difference between the Holy Cross, say, and Holy Communion.

The matter, the thing of ordinary bread and wine, becomes at the same time, when consecrated according to the rites of the Church, the True Body and True Blood of Jesus. Not a replica, not a symbol, but the real thing. Mystically, repeatedly, in a way that we cannot apprehend except through faith. But it is not our faith that makes it so. The Real Presence of Jesus in the elements simply is, whether one believes it or not. We assent to it in our great amen, we accept it when we come forward with hands outstretched, and we are surely and certainly nourished by its grace after we eat and drink. The Holy Cross cannot do this for us. Only Holy Communion can. O come, let us worship.

Father Daniel S.J. Scheid, SCP

Holy Cross Sunday – Sep. 14, 2025

All Saints’ Episcopal Church, San Francisco

“Here’s the Thing”