n Thinking Theologically, Adventist theologian Fritz Guy begins with a foundational reminder of what our faith is really about. "To be Adventist," he writes, "is to be, first and foremost, Christian; and what is most important in Adventist experience, practice, and belief is not what differentiates us from other Christians but what unites us to them."

This is something we--individually and as a church--need to constantly come back to. It seems surprisingly easy for communities supposedly focused on God to sink back into themselves. And in recognizing our commonality with other Christians, we can also recognize that the temptation is not unique to us. Writing from his own Catholic tradition, Henri Nouwen identified a similar risk: "As soon as the community becomes sedentary, it is tempted to lose its faith and worship the house-gods instead of the one true God who is leading it in a pillar of fire" (Intimacy).

But religiosity, church politics, our religious subculture, lifestyle, and social connections can seem so much more comfortable than the stark declaration of an ugly and cruel cross. Indeed, when we look at the cross without the pleasant nostalgia of the dust of distant history, it is a cause for constant affront.

We are sinners, we are lost, we will die--probably painfully and without any particular grace. We are animals, with the added aching burden of being able to recognize--in those moments of greatest honesty and clarity--our own lostness. The cross screams the bloodstained certainty that we are not good enough, that we can never be good enough. Every time we see a cross, we are reminded of our own hopelessness, the evil that is within us, and the certainty of our own death.

The cross signifies the dashing of all our self-deluding optimism--and the beginning of true hope. The cross must be the focus of our Christianity: Jesus, God with us, God in our world, God in our mess, God lifting us, by His death, out of our mess.

The overwhelming significance of the cross is reflected in the experience of many in the early church. At the end of John 20 John explains his reason for writing his Gospel: "These are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah [the Savior], the Son of God, and that by believing in him you will have life" (verses 30, 31, NLT).

Reflecting on the centrality of the story of Jesus to our faith and our lives as Adventist Christians, Jon Paulien emphasizes the preeminence of Jesus as testified by John: "The only witnessing that truly matters is witnessing about Jesus. To share the Sabbath, the prophecies, the sanctuary, the state of the dead with others is not witnessing unless doctrine brings Jesus into clearer focus" (in John, Paulien's commentary on the Gospel of John).

As Adventists, we should not seek truth to claim any kind of superiority. Rather, we seek the privilege and responsibility of understanding the gospel, the story of Jesus and the love of God, a little better. It was a focus Paul also identified with when he assured his readers that he had "decided to concentrate only on Jesus Christ and his death on the cross" (1 Cor. 2:2, NLT).

This is the center of Christianity and, as Adventist Christians, the center of our faith, our church, and our lives. Recognizing this reality, perhaps we should be a little less shy about using the cross as our symbol: "For all the false and misleading associations that may surround it, [the cross] still says--even without the knowledge of the one displaying it--'I am bought by the sufferings and death of Jesus and I belong to God. The divine conspiracy [the kingdom of God] of which I am a part stands over human history in the form of a cross'" (Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy).

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Nathan Brown is editor of the South Pacific edition of Signs of the Times and the South Pacific Division Record.