I'm way behind on posting sermons preached in 2018; here's the start of a dozen or so I need to post while catching up.
You know
the family car trips, where you all sing something or do something when you go
under a bridge, or see a cow, or whatever. In my family, when we saw one of
those road signs warning about ice, with the black skid marks behind the tires,
we would yell, “Snakes bite your tires! Snakes bite your tires!” For a few
years at least, my older siblings had me convinced me that that sign really was
a warning about snakes. Snakes are scary.
So here is this confusing snake story
in our Old Testament reading, about God visiting snakes on the complaining Israelites,
and they are in terror, legitimately. And when Moses intervenes for them, God
tells him to put a brass snake on a pole, and that the Israelites will be healed
when they look at the snake on a stick.
The reason this weird snake story is in
our lectionary is because Jesus refers to it in the Gospel lesson, and I’ve
always wanted to get to the bottom of it. In the Bible, snakes sometimes symbolize
evil and deceit, but also wisdom: “Be as wise as serpents…” Jesus says in
Matthew. In Greek religion, Asclepius, the God of healing, is depicted as a snake
entwined up a staff—still the symbol of medicine today. Ancient peoples
observed that snakes went under the earth to hibernate for months at a time. In
Jungian analysis, the serpent is a representative of the lower worlds, of what
is inside, or beneath, that cannot be seen from the surface. Dreams about
snakes are seen as carrying messages from our shadow side. So perhaps God had
Moses put the snake on a stick so the people could reflect on what they were
really afraid of. God does not take away the snakes—the source of their pain.
Instead God asks them to imagine a world where there are snakes--where they
might get bitten--AND where God is with them, and where God’s mercy is sure.
In our Gospel story, Jesus is
talking to Nicodemus (a Pharisee, and leader of the Jews) who comes to him in the
dark of night, not wanting to be seen. And in the verses before these ones, he is
asking Jesus, “What kind of Messiah you do claim to be. What is behind the
things you do? What is the path to salvation you hold out to the people?” Our
passage opens as Jesus is answering him. He says: “You know, just like the snake in the desert, the
son of Man will be lifted up on a tree.” (That must have been illuminating.) And
then Jesus says those famous words, “For God so loved
the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may
not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the
Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be
saved through him.”
God “so” loved the
world—we often hear this as “God loved the world SOOOO much…” But Jesus is
saying—This is the way that God loved the world. God loved the world like so: God sent his only Son. And the only way that
the people could be saved was for the Son of Man to be lifted on a tree, to be
crucified. And God did that, not because God wanted to punish people, but
because it was the only way they would get the message.
It’s significant that
Jesus says the “Son of Man” must be lifted up. The Son of Man hints that Jesus
is the pattern for all of us. Jesus came to take up our human experience, to
live and die as one of us. So the Son of
Man must die, because we die. God’s
saving action was not to take away death, but to transcend death, to make possible
eternal life. And in order to receive this new life, we must look at the cross
in faith. We must trust that this symbol of death is to us a symbol of new life.
So in a world where death is everywhere, there is the hope of life. Just like that snake on a stick: “Snakes are not your enemy,” God tells the
people, “your fear is your enemy. And your fear is keeping you from seeing that
I have liberated you from slavery, and am leading you into the promised land. I
am giving you new life!”
The Israelites
were fearful. And so are we. And so, we organize our lives around avoiding that
fear. Henry Nouwen talks about Jesus as God’s invitation into the House of Love.
But we have to move into the House of Love, from that other house—the House of
Fear. And it’s hard. The Israelites struggled to do it. That’s why Jesus was
still talking about the snake on a stick, many hundreds of years later.
 |
| Welcome Home, by Carol Aust |
To be honest, today’s
Gospel passage makes me a little uncomfortable. I mean, John
3:16, has been trivialized, turned into a bumper sticker, a screen saver, a sign
in the end zone at a football game. And some of the language in this passage,
and in our Epistle, seems like TV preacher talk. This talk of being saved.
Conquering death. Eternal life. But Martin Luther called this passage “the
Gospel in a nutshell,” and I respect that. So let’s talk about those words.
Being saved: Security, being healed, restored to wholeness
and the kind of innocence that life has beaten out of us. As to death: our fear
of actual death, yes, but also the fear of lesser deaths: Failure. Loss. Losing our vitality. And being
spiritually deadened, a life that is just going through the motions, living for
ourselves alone—as our Epistle described.
What is eternal life? It is life in
communion with God, life in Christ. And it starts now, as the life in
the spirit Paul writes about. It is living in the now, in gratitude, in ease
and contentment. It is not a life immune from danger, but it is not captive to
fear. It is not without pain, but it is not defined by it. It is feeling we are
where we are supposed to be, doing what we were born to do--“for we are what he
has made us…” This life is eternal because Christ is eternal. So our life in
Christ continues when we die--it merely changes form.
And this promise -- being
saved, conquering death, having eternal life -- is the gift that is offered to
us in Jesus—a gift of pure grace. And it is available to everyone. Everyone that is, “who
believes in him.”
That’s what I think John 3:16
says. But there’s this other word. I was
grateful that “believe” was one of the words in our Lenten series, because the
word “believe” is a stumbling block. It must be, because people have been
reading John’s Gospel for millennia, and struggling to believe it. We don’t
accept the gift we have been offered. So how we are believers?
John uses the word “believe” dozens
of times, usually in this sense: “to
place confidence in,” to “trust in.” The proposition is this: “If you trust that this impossible promise is
possible, and is meant for you—yes YOU; if you trust that the God of love is
stronger than your fears; if you trust that being alive in the spirit is better
than where you are right now—then you can have a new life, a life in Christ, a
life that does not end, even in death.” If you really trust that.
Many who claim to “believe” in
this proposition, still live in the house of fear. Because
even though we don’t like fear, if we are looking for evidence to support our
fears, we will find it. So maybe we
visit the house of love from time to time.
But a lot us still hang out in the house of fear. It may be our primary
residence.
Snakes are our fears. They
remind us of the things we’re afraid of, things perceived and what is in our
unconscious. In the desert, God left the people to be confronted with their own
selves, with the evil within and without them. They had hoped God would make
the snakes go away—they were being asked to live with them, and to put their
trust in God. When we do not “believe,” or put our trust in God, we put our
trust in something else, in the things or values of the systems of this world.
We cannot on our own banish the
snakes of our own nature, of our own fears, failings and shortcomings. Nor can
we banish the evil around us. But we are not left alone to them, either. The
house of love is not in La-la land. It is not in the sweet bye-and-bye. It
might even be in a dodgy neighborhood.
But it has a “room available” sign on it right now. So let us lift our hearts to God, let us
place our trust in God. The door is open. The path is lit, and there is
strength there, strength that will do for us what we cannot accomplish for
ourselves.
Preached at St Gabriel Episcopal Church, Portland OR, March
11, 2018.
Lent 4(B) readings: Numbers 21:4-9; Ephesians 2:1-10; John
3:14-21; Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22
