The House of Love

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