M7
Num. 21:4-9
Ps 107:1-3,17-22
Eph. 2:1-10
Jn. 3:14-21
“And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may not perish but have eternal life” John 3:14.
Look around you. Imagine that you are the people of Israel, because in a way you are. You left slavery in Egypt with sore backs and calloused hands. Beatings and hard labor made your joints so sore that you thought you could never escape the Pharaoh’s army. When the Red Sea swallowed up the finest warriors in the world, you wrote songs of celebration.
Fresh from this victory, breathing the clean air of freedom and with a new lightness in their steps the people of Israel passed quickly through the desert to the edge of the promised land. Before going into this land of Canaan you choose twelve people: Rachel Wagner, Alan Sarles, Laura Barker, Robert Pescosolido, Jim Snell, Maryetta Shriver, Clare Ledwith, Gloria Wing, Paula Matosian, Bob Stanfield, Paul Kojola and Bill Bien. You send them as spies to survey the land.
They arrive at harvest time and spend forty days traveling in secret through a place of overwhelming beauty. The twelve agree completely about the richness of this land of milk and honey. They cannot help but notice the severe contrast between it and the desert they just passed through. At the same time, ten of the spies (I won’t say who) have also noticed that the people who already live there seem stronger and larger than us (Numbers 13).
Two of the spies want to follow God’s command and find a place to live in the promised land. They make their case but the overwhelming majority of us are so afraid to go that we threaten to stone them to death. And so we all return to the desert for forty years, where each of the spies dies, except for the two who did not rebel against God.
Even though WE chose it, the harshness of desert life makes us complain about God. We say that he should have left us in Egypt. We seem to despise our own freedom. Nothing seems quite right to us although we probably grumble about our food the most. There is a kind of poison in our community and we will not be won over to God. So God sends poisonous snakes which kill our friends and our children. Imagine many of us dying, the rest of us bitten and waiting to die.
But again God sees our suffering and has mercy on us. He instructs Moses to make a bronze serpent on a high pole. The people who look at it will live. So Moses walks deliberately around our camp tents. He calls each of us out by name so that we can look and be saved. Moses cannot change the fact that we have been bitten. He cannot remove the poison, but through him God can make us live (Numbers 21).
We are the people of Israel. The same poison runs thick in our veins also.
In one summer month both of my grandfather’s sons moved to California. I’ll never forget the day we said goodbye, my hippie uncle telling my conservative father that he would meet us in the promised land. He was right. We live in the land of milk and honey, in these green hills between the richest agricultural valley in the world and the vast mystery of the Pacific Ocean.
At this time of year, in this mild climate, the wildflowers covering these hills seem like signs of God’s continuing grace. According to any measure from objective industrial productivity to the subjective beauty of our sunsets, California is rich.
We would notice this more if it we did not have the poison. All of us experience its effects in slightly different ways. We have conflict with people who we are supposed to love. We worry about the future. We have a vague sense that something is not right, that we are not keeping up, or living up to our potential. We also see signs that frighten us: this country’s steeply rising debt and our own, increasing healthcare costs, the declining quality of education, global climate change along with our political leaders’ vague threats of terrorism. Personally we feel vulnerable, that somehow we haven’t done enough to protect ourselves.
Alan Watts, a former Episcopal priest and teacher of Zen Buddhism points out that we will never be satisfied if our happiness depends on material things or on other people’s opinion of us. I have read Alan Watts’ books. I recognize this wisdom. At the same time I feel wounded by knowing that this was too hard for him and that he died young of alcoholism.
Watts never wrote openly about his own struggles with alcohol, but in a touching aside he writes anonymously about what seems to be his own experience. “In very many cases [the alcoholic] knows quite clearly that he is destroying himself, that for him, liquor is poison, that he actually hates being drunk, and even dislikes the taste of liquor. And yet he drinks. For, dislike it as he may, the experience of not being drunk is worse. It gives him “horrors” for he stands face to face with the unveiled, basic insecurity of the world.”
If anyone should be immune from this poison, the symptoms of which include our basic sense of insecurity, it should be graduates of Harvard Divinity School. They should be both intelligent and spiritual. Last June I heard Professor Kim Patton give the sermon at graduation. She addressed students applying to jobs and doctoral programs who were concerned about “gaps” in their resumes. She said, “Like the wider American culture, Harvard lionizes the loner, the brilliant individual who has won some high-level game of musical chairs where 150 players contend for 8 seats and the music is by Mahler.” She reassures them that, “[t]he gaps on the resumes are the abysses into which we fall from time to time, and in the process, fall into the hands of the living God…”
The bad news is that everyone has the poison, we all just show different symptoms of the same disease. I pray about this because I believe that this poison leads many to misunderstand one of the most important things that Jesus ever said. This verse is a famous one. At football games people hold up signs that say “John 3:16.” In it Jesus says, “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.”
Unfortunately a vast majority of Christians in this country interpret these words to mean that if you are not in their Jesus club, God will condemn you to eternal death. For them, unless you say certain words or think certain thoughts about Jesus, in the way that they do, you are what they call “unsaved.” This is not a biblical word so you may have trouble understanding it. But if you spend time with Christians like this you hear it all the time. They talk about their “saved” friends and their “unsaved” friends. And then the complicated world filled with our own poison suddenly seems a lot safer and simpler to them.
“Saved” Christians may not tell you this, but the context of Jesus’ remarks matter. Jesus is talking to Nicodemus a kind of first century theology professor who came to him secretly in the night. Nicodemus wants to know who Jesus is. And because like us both of them are people of Israel, Jesus answers by referring to a story about the time when the people of Israel chose to wander in the desert rather than follow God’s instructions.
Jesus says, “[j]ust as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up…” Unless you remember the story of Moses curing his snake-bitten people with the bronze snake pole, this can be one of Jesus’ most perplexing statements.
Even after reading both stories this might justifiably leave you lost. This is a prophetic symbol, in other words it is a sign to let you know what God is about to do before it is too late. We’re all familiar with symbols like this. We encounter them in secular contexts all the time. For instance, in the movie Titanic, we see the officers on the bridge drinking a cup of hot coffee on a cold night peering out into the fog. The camera pans all the way down the ship, as some ice floats by while the audience hears cellos make a low shimmering sound.
In ancient times people believed that when you saw something, a part of you went out from your eyes and touched the world. It sounds odd when Jesus compares being crucified to being lifted up like Moses’ bronze snake. But Nicodemus probably understood what Jesus means. Seeing the bronze snake could not take away the poison but it could restore life. In the same way, if we can be touched by a God who suffers on the cross, we can have life too. This does not mean that all the poison in the world instantly disappears. But Jesus does make it possible to survive, to really be alive again.
This is the central mystery and challenge of Christianity: letting go of a picture of a god who miraculously adjusts the world to meet the demands of our ego and embracing the real Jesus who suffers for you and with you and in you, who through you brings love into the world.
It is hard to keep an image of Jesus suffering on the cross at the center of our life. We want to substitute that picture with the Messiah king who uses overwhelming power to justify us and bring the kind of peace we want. But in the end it is the suffering Christ who can save us.
I wish I could speak at greater length about this, because I have seen so many miracles happen through Jesus’ love. Sometimes amazing grace comes out of terrible suffering.
Fred Craddock is one of the most distinguished preachers of our time. He tells the story about God’s persistence in calling his father. He says, “When the pastor used to come from my mother’s church to call on him, my father would say, “You don’t care about me. I know how churches are. You want another pledge… Isn’t that the whole point of church?”… My nervous mother would run into the kitchen crying for fear somebody’s feelings were hurt… I guess I heard it a thousand times.”
“One time he didn’t say it. He was at the Veteran’s Hospital. He was down to 74 pounds. They had taken out his throat, put in a metal tube, and said, “Mr. Craddock, you should have come in earlier. But this cancer is awfully far advanced. We’ll give radium, but we don’t know.” I went in to see him. In every window [were] potted plants and flowers. Everywhere there was place to set them – potted plants and flowers… There was by his bed a stack of cards. And I want to tell you, every card, every blossom, every potted plant [came] from groups, Sunday School classes, women’s groups, youth groups… of my mother’s church – every one of them.”
“My father saw me reading them. He could not speak, but he took a Kleenex box and wrote something on the side from Shakespeare’s Hamlet… He wrote…, “In this harsh world, draw your breath in pain to tell my story.” I said, “What is your story, Daddy? And he wrote, “I was wrong.”
Look around you. Imagine that you are people of Jesus, because you are. In your veins you have the same poison that is killing others all around you. But somewhere in your heart God has revealed his suffering for you. In our shared Eucharist his love becomes eternal life in you.
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This part of The Wisdom of Insecurity is quoted in Monica Furlong, Zen Effects: The Life of Alan Watts (Woodstock, Vermont: Skylight Paths Publishing, 2001), 150.
Kimberly C. Patton, “When the Wounded Emerge as Healers,” Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Winter 2006, 57
This whole paragraph comes from a conversation with Rick Fabian who is preparing this material for a lecture at Sewanee on the open table.
Cited in Jim Fitzgerald’s sermon, “Serpents, Penguins and Crosses,” Preacher’s Magazine Lent/Easter 2006. http://www.preachersmagazine.org/webmar26.htm
