Fourth Sunday in Lent, Year B, March 11, 2018; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O God of infinite grace, grant us the wisdom, the strength, and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth – come when it may and cost what it will.

When I’m writing a sermon, I often think of songs or poems. For today it was Adrienne Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck.” The connection in my mind is our gospel lesson from John – the wreck of misunderstandings and mistreatments of this text – it’s almost too much for me to bear. I knew that when our Deacon Bob read this passage to you, many of you would start shutting down, going other places in your heads, perhaps leaving the building in your imaginations. I’m not going to recite the whole poem, but listen to these lines from the middle:

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail…

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth [1]

The misconceptions and misuses of our Gospel text are exacerbated by interpretive punctuation and capitalization and paragraph breaks that have been inserted where none existed in the original. For example, why does the New Revised Standard Version make verse 16 into its own paragraph? In a fit of pique this past Tuesday, I capitalized all the nouns in our bulletin copy of the Gospel passage to diminish the effect of “proper” nouns. My mischief has a certain German charm, but the passage still sounds like yet one more theological shakedown to sort out who is in and who is out of the reach of God’s realm. If it is, then we should reject it. We should not be party to a religious shakedown. But I’m reluctant to just let the pirates have it, so I’m going to dive into the wreck and tell you what I find. I think there’s treasure.

The gospel passage begins right in the middle of Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus, a member of the leadership council that convened at the Temple in Jerusalem (the same temple where Jesus had just made a big mess). Nicodemus had come to talk with Jesus under the cover of darkness. We know that Nicodemus was drawn to know Jesus, but he was afraid (for good reason). Jesus made reference to the peculiar story of Moses lifting up the serpent in the wilderness from the Book of Numbers, which was our first reading. The Torah name for this book is B’midbar which means “in the wilderness.” It’s the story of wherever Israel was on its spiritual journey! You know, Israel means one who wrestles or struggles with god. We are all Israel, as our Rabbi-in-Residence Howard Berman likes to say.

The story goes that the spirit or the life force – the nefesh — of the people became short. They became short tempered. They were at the end of their rope, short on patience, short on energy, down to their very souls. And they started complaining to Moses and to God that they’d had enough of their spiritual journey – that it was better to be enslaved in Egypt than to be in the wilderness. Slavery was “a piece of cake” compared with their seemingly endless journey. This is a complaint they’d made several times before. It’s a variation of “there’s nothing to eat” even though plenty of bread and meat had been provided for them to eat their fill. It reminds me of a teenager standing at the refrigerator with the door open, staring at the food and saying “There’s nothing to eat… .I’m sick of the food we have.” But it’s bigger than one hungry teenager. The whole people was sick of what they had – sick to death.

Then, it seemed to them as though God, because of their belly-aching, had sent a plague of fiery serpents – or seraphim (you know, like cherubim and seraphim). They weren’t being bitten by any old poisonous snakes in the wilderness. These were six-winged fiery flying dragons. This is mythical, folk tale language describing mystical, spiritual beasts which were tormenting people to death. It was as if their bitter and relentless complaining had unleashed deadly poison into the heart and soul of the community. Torah translator, Robert Alter suggests that their denigration of the bountiful gifts that they had received from God was lethal. [2] The people experienced the unleashed poison as punishment and they assigned it to the Holy One of Israel who, they imagined, had a low tolerance for whining. (I think they were probably projecting.) They went to Moses, confessed that they were wrong to complain to him and to God about having nothing to eat when they actually had what they needed. They said literally that they had missed the mark (the Biblical definition of sin). They had missed the mark of Love. They asked Moses to intercede on their behalf – to ask the Holy One to remove the seraphim – remove the poison. So Moses prayed for the people. (That might be the best line of this whole story.) Moses interceded for them even after they had blamed him for their misery and rebelled against him!

Moses discerned the voice of God suggesting that the thing to do was to make a bronze serpent wrapped around a standard or an ensign which would save the people when they’d been bitten. If the people who had been bitten looked up at this bronze seraph, they lived. And that is a Hebrew Bible story of how a symbol of fear and oppression became a symbol of healing and protection. A snake on a pole is still a symbol of healing in modern medicine (the Rod of Asklepius is the name of a snake on a pole from Greek mythology). It strikes me as not that different from putting fire on sticks as we do in church, even though we have electric lights. Torchbearers carry ceremonial fire that can both burn and heal, both destroy and save. And of course, the cross, which was an instrument of mass murder for slaves and non-citizens, a form of brutal oppression and a most publicly humiliating shameful death, is what the Gospel of John is holding up, proposing as a symbol of deep love and profound hope. It’s a symbol about which I feel considerable ambivalence, but I find, again and again, to paraphrase the late feminist theologian, Dorothee Sölle, I cannot bear to abandon Jesus to the great disregard for life, so I believe Jesus about his sacrifice. [3]

Here is some treasure in this wreck. In this passage, “believe” doesn’t mean intellectual assent to concept or idea; it means trust in, confidence in, commitment to. To what? The Love of God for the entire world – cosmos in Greek. For his followers, Jesus was the full embodiment of the Love of God. That does not mean the Love of God is not present or accessible apart from Jesus. To say that Jesus means the world to Christians does not mean that Jesus is the entire world. The term “Son of Man” originated as a term for mensch or mortal – salt of the earth. In the century before Jesus it started to take on mythical and mystical meaning – as in the Book of Daniel where a hoped-for savior is depicted as a mensch arriving on a cloud like superhero. But here Jesus is saying no clouds, no superheroics – the essential human is not going to descend from a cloud, but be hoisted on a most gruesome billboard that the mighty Love of God will redeem.

Here is some more treasure. “Eternal life” doesn’t mean a never-ending term of human existence and it doesn’t mean afterlife; it means fullest possible life now in the unending presence of the Holy One. [4] Jesus is saying that those who do not trust in Love, who have no confidence in Love, who aren’t committed to Love, are already doomed (not by God, by their own hardness of heart). And here is even more treasure. Judgment here doesn’t mean punishment; it means exposure, revelation, disclosure of a life committed to Love or not committed to Love. When the light next shines on any of us, does it reveal our loving actions or not? That is the subject of this teaching, the conclusion of which is that light allows deeds done in God, Who is Love, to be clearly seen. If you read ahead in the Gospel of John, you’ll know that Nicodemus went to the crucified body of Jesus in broad daylight with a hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes to lovingly anoint his body and lay it tenderly in a garden tomb. In the light, it could be clearly seen that at considerable personal risk, his “deeds had been done in God.”

The assurance given in the letter to the assembly of Jesus followers in Ephesus is that no matter what, God is rich in mercy and great love poured out on us even when we are poisoned and accounted for dead because of the deeds we do that are based on anything but love. The grace of God is wildly and even offensively indiscriminate – it has nothing to do with what we do or fail to do. The teaching here is that Christians are created in Christ Jesus for good (that is, loving) works and God loves us whether we do them or not, whether we like it or not, and whether we think it’s true or not. I’m sure I don’t have to point out that some Christians don’t act like they were created for loving works. Let’s not imitate them or justify our own bad behavior because of them. Let’s demonstrate something different in response to the richness of mercy and great love of God, so when the light shines on us, anyone can see extraordinary acts of loving kindness.

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