Lent 4B, March 14, 2021

O God of Grace, may we have the wisdom, the strength, and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth – come when it may and cost what it will. Amen.

One of the many joys of grandparenting for me is watching Sesame Street! I know I don’t have to have grandchildren to watch it, but they’re a good excuse! Some of you might remember a Sesame Street song called “One of these things is not like the other.” That is an apt song for our Hebrew Scripture passage this morning wedged into a Sunday series of covenant stories during Lent. Remember we started Lent with the story of God’s promise to Noah and then the story of God’s promise to Abraham. Then the promise from God that when (and whenever) we are loving God, we won’t behave in ways that do damage to one another and to ourselves. Next week we will hear the story of God’s promise to write God’s love on the hearts of people so that no one will have to be taught about God, everyone will already know God – by heart. But this week, we have one of those things which is not like the others. We have this peculiar little story from the Book of Numbers.

It’s here today, of course, because the Gospel of John refers to it with the words “just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness”, so it’s the lectionary makers’ way of bundling scripture in a tidy worship-service-sized package. The name Numbers refers to the numbers of Israelites counted in the census taken twice over the course of Israel’s forty years of wandering in the wilderness. 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 god-struggler or one who wrestles with God. This is a book of the Bible especially suited for Emmanuel Church, because it’s a book about wrestling and about hope.

Today’s story takes place about halfway through the book. The Israelites had pulled out from their encampment at the mountains where Moses’ brother Aaron had died, and they were having to take the long circuitous way around the land of Edom. That’s because the Edomites wouldn’t let them go directly through. Edom is a nickname for Esau (Jacob’s rival twin), and remember it was Jacob who was first given the name Israel. 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, ineffective, powerless, down to their very souls. They started complaining to Moses and to God that they’d had it with their journey, that it was better to be enslaved in Egypt than to die in the wilderness. Slavery was “a piece of cake” compared with this miserable, seemingly endless journey. This is a complaint they’d made before. It’s a variation of “there’s nothing to eat” even though manna and quail had been provided for them to eat their fill. It reminds me of any one of my children standing at the refrigerator with the door open, staring at the food and saying, “There’s nothing to eat….I’m sick of what we have.” But it’s bigger than that; the whole people was sick of what they had.

Then it was as though God, because of their bellyaching, had sent a plague of serpents, and the Israelites were being poisoned by the bites. The thing is, the Hebrew text refers to the serpents as seraphs (or seraphim – you know, like cherubim and seraphim). They weren’t being bitten by any-old-poisonous serpents. These were six-winged, fiery, flying dragons. This is mythical, folktale language describing mystical, spiritual beasts, which were tormenting people to death. It was as if the complaining had unleashed deadly poison into the heart and soul of the community. The people imagined that they were being punished, and they assigned the punishment to the Holy One of Israel who, they guessed, had a low tolerance for whining. (I’m imagining they were projecting.) They went to Moses and acknowledged 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 that they had missed the mark of loving one another and God, which is the biblical definition of sin. They asked Moses to intercede on their behalf, to ask the Holy One to remove the seraphim, remove the poison. Moses prayed for the people. (That might be the best line of this whole story.) Moses interceded for them even after all that complaining!

And 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 by the six-winged fiery dragon. If the people who had been bitten looked at this bronze seraph, they lived. And that is the Hebrew Bible story of how a symbol of oppression became a symbol of healing. The symbol is called the Nehushtan; the story goes that it was later destroyed by iconoclastic King Hezekiah because it had lost its meaning and had become a fetish. But it got the Israelites through this particular terrible time in the wilderness. You know, a snake on a pole is still a symbol of healing in modern medicine; the Rod of Asklepios is known in Greek mythology, and it’s on the logo of medical organizations: the American Medical Association, Emergency Medical Technicians, and medical buildings.

The question that I always have when it comes to scripture is not, did this really happen, but is this really happening, is this true? When I was working on this scripture passage, I thought about the pink triangle. The Nazi symbol used to categorize men convicted of being gay, a symbol of people being tormented to death, has become an international symbol of gay pride and gay rights. Of course, the cross, which was an instrument of brutal oppression and a most humiliating shameful death, is what the Gospel of John is lifting up or holding up, proposing as a symbol of deep love and hope for oneness with the Divine. It’s foolish, scandalous, and true.

To get at the question of whether this story from Numbers is really happening, I would like to invite you to think about your own experiences of wilderness as you have wandered through the last year of Covid-tide or perhaps the last forty. I want to ask you some questions inspired by a former rector of mine, Bill Dols. [1] My questions are for you as individuals, and they are for us as a parish. So the you in the questions is both singular and plural. It’s a little bit of a guided meditation, so I’m going to slow down a little as I ask them. If it will help you reflect, I invite you to close your eyes; get comfortable in your seat. If you fall asleep, that’s perfectly alright; I trust that you’ll hear whatever you need to hear. If you don’t have answers, just let the questions wash over you.

• • Think for a moment about when you have been short on spirit and long on complaints.
  • What was the narrow place or the tight spot (the Egypt) that you had been freed from that had started looking better in hindsight, after you’d been away from it for a while?
  • Who have you blamed for your experiences in this wilderness that felt worse than you remember Egypt ever being?
  • What did you have to swallow that you detested?
  • What was or is at the core of your unhappiness?
  • When you remember those wilderness times full of bitterness, of blaming and complaining, what fire-breathing dragons were unleashed around you and within you?
  • What part of you died there in the wilderness from the poison?
  • What did your grief awaken in you or give birth to in you that you had either forgotten or never known before?
  • What icon of oppression or death has become or could become a standard or an ensign for you, a sign of hope and of new life?

Before I close my sermon, I want to say something about actively moving away from the damage that white supremacy has done with language of light and dark from our Gospel passage, and about the only-ness of Jesus Christ. I urge you to consider other word pairings to get at what darkness and light might mean for John the Evangelist’s community. The contrast could be considered as clouded versus brilliant, shrouded versus revealed, opaque versus transparent, gloomy versus bright, obscure versus clear. Think Jesus is the Word and the Clarity of God. “No one has ever seen God,” the Gospel writer says in the first chapter. It is Jesus, the Word, who is close to the Author’s heart, who has made God known.” And just because the Gospel tells us that God loved Jesus as if he were an only son, that doesn’t mean that God only loved Jesus or that God doesn’t love each of us as if we were that precious. Just because, according to the Gospel, Jesus was the truth and the clarity of Love, that doesn’t mean there aren’t other paths to see the truth and clarity of Love. Doing deeds in God means doing them in Love as opposed to doing evil. That’s what matters, according to the Gospel of John.

As we continue to move through this particular and peculiar wilderness of the forty days of Lent, or the particular and peculiar wilderness of 13 months of Covid-tide, or whatever wilderness you’ve journeyed through for even longer, I pray that we can focus our gaze on our own painful symbols of oppression or death. May we be reminded of those symbols when our shortness of spirit, impatience, and blaming have produced poison, and let those symbols be transformed into reminders of healing power and of promise.

← Back to sermons page