Lifted Up

Scriptures:      Numbers 21:4-9; Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22

Ephesians 2:1-10,  John 3:14-21

Woody Allen began one of his films – it might have been Annie Hall – by having the character he plays tell an old joke about two elderly women at a resort in the Catskill Mountains.  The women are having dinner.  One of the women says, “The food at this place is really terrible.”  Her dining companion says, “Yeah, I know, and such small portions.”  Woody Allen goes on to say, “And essentially that’s how I feel about life…it’s full of loneliness and misery and suffering and unhappiness, and it’s all over much too quickly.”

Our Old Testament reading from the book of Numbers starts out a bit like that old joke.  Moses is leading the increasingly cranky Israelites through the wilderness.  They had just won a great battle against the King of Arad, but Moses was taking them by a route along the Red Sea to avoid the Edomites.  The people said to Moses, and not for the first time, “Why have you taken us up out of Egypt to die in this wilderness. There’s no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food!”   Like Woody Allen’s joke….”Such terrible food, and such tiny portions.”  There’s definitely a punch line somewhere in that complaint.

But God wasn’t laughing….it appears that the Almighty was a bit out of sorts that day.  We’re told, “Then the Lord sent poisonous snakes among the people” – some translations say “fiery serpents” – “and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died.”  Seems to us like an extreme reaction….if I hear that one of your kids complained about having to eat green beans and you put a rattlesnake in the kid’s bedroom, I’m calling child services.  Just sayin’.  It’s a jolting reminder that the ancient Israelites didn’t experience God as being particularly cuddly-wuddly or even safe to be around….they saw God as powerful but hard as nails, and unpredictable, even dangerous, with extreme anger management issues.  And it has to be said, the story can also be understood in reverse: the people stumbled onto a den of snakes, asked why God let this happen, and came to understand it as a result of their earlier complaints.   Stories like this remind us of how revolutionary it was for Jesus to refer to God as “Father”….what a different image from the vengeful God we see in this story.  I don’t think we’re necessarily called to see God in the same way the ancient Israelites did, but perhaps we’ve gone too far in the other direction, turning God into a toothless, half-senile, doting heavenly grandfather, or perhaps Buddy Jesus.  God’s power – and God’s anger at our sin – is still there.  Fortunately for us, so is God’s forgiveness.

Anyway…. Some of the people are bitten by poisonous snakes and die, and those around them are understandably freaked out.  “We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you, pray to the Lord to take the snakes away from us.”  So Moses prayed.  We’re told God told Moses, “Make a poisonous serpent, and put it on a pole, and everyone who is bitten will look at it and live.”  And, we’re told, “Moses made a serpent of bronze and put it on a pole, and whenever the serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.”

Where to begin in trying to wrap our minds around this passage.  Maybe the place to start is “don’t try this at home!”  Of course, from a literal, clinical standpoint this passage makes no sense….this procedure wouldn’t fly at your local urgent care center or ER.   It would also seem to be a violation of the commandment against graven images.  It seems like an example of a kind of magic that was practiced in those days – the line of thinking seems to have been something like “make an image of the thing that is troubling you, and you can control the trouble.”  There’s another example of this line of thinking in an odd story in I Samuel chapters 5 and 6, when the Philistines captured the ark of God and were plagued with mice and stricken with tumors, and to make the mice depart and tumors stop, they fashioned mice and tumors out of gold, and sent them, along with the ark, back to the Israelites.  And, as it happens, there’s another story about this bronze serpent, much later in the Old Testament, in II Kings 18:4, during the reign of King Hezekiah, who was considered in the Old Testament as one of the best kings of Judah.  We’re told, “He” – Hezekiah – “did what was right in the sight of the Lord just as his ancestor David had done.  He removed the high places, broke down the pillars, and cut down the sacred pole.  He broke in pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made, for until those days the people of Israel had made offerings to it; it was called Nehushtan.” What was once an instrument of healing had become an object of idolatry.  What had once been an instrument of God had been set up as a sort of demi-god in its own right, a competitor to God for the peoples’ devotion….and so Hezekiah had it destroyed.  Of course, this imagery – serpents on a pole as a symbol for healing – lives on as a symbol of the medical profession, though the derivation is from Greek mythology.

I think we’re tempted to put the story of the bronze serpent into a box called “weird, random stories from the Old Testament” – we can put it next to the story about the golden mice and tumors, which is also plenty weird - and put it on a shelf to collect dust…..except that in our Gospel reading, Jesus took this weird story about the bronze serpent out of the box to explain his own ministry.  And so, you might say, we’re sort of stuck with having to deal with it. Jesus said, “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 have eternal life. 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.”  Jesus said that he would be lifted up on a cross, just as the bronze serpent was lifted up on a pole, and that once lifted up, the people would look to him for healing from their sins.

Going back to the Numbers story:  Remember that the Israelites wanted Moses to pray for the snakes to be taken away.  They seem to want to rewind the tape, want God to forget that they had complained, want the snakes to evaporate into thin air.  That prayer, in the form they made it, wasn’t answered.  The snakes were still there, and folks still got bitten.  But their underlying prayer – for healing and safety – was answered.  The snakes were still there, but on God’s instructions, Moses made a way for them to be healed, to move forward even with the snakes in their midst.  The snake – a cause for suffering – was transformed into an instrument for healing.

We’re not so different from the ancient Israelites.   We want to live free from suffering, and when we mess up, we don’t want to take accountability.  When we do suffer, we understandably want God to take away the suffering, as the ancient Israelites wanted God to take away the snakes.  And sometimes God does.  We’ve seen lots of prayers for healing answered here at Emanuel.  But at other times, God’s will is for the suffering, not to be removed, but to be transformed into a force for healing.    We know that snake venom can be transformed by medical science into a cure for snake bites.   Weakened or dead bacteria are transformed into vaccines.    On the cross, human sin was transformed into a remedy for sin, into salvation.

Part of the transformation is for sin to be exposed.  The natural human tendency is to hide our sin, and to hide from our sin.  And our attempts to hide from our sin are lame…sort of like the memes you see on Facebook now and then, with a picture of a dog that has torn into a bag of garbage, left trash all over the place, and the caption says “I’m so glad you’re home!  This bag just exploded! I don’t know how it happened!”  But throughout Jesus’ ministry, and especially on the cross, human sin was brought into the light, exposed, and transformed.  There’s a saying in recovery programs, “you’re only as sick as your secrets.”  In order for recovery to happen, there needs to be a move from secrecy to honesty.   Remember that it was the leadership, religious and political, who crucified Jesus…..and so one of the secrets exposed on the cross is the depravity of those considered society’s best and brightest, the best that humanity apart from God had to offer.  And it was the very attempt on the part of these best and brightest to hide their depravity that put Jesus on the cross.  Then as now, “It’s not the crime, it’s the coverup” that causes the most problems.  In sending Jesus to the cross, these leaders attempted to hide their own corruption, but instead ended up in effect putting it on a billboard for all to see.  Something like this also comes through in Paul’s 2^nd letter to the Corinthians, 5^th chapter, 21^st verse: “For our sake God made him” – that is, Jesus – “to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

We’re only as sick as our secrets.    Only when sin and suffering are exposed can they be transformed.  In our Gospel reading, Jesus said, “Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.”  Again, “all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed.”  In order for our sin and our suffering to be transformed and healed, they must be brought into the light.

From I Thessalonians, 5^th chapter, “You are all children of light and children of the day; we are not of the night or of darkness.”  From the letter to the Hebrews: “Let us run with race the perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame.”  And so may we look to Jesus, living in the light, so that our brokenness and suffering can be transformed, for our healing, and perhaps for the healing of others.   May we live as children of light, and not children of darkness.  And may God use us, including our transformed sin and suffering, to heal a broken neighborhood and a broken world. Amen.