Sermon: Create in me a heart that is free (Mar. 15, 2015)

Lent 4B

March 15, 2015

Numbers 21:4-9

John 3:14-21

            Our reading today from John’s Gospel includes what is probably the most famous verse in all of Scripture. If you have one verse memorized, this is the one. We see it painted on people’s faces at football games, written on poster board on the Today Show, and I even noticed once that such unlikely clothing stores as Forever 21 have the verse printed on the bottom of their bags. You know the one I’m talking about – say it with me: 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.

            Yes, almost all of us know it, or at least have heard it. And yet, did you know that the verse immediately preceding it refers to one of the strangest stories in all the Bible? “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes him may have eternal life.” It is a reference, of course, to the bizarre story we heard today in our Old Testament reading. The Israelites are wandering in the wilderness in search of the Promised land (as you may remember, they wandered a whopping 40 years before they found it), and although God has provided for them everything they need – bread that literally rains from heaven, quail to satisfy their protein needs, and even water flowing from a rock – they are not happy campers. They whine and complain and grumble, and remember back to the good ol’ days when they were slaves in Egypt, but at least they had more variety in their diet. Like angsty teenagers, they complain against God and against Moses, “What, have you brought us out here to die? Our lives were so much better before! We hate this miserable food!” (Wahh wahh wahh.)

And so like any loving parent, God responds by sending them… wait, poisonous snakes?! And they bite the Israelites and many die! Well, the punishment worked (though, parents, I don’t recommend this as a parenting strategy!), and the Israelites admit to Moses that maybe they were being a little dramatic before, and would Moses please ask God to stop with the snakes already? Moses does, but God doesn’t take away the snakes. Instead, God suggests the very reasonable

approach of putting a snake up on a pole where everyone can see it. Then, if someone gets bit, they should simply look at the snake lifted high, and they would be healed. Makes perfect sense, right? This all-powerful God, rather than simply taking away the thing that is causing the problem (which, by the way, God brought upon them in the first place), says that making people literally face their fear and the cause of their pain, glorified and lifted high, will heal them and bring them life.

Weird story, right? And no, I don’t think I have ever seen someone with John 3:14 painted on their face at a football game. And yet, it is this bizarre story that John uses to set up what many of us have come to see as the very heart of the gospel: that God so loved the world that he gave his only Son so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life. Obviously, John’s choice to put those stories side-by-side was intentional, so let’s try to figure out why.

First of all, I think it is very significant that God’s idea for the Israelites is to have them face head on the very thing they fear the most, and that is what will give them life and healing. Strange as it may sound, it is not so different from our experience. Take my husband Michael, for instance. In a time in his life when he was trying to make himself over, so to speak, and become the person he really wanted to be, he decided he needed to face his fears. Like everyone, he had many fears, some more concrete than others, but he decided to start with one of his more concrete fears, which was, coincidentally enough, a fear of snakes. The things gave him the heebie-jeebies. So he went out of his way to touch a snake, two different times, so he could get over his fear. Now, he finds them fascinating creatures. Just this week in Florida we were looking at a picture where Michael’s step mom is holding a python and his dad is shooting the picture, and Michael said, “Oh, he’s cool!” I explained that Michael loves/hates snakes. He added, “They terrify me, and I think they’re awesome.”

That’s what can happen when we face our fears. We gain a healthy respect for it – after all, being afraid is often a mechanism to help us stay out of danger – even as we can gain an appreciation for it in our lives. Perhaps your fear is of romantic relationships, after too much heartbreak, but opening your heart once again may allow that broken-heartedness to be healed. Perhaps your fear is of failure, but then you actually do fail and find that the world didn’t end, and in fact, you learned something from the failed effort. Perhaps your fear is of loss, but then you experience it and you find that even in your loss, you gained love from unexpected places and people. So often, facing our fear, as the Israelites faced that snake up on a pole, may at first appear to cause pain, but when we can recognize God’s presence and purpose in it, even though the pain doesn’t always go away, the pain leads ultimately to healing.

But this story goes deeper than merely facing fears. In telling the Israelites to look at the snake, he is telling them to look at the very thing that is causing them pain and even death. It may have seemed to them that this was the snakes who were biting them. But a closer look reveals that the cause of pain was something else altogether. Think: what were the snakes doing there in the first place? Well, God had sent them because the Israelites were complaining and not trusting God. So the snakes represented their lack of trust, their fear, and their self-serving behavior, all in one. That was what they were confronting when they looked up at that snake on a pole. That is what they needed release from.

            This past week in our midweek gathering, we learned about the Sabbath. One of the things our presenter talked about that really resonated with me was how Sabbath was commanded to be a

relief from slavery. It was about freedom. When they received the 10 Commandments, the Israelites had just come out of Egypt, where they were slaves and where the possibility of rest wasn’t even on their radar. For God to command a day a rest was a command for freedom, a command to be released from what had enslaved them for so many years.

            I wonder if God’s little ploy with the poisonous snakes might be something similar. Again and again throughout the Bible, ours is a God of life and freedom, and this story is no exception. God doesn’t take away the snakes, because if He did the people wouldn’t even remember that they had been enslaved to anything. Instead, God encourages them that, when they feel trapped by their fears and their pains, that they should look up, look those things in the face, and remember that in the midst of our pain, God offers us freedom from all that ails us.

            Of course in the Christian story, it is not a snake on a pole that we look to for freedom from all that ails us. But we do look to another thing that reminds us of sin and death: the cross. Yes, hope, life, and freedom come from looking to the cross, the very thing that has just convicted us, that shows us that it was our sins that put Jesus there. Just as God took the poisonous snake and transformed it

Resurrection cross

into an agent of healing and a way toward life, God took the ultimate sacrifice of His son, and the cruel, self-interested act of crucifixion, and turned it into a way toward freedom, “so that all who believed in him would not perish, but have eternal life.”

At the beginning of worship, we sang the well-known hymn, “Lift high the cross.” And so we shall, but when we sing that we also need to do it: to lift high this instrument of death, which represents our failings, our fears, and our sins, and to see it as our only way toward healing, life, and freedom from all that ails us. Lift high the cross, the love of Christ proclaimed, ‘til all the world adore his sacred name.

Let us pray… God of freedom, we are enslaved to so many things. Create in us clean hearts, which are courageous enough to look at our fears, pains, and sins, indeed to look at the cross, and to see in this instrument of death a way toward freedom from what enslaves and eternal life. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.