Full service HERE (one full year of worshiping online!). Sermon at 31:00.
Lent 4B
March 14, 2021
Numbers 21:4-9
John 3:14-21
INTRODUCTION
Today, halfway through Lent, we get a brief respite, in which all of our texts are about life and grace. We get this by way of one of the most Lutheran passages in all of scripture (Ephesians); one of the most quoted verses in all of scripture (John 3:16); and one of the weirdest stories in all of scripture (Numbers).
Let’s start there, with the Israelites in the wilderness. Remember that the Israelites wandered in the wilderness for 40 years, and this time is a sort of Faithfulness Boot Camp, in which they learn what it means to be God’s faithful people. The 10 Commandments we heard about last week gave a good foundation, but there is yet much to learn. Throughout this boot camp, the Israelites famously complain. Today their complaints are followed by the arrival of deadly, poisonous snakes (it’s no wonder this is the final complaint story – lesson learned!), and God will suggest a strange, but effective, treatment plan.
Moving to the Gospel reading, this is actually just a part of a much larger story, in which the Pharisee Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night (presumably because he doesn’t want his colleagues to know he is interested in Jesus’s teachings), and Jesus tells him he must be born again, born of the Spirit. What we hear today is a part of Jesus’ explanation about what that means. Today’s gospel text begins with a reference to the poisonous snake story from Numbers, which will set up the verse you all know and love, John 3:16.
As I mentioned, all of today’s texts are about life – finding help in the midst of struggle, finding light in the darkness, finding grace instead of punishment. They will raise very contemporary questions such as, “Does God punish? What do I have to do to get what I crave? Why am I suffering?” and the answer will be unequivocal: God is a God of love and grace. So as you listen, listen for that promise of grace. Let’s listen.
[READ]
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
“Without knowledge of self, there is no knowledge of God.”
This quote from 16th century reformer John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion is partly what inspired my Lenten discipline this year. With the hope in mind of gaining more self-knowledge, and so also deeper knowledge of God, I decided to revisit the enneagram, which I first learned about in seminary. In case you are not familiar with this tool, it is a system of personality typing that describes patterns in how people interpret the world and manage their emotions. It is a tool for personal growth, but is also a profound tool for spiritual growth, and there are gobs of books and blogs and podcasts by Christian thinkers (including Fr. Richard Rohr, if you’re familiar with him) about how to use the wisdom of the enneagram to find the path back “home,” back to God’s own loving embrace and our True Self. The basic gist is this – we are born with this inherent belief about the world: that we are whole and perfect as we are, that our needs are met, that we belong and are loved… good, life-giving things like that. But sometime in our childhood, that belief is disrupted, and we develop mechanisms to create the illusion of those desires for ourselves – like, always correcting and reforming in pursuit of perfection, or tending to everyone’s needs except our own, or constantly striving to succeed in bigger and better ways to prove our worthiness for love. We came to see these things as goods, even, perhaps, as godly, yet in reality, they set us down a different path toward a False Self, a path that leads us away from a fully trusting relationship with God our Creator. Remember that evil often presents itself as a good, even as it chips away at our faith. We started telling ourselves lies about where our worthiness comes from, like I am what I do, or, I am what I have, or, I am what other people say about me.[1] We become motivated by these lies, rather than by the knowledge that we are God’s beloved, that we are worthy of love because God made us so, and that there is nothing that can take away that belovedness or worth – the sort of stuff Paul talks about in Ephesians. In other words, with the help of these lies, we strayed from God, from home.
When we are able to recognize our own patterns and motivations, we begin also to see how they keep us from placing ourselves fully in God’s embrace, where we know that we are loved and worthy and safe because we are with God. To Calvin’s point, when we know ourselves, and can discern between our False Self and our True Self, the one God created us to be, then we can indeed draw closer to God. Without knowledge of self, there is no knowledge of God. But that self-knowledge can only be attained if we make the intentional effort to recognize the ways our patterns, and the scaffolding we have put up to protect ourselves, keep us from God. When we look at all that head on, come to terms with it, and work to overcome it, we can indeed grow closer to God.
All of which brings me to our texts for today. As strange as it is, I really love this story from Numbers, because it rings so true for me, even in my enneagram journey. Here we have the Israelites wandering through the wilderness and complaining, as they usually do. Until now, God has generally provided for them each time they complained. Thirsty? Here’s water from a rock. Hungry? Here’s some bread from heaven and some quail. But now? Maybe it’s just gone too far. This time when they complain, God doesn’t just fix the problem. Instead, God sends… poisonous snakes?! Well that was an unexpected turn! And when they complain about the snakes, because you know, people are dying, God doesn’t just take them away. Instead, God tells them, “Put the likeness of a snake on a pole, lift it up, and look at it, and you shall live.” And they do, and they live!
There are lots of things not to love about this story, I admit. You could not love that God sends the snakes in the first place, thus creating the problem that causes people to die. You could not love that God doesn’t provide what they asked for. You could not love that God doesn’t take away the problem. But here’s why I do love this story: I love it because the way it plays out is a lot more like real life. The Israelites are struggling. Indeed, they are losing their life. And God’s response is not to take away the struggle, but rather, to give them tools for dealing with it. That’s life, right? God never promised that our lives would be free of pain and struggle, but God did promise to be present in it, and God equips us not only to come through what we’re facing, but even to grow and find new life out of death. In fact, that’s the whole purpose of the wandering in the wilderness part of the Israelite saga: as I said, it’s like Faithfulness Boot Camp. Every challenge they face becomes an opportunity to learn and grow deeper in faith, to learn better how to trust God and look to God in times of trouble.
And that is what they are learning here, too, and what we learn through the Israelites: that we cannot ignore our troubles, or run from them. Instead, we look at them head on, trusting that by doing so, God will bring life out of that death. And here’s where it comes back to the enneagram for me. The enneagram is a tool for looking at those harmful patterns we develop, to look at them straight on, to recognize that what we had convinced ourselves was good is actually damaging to our relationships with God and our neighbor. When we look at them, rather than ignore or run from them, we are able to find healing from them, even to find life.
This has of course long been a faith practice: it is why we do confession. We name our sin. We look at it. We recognize the ways we have strayed from God. We acknowledge that our ways of living are not of God and that in fact they lead us away from whole-hearted trust in the God who gives us life. And then, by looking at the thing that was killing us, at that crafty serpent in the garden or the poisonous snake on a pole, we are able to move away from it, and find life.
That’s also what is happening in today’s text from John. In the Numbers story, snakes brought death upon the people because of their sin, and the snake, the instrument of death, lifted up becomes the pathway to life. In John, Jesus gives a similar dual meaning in the cross. The cross was an instrument of death, which was brought upon Jesus because of the rebellion of the people – a sinful rebellion in which we all still participate in our own way. So when we look at the cross, it becomes a way for us to acknowledge, “We did this. We are responsible for this expression of death.” It’s a theme we see so strongly throughout Lent, and especially in Holy Week. A one beloved hymn plaintively asks, “Who was the guilty? Who brought this upon thee?” and the agonized answer: “‘Twas I, Lord Jesus, I it was denied thee. I crucified thee.” You see, Lent is a season when we take responsibility for our participation in the brokenness of the world – and this ultimately brings not more death, but healing and life! That’s the work I’ve been doing this Lent using the enneagram, but we also may do it in counseling, or spiritual direction, in a 12 step program, in prayer and confession – we learn to recognize and look straight on at what we are doing to contribute to the brokenness of this world, so that we might move away from that behavior, away from that brokenness.
But then, paradoxically, the same cross on which Jesus was lifted up, that instrument of death, becomes for us a source of life. When we lift it up and look with faith upon the one who hung there, his resurrection becomes ours as well. Just like the Israelites looking at the fruits of their sin, and finding healing in the looking, we find healing from our own sins when we look upon what Jesus has accomplished through the cross. What had previously brought death, now brings life.
It’s the story of death and resurrection, the centerpiece of our faith, and it plays out not just in the first century, or in ancient Israel, but continually through our lives. A life of faith is always being willing to look at what brings death and brokenness, both in ourselves and in the world around us, in order than we might instead receive life, and be saved. For by grace we are saved, and this is a gift from God, that we would be raised up and made alive together with Christ. Thanks be to God!
Let us pray… God of grace and life, we would rather ignore those things that bring pain, or even convince ourselves that they are good. Help us to look at them straight on, to reckon with them, and to do the work of seeking you, so that we might be ready to receive your gift of life. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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