March 11, 2018: May God’s words alone be spoken, may God’s words alone be heard. Amen.
Well, we lost an hour sleep last night to Daylight Savings Time, so the gospel message seems about right – “the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light…[because the alarm clock is evil].” Okay, it didn’t say exactly that, but I am sure I am not alone in feeling that way this morning. “Oh, God, I love the light, but why, oh why, must this change be on a Sunday morning?” (cried every clergy person in the US this morning as we wearily made our way to the church wondering who might show up on time, and who might show up after the service was over).
Yet here we are, and on this fourth Sunday of Lent, we hear a story about snakes in the desert, and a gospel that has become a cliché, a trite reference displayed on posters at sports events. John 3:16 is one verse from the text we heard today, and sadly, we don’t even get the whole story within those verses either. All most folks ever remember from this part of the fourth gospel is the oft quoted, and rarely understood, verse “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.”
“Evangelicals have turned this into a trademark – a neat sound bite. Ask folks to name a gospel verse, this is likely to be the one they mention…ask them what it means, and it is unfortunate that they neglect the rest of the passage, because invariably they will tell you that if you don’t believe in Jesus than you are going to hell.”
Let’s just stop right there, because that very notion is antithetical to our faith – our incarnational and Trinitarian belief that God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit are three in one, and one in three, and that Christ is God incarnate. They are interchangeable, and so if someone is in relationship with God by some other path, which God has provided to them – be it as a Jew or a Muslim, or whatever – then they are in relationship with what we call the Christ – just as we are also in relationship with the God that is manifest in their faith too, because it is all the same God!
Yes, it may have been the intent of the authors of this gospel to push aside the Jewish people (hence the prevalence of “the Jews” statements that we must be mindful of when reading it). However, we must remember that God came into our world as…a Jew – Jesus was a Jew – and by no means should we then try to box God into creating only a single path to Her, especially one that would exclude the very people Jesus called his own. Indeed, our St. Paul was quite clear about that – the Jews will always be the first and chosen.
All that to say that there are some important truths for us in these texts today, but only if we are willing to let go of the easy answer and look deeper. To do that, we need to understand what was meant by that most famous of verses, which can then liberate us to embrace the meaning for us today.
First, we should keep in mind who Jesus was speaking to – Nicodemus. That’s right, the learned Jewish leader who sought Jesus out in the night – sought the light within the darkness – good old Nick at Nite. That was who Jesus was speaking to in this passage, we just cut out that whole story in our lectionary, and jump in at the end. Don’t you just hate that, when somebody gives you the end before you get to the beginning?
The rest of the passage – both before this part, and within what we heard today – is about light and dark, which is featured throughout this gospel. Remember that right from the opening, right in the first chapter – we hear first and foremost not about the Word becoming flesh, but about the light coming into the world – into the darkness. “The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.” Light was what God sent to the world.
And finally, without doing too deep a dive into the Greek – suffice it to say that a better translation of what we read now as “For God so loved the world…” would be “For God, in this way, loved the ones who despised themselves and God…” or, keeping with the light and dark theme “For God, in this way, loved those who kept themselves in darkness, by sending a light that no darkness could overcome.”
And here is why all that is important, and not just some esoteric seminary stuff that hopefully didn’t already bore you to tears… When we focus our attention solely on the exclusionary language of believing in Jesus, rather than on the larger context, we find ourselves tripping on the anti-Semitism of this gospel, and missing another message within it that makes it worth not tossing aside from our canon. We end up focusing on the wrong thing – just like Nicodemus, and…just like the Israelites in the desert with Moses. And yes – let’s get ready to talk about snakes on a plain – because we may just have forgotten that the first words Jesus says in this passage snippet were about the very story we heard in Numbers – and it’s all about snakes – real and proverbial.
Now, does anyone else think it’s kinda great timing that we are getting snakes today as we head into St. Patrick’s day this Saturday – The Saint that drove the snakes out of Ireland, or so the legend goes? Which reminds me of this silly little story about a snake:
An old snake goes to see his Doctor (I know…I did say it was silly) Anyway, he says, “Doc, I need something for my eyes…I can’t see well these days.” So, the good doctor fixes him up with a pair of glasses and tells him to return in 2 weeks. The snake comes back in 2 weeks and tells the doctor he’s very depressed. The Doc says, “What’s the problem…didn’t the glasses help you?”
“The glasses are fine doc, I just discovered I’ve been living with a water hose the past 2 years!”
I know, I know – you lost an hour of sleep, you don’t need to be tortured with this – but this is what happens when your priest loses an hour of sleep. And besides, here’s the thing…snakes weren’t the point of the story we hear in Numbers anyway. People were the point. People who have entered into darkness – and can’t find their way out.
The Hebrew people had been journeying so long in the desert that they lost their way – no, not for lack of a GPS – but because their lives were not meeting their expectations. Their despair turned their hearts to bitterness, and that darkness then turned outward, as it always does. This is a dangerous thing in any community, and faith communities are not immune. Individual bitterness, once dropped into a community, can infect everyone as quickly, and with as deadly a venom, as any snake. Is it any wonder that when we speak of someone using harmful language we often refer to it as venomous? And, it can eat away at individuals and all those around them.
But why on earth would God throw a bunch of snakes at them? I mean, really? Isn’t that like pouring oil on a fire?
I am reminded of a very old Native American tale. “A Cherokee Elder was teaching his grandchildren about life. He said to them, “A fight is going on inside me … it is a terrible fight between two wolves. One wolf represents fear, anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride and superiority. The other stands for joy, peace, love, hope, sharing, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, friendship, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith. This same fight is going on inside you, and inside every other person, too.”
The children thought about it for a minute and then one of them asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?” The old man simply replied, “The one you feed.”
The people were biting one another and God with poisonous venom. They were feeding the worst of themselves, and that in turn was feeding the worst in the community. They were devolving into the darkness of that other wolf. And, as a friend of mine put it: “Into the midst of [that] discontent God throws snakes that bite the people. Only by facing up to the effects of the poison (looking at the hoisted serpent) can the people begin to heal.”[1] She is quite right. Or put another way, only by being shown their own two wolves can they begin to see the one they have been feeding, and the darkness of hate in which they have wrapped themselves. Only then are they able to then step into the light of love.
And, so Jesus reminds Nicodemus that “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness,” so will he be as well – and, for the same reason too. For you see, in our human condition – then, as now – we will often fall into the darkness of our pride, our discontent, our bitterness at what life has dealt us. We feed that other wolf. It is natural, it happens to most, if not all, of us at one time or another. We have all been, or have known people, who are just like those Israelites in the desert. In the church, we sometimes refer to this as the “parking lot discussions” – the ones where people gossip or complain, but not openly – not with the intent of helping, but of hurting. When that happens, when we become as the Israelites were, we have turned our backs on the light, and entered into the darkness – and that is contagious to all around us. We condemn ourselves by our actions in response to this pain, but one thing is absolutely certain – we are not condemned by God.
God doesn’t do these things to people – life is full of wonderful things – new beginnings, joy, love, companionship…and full of difficult things too – death, sorrow, pain. It is part of our human existence. And into this human existence God came. For those people whose hearts have grown dark out of their misery – whose wolves have devoured them from the inside out – for them most of all did God become human – and in that humanity, God understood that death would result.
Jesus, the incarnate One, would die, would live, and would ascend, and in that experience – in our looking up at the cross, first with him on it, and then empty, we are healed – we are brought from our own condemnation, turned back from our own darkness. Because in looking at the cross, we stare directly at the snake of the world’s bitterness – we stare directly at that other wolf of our own despair – and we remember that God truly did love us so very much that we healed in the knowledge of that wondrous gift.
So, you see – to take this passage and use it to exclude anyone from God’s grace is a sign of our own darkness and self-condemnation, not of God’s. It is missing everything God hopes for us. It means we have rejected the Christ crucified, we have refused to let go of our darkness, we have turned away from the light. We are feeding the wrong wolf.
God hopes we choose another path, because today we face so many trials of humanity’s capacity to do harm – the earth is groaning under our abuse and neglect, children are being killed through violence or starvation, many live on the margins to which we have pushed them, there is rampant poverty of the spirit and of means. These are all the result of the self-condemnation of people whose hearts are filled with darkness – who feed the wolf that devours their own soul and the souls of others. It is for them that God came into the world. And it is for them, that we too, as the body of Christ, leave these doors and go into the world too.
Yes, us. Remember what we said today in our catechism, which we do in Lent. For all of the ministers of the church: Deacon, Priest, Bishop, and yes – laity – you, The ministry of a each one “is to represent Christ and his Church.”
And now, perhaps more than ever, we must live into our calling. For if any remains in darkness, all of us become touched by the shadows – in fact we know that we can never be fully in light whenever any of our sisters and brothers lie in darkness.
And so we must go, as God did – to those who have imprisoned their hearts with hate and venomous bitterness, to those feeding the wrong wolf, knowing that the light we carry within us – the light of Christ – can never be overcome by darkness. We are now to be that staff, that others might see in us that same love and grace shining through us – shining through our cracks, our own vulnerabilities, our own brokenness – shining to heal and restore to wholeness all who encounter us – shining to defeat the darkness of the world.
I am reminded of Holy Cross Monastery in West Park, NY, which is a favorite retreat place for many in our diocese. In fact, our vestry goes on retreat there, and will be there again this fall, and I will be there next week with our bishop. Retreats are where we come to see both wolves, and learn to feed the one that feeds us. And so it is appropriate, I think, that over the door to the guesthouse at Holy Cross is a message in Latin “Crux est Mundi Medicina” – The Cross is the Medicine of the World. Or put another way – the cross is the staff in the desert of our despair. It is the medicine by which we begin to feed the good wolf, and starve the other.
In this Lenten season, we are moving now toward that very cross – toward Jerusalem with Jesus – toward Holy Week. May we not turn aside from this journey, but embrace it – stepping boldly into the shadow of the cross, staring directly into the darkness of Good Friday, that we may know the wickedness of the world, and the way in which even that was no match for God’s far more powerful love found in the Christ Jesus.
The cross is then not a serpent that bites, but a symbol of healing – medicine for a sick world.
Medicine perhaps for each one of us.
Let us look upon it and be healed for our sake, and for sake of the world God loves so very much.
Amen.
For the audio from the 10:30am service, click here, or subscribe to our iTunes sermon podcast:
[1] From a homiletical recommendation of Dr. Deirdre Good, Professor of New Testament.
The Rev. Diana L. Wilcox
Christ Church in Bloomfield & Glen Ridge
March 11, 2018
Lent 4
1st Reading – Numbers 21:4-9
Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22
2nd Reading – Ephesians 2:1-10
Gospel – John 3:14-21
