4 LENT, YEAR B
22 MARCH 2009
THE REV. ANNE STANLEY
SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH, NORWAY, MAINE
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Numbers 21:4-9; Ps. 107:1-3, 17-22; Ephesians 2:1-10; John 3:14-21
For the Sundays in Lent, we’ve been focusing on the string of covenants God has announced one by one, over time, to Hebrew people. We’ve been hearing these covenants, one each Sunday, read from the Hebrew scripture. Covenants made by God. Covenants made by God to show the people how much God loves them and how God expects them to live their lives.
First, after the flood, God said he’d never again try to destroy the earth. Second, God told Abraham that he would be the father of a multitude of nations beginning with the son that he and Sarah would miraculously produce in their dotage. Third, God laid out the Ten Commandments, a guide for people so they could live in peace with God and with each other.
Today, on Sunday # four, we don’t hear about a new covenant. What we do hear is a tale about the life of the Hebrew people as they carried on living under the covenants they already had. We hear a bit of a progress report. We look in on how they are doing.
First remember, the people are living in the desert. They’ve managed to escape from Egypt, where they’d gone to avoid a famine back home. Life in Egypt was good for awhile but the new pharaoh was cruel and things had turned sour. So God came to the people’s rescue and engineered an escape. Moses was appointed to carry out the plan and then to lead the people through the desert wilderness back home to the land God had promised to them. So the people are free, but for now, they’re stuck in the desert. It is taking a long time to get home and life is hard. They’re low on water and they hate the food. So they gripe and complain to poor Moses, who is doing his best to get them home so they can get on with the job of nation-building. Moses and God have many chats during this trying time, with Moses reporting to God about his hard job controlling the miserable and rebellious people and God listening and giving Moses directions. Even though God reminds the people of what he’d done for them (“I am the Lord your God, remember, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery…”), still the people complain. How soon we forget the blessings we have, it seems….
For the most part, God has been lending a hand, bringing relief to the desert-wandering Hebrews. Remember the manna and the quails? But today, the story is a little different.
Is God getting sick of the complaining? Have the people forgotten God?
Today it’s different. Today there are snakes. “…the Lord sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died.”
Here’s a question for our Lenten lunch conversation today about God and suffering. God made the serpents. Did God make them so that they would bring pain and suffering and death? As punishment? Or were they just there anyway and that’s how the people interpreted their snake bites?
I have read about a type of creature, the Guinea worm, that has lived forever, it seems, in parts of Africa. People are infected by these parasites by drinking standing water that contains tiny fleas that are themselves infected by Guinea worm larvae. These larvae grow in the human hosts to be as long as 3 feet and after many months cause enormous, burning pain, like fire, they say. The worms grow for a year. They can be pulled out through the blisters at that point, but it can take up to a month of pain as they are wrapped around a stick and pulled tiny bit by tiny bit. Sometimes the victims try to release their pain by going into ponds, which causes the worms to emerge more quickly, but this releases thousands of new larvae and the water is instantly infected. Evidence of Guinea worms has been found in calcified Egyptian mummies 3000 years old, and scholars believe these creatures may be the very things that we’ve heard about in this ancient text today, the “serpents” that God “sent,” says the story, because God was angry.
However we interpret this event, the fact remains that the story stayed with the people as part of their sacred history. And here we are, reading it today! If the Hebrews were infected with Guinea worms, it’s easy to imagine why this memory was so vivid for them and why the story has endured.
The traveling Hebrews have prayed to God to get rid of the horrible snakes, or serpents, or Guinea worms. Life under the covenants is tough. The people have erred and strayed and now the chickens have come home to roost, or rather, the worms have come to live in the people’s bodies and teach them a lesson.
But God, being God, eventually answers their prayer. Not by getting rid of the serpents---they exist to this day---but by telling Moses to make a bronze replica of a serpent and to hoist the thing up high on a pole to remind the people of their selfishness, to remind the people that they were paying more attention to themselves and their own well-being than they were paying to God, who was their creator and who had saved them once and whose promises would always hold true, and they mustn’t forget it. The suffering victims saw what Moses had concocted, and they gazed at the bronze serpent as God had said they should do. They remembered their God again and they lived. Sin has its consequences, says this story. We get bitten, but God does not break his own covenants and promises. It is believed that the Guinea worm is the symbol of medical healing we have today: the “serpent” wrapped ‘round a pole.
Jesus knew this story, too, when he talked about the Son of Man being lifted up one day, just as the bronze serpent had been lifted up. We interpret Jesus’ words to mean the cross, with its suffering and resurrection, both. That just as the bronze serpent brought life to the suffering sinners who gazed on it and remembered God who loved them, so, too, we, when we behold the Cross and remember, we, too, receive new life through it. It’s not magic. It has to do with trust, which is what faith means.
It’s a bit bizarre to me, though—that the image of a wriggling serpent which has brought pain and death to many and is fixed on a pole and lifted high, for people to gaze at, is a sign of healing. It’s absurd. But hasn’t God often done absurd things to bring us to our senses? Who’d have ever thought that the Messiah, the Son of God himself, fixed on his own pole, to die in agony there, would end up bringing life to us all and to the world? Everlasting life, life beginning whenever we behold the Cross and trust that it is so, and life continuing through eternity? It is absurd. But this is the fourth Sunday of Lent, the Sunday known as “rejoice” Sunday, the day when our tradition directs us to widen the Lenten theme of repentance to include the hint of resurrection. Repentance AND joy. What better way is there to celebrate this day than to remember the strange, absurd ways that God has used to rouse us to our senses and bring us Good News?