Homily: Lent 4 – St. Paul’s Monroe
lectionary
Numbers: Magic of the complaining, poisonous serpents & the healing bronze serpents
Images:
- Moses and the Brazen Serpent
- Manna
- Nicodemus
- Crucifixion, the way of the cross
What wonderful images are conjured up today
Moses & the Serpent
First we have Moses, responding to the complaining people he is leading in the wilderness. It’s always interesting to me when talking with group about those murmuring complaining Israelites, wandering in the desert, that some people naturally identify with the people. Others naturally assume that it is talking about some other group of folks. So God told Moses to put a bronze serpent on a pole and set it up among the people. I’m sure Moses must have said to himself, “Why didn’t I think of that?”
So the bronze serpent on a pole kept the people alive, so they could go on complaining another day.
Moses lifts up the brass snake, curing the Israelites of snakebites. Hezekiah called the snake ‘Nehushtan’, meaning “a brazen thing, a mere piece of brass”. [1] Later editing of the text makes it clear that this association of the Lord God with a mere idol was seen as scandalous, the image of the people coming before the magical pole with the bronze serpent.
It’s not entirely surprising that the idol would be present there in the text because there numerous examples in the ancient near east of serpents as symbols of healing and used as cult objects for sacrifice and prayers.
This example that looks and feels like magic in one of the 5 books of the Pentateuch – the Torah – is not the whole story. It is a vignette crying out for explanation and a larger context.
Snapshot: Paul’s preaching
“You are saved by grace not by works” – it is a basic foundational building block of the Protestant theology many around this part of the world have grown up with.
Paul: For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God– not the result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.
The Reformation – Luther in particular – latched onto that phrase in his effort to redirect, reform, readjust the church as he had experienced it.
From that moment on – because the phrase got turned into a sound bite – the church has had to argue about how it’s both grace and works, that the NT includes both Paul and James. James famously said, “What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds?” Neither of these voices alone does the whole Gospel justice. The Gospels present a complex person, Jesus, – his life and his message – and it just doesn’t fit into a sound bite.
It turns out that thinking in sound bites is not a helpful way to think about things. Like all of us, Paul was an astonishingly complex person, with contradictions and passions, moments of brilliance and moments of weakness. Does he reflect Jesus’ love and compassion or does he reflect the judgmental legalism that he so abhors? Well, some of each.
Snapshot: To Nicodemus – “John 3:16”
In our reading from the Gospels this morning we hear John 3:16 (evoking Moses and the serpent). Jesus is addressing Nicodemus who has asked, “How can someone be born when they are old?” Nicodemus asked. “Surely they cannot enter a second time into their mother’s womb to be born!” In his explanation includes this very famous verse – 3:16.
Why Jesus could have just held up a placard with the chapter and verse on it. Just like the Rollen Fredrick Stewart used to do in the 1980’s. That’s how I initially think of Jesus’ response to Nicodemus. “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.” It’s a placard. A meme.
John 3:16 and baseball games
Rollen Fredrick Stewart (born February 23, 1944), also known as Rock’n Rollen and Rainbow Man, is a man who was a fixture in American sports culture best known for wearing a rainbow-colored afro-style wig and, later, holding up signs reading “John 3:16” at stadium sporting events around the United States and overseas in the 1970s and 1980s. He is serving three life sentences in a California prison after being convicted of multiple kidnapping charges after a 1992 incident. [2]
He later claimed that he drove 60,000 miles a year to attend more than a thousand sporting events over about fifteen years. [3]
Today is my brother’s birthday.
He is with my mother who fell in the middle of the night a couple weeks ago and is now in a nursing home. (Such a common story). David had to drive for 2 days to get Las Cruces. If I tried to tell the story of my mother or my brother on the basis of the last few days, the bare bones of which I have just given you, I think you can see that I would miss most of who my mother and my brother are.
It’s not enough to tell a life in sound bites, slogans, or single vignettes. We are made up of so much more.
We thrive on looking at the snapshots
Not looking at the whole person
We end up with slogans, buzzwords, outtakes, snippets, 15 minutes of fame
a meme, a trend, a craze
These things seem to fuel the American mind and society. And yet I think they fundamentally lead us astray.
Take the episode in the wilderness. Moses and the people and their obviously idolatrous serpent on a pole. We recognize that as some kind of aberration of the Jewish fundamental claim that not only is God one but he is the only God there is.
No, we wouldn’t do that. Or maybe, under similar circumstances, maybe …
Why would God make himself out to look like magic to Moses and the people? Why do we always want to simplify Paul – or the Bible for that matter – into little digestible chunks instead of enjoying the whole delectable feast that is prepared for those who love God? Why do we turn Jesus’ work, – his life, his mission, his message, his salvation – into slogans that end up on the Simpsons of all places?
Proposal:
I think it is God’s concession to our natural-born limitations, the fact that our natural born eyes are not that great, and given the natural course of things they only get worse. I think it is because God recognized from ages long past, that we don’t listen very well, and especially we have trouble listening to the message God has for us.
God’s plan, all along has been to move us from our blindness to vision, our brokenness to wholeness, our self-centeredness to service to all our fellow-sojourners.
God would like us to break free from the shell we were born with and to soar like the eagles he meant us to become. It’s not an easy process.
Buechner, Frederick, “Journey toward Wholeness,” Theology Today, 1993.
“All his life long, wherever Jesus looked he saw the world not in terms simply of its brokenness—a patchwork of light and dark calling forth in us now our light, now our dark—but in terms of the ultimate mystery of God’s presence buried in it like a treasure buried in a field… .Tobe whole, I believe, is to see the world like that. To see the world like that, as Jesus saw it, is to be whole. And sometimes I believe that even people like you and me see it like that. Sometimes even in the midst of our confused and broken relationships with ourselves, with each other, with God, we catch glimpses of that holiness and wholeness that is not ours by a long shot and yet is part of who we are.”
I heard a woman do an interview with Krista Tippet a number of years ago. [4]
The art of mosaic – an ancient art. The materials include stones of similar size, or tessera cut to a particular shape, or broken glass, among others. But it is an art that takes little bits and pieces – little sound bites and snippets – and makes of it a beautiful whole.
What I remember from that talk – which was about spirituality as much as it was an artistic technique – was the way in which the artist understood the medium. For her it was making something beautiful, telling a complete narrative, from broken pieces – like the broken pieces of our lives.
Broken pieces of our lives. God draws straight with our crooked lines.
Sunday’s coming
Sunday’s comin’
I first heard this from Tony Campolo’s rendition. The original was an Easter meditation by S.M. Lockridge (1913–2000), pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in San Diego from 1953 to 1993 [5].
It’s Friday
Jesus is praying
Peter’s a sleeping
Judas is betraying
But Sunday’s comin’
It’s Friday
Pilate’s struggling
The council is conspiring
The crowd is vilifying
They don’t even know
That Sunday’s comin’
It’s Friday
The disciples are running
Like sheep without a shepherd
Mary’s crying
Peter is denying
But they don’t know
That Sunday’s a comin’
It’s Friday
The Romans beat my Jesus
They robe him in scarlet
They crown him with thorns
But they don’t know
That Sunday’s comin’
It’s Friday
See Jesus walking to Calvary
His blood dripping
His body stumbling
And his spirit’s burdened
But you see, it’s only Friday
Sunday’s comin’
It’s Friday
The world’s winning
People are sinning
And evil’s grinning
It’s Friday
The soldiers nail my Savior’s hands
To the cross
They nail my Savior’s feet
To the cross
And then they raise him up
Next to criminals
It’s Friday
But let me tell you something
Sunday’s comin’
It’s Friday
The disciples are questioning
What has happened to their King
And the Pharisees are celebrating
That their scheming
Has been achieved
But they don’t know
It’s only Friday
Sunday’s comin’
It’s Friday
He’s hanging on the cross
Feeling forsaken by his Father
Left alone and dying
Can nobody save him?
Ooooh
It’s Friday
But Sunday’s comin’
It’s Friday
The earth trembles
The sky grows dark
My King yields his spirit
It’s Friday
Hope is lost
Death has won
Sin has conquered
and Satan’s just a laughin’
It’s Friday
Jesus is buried
A soldier stands guard
And a rock is rolled into place
But it’s Friday
It is only Friday
Sunday is a comin’!
If when we examine our lives, we find them to be made up of broken pieces – it is the way of the cross – often portrayed in mosaic – and in the end it’s going to be all right.
Our Lenten journey
As we examine our lives this Lent, I urge you to look at the whole of yourself. Don’t focus on one little piece, what you’re doing right or what you’re doing wrong. Look at your life. See yourself for the precious bundle of joy that your heavenly Father sees. Recognize that this is not the end of the journey – we are still in the midst of it. Though it is a journey to Jerusalem and the cross – Lent ends with us telling the story of Jesus’ death on 2 occasions, Palm Sunday and Good Friday – yet nevertheless, Easter’s comin’. See the whole story at a life near you. Amen.
Snake cults had been well established in Canaan in the Bronze Age: archaeologists have uncovered serpent cult objects in Bronze Age strata at several pre-Israelite cities in Canaan: two at Megiddo, one at Gezer, one in the Kodesh Hakodashim (Holy of Holies) of the Area H temple at Hazor, and two at Shechem.
In the biblical Books of Kings (2 Kings 18:4), the Nehushtan (or Nohestan) (Hebrew: נחושתן or נחש הנחושת) is the derogatory name given to the bronze serpent on a pole first described in the Book of Numbers, which God told Moses to erect to so that the Israelites who saw it would be protected from dying from the bites of the “fiery serpents” which God had sent to punish them for speaking against God and Moses Numbers 21:4–9. In Kings, King Hezekiah institutes an iconoclastic reform that requires the destruction of “the brazen serpent that Moses had made; for unto those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it; and it was called Nehushtan”. The term means “a brazen thing, a mere piece of brass” (Wikipedia)
In Greek mythology, the Rod of Asclepius (Greek: Ράβδος του Ασκληπιού Rávdos tou Asklipioú; Unicode symbol: ⚕), also known as the Staff of Asclepius (sometimes also spelled Asklepios or Aesculapius) and as the asklepian is a serpent-entwined rod wielded by the Greek god Asclepius, a deity associated with healing and medicine.
The caduceus (☤; /kəˈduːʃəs/ or /kəˈdjuːsiːəs/; Latin cādūceus, from Greek κηρύκειον kērū́keion “herald’s wand, or staff”) is the staff carried by Hermes in Greek mythology and consequently by Hermes Trismegistus in Greco-Egyptian mythology. The same staff was also borne by heralds in general, for example by Iris, the messenger of Hera. It is a short staff entwined by two serpents, sometimes surmounted by wings.
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In 1508 Michelangelo’s image of the Israelites deliverance from the plague of serpents by the creation of the bronze serpent on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. ↩
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(Wikipedia) ↩
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(https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justin-taylor/its-fridaybut-sundays-comin/) Easter meditation S.M. Lockridge(1913–2000), pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in San Diego from 1953 to 1993. ↩
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