March 10, 2024 First Congregational Church UCC in Auburn, MA
Numbers 21:4-9 — 4 From Mount Hor they set out by the way to the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom, but the people became discouraged on the way. 5 The people spoke against God and against Moses, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.” 6 Then the Lord sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died. 7 The people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed for the people. 8 And the Lord said to Moses, “Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole, and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.” 9 So Moses made a serpent of bronze and put it upon a pole, and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.
John 3:14-21 — And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, 15 that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.
16 “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.
17 “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world but in order that the world might be saved through him. 18 Those who believe in him are not condemned, but those who do not believe are condemned already because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. 19 And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. 20 For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. 21 But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.”,*
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God our Rock and Redeemer. Amen.
These two stories, one from the book of Numbers, the other from John’s Gospel, come together in ways hard to predict. After all they were written down at wildly different times, and for very different people.
That kinda makes them a great example of how different stories can work together to tell us something really important. So it’ll be helpful to have a little background.
Our lesson from Numbers is part of the story of the journey of the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt. We’d love to think that journey, because it’s so central to our faith, so holy, was the perfect example of a perfect journey. But the Bible never covers up the ways we fall short of perfection, and so, we hear this time, that the children of Israel have once again turned to whining. If anything goes wrong, you can count on them to whine. It’s their special gift.
Well, according to this story, the whining didn’t go well. God gathers up poisonous snakes and sets them loose among the whiners. People die. (no, God didn’t really do this –I’m guessing it’s the dream of someone who had had to listen to way too much whining, but we’re asked to take it seriously.) Moses prays to God; God tells him to take a poisonous snake, hold it up on a tall pole – then anyone who is bitten can look on the snake and life.
Now, don’t get lost in the practicalities. Just think about this – God suggests to Moses that if the people look on what has made them sick, they can be healed. It might not work for snakebite, but taking the time to look at what has made us sick, is almost always, one of the right paths to healing.
This is exactly what the medical lab is doing when it tests our blood, or whatever… it’s looking closely at what has made us ill, and once it’s identified, then healing can be helped.
It’s exactly what we do if we engage in therapy. Understanding, as an adult, what happened when we were children, can be healing. Understanding the dynamics of a bad situation.
And if you’re trying to figure out why the lawn mower won’t start, the first thing to do is look closely at it, right?
So, though the details of the story seem more than a little odd, the principle the story illustrates is true.
And it is not trivial. Sure, sometimes it’s easy to see that what the lawn mower needs is gas, but sometimes, most of the time, figuring out what’s going on is more complicated. This is particularly true of those things we really don’t see. If you can’t see what’s wrong, you can’t heal it.
It’s way too easy to keep doing what we always do the way our ancestors always did. Habit hides all kinds of shortcomings. God sent us this lesson to remind us that there’s just about always something we need to take a closer look at, not just in our personal lives, but in our social world, our work world, indeed in all our world.
All we need to do to see this wrongness, I think, is to practice listening to people from other parts of our world, from other worlds. I don’t mean just listening to someone from, say, Samoa. I mean listening to those right around us. Here’s what I mean:
Years ago, I was doing an interim down in a church near New Bedford, and was leading a book study with a group of women from the church. We were a mixed bag – some lifelong residents, some newbies, some Yankee in background, some Irish or German, some Portuguese. They’d known each other for maybe thirty years, I think. One of the Portuguese women shared her experiences when she was a child in New Bedford, and how, on her way to school, the Irish kids down the street threw things at her, told her she wasn’t welcome, no Portuguese were welcome there. She wasn’t welcome in the school, or in the local Catholic church.
Her friends were astonished. All about the same age, they had trouble believing her story, but it was for them a beginning, a time to recognize that discrimination is there for many of us, even if those who aren’t being victimized don’t even notice it.
So, we are called to listen, really listen, to those around us, those whose experience of life is so radically different from ours.
But where does the story from John fit in? Well, look again at it… it tells us that at that time and place, one way to frame Jesus’ death on the cross is to see him as lifted up so that we can look on his love and be healed. This reading is the complement to the idea of looking back at the bad; now we are encouraged to look forward to the best example of good that has ever lived.
That picture of Jesus, looking down on us with love, will help us discern the right path among all the choices before us. It will help us recognize the evil in our world, to hear the stories we’ve not noticed before, and to let them change us.
Look on Jesus and be freed from the habits of being self-centered, and the curse off being oblivious to the realities of this world. Look on Jesus, and be people of everlasting love.
Amen.
© 2024, Virginia H. Child
To Believe is to Care. . . To Care is to Do 