Texts: John 3:14-15 (Numbers 21:4-9)                                             W Laetare (4^th Sunday in Lent)

Lifting Up Christ

            In the name of him who loved us and gave himself for us, dear brothers and sisters in Christ:  “For God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whosoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life.”  John 3:16 … that’s got to be the most memorized and dearly loved passage in the entire Bible.  And for good reason:  this one verse contains the very heart of the Gospel message, and it reveals God’s super-abounding love for all of lost mankind.  It’s small wonder that it sparkles for so many Christians as one of the Bible’s prettiest and shiniest gems.

            But what I’d like to point out it is that doesn’t appear by itself in the Scripture.  It doesn’t just float freely through the air or appear alone against a blank white background.  No, our gracious God went to great pains to place this particular gem in a setting that would highlight its luster and value, just like a master jeweler would do with a particularly magnificent stone.  I’m referring to the passages around the verse that give it context and significance – that help us truly appreciate its wonder and brilliance. Too often, many Christians, in their eagerness to hold and treasure John 3:16 by itself, inadvertently tear it out of its beautifully designed setting and so, to their disadvantage, lose some of the meaning and power God intends it to have for us.

            Just to give you an example of what I mean, part of the verse mentions not perishing; and by itself, it almost sounds as if you’ve come to a fork in the road.  Believe in him and you live; don’t believe in him and you’ll be condemned to destruction. It sounds as if that’s in front of you and it’s either/or: make your choice.  But if you read on just a bit past John 3:16, you find out that’s not the way it is at all. Verse 18 says that those who don’t believe in him are “condemned already”.  It’s past tense.  When you put that idea back into verse 16, you see that God gave his Son not to save you from taking a wrong turn, but rather to lift you straight up out of hell where you already belong.  This, in turn, gives greater force to the mention of God’s love.  He gives his Son not for those for who are his friends or who are least morally neutral as they merrily make their way through life; but rather for those who are his wicked, rightfully condemned enemies. Do you see what I mean about the setting giving more power and meaning to the verse?

             The part that comes before does this even more strongly.  John 3:16 says, “God gave his … Son”; but verse 14 illustrates exactly how God gave his Son.  “As Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up.” Like a snake:  a creature cursed by God … lifted up:  an obvious reference to the cross, the most horrible and painful death imaginable—that’s how God gave his Son.  Do you see how pulling the verse out of its context almost sanitizes that word “gave”? It makes it so much prettier and more palatable; it’s more like a gift-wrapped box of chocolates sort of giving – “Here you go; I want you to have this” – instead of the damned, ugly, bloody, repulsive, suffering and dying that it is.

But I think that for the most part, Christians prefer the sanitized version. We want our religion bloodless and our God to be perpetually smiling.  We don’t like looking at the cross of Christ.  It confronts us with things we’d rather not think about: wrath and judgment and suffering and death – and more to the point, our sin that brings it all about.  We’d rather skip over all that unpleasant stuff and go right to God’s grace. But, you see, without the cross it’s a weak and anemic grace, because it avoids everything God’s grace is really about.

In last week’s Epistle, we heard St. Paul say that regardless of what people want to hear, “We preach Christ crucified.”  Later in the same letter to the church at Corinth he says, “I am resolved to know nothing among you but Christ and him crucified.”  Picking up the same theme, Luther said it this way: “The cross is our theology.”  God gave his Son to suffering and death on the cross to bear our sin and shame – to be damned in our place – in order to give us life.  That truth is the bread of life from heaven. That’s the food God gives us that we need every day to nourish and sustain the life of faith as we journey here below.  But like the Israelites in the desert, we get sick of it.  We grow impatient hearing about our sin all the time and about what God has done to save us from it.  It’s always the same:  Word, sacrament, confession, absolution, Baptism, Lord’s Supper, Creed … c’mon! Is this all there is?  With the Israelites, tired of the same old manna we complain, “We detest this miserable food.  Give us something else, something more palatable.  Give us the box of chocolates.”  And unfortunately there are many in the modern Church who are more than happy to provide it. 

Which makes me wonder what it would have been like if we modern Christians had been out there in the desert with the Israelites. It’s an interesting thought. So, if you’ll indulge me in a flight a fancy for a few moments, I’d like to present how things might be if we were to take the Christian today and place it out there with Moses “on the route to the Red Sea around Edom.”  And one disclaimer:  please understand that any similarities to the names and ideologies of any real persons are purely intentional.

The situation is this:  we’ve been out here now for nearly forty years in the hot, dry, dusty desert. We’re on the home stretch now, eager to take possession of the land flowing with milk and honey.  In it are delights that we can only imagine.  It’s been ages since anyone of us has so much as seen a shady tree, a fruit orchard, a grape vineyard, a babbling brook or cold mountain stream. Imagine: fresh baked bread right out of the oven.  We haven’t had it for forty years.  All we’ve had is manna and an occasional quail.  You know how much meat there is on a quail?  Or how about a real house instead of a tent?  A place to put down roots and call home?  We’re so close … we’re almost there … and now’s there’s been a setback.  It’s going to take us a few weeks longer than we thought to get there.

That’s what started the rebellion.  We got our hopes up and then God put us on hold for a little bit.  And forty years of frustration came pouring out: “We’re sick of it, Lord, do you hear? There’s no bread, there’s no water, and we’re dying out here.  And all we’ve got is this stinking manna, and we hate it.”  Instead of thanking God for his infinite grace and provision all these years, we started complaining bitterly about the means God has used to take care of us. In response, God sends some snakes into the camp to help us with some attitude adjustment and to remind us of what this whole thing is all about.  Now, as people lie dying in pain from their snakebites, we are forced to remember our sin and his grace.  Boy, are we a bunch of ingrates.  We cry out to the Lord and beg him to take the snakes away.  In his mercy, he answers.  He doesn’t take the snakes away, but he gives us a way out. He has Moses set a bronze snake on pole and raise it up.  

And Moses says, “Whenever anyone is bitten, let him look at the serpent that has been raised up for you, and you will live.”

But there are some two or three million people in the camp, so runners go from Moses in every direction to explain God’s great solution to our problem. They tell the various leaders and elders of all the tribes and clans of Israel so that they can pass the message down to us, the people. Unfortunately, it’s at this level that this very simple message gets terribly confused.

One of the elders is a fellow named Robert Schulleriah. And Schulleriah feels that his folks are a very sensitive group of people.  He thinks that it wouldn’t be a good idea to tell them that these snakes have been sent as a punishment for sin.  That might hurt their tender feelings and bruise their fragile senses of self-esteem. So instead of directing people to look at the bronze snake, Schulleriah encourages them to think positively about themselves and life in the wilderness, and even the snakes too.  The answer to the problem, he says, is found in the power of positive thinking.

Of course, some folks, despite all their positive thoughts, are really disturbed about why all these seemingly good people are suffering so terribly from snakebites.  If God really exists, and if he’s as good and gracious as is said, they reason, then he must not be all-powerful.  Otherwise he would have prevented this tragedy from happening. So they established support groups for those who have been bitten, and also for those who have lost loved ones from snakebites. They sit in circles and talk about their experiences and draw encouragement from the others.  These groups really help the people recover more of their self-esteem.

Some others take this idea of positive thinking to the next level. They argue that since God is good and because he made everything good, and since these snakes appear to be bad, then the snakes must not be real. Ironically, they begin to refer to themselves with the unlikely name “the Snake Scientists”. They tell people that if you are suffering from snakebite, you need to refocus your thinking and realize that there are no such things as snakes and venom and sickness. Similar groups with a variety of New Age names begin to hold seminars to teach people how to meditate to visualize peace and health in the midst of all the chaos in the camp caused by negative thinking.

And in response to all this, Moses says, “Whenever anyone is bitten, let him look at the serpent that has been raised up for you, and you will live.”

In another portion of the camp, there’s a group that’s not so much against the idea of the snake on the pole, but they feel that what we really need is to address the root of the problem, which is our bad moral behavior that caused God to send the snakes in the first place.  One of their leaders, Elder James Dobsoniel, says, “We have this plague of snakes because we’ve lost our moral compass. For the sake of our children we need to develop a stronger sense of ethics so that we can get rid of these snakes.”  Elder Pat Ben-Robertson and D’James Kennediah agree with him.  They say that we need to choose more conservative leaders who will inspire us to higher standards of behavior. Ben-Robertson is organizing a club of 700 founding members who have the goal of calling the whole camp back to our pre-wilderness morality.  He calls it “the 700 clique”.  Meanwhile, Elder Jerry Falweliel says the real problem is all “those sinners” with the rest of us in the camp.  He thinks all we have to do is identify the sinners and drive them out.  The snakes will be sure to follow.

On the other side, Elder Harold Campingham says that the snakes in the camp are a sign that God wants everyone who is faithful to leave the camp.  He encourages everyone to flee to small “transitory settlements” in the desert. They still have problems with snakes, though not technically in their camps because they don’t call them camps. They also don’t wander off too far, because the manna only falls here in the camp and not in their “transitory settlements”.

There’s another elder named Bill McCartniel.  He says that the moral problems we have are the result of the men in the camp not taking their family responsibilities seriously. Specifically, they’re falling down as spiritual examples and guides. He’s come up with a list of seven promises that he thinks all men should agree to keep.  Those who do get to join a group called “Covenant Keepers”. They meet regularly at big rallies where they remind each other of the seven promises, do a lot of self congratulating, and swap emotional stories about how they used to be failures and how now they’re now doing so much better.  They like all this because it puts the focus on what they are doing, and not on that snake on a pole.

And in response to all this, Moses says, “Whenever anyone is bitten, let him look at the serpent that has been raised up for you, and you will live.”

On one of the outer edges of the camp, there are some folks who are focused on being more spiritual than the rest of us.  They believe that God sent the snakes into the camp to test our faith because we just don’t have enough of it.  Elder Oral Robertziah is saying, “We need to speak faith to this situation.” He tells everyone that they need to take authority over the snakes, rebuke them, and “bind them in the name of the Lord.” And please understand, it’s not that he’s against the snake on the pole, it’s just that he feels it’s a crutch for the spiritually immature.  Elder Benny Hinnel agrees with him, but he thinks the reason people are dying from snakebites is because they aren’t sufficiently filled with the Holy Spirit.  “If you had the Spirit”, says Hinnel, “then you could do miracles that would allow you to overcome the burning venom of these demon snakes.”  Others in the camp say that more prayer warriors are needed to combat the snakes.  They say, “The secret to defeating snakes is fasting and fervent prayer!”

There’s one peculiar elder named Neil Ben-Anderson who insists that the snakes are the result of traumatic experiences you had as a child.  These experiences wounded you spiritually and made you susceptible to snakebite. He offers to help you recover your repressed memories so that you can discover the hurts that make you vulnerable to the snakes.  If you can’t remember anything particularly traumatic, he tells you that the reason that you can’t is that there are powerful demons blocking your memories – which proves that you were once the victim of Satanic Ritual Abuse. He then supplies the missing information so you can remember what really happened to you. Then, having identified the demons and the old hurts, you can claim victory over them – and then you won’t be susceptible to snakebites anymore.

And in response to all this, Moses says, “Whenever anyone is bitten, let him look at the serpent that has been raised up for you, and you will live.”

Well, it happens that way over on the left side of the camp, there are some very clever people are who raising serious questions about Moses and his so-called direct line to the Lord.  Has he really heard from God about this snake on a pole thing? Is he just making parts of it up? What about all those things he says God told him that we don’t understand? Or the things that seem inconsistent? Many of them think that the healings that have taken place after people have looked at the snake on the pole can easily be explained by natural causes.  Besides, if God is talking, how come it’s just to Moses?  Why isn’t he talking to other smart, highly educated folks like them? They’re forming a group to vote on the probable authenticity of the things God may or may not have said to Moses. They call themselves the Moses Seminar.

Some women in the camp are pretty skeptical too.  They’re upset because Moses did not share the responsibility of setting up the pole or spreading the word about it with the women.  They feel that a woman could have set up the pole just as well as (and probably better than) any man.  They protest that the women have been repressed and put down by the men ever since leaving Egypt.  One of them has been going around saying, “I’m not looking any snake on a pole that was set up by a man.  Besides, have you heard?  It’s a male snake!”

And in response to all this, Moses says, “Whenever anyone is bitten, let him look at the serpent that has been raised up for you, and you will live.”

Well, there are other groups.  One is led by a fellow named Mark Hansonezzer.  They believe that we have to get past all this bickering and arguing about cures for snakebite.  Sure, the snake on the pole works for some people; but surely there are other cures that work.  Lot’s of folks are very attached to their own home cures.  We have to be careful not to offend them by saying that ours is the only way.  The important thing is that we be accepting of our differences and try to get along.

Another group agreed that the situation in the camp was critical, and that Moses had indeed heard from God, but they felt that you couldn’t just direct dying people to look at a snake on a pole.  They believe that Pole-gazing is an acquired taste.  So, before you can properly direct people to look, you need to take their course on snakebite sensitivity training.  One of their elders says, “We need to find out what people are looking for to address their felt needs.  Before we push them toward the pole, we need to find out what they are looking for in a pole.”  This started to catch on.  Now some have aerobic classes so that people will be better able to run from the snakes. And there are programs being offered that teach the principles of living in a snake infested camp, how to manage your money in a snake infested camp, and how to have a happy marriage, raise your children, and perform tent repairs all in a snake infested camp.  There are others who just get together to sing happy songs so that they can forget about the troubles and heartache of living in a snake infested camp.

And in response to all this, Moses keeps on saying, “Whenever anyone is bitten, let him look at the serpent that has been raised up for you, and you will live.”

            But the Lord God, looking down at all the confusion in the camp said, “What you people really need are some more snakes.”  And he sends them so that when every foolish human plan fails, people will have no other option but to look at the snake on the pole that was raised up as the cure for all.

            So may we, as we wander through this wilderness feeling the sting of the serpent’s bite, always look to the One who was raised up for us – who suffered the fiery venom, and died in our place – and crushed the serpent’s head.  To him be thanks and praise forever.  Amen.

Soli Deo Gloria!