March 10, 2024 Sermon
Sermon title: "Face Your Problems!"
Scripture: Numbers 21:4-9
(Other lectionary suggestions include Psalm 107:1-3 and 17-22, Ephesians 2:1-10, and John 3:14-21.)
Numbers 21:4-9
4From Mount Hor they set out by the way to the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom; but the people became impatient on the way. 5The 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.” 6Then the Lord sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died. 7The 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. 8And 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.” 9So 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.
The sermon title is "Face Your Problems!", and when I came up with that title, I had not plumbed the depths of all the issues raised! And I'll get to some of those in a moment. But first of all, what this Old Testament Scripture lesson may be saying is, Face Your Problems. While God may seem mean and vindictive for the moment, he does tell Moses to make a serpent of bronze and place it on a stick. And when the people FACED that stick, they were saved from the snakes.
Interesting, don't you think, that a snake on a stick is almost an IDOL to which the children of Israel are asked to face? True, they aren't asked to worship the snake on a stick but facing it does have some healing power. And maybe the point of the story - or one point of the story - is don't whine about your problems. FACE THEM, and you will be healed.
One of our lectionary suggestions for today is John 3:14-21, and that passage has Jesus mentioning the snake on the stick that we heard about earlier. For Jesus - and maybe for John also, since he is writing these words - the snake being "lifted up" reminds him that he too is to be lifted up when he is crucified. Here is the passage, starting at John 3:14: "And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life." And then we have what is perhaps everybody's favorite New Testament Scripture: "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." Martin Luther called that passage "the Gospel in miniature".
As I was thinking about this sermon, it occurred to me that we humans have had some kind of fascination with snakes for a very long time. Not only the quotes from Numbers and the Gospel of John but look at the caduceus. Do you know what that is? It's a symbol from medicine, and it consists of a straight up-and-down pole with two SNAKES wrapped around it! And it's not a bad symbol, but a GOOD symbol, a symbol of healing. What is it about snakes that we humans have found so compelling? I don't have the answer, but some Asian cultures have reverence or respect for snakes, too. The Year of the Dragon just started. What is the dragon but a different kind of serpent or snake? There is a lot in us as a race that is both afraid of snakes and respectful of them at the same time. So let me use this cliche: "It's complicated." No place else in the New Testament is this serpent mentioned. While Moses put the bronze snake on the pole so that people would look at it and be saved, John is saying (through Jesus) that the people will be saved by looking on Jesus hanging on the cross. As I said, it's complicated. Are Jesus and the bronze serpent the same? No, of course not! But as the Old Testament Israelites are saved by looking on the snake, so too are WE saved by looking at Jesus's death on the cross. It may be a stretch, but that's what John and Jesus are trying to say.
I originally called this sermon "Face Your Problems!" Perhaps I should have called it, "It's Complicated". In any case, there is a connection between the bronze serpent on a pole in the Old Testament book of Numbers and the death of Jesus on a cross as described in the Gospel of John. In the words of N.T. Wright, the British scholar, "All we can do, just as it was all the Israelites could do, is to look and trust: to look at Jesus, to see in him the full display of God's saving love, and to trust in him.....Believing in Jesus means coming to the light, the light of God's new creation. Not believing means remaining in the darkness..... But the point of the whole story is that you don't have to be condemned. You don't have to let the snake kill you. God's action in the crucifixion of Jesus has planted a sign in the middle of history. And the sign says: believe, and live." Amen. What do you think?
Pastor Skip
