4th Sunday in Lent
This is the fourth sermon in a series. For the past several weeks, we’ve been following along with the Revised Common Lectionary, the three-year cycle of lessons that we follow in the life of the church.
This year we happen to find ourselves in the Year B, the other two being Year A and Year 12. No, it’s C, of course! And in Year B, during the season of Lent, the Revised Common Lectionary focuses on covenants in the readings from Hebrew scripture.
The covenant stories are really great stories. Thus far we’ve had the aftermath of the story of Noah, with God establishing a covenant with all living flesh never again to destroy with a cataclysmic flood the earth and all that lives upon it. We had the story of Abraham and Sarah who, after years of gamely following along with God’s plan, finally understand and accept what God is promising them. We had the story of Moses in all his Charlton Heston/Cecil B. DeMille-inspired glory bringing the 10 Commandments to the people who’d been freed from slavery. All great stories. All incredibly moving in their depictions of God and God’s selflessness in establishing and strengthening the divine covenant with humankind.
And today? Well, let’s just skip today, because it’s not terribly convenient and really kind of flies in the face of the narrative arch that I’ve been constructing for you all and for myself over the past several weeks. The End. Amen
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Of course, that’s not where it ends, much as I might like it to. The reading for today is one of those readings that I don’t like. Actually, that’s not quite true. I actually like it a lot because on the one hand, if you look at it just right… You know, if you squint just right… Not super-hard, but more like medium-hard. So, if you squint just right, about medium hard, and tilt your head slightly to the left, kind of like a curious poodle…
That’s when I like this reading a lot, because it makes for an easy sermon. You can condemn the stupid, ungrateful, bull-headed Israelites for not being appreciative enough for what all God has done for them, and then we can continue right on with condemning ourselves for being likewise too unappreciative, stupid, ungrateful etc. etc. etc., but not too much, because we don’t want to make everyone depressed, plus we also need to remind ourselves that it’s not all that bad for us, because we’ve got Jesus who makes everything better again… You know, to give us a good start to inoculate us against the week that starts tomorrow.
But when I’m being honest, today’s reading from Numbers is one of those stories that I’ll wiggle out from under if I can at all manage it. It’s just… It’s one of those stories where, in the end, I feel like nobody comes out looking very good.
In the Lutheran Study Bible, the opening notes for Numbers 14 read as follows: “The Israelite journey through the wilderness is punctuated by fits of complaining in Exodus 17 and Numbers 11. This time they are ready to fire Moses and choose someone who will take them back to Egypt. They would rather live in the familiar chains of slavery than the uncertainty of freedom. Many people are like the Israelites, afraid of the responsibilities of liberation. They have been freed from abusive or destructive circumstances, but choose to return to what is familiar. Can you think of situations in which people choose the familiar over the freeing? Why do you think this happens?”
What I really don’t like about this text is really two-fold: First, it’s so completely and utterly avoidable. Second, it’s the whole idea of God sending poisonous snakes…
It’s important to remember that this story takes place within the context of the covenant which God has established with Israel. And God has acted faithfully according to that covenant. God rescued the people of Israel from slavery. God has attempted to deliver them into the land promised to them, the land of Canaan.
The problem is that those whom God has redeemed from slavery in Egypt and with whom he made a covenant at Mount Sinai respond not with faith, gratitude and obedience but with unbelief, ingratitude and repeated acts of rebellion. At their most extreme, the refused to undertake the conquest of Canaan. For their refusal, they were sentenced to spend the next 38 years wandering in the wilderness, until the last of those unbelieving, ungrateful, and rebellious people had died. Such people simply could not inherit the Promised Land.
In our text, we meet them in the third stage of their winding journey, the final leg from Kadesh to the plains of Moab. By now they are more than ready to head directly to the Promised Land. Instead, “they travelled from Mount Hor along the route to the Red Sea to go around Edom.” Yet another detour, one of many in a seemingly endless and endlessly difficult journey! And they snapped. They had had enough. “They grew impatient on the way….” But they took their impatience a dangerous step further: “they spoke against God and against Moses…”
It would be one thing to complain about Moses. Who hasn’t complained about their supervisor on occasion? But it was quite another thing to speak against God—not just to God in complaint or lament or argument, but directly against God in rebellion and rejection.
When you take a close look at what is happening, here, it goes some way in explaining why God respond with slithering poisonous snakes. They didn’t simply question God. They challenged the great, defining redemptive act of God by which they had become free.
“Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the desert?” That isn’t what God had done at all. God had liberated them so they could live in the land of milk and honey. Their death in the wilderness was the result of their sin and unbelief. And they hadn’t even died yet, because even in that dry and barren land, God had provided bread and water. But they complain that there is no bread and water, directly contradicting the reality of the gracious gifts God had given them. And to top it off, they say that they “detest” the gift of manna from heaven, calling it “miserable food.”
In no uncertain terms, Israel is rejecting the grace of God in all its forms—his great redemptive acts on their behalf and his daily provision for their lives. Anything and everything God had done for them in his gracious love is spurned by an impatient, unbelieving, ungrateful and rebellious people. This isn’t the first time they had done something like this, but this is a particularly egregious rejection of grace. So instead of waiting for Moses to intercede for Israel (as God so often did), this time God snapped, too! God’s famous patience runs out and immediately their sin is punished with a plague of poisonous snakes. God has done literally everything for them, but they completely turn their backs on God. Why wouldn’t God be angry—not just sad or heartbroken or disappointed, but downright angry? What human parent wouldn’t feel the same?
But even God’s own righteous anger cannot withstand the power of God’s amazing love. We know that because of what happens next in the story. In response to Moses’ intercession, God’s grace yet again provides salvation from sin and punishment.
They asked Moses to pray that “the Lord will take the snakes away from us!” Instead, God told Moses to make a snake of bronze or brass (a “fiery serpent” in the image of the fiery serpents that were killing them). Put it on a pole and “anyone who is bitten can look at it and live.”
There is a world of gospel wisdom in that ending to the story. God doesn’t simply answer the people’s request to “take away the snakes, because simply taking away the snakes would leave the people dead in sin. Instead of changing their situation, which is all Israel wanted, God knew that the people, themselves, needed to change. The people who had rejected God’s amazing love needed to learn to accept it again. They had turned away from the God who had saved them multiple times. They needed to turn toward that God again and look at his saving work. The snakes remained so that they would learn to look at The Snake on a pole. The snakes weren’t the main problem; their rejection of God’s grace was. That way leads to death of the worst sort. So, Moses calls them to accept God’s grace by believing the Word of God and looking at the Snake on a pole.
Sometimes we may struggle to see the connection between Hebrew scripture and our own sacred stories, but in this case Jesus himself draws the parallel. “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.”
What follows, of course, is the most perfect statement of the Gospel in Scripture in verse 16: 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.17Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”
This story, likewise, brings with it a tremendous amount of suffering. But this time it’s the suffering taken on by God through the crucifixion and murder of Jesus. That tells us that this whole story, especially the most unpleasant part, is about the love of God for the world. God’s love for the world runs so deep, that God must respond strongly to sin. Our lives depend on it.
This is the true power of the Incarnation – God walking among us. Think about it in this way for as moment: the snake is a symbol of death. In our own way, so are human beings! We symbolize darkness, lostness, rebellion, sin and death! And God, in order to save us, is to be found suffering as a human being!
In other words, the story of God’s salvation – from Exodus to Incarnation – is the story of God entering into lostness and redeeming it. The lifting up of Jesus on the cross is both the symbol of the very depths to which humanity sinks (the most potent symbol of evil) and the sign and symbol of Life! Both the snake and the crucified savior become the means of Life because God is there! God embraces the messiness and death-dealing ways of human living in order to save us. God, in love, embraces what is utterly opposite to God – suffering and death. And in doing so, God brings us to eternal life. Thanks be to God! AMEN