Roger Ray, pastor
March 18, 2012 Lent 4
John 3:14-21
14And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, 15that 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. 18Those 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. 19And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. 20For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. 21But 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."
About a third of this congregation was packed into Galloway Station last night to celebrate St. Patrick's Day and the fact that there is no video from that gathering will be the focus of our prayers of thanksgiving later in the service. This social gathering was organized by our own June Hertenstein who is the only member of the church with an accent that could pass for Irish.... However, she is no more Irish than St. Patrick was.... June is Scottish, a distinction often lost on this side of the pond but never forgotten in Britain.
Perhaps the more alarming thing I just said though is not that June is not Irish but that St. Patrick wasn't Irish. The truth is that Patrick was born in Wales in the fourth century and was captured and made a slave for several years before he was able to escape and return to his family. Much later, he returned to Ireland as a Christian missionary.
It is always also alarming to many traditionalists to learn that Patrick, although declared to be a saint, was not Catholic.... He lived before the Roman Catholic Church came into existence. And March 17th is not his birthday.
We don't know when he was born but historical records indicate that he died on March 17th.... Not a terribly happy holiday. But the mythical record is that Patrick drove all of the snakes from the Emerald Island which would be a noteworthy thing had there ever been snakes in Ireland. You could say that I drove all of the wild tigers out of Springfield but I'm not going to put it on our stationary because, even though there are no wild tigers in our Ozark woods, it would be somewhat disingenuous of me to take any credit for that fact.
As much as some of this factual information might rile an Irishman in the United States, it would not rise to being worthy of a good fist fight in a pub in Dublin because, in Ireland, they call St Patrick's Day, simply, March 17th. It is a lot more important to second and third generation immigrant families who need a good excuse to drink green beer. Self respecting patrons in pubs in Ireland don't drink green beer.
Mark Twain said, "A lie told and stuck to is as good as the truth." In many ways, so far as religious traditions go, a lie told and stuck to for a few generations becomes the truth. Certain Biblical myths or certain interpretations of Biblical myths become so well situated in our minds that they become so true that no one is allowed to speak or even to think differently.... Which is generally why that none of you free thinkers ever felt like you belonged in a traditional church.
We have before us today one of the most familiar passages of scripture in the whole of the Bible. So familiar that when you see someone unfurl a banner at a football game that reads simply, "John 3:16" you know that you want to try to find a seat as far away from those people as possible.
I've been grading midterm papers all week for my students at Drury so forgive me for putting it just this way, but any "C" grade student could hear these seven verses Russ read for us today and they would be able to tell you that it was the "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, ..." text. A "B" grade student would have also caught that reference to Jesus being like the serpent Moses lifted up in the wilderness.
A solid "B" grade New Testament student would be aware of the reference to the account in Numbers 21, when the people of Israel had escaped from Egypt but they immediately started grumbling about how bad the food was. And, verse 6 says, that God, not caring much for food critics, sent poisonous snakes into their encampment and many of them had died from snake bites. I suppose for our more literalist and fundamentalist friends we should say, "God loved them so much that he sent poisonous snakes into their camp to bite them and kill them so that they would learn to appreciate God's cooking." So, the story goes, rather than command the snakes to go away..... like St Patrick would have.... God tells Moses to make a snake out of bronze and put it on a pole in the midst of the camp and then anyone who looked up at the bronze snake, after being bitten, would not die. There are several things about this narrative that should seem a little fishy to you not the least of which is that the second of the ten commandments we discussed last week very specifically said not to make any graven images of any human or animal..... and now God is telling Moses to make a bronze snake.
But now, an "A" student would dig a little deeper and would be aware that the other point in the Old Testament where this bronze snake shows up is in a text in 2 Kings when King Hezekiah was leading a reform to restore the faith and make Yahweh, once again, the only God in Israel.
In Hezekiah's time, there was a bronze snake on a pole in the courtyard of the temple to which people came and made offerings!
The embarrassing truth of the matter was this, the Israelites, who were not supposed to have any idols, not only had idols but they had them in the temple courtyard until Hezekiah decided that he was the new sheriff in town and he was going to get rid of all of those rivals to Yahweh. Years later, in the priestly accounts of Israel's history, not wanting to admit that they had an idol of a snake in the Temple grounds, they basically made up this insane story about the snakes and Moses making the bronze snake.
And, again, as Mark Twain said, "A lie told and stuck to is as good as the truth." It would have remained as one of those rather untidy little bits of narrative in the Old Testament if John had not picked it up as a metaphor to use to explain why Jesus had been killed.
You see, in spite of what we were told in Sunday School when we were growing up, there was no one in pre-Christian Judaism who was expecting a son of God to come and die for our sins. Some were certainly hoping for a Jewish king who would be a successful military leader who could same them from Roman occupation.... But any talk of a messiah among the Jews certainly did not include a cross!
For most of the followers of Jesus, his cruel execution was the end of the movement. Just like when John the Baptist was beheaded, his movement quickly lost steam and within a generation you didn't find the church of John the Baptist spreading around Palestine and Alexandria.
For the early New Testament writers, the execution of Jesus was a problem to be explained to their readers and they tried lots of different ways to explain it, some of which make more sense than others. In some ways, I believe, the more poetic explanations make more sense than the concrete doctrinal explanations.
Here, in the midst of this beautiful and memorable text, John compares Jesus on the cross to that bronze snake that Moses had allegedly put up on a pole. Now, the story about Moses putting a bronze snake on a pole that you could look at and be cured of a poisonous snake bite is not literally or historically true.... I trust that you are with me on that.... It is a myth used to hide an embarrassing fact that the Jews had kept an idol in the temple courtyard for a couple of hundred years.
But in John's hands, the myth becomes a beautiful metaphor for the sacrifice of Jesus. The Psalms often speak of their kind, literally, their "messiah" being "high and lifted up." And by that, they mean that the king is elevated on a throne high above the heads of the people. The paradox for Christians is that when Jesus was lifted up, he was just lifted up about three feet off the ground and then they nailed him to a cross.
Now, I don't want to go all "Mel Gibson" on you, but what do you think John means when he says that looking up to that tortured, broken, executed body of Jesus, nailed to a cross, will heal you? They were looking for a king, a messiah, who would be a great and successful military leader, who would both protect them and punish all of their enemies and yet, what they got, which is not want anyone wanted, was a messiah on a stick.... Christ on a cross, that looks like failure and the end of the story if all you really want is a throne.
Now, I know that I shouldn't try to tell you exactly what John meant by using this metaphor but if you'll indulge me just a moment to return to my previous story about St. Patrick. Now, the part of Patrick's story that is actually historical, what really did happen is that some really bad assed Irishmen had come to the coast of Wales, raiding defenseless villages and they had taken young Patrick to be a slave.
And he served several years under cruel circumstances in the household of his Irish master until he managed to escape and go back to his family in Britain. There Patrick became a person of great faith, and after several years he decided to go back to Ireland, to go back to the people who had stolen his childhood from him, back to the people who had abused him, enslaved him... the people who had ruined his life.... He went back to those people to share his faith with them, to protect them from the abuses of the vestiges of the Roman army that was persecuting Christians and, the legend has it, he even took money to his former master to pay him the price of redeeming a man from slavery.
What could make a man do that? What could make a man forgive that much? What could lead a man to set aside his own pain, any desire for revenge, and find himself able to sacrifice his life in compassion even for people who don't deserve it at all?
You can look up to a man like that.... You can look up and if you can emulate that character, that willingness to be sacrificed in service of the undeserving, even your own enemies, then I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that if you can do that, you can be healed.
