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March 26, 2006 - Lent 4, Year B

It's not often
that our weekly bible readings
feature animals. The bible has many references to animals
but usually
they are pretty much incidental to the story — donkey, horse, ass, dogs under the table and sheep in the field.
But it's pretty rare
to get one
where the animal
is the main character,
and especially
where that animal
is a snake.

Growing up as I did in Australia
we knew all about snakes.
They belonged in the list of deadly things you don't go near: sharks, spiders and snakes.
We learned as small children
that the best thing to do
was to avoid them.
I remember scrambling out of the sea
when the shark alarm sounded,
and carefully squashing a red-back spider with the heel of my shoe.
But snakes were pretty rare.
We were taught in school about how to treat snakebite: a compression bandage on the site of the bite, elevate the limb, and get medical help as fast as you could. It also helped to know what kind of snake it was — brown snake, copperhead, death adder, red-bellied black snake, taipan snake or tiger snake — so the hospital knew what kind of anti-venom to use.
But the closest I ever came to a deadly snake
was finding the skin
cast off by a red-bellied black snake.
But there was always that fear
as you stepped over a log
or crawled under the house
that a snake would be lurking there
waiting for you.

And all that makes me somewhat sympathetic
to the wandering Israelites
when they found themselves surrounded by poisonous snakes
sent by an unsympathetic God.
The snakes were deadly,
like my Australian ones, but there was no anti-venom. If one bit you,
you died.

Of course, as the story goes, it was all their own fault. You know the story. They had been slaves in Egypt, oppressed by Pharaoh,
and then after plagues of bugs and frogs and blood and boils,
and a dramatic escape through a suddenly dry river bed,
Moses led them out to freedom.
But — and it was a huge but — Moses
didn't really seem to have
much of a sense of direction.
The idea
was that he was supposed to lead them
back to their ancestral home
in what we now know
as Canaan,
the land
that Abraham had won for them in his covenant
with God.
Instead
they ended up
wandering round in the wilderness
trekking backwards and forwards
across the Sinai Peninsula
with apparently no hope
of ever getting
back home.
They might as well
have stayed
in Egypt.
And so they grumbled and whined. There's no food. There's no water. We — no, you — are lost!

And God sent them food, manna from heaven,
and God sent them water, gushing out from a rock,
and God led them
with a pillar of cloud by day
and a pillar of fire by night.
And still
they complained.

Until finally, God had had enough.
And he sent snakes, poisonous snakes
and they bit the people who had been whining
and the people died.

It's a grim story, one that doesn't really
endear us
to God.
God comes out
looking nasty, vindictive, angry.

But to make sense of this story
we have to get past all that, and go back
to the very roots of our faith,
the story
of creation
and fall.
Back at chapter three
of the book
of Genesis.

You know
how it goes.
God creates the world. Six days
of beautiful, wondrous new life.
And a seventh day
of rest.

And a part of that beautiful, wondrous new life
is humanity. A man and a woman
put in the middle of creation
and granted the care of it all.
God hangs out with them
in the evenings.
They get to name things — fish, butterfly, flower —
and to eat anything, anything
they find there
except the fruit
of just one tree. If they eat that,
they will die.

And then along comes
the snake.
The bad guy.
You don't have to listen to God. You can eat anything you like. Just taste
and see.

And the woman tastes
and the man, and suddenly
it's like all the color has drained away.
And that evening
they are too afraid
to go hang out
with God.

And God says to the snake:
‘Because you have done this,
cursed are you among all animals
and among all wild creatures;
upon your belly you shall go,
and dust you shall eat
all the days of your life.
I will put enmity between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and hers;
he will strike your head,
and you will strike his heel.'

Whether you take it literally and argue
that it happened exactly like this; whether you take it figuratively,
a story that makes sense of the world as we know it,
the result is the same. Snakes are not
to be trusted. Snakes
are to blame. Snakes
are evil.

And it's the same in the time of Moses.
Snakes are not
to be trusted. Snakes
are to blame. Snakes
are evil.
No wonder
when snakes invade the campsite
and people begin to die from snakebite,
they begin to panic. And they rush to Moses,
"Help. We must have done something wrong. God must be punishing us. We're sorry. Do something!"
And Moses begins to pray to God, and God tells him
to make a snake out of bronze
and put it on a pole.
And whenever someone was bitten by a snake
they could look at the bronze snake
and live.

Snakes are not
to be trusted. Snakes
are to blame. Snakes
are evil.
But this snake
brings life.

That's the story in the Old Testament.
But it's not the end of the story
for us as Christians.
Jump forward to the gospel of John
and suddenly Moses's bronze snake
appears again.

Jesus
is talking with Nicodemus.
Nicodemus
is one of the Jewish leaders,
and something about Jesus
has attracted his attention.
So late one night
when everything is dark and quiet
Nicodemus sneaks away from his household
and goes to find Jesus.
And so begins a conversation
that gets to the core of what it means to be a Christian — to be born again, to be given new life
in Christ.
And in the middle of the conversation, when Nicodemus is thoroughly confused,
suddenly Jesus says "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."

It's not accidental. In Jesus's mind
he's got a connection going
between himself and that bronze snake.
Where a snake brought death, another snake brought life.
And more than that,
that bronze snake
became a symbol of hope
that the death that the first snake brought in the garden of Eden,
the death that stripped humanity of their right to live forever,
that death
might one day be overcome.

Jesus is like that bronze snake.
The way the apostle Paul put it was this:
For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being; for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ.
Death came through a human being — we're being told to go back to the story of the garden of Eden, back to the story
of a snake's tempting
and human failure,
back to the story
of the first time humans
succumbed to sin.
Death came through a human being;
but now a human being, lifted up high like the bronze snake —
lifted high on a cross —
a human being
brings life.

And Jesus' death works in two ways.
First, is the way we all know about, if we've heard the story of Easter. Because of the resurrection, because Jesus was raised after he died,
we will be raised too.
Our deaths are not the end.
God will raise us
to everlasting
life.

But there is a second way.
As human beings, we inherited the curse of Adam, the curse of not living forever. We all live
under the sentence of death.
And living under the sentence of death
means living with fear, without hope, without a future.
We're kind of like those people back with Moses, just after they got bit.
But when they looked up a that snake on its pole
they received a reprieve from that sentence of death.
They had new hope, new life.

And when we look, when we focus our eyes and our lives
on the Christ who is lifted on the cross,
we get not just a reprieve
but a full pardon
from the sentence of death.
We no longer need
to be afraid; we have hope, we have a future.

There is a group of people
that I hang out with online, about twenty crazy Episcopalians. Most of them I've met, at some church event or other, but usually we just talk via email.

This week, one of my friends was told that she has a lemon sized tumor in her liver. The prognosis
is not too bad — with regular observation and treatment, she'll likely live a normal life for good time yet.
She's the third of our group to be diagnosed with some form of cancer over the last few months, and others are cancer survivors. And as we've talked about it, and complained about how it is that as a group we far outweigh the average cancer rate, and worked at supporting and encouraging one another,
something has struck me.
We're not afraid. Sure, we might be at times, but the overall atmosphere in our conversations
is one of blessing.
We might be under
a physical sentence of death,
we have confidence
that death will not be the end for us.
We are alive in Christ now,
and will be forever.

A bronze snake on a pole
back in the story of the Exodus
took people from death
to life.
Jesus on the cross
takes us
from death
to life.
It makes no sense, logically speaking.
But it makes all the sense in the world
when you take the risk
and put your trust
in Christ.

"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."

 

Sermon ©Raewynne J. Whiteley 2006