Snakes, Sin, and Eternal Life Now

John 3:14-21

“Just as Moses lifted up a serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him may not perish, but may have eternal life. 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.

“Those 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 holy Son of God. And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world and they prefer the darkness to the light because their deeds are evil. For those who do what is evil hate the light and do not come to the light for fear that their deeds might be exposed. But 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.”

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There’s a story way back in the Hebrew scriptures, in the book of Numbers, that tells of a time when the Israelites were making their in the wilderness, after they’d been liberated from slavery in Egypt, on their way to the Promised Land. They were a miserable, lost, wandering, struggling people, complaining about their lot in life, in spite of having recently been freed from slavery and oppression under Pharaoh. They were hungry, unsure about their future, not happy with and doubts about Moses, who had helped to liberate them in the first place.

And then there were snakes. Poisonous serpents. And the people perceived the serpents – as serpents were inclined to be perceived in Scripture – to be God’s punishment upon them for all of their complaining. The snakes bit and killed so many of them that they begged Moses to do something about it. So at God’s direction, Moses made some kind of a bronze snake on a pole – a sign and symbol of their affliction – so that whenever one of them got bit, they could simply look at the snake Moses had raised up on the pole, and they would be healed, and survive.

When Jesus brings this up this ancient story – generations later, as we heard in this morning’s Gospel – the connection is supposed to be obvious. “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him might have eternal life.” In other words, “look at that which plagues you and you will be made well.” “Face your fallen nature and let God raise you up.” “Look at the result of your sinfulness and watch what God will do with it.” “Lay eyes on those things that cause you such suffering, struggle, and strife, trusting that God’s grace … in Jesus … is enough to conquer them.”

For the Israelites in the wilderness, it was snakes. Generations later, it was – and is – the sins of humanity. For the Israelites in the wilderness, Moses gave them a snake on a pole. Generations later – it was Jesus, himself – on the cross, which we’re invited to see, and through which we’re encouraged to trust our healing to come.

(This modern-day sculpture, on the top of Mt. Nebo, in Jordan, was created to bring all of this together in a beautiful way. Not only is it a bronze serpent, maybe something like Moses lifted up, but it’s one in the shape of a cross and the crucified Christ, too.)

Anyway, in the wilderness, with Moses, the Israelites were told to “look and live,” so they do and they did. And our invitation is the same, “look and live,” but I wonder if it always works for us, in the same way.

See, I think the difference for us, too much of the time, is that we forget – or aren’t encouraged often enough – to realize all of this is meant to happen in real time. When we hear about “eternal life,” it seems to me that popular theology has convinced us that that only applies to life after we’re dead and gone from this life, as we know it. But that just isn’t always or only the way Jesus talks about eternal life.

Modern Christianity is obsessed with heaven and hell; with who gets in and who gets left behind; with how wonderful one is and how terrible the other will be. But Jesus came so that we could have life – and have it abundantly – right where we live. Paul preached about “being saved,” as a work in progress, as something that happens and that is happening to those who are trying to follow Jesus in this life – not just something that has happened or that will happen some day in the future.

When the Israelites were out there in the wilderness, suffering with those snakes, God gave them the gift of the serpent on the pole for their healing in the moment. God didn’t tell Moses to wait until they arrived in the Promised Land; until they made it out of the wilderness; until they suffered some more and struggled some more or until more of them died along the way. The command and the promise was that they should look at that bronze serpent, be healed, and live – right then and there.

But for some reason, too much of the time, we get to Jesus on the cross, and think our salvation and new life is all or only about the other side of heaven; that when Jesus talks about “eternal life,” he’s only talking about a gift we receive after we’re dead and gone; after the snakes and our sinfulness have had their way with us in this life. But listen closely to what he says in today’s Gospel. Much like Moses, his words are about what happens to us here and now, right where live, on this side of heaven, too.

He says, “…those who do not believe … are condemned, already…” (Maybe you could say, “those who do not believe are already being condemned.”) And he says, “…this is the judgement, that the light has come into the world and people prefer the darkness to the light, because their deeds are evil. Those who do what is evil hate the light and do not come the light for fear that their deeds might be exposed.”

In other words, our judgement isn’t only waiting for us once we’re dead and gone – in some kind of eternal Heaven or everlasting Hell, whatever that might look like. We also experience our judgment – much like the Isrealites in the wilderness – every day that we forget or deny or refuse to believe that God’s love and grace have already come; that the light has already dawned; that our deliverance – our eternal life – has already begun, in Jesus.

Those who do what is evil … those who commit sin and are slaves to sin … those who are plagued by shame, or troubled by regret, or saddled with sadness, or full of fear, or lacking faith … (do you know anyone like that?) … our judgment comes when any of that keeps us hiding in the darkness, sends us scurrying from the light, keeps us apart from God’s desire and ability to love us on this side of Heaven.

It’s not a judgement that nips at our heels like so many snake bites… It’s not a judgement that feels like punishment from on high… It’s not a judgement that’s waiting for us, either … scaring us with fear and dread for God’s wrath in the afterlife.

It’s a judgement that impacts our life as we know it, now, simply because it keeps us from living lives infused with hope, fully in the grip of God’s grace; lives liberated by the forgiveness, love, and mercy – already delivered – in Jesus Christ our Lord; the kind of “eternal life” that has already begun with his life, death, and resurrection.

And God doesn’t want any of this judgement for any one of us. And ours is a God who loves a visual aid.

Whether that’s a sculpture in the desert; a cross in the sanctuary; water in the font; bread and wine on the table; or a wall of grief on the altar during Lent, even, we need all the help and practice we can get looking at that which plagues us in this life, not fearing the darkness that surrounds us, seeing the source and result of our brokenness and that of the world, so that we can also look and live… see, acknowledge, and hope – with all the faith we can find – that God’s love is bigger. That we are worth it. And that our eternal life is already underway.

For God so loved the world … that we have this Cross and we have this Jesus …

For God so loved the world … that we have been, we are being, and we will be saved …

For God so loved the world … For God so loves the world …. That God didn’t send Jesus to condemn the world, but in order that the world – all of it and all of us – would be saved through him.

So let us see it and believe it and be changed by the blessing of this good news, so that we are not afraid to come to and live in the light of God’s grace and goodness;

…so that we aren’t afraid to come to and live in and share that kind of light with the broken, hurting, scared and scary world around us;

And so that the judgement of God is less like something that comes from a petulant, oppressive tyrant on the other side of eternity and more like something practical and holy – and something that can change us, here and now – thanks to a God who loves and forgives and cares for us, right where live, on this side of heaven, where eternity has already begun – on earth as it is in heaven – thanks to Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen

Grieving Well - The Sorrows of the World

Matthew 6:25-34

“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. “So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.

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“The Sorrows of the World” sounds pretty ominous and like a whole lot of ground to cover, I know. If I were to ask you to wonder about what we might be invited to tackle tonight, under that banner – “The Sorrows of the World” – I suspect you might guess things like war and poverty and sickness and disease and drug culture and gun violence and racial injustice and more, right?

Well, the good news is we’re not going to go down all of those roads tonight. Instead, I’d like to take “The Sorrows of the World” quite literally. So, I’m inviting us to grieve for the world … for creation … for all that God has made … and how its sorrow – that of the planet we call home – inspires our own sadness and impacts our own grief, whether we always realize that or not. And that’s enough trouble for today, as Jesus would say. “Today’s trouble is enough for today.” Today’s grief – this very particular grief – is enough for tonight.

Because, National Geographic has reported, that 90% of the oceans’ fish populations that were around in 1950 are no longer, and that a crucial mass of the world’s stock of fish may very well run out by 2048. (That’s within my lifetime, if I’m lucky. I’ll only be 75 years old. My son, Jackson will be 44. Max will only be 41, both younger than I am now.)

According to the World Wildlife Fund, there was a 52% decline in wildlife populations between 1970 and 2010. In those 40 years, more than half of something like 3,000 species of not just fish, but mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and birds have been decimated thanks to global warming, pollution, and disease. On our wall, the kids and families tonight - before dinner and worhsip - put some fruit bats, some catfish, some mussels, some honey creepers, all creatures that went extinct in 2023.

So, when I was reading one of the books that inspired much of this midweek series on GRIEF – I’ve mentioned it before, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, by Francis Weller – I was particularly moved by the way he describes our souls’ innate, spiritual, bodily connection to the world around us. (Francis Weller is a therapist and counselor who does a lot of work with people – as individuals and in groups – around grief.)

Anyway, about our grief for creation and “the sorrows of the world,” he says: “Whether or not we consciously recognize it, the daily diminishment of species, habitats, and cultures is noted in our psyches. Much of the grief we carry is not personal, but shared, communal.” And he sites a psychologist named Chellis Glendenning, who has gone so far as to call all of this “Earthgrief” and she says, “To open our hearts to the sad history of humanity and the devastated state of the Earth is the next step in our reclamation of our bodies, the body of our human community, and the body of the Earth.”

Now, Weller doesn’t attach any of this to Scripture or faith, necessarily, but it helped me to think about the creation story in Genesis differently. We get so caught up, too often, in the details of the creation stories – how there are two versions of creation in Genesis, for instance, and that they tell very different stories about how it all came to pass. And we wonder whether we should understand them literally or as prehistoric poetry, for example.

But, I think it may be enough to focus and reflect on a Truth our creation stories try to tell: that we are, all of us – men and women, birds and bugs, fish, flora, fauna, stars and sand – created from the same dust; and that we are, therefore, bound together by the source of life we understand to be God, the creator of the universe. And that when one or some of what God has created suffers, we are all – each of us – bound to that suffering, in a cosmic, spiritual, practical and holy way.

And, just when I was wondering if this Francis Weller guy might be a little too “new age-y” or esoteric or “spiritual, but not religious” enough; I came across this bit from an encyclical published by Pope Francis, himself, where he said, “Thanks to our bodies, God has joined us so closely to the world around us that we can feel the desertification of the soil almost as a physical ailment, and the extinction of a species as a painful disfigurement.” (Pope Francis, The Joy of the Gospel [Evangelii Guadium], no. 215) Again, this is a grief we know and feel, in our being, whether we always give it words or attention or credit for the impact it has on us, or not.

And, honestly, the more I thought about this, the more I realized I didn’t need Francis Weller or Pope Francis to tell me this.

When I was in elementary school and fishing off the dock at my Uncle Charlie’s house in Celina, Ohio, I caught a nice-sized carp at a family gathering. The thing was huge, I could hardly lift it, but I don’t think anyone even thought to take a picture. While I was impressed with myself, and learned that no one in their right mind – in the great state of Ohio, anyway – would eat carp for dinner, I was scandalized when my uncle demanded that, instead of throwing the fish back into the lake from whence he came, we dig a hole and bury it alive, instead. It was a trash fish, I was told, and did more harm than good, wasn’t good for anything, and all the rest. Which I kind of understand. But again, I felt sorry for that damned fish as it died in the dirt!

A few years later, my friend Dave and I were visiting my grandparents and found an old BB gun that belonged to my mom and her siblings when they were kids. We did what many young boys would do, of course. We tested it out … shooting at trees and cans and bottles and whatnot. Until I saw a perfectly innocent robin in the field across the street. I was as surprised as Dave to see the feathers fly when I killed the poor bird in one clean shot. I didn’t even need the scolding I got from my grandfather to feel some much-deserved shame and sadness for what I had done.

My point in all of this is to say, I think it’s true that we experience grief for the hurting world – in our bones, in our bodies, in our spirits, and our souls – whether we’re always aware of that or not, but certainly when it is called to our attention, by way of random facts from our Pastor on a Wednesday evening in Lent; or when we hear about the latest, wildfire in Texas, which was breaking news when I woke up this morning; or when we see something as common as road kill; or when our imagination invites us to wonder – not just about the human homes and lives lost in places like Gaza and Ukraine – but when we wonder, too, about the natural habitats that are also destroyed; the air and water that are poisoned; the terror of the birds, bunnies, and beasts of all kinds, who also dodge bullets and bombs; who are also left homeless, limbless, lifeless, orphaned, and more.

This “Earthgrief” is real, it seems to me. And all of creation seems to groan and grieve right along with us, as Paul suggests.

So, I chose tonight’s Gospel reading a bit facetiously. I think I know what Jesus means, but also wonder if the birds of the air are more worried, these days, than they may have been when Jesus was around. I wonder if the lilies of the field really are toiling and spinning in ways they haven’t always.

And while I’d love to make this a call to action, reminding us about our command to care for creation… to restore and replenish what we use up from God’s good earth… to compel us all to give up plastic, limit our carbon footprint, reduce, reuse, recycle, and all the rest… I wonder if we might first, actually have to simply acknowledge our grief over it all. (Again, today’s trouble is enough for today.)

So I hope that the things we’ve left on the wall this evening do nothing more and nothing less than bear witness to our part in what makes us grieve and God’s creation groan; and to our shared sorrow for the suffering planet we call home; for the creatures and creation God calls “good,” and for that which is ours to tend to, at God’s command.

And I pray, too, that – as we engage all of this season’s grief – we can do it deliberately … grieve the sorrows of the world, I mean … because our faith gives us hope that it will all be redeemed, according to God’s goodness and grace, in the end.

Amen