When I retired eight years ago, the only thing I promised myself was that I would never again preach on the Sunday we spring forward to Daylight Saving Time. I didn’t know Cindy then, and I didn’t reckon with her persuasiveness.
Two of today’s scripture readings feature snakes: Moses lifting up a serpent in the wilderness as a divine cure for snakebite, and Jesus’s comparing his own lifting up on the cross to that earlier exaltation of a snake. Every time I come across a snake in scripture, I’m drawn back to the day, in 1982, when I began my job as vicar of St. Aidan’s Church in Malibu. The church is situated on a hillside, across the PCH from Paradise Cove. As I got out of my car I was greeted by the Junior Warden, who was carrying a shovel. He greeted me with a hearty, “Good morning, father!” and then proceeded to decapitate a gigantic rattlesnake that I was just about to step on.
I am a snakeophobe. (The Latin term is ophidiophobia.) But over the course of my years in Malibu I made a kind of peace with them. It turned out we had a huge den of rattlers on the hillside above us, but they did a really good job of keeping the rodent population down. And every so often I would see king snakes gliding around, and they were very good at controlling the rattlers. I learned to make my way among them, if not with ease, then at least with confidence and some real gratitude.
We’re gathered this morning on the Fourth Sunday in Lent, a day also called “Refreshment Sunday” in the U.S. and “Mothering Sunday” in the UK. This Sunday marks a kind of pause in the Lenten action. We often read the story of Jesus’s feeding of the five thousand today, and our collect refers to Jesus as the bread which “came down from heaven to be the true bread which gives life to the world”. But instead of bread today, our readings give us a couple of snakes. Go figure.
Let’s look at each of our three readings briefly.
The Old Testament reading, from the Book of Numbers [Numbers 21: 4-9], recounts a moment part way in the Israelites’ exodus journey from Egypt toward the promised land. The people are tired and hungry, and they constantly complain. The always unpredictable Old Testament God gets so annoyed that he sends poisonous snakes to bite the people. When they repent, God tells Moses to put a bronze serpent on a pole so that those bitten by a snake may look on the bronze one and live.
There’s not a lot to say about this, except to note that the ancient symbol of medicine—the caduceus or staff of Asclepius--still in use today: two snakes coiled around a staff or pole. What it seems to suggest is that the malady we suffer contains within it the cure. The cure for snakebite lies within the bite itself. The remedy for the thing we fear is to look directly into the thing we are afraid of. It sounds a bit New-Agey, but there it is.
But Jesus clearly has something like that in mind when he compares himself, in the Gospel [John 3:14-21] to Moses’s bronze snake in the sky: “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.” The lifting up that Jesus foretells is a crucifixion, not an excursion up into the heavens to bring back divine advice. My friend Andrew McGowan, dean of Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, describes the notion, current in biblical times, of a sage “as a sort of pedagogue who will share interesting theological tidbits and diverting signs from the upper realm.”
As McGowan points out, what Jesus says in today’s Gospel differs radically from the conventional pieties about divine figures:
Yet his version of being lifted up also amounts to a critique of the conventional ideas about heavenly beings or revealers ascending and descending calmly and benignly with their stores of divine knowledge. [“Jesus Lifted Up”, abmgc@substack.com, March 5, 2024]
And that is why, a few verses later, Jesus can say the oft-quoted saying, familiar to old time Episcopalians from the “comfortable words” of the old prayer book to those of us baseball fans who have to endure it written on signs held up behind home plate. John, 3:15: “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.” This is the kind of exaltation Jesus is talking about, an exaltation in service of divine love and forgiveness. Christianity is not about tidbits of divine wisdom. It is about this life-giving encounter between God and us. God lifts up Jesus as an act of love for us. Our response, in that same spirit of love and forgiveness, is to extend compassion, mercy, and grace to others.
And this brings us to what is, for me, the most important reading in our service this morning: the passage [Ephesians 2: 1-10] from the Letter to the Ephesians. Now I have to admit that Ephesians is perhaps my favorite book in the Bible. It was probably written not by Paul but by a next generation follower. And it wrestles with the reality of what it means for the early church to be made up of two groups who were absolutely anathema to each other: gentiles and Jews. In today’s passage he engages the implications of living together in radical difference for a real, flesh and blood, human community:
You were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once lived, following the course of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient. . . But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ. . . For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God-- not the result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.
Now it’s always a bit hard to follow these New Testament arguments; their style can be a bit confusing. But what the writer says here is supremely important for us individuals, as citizens, as church. None of us is here by right. We were brought here by the same divine action that lifted up the serpent in the wilderness and Jesus on the cross. As Jesus says, : “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.” It is only because of God’s generosity that you and I have any status here at all. Our claim to importance rests not on our own doing but on our being recipients of God’s forgiving, empowering, and liberating love.
The Letter to the Ephesians goes on to claim in later chapters that the existence of a church made up of Jews and gentiles is in itself a proof of God’s greatness. Who could have imagined such a thing? God has brought two human groups who cannot stand each other and put them together in one shared community. A church made up of Jews and gentiles is as startling as would be a church made up of Israelis and Palestinians, of MAGA Republicans and members of ANTIFA, as Trojans and Bruins. What we need to see through the antique reasoning of Paul or his follower is that all of us, together, are recipients of God’s love and grace. The truest thing about us is that we are forgiven, accepted, and loved. All other claims to status are ultimately false. As my late friend, teacher, and lifelong mentor Harvey Guthrie used to say, “We’re all on cosmic relief.”
You here at St. James have lived through ecclesiastical controversy and come out on the other side. We all have lived through Super Tuesday and now will endure another eight months of bitter squabble until November’s general election. In this Lenten and prolonged campaign season, perhaps the best thing we followers of Jesus can do is to remember the words from John and Ephesians as we make our ways through the dissension and contention of our shared, civic life. : “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.” “By grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God-- not the result of works, so that no one may boast.”
Snakes are slithering all around us, whether we’re in Malibu, Newport Beach, or Washington, D.C. When surrounded by these malign serpents, let’s keep our eyes on the one lifted by Moses and Jesus on the cross. These, and no other nostrums, are the antidotes we need.
“We’re all on cosmic relief.” If God can make a church out of Jews and gentiles, God can make a society out of left, right, rich, poor. As Lent rolls on into Holy Week and Easter, let us remind ourselves and the world of God’s generosity, our dependence on it, and the divine love that sustains us all. Amen.
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