It is my honor to be back here in this pulpit. I wish Pastor Lauren a week of rest, renewal, and relaxation. In some ways it seems like so long since I have been here and in other ways it feels like just yesterday. I am sad that we are back to being virtual but I am glad we are staying safe and keeping each other safe. I gotta tell you, these past few weeks have been bittersweet for sure. My dad, who many of you met when he came to visit the last time I preached, moved from my childhood home in Virginia to a new house in Pennsylvania. My brother started a new job. My nephew started high school, my youngest niece started middle school. It only took 3 days for her to text me to let me know she hates middle school already. Of course yesterday we honored the 20th anniversary of the terror attacks that rocked our world. In our weekly staff meetings, we are planning some super exciting things for the rest of the fall. Things I can’t quite give details on yet but trust and believe you should be excited. I’m excited. This past week I celebrated 14 years of living in Northern Virginia. I wish I could say the events that led me to Northern Virginia all went down as a neatly orchestrated process but it wasn’t. Well, it wasn’t that way on my end at least. After college I knew I wanted to go to seminary and I was trying to whittle the list down. I knew whatever path I chose I would have to move. I finally decided I would either move to North Carolina or Northern Virginia. In the midst of my prayers for clarity, one of my friends from college jumped on her AOL instant messenger and wrote me this note: “hey, I got an internship in DC. Wanna move with?” And so I did. At the time she lived near Virginia Beach and I was outside of Richmond so we shared a uhaul and drove our things to Arlington. The apartment was in Shirlington, this cute little neighborhood with lots of “young professionals” and lots of stuff within walking distance. But then reality set in. The apartment was a disaster. By the time we moved out, we had caught 14 mice. Our neighbors didn’t like us and we had feces smeared on our door. There was at least one attempted break in. My roommate’s car was towed even though it shouldn’t have been but it still cost us $150 that we didn’t have. We already couldn’t afford internet in the apartment and I found myself living off of peanut butter sandwiches and oranges. My job turned out to be one in an extremely toxic environment and my roommate struggled to find work after her internship was over. I am sure there were other terrible things that happened but I have done the best I can to block that time period out of my mind. More than once we found ourselves to be a pile of tears, saying that moving here was a mistake. And how we just wanted to go back home with our families where we could afford internet, where we got along with our neighbors, where we could afford to eat real food, and everything was familiar.
So when I read the first part of the Numbers passage, I can kind of relate to the Israelites. Maybe you can too. Maybe there is something you wanted so badly and when you got it, it wasn’t quite what you thought it would be. Something that ended up being harder than you expected. Something that seemed so God ordained but ended up being a trial. In those moments, it is virtually impossible to not complain at least a little. The people are so miserable that they look back on their life in slavery and remember it fondly. Their complaints are that there is no food or water yet they are also complaining about the food they have. Okay see I kind of get that too. I never went hungry but I still have a hard time choking down peanut butter sandwiches. For the Hebrews, it was the ultimate “hey, let’s get McDonald’s on our way home” and God being like “no, you have food at home” and the people saying “but I don’t want that food”. And the food turning out to be a microwaved hot dog on sandwich bread. Naturally the people yell at Moses and God. And then God sends some poisonous serpents that bite people and kill them. Wait, what?
The text doesn’t explicitly say the poisonous serpents were sent because of the complaining but it might be implied. There seems to be some “post hoc ergo propter hoc” going on. I think it is more likely that the people were searching for a cause of a serpent invasion. But when the people repent, they say they sinned by speaking out against Moses and God. If that’s enough to get one bitten by a serpent, have I got some bad news about some of the book of Psalms, some bad news for me, and probably some bad news for you. Okay but you have to admit that if the serpents were sent as punishment, the punishment doesn’t really seem to fit the crime. But then again God’s wisdom doesn’t quite seem to mesh with ours.
That point is really driven home in our text from 1 Corinthians. As I like to remind everyone every time we read a letter from Paul, we are reading someone else’s mail. This is a specific letter written to a specific audience for a specific reason. And because of that, it is important to put the text in context. This letter was written to address divisions in the church. Apparently the church in Corinth was having problems understanding that they were following Christ and not Paul or Apollos or Cephas. They neglected to understand that there is Christ and then there are things and people that point us to Christ. It’s like standing outside and admiring the “hot donuts now” neon sign of the Krispy Kreme but never actually going in, getting a donut, and getting that delicious hot sugar crackle in your mouth. Sure, that neon sign looks pretty but does nothing to actually satisfy the hunger.
Let’s actually back up to verse 17 of our Corinthians passage to see that. Paul says “For Christ did not send me to baptize but to proclaim the gospel, and not with eloquent wisdom, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its power”. Paul is not Jesus. Paul is the messenger who points to Jesus. Just like in our Numbers passage. The bronze serpent was not the healing. God provided the healing and the serpent pointed to God.
But what about the cross? Our passage from Corinthians seems to start out straightforward but of course it is not. We can’t get past 6 words in that passage without there being a controversy. Our translation, the NRSV, says “the message of the cross” but the RSV calls it “the word of the cross”. Message, word… similar but different. This word, in Greek, is logos. Professor Alexandra Brown out of Washington and Lee University notes that “For Jews, the logos was the law and Wisdom … For Greeks, the logos signified the reason behind the cosmic order and the advances of philosophy in understanding that order.” Brown concludes, “This ‘logos of the cross’ constitutes a contradiction in terms offensive both to the reasoned and to the religious mind.” No wonder the Corinthians had problems with unity! But this contradiction gets to the heart of Paul’s point.
According to Paul, the message of the cross is “foolishness to those who are perishing” and “the power of God” to those of us who are being saved. First of all, I love that phrase “to those of us who are being saved”. Not “those of us who were saved” or “are saved”. No, this phrase implies that this is an ongoing process. But if being saved is an ongoing process then so must “perishing” be also. Which means it’s never too late to turn around. That certainly seems like a strange move on God’s part.
The point is that God’s wisdom is totally different from ours. Verse 25 from 1 Corinthians chapter 1 says “for God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength”. But we see this over and over again in scripture. “The first shall be last and the last shall be first” and pretty much the entirety of Mary’s song where the poor are given good things to eat and the rich are sent away empty. That’s what God does. God’s wisdom elevates the lowly and knocks those on top down a few notches. God’s wisdom chose a virgin to bear a son. God’s wisdom pays all vineyard workers the same, whether they worked 12 hours or 1 hour. God’s wisdom often leaves us scratching our heads.
Because I will tell you one thing for sure. I don’t understand the wisdom of God that allowed Jesus to die on the cross. Which, of course, brings us to our Gospel reading of the day. Our text includes the most popular and most quoted verse of all time. So fitting that this passage falls on the first Sunday of regular season football. You know, since there’s always someone holding up the John 3:16 sign in the end zone. Everyone knows this verse. And because of that, it’s easy to tune out what this passage is really saying. So let’s back up a bit.
When the gospels are translated into English, if you take Matthew, Mark and Luke, forms of the word “believe” appear 31 times. In the Gospel of John, it appears 84 times. 84. This is significant. The author is suggesting that belief is a key Christian concept. But we already knew that. That is why we recite the creeds weekly. Because our creeds clearly communicate what we believe. But we aren’t the ones who this passage and this book were written for. They were written for those who don’t know. The ones who see this as foolish.
The Greek word for “belief” is “pistis” or “pisteo”. “Pisteo” is fully grounded in relationship. To “believe” is not simply a mental exercise, but “an all-embracing relationship, an attitude of love and trust in God.” The connection between God and humanity is central to the notion of “pisteo.” The growing relationship between Jesus and the community, the signs and wonders which permeate the Gospel of John. In all of our scriptures, God is not hands off. This relationship is two ways.
God doesn’t remove the bad thing, God makes a way for the bad thing to be more bearable. That’s kind of a non-specific, aggregate concept but look at Daniel in the lion’s den. God didn’t remove Daniel or the lions, God intervened so that Daniel stayed safe. Shadrack, Mishack, and Abednego. God didn’t remove them from the fiery furnace. God went into the furnace with them. In all of these situations, our triune God interceded but still worked within the confines of relationship. God coming in, action hero style, to save the day then swoop back up to heaven would be the antithesis of “relationship”. Makes for good entertainment but does nothing to grow our relationship with God and with other Christians. Because God doesn’t swoop in. God is here and present with us just like God was present in Jesus on the cross, just like God was present during the serpent invasion, and just like God was present at the beginning of time.
Our gospel passage is actually the thing that links the Hebrew Bible text to the Gospel text. Verse 14 of John says “and just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up”. I don’t think this link is a coincidence either. Because in both of these passages, God makes a way when a way seems impossible. Whether or not you think God sent the serpents to teach the Israelites a lesson, God provided a way for people to not perish. God could have removed the serpents. But God chose to, instead, make a way to save those who were perishing. And then we have the cross. God could have had Jesus remove himself from the cross, punched all the “bad guys” to prove God’s power with an army of angels and then ridden off into the sunset on a white horse. But instead, God made a way. God made a way for us to not perish but to have eternal life.
The healing didn’t come from the serpent on a pole. The serpent pole pointed to God. Eternal life doesn’t come from the cross itself. Eternal life came because of the cross. The cross points us to God. The serpent pole and the cross point to the faithfulness of God. Because of this, I can look back on my time in that horrible apartment and know God was watching over me. You can look back at experiences in your own life and know God was with you. Those times when God seemed silent and distant, God was there. Those times that seemed bleak and desolate, God was there. Those times when it seemed like there was no way, God was already there, making a way. Because there is nothing on this earth that we can experience that God has not already experienced. THAT is the message that the cross points us to. It’s the message that God loves us so much that God humbled Godself and took the form of a human. God suffered and died and rose again. And that is truly the best news of all time. Amen.
