Year B
Numbers 21:4-9
Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22
Ephesians 2:1-10
John 3:14-21

May the words of my mouth… O God… speak your Truth…

Like a lot of kids in the summer…  I sometimes caught and kept a garter snake or two…  small… manageable…  pretty easy to catch…  and most important…  not poisonous…  and what I thought was so cool…  is that they smell with their tongue…  but at a county fair one time…  I was handed…  and held a rattlesnake…  defanged and reasonably safe…  but noticeably heavier…  I didn’t yet understand the danger they posed in the wild…  and while there’s some disagreement about exactly how high the percentage is…  a significant number of people…  women and men…  are afraid of snakes…  some of this may go back to the story about the snake and the apple… and like some of them…  I eventually saw enough movies about how quickly rattlesnakes…  and cobras…  and other venomous snakes can rear up and strike…  so much so…  that my willingness to get too close…  to too many snakes…  has diminished…

W. Sibley Towner…  professor of Biblical Interpretation at Union Theological Seminary…  summarized the narrative of complaints the Israelites made after their release from slavery…  they didn’t like the bitter water of Marah (Ex. 15:22-25) and so God showed Moses how to sweeten it…  they complained about the lack of food (Ex. 16:2-3) and so God gave them manna…  they complained that they were thirsty (Ex. 17:3) and at God’s command Moses struck a rock and water gushed forth…  when their march resumed after Sinai they were again asking for meat…  and a wind from God brought them quails to eat (Num. 11:4-6)…  but the complaint in today’s passage from Numbers is different…  did you notice…  this time…  the ungrateful people complained not only against Moses…  but against God too…  God who had sustained them for more than four-hundred years in slavery…  and who was now guiding them to the land that had been promised…  ungrateful people for whom God had done so much…  and God had had it…  and so God sent snakes…

If there’s any foreshadowing of the Cross in the Jewish scriptures…  the clearest but perhaps most confusing passage might be today’s poisonous bronze snake on a pole…   in so many images…  like that on our bulletin cover…  the snake on a pole resembles the Cross…  but a poisonous bronze snake on a pole…  isn’t like Jesus on the Cross…  is it…

But there may be more to the story…  just what did the people do…  that provoked God into sending snakes…  they sinned by speaking against Moses and God…  they sinned against God and neighbor…  it was their sin that brought death on themselves…  and they must have continued to sin…  because even after Moses made the bronze serpent and put it on a pole…  the text says…  and whenever a serpent bit someone…  that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live… part of an ongoing human condition perhaps…

One commentator put it this way…  the bronze serpent represented sin…  and on the Cross…  Jesus took on the sin of the world… or to put it another way…  we can consider that the serpent is a symbol of death…  and in order for Christ to save us…  he must become “death” on the Cross…

Now many of us are familiar with the passage from 1Corinthians 13:4-7…  it’s often read at weddings…  about how love is patient and kind…  not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude…  how it doesn’t insist on its own way…  isn’t irritable or resentful…  doesn’t rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in truth…  and how it bears all things…  believes all things…  hopes all things…  and endures all things…

What a lovely sentiment this is…  but it recently occurred to me that this isn’t human love…  it can’t be…  I really can’t ever hope to achieve love in all of these ways…  not all at once…  I’m too broken and selfish and ungrateful…  no…  this love…  the love that’s described here…  this is divine love…  it’s how God loves us… always and forever…

As a convert to Christianity…  I used to think that sporting-event signs that referenced John 3:16…  embodied a shortsighted and fundamentalist perspective…  but I’ve come to believe that it’s the love described in the passage from 1Corinthians 13…  for God so loved the world…  indeed…  God did not send Jesus to condemn the world…  but to love it…  everything…  else…  flows…  from this…  God’s love for God’s creation…  and God’s love for every one of us who ever was…  or is…  or ever will be…  in it…

In Jesus’ love…  God embodies how we are called to be…   and what we are called to become…  and in order for us to become more loving…  we must face how we are not loving…  and love is hard…  all of you who are married know this…  all of you who have children know this…  and any of you who love me know this… but in order for us to become what we deeply want to be…  we can’t “go around” we can’t bypass…  what we are not yet…  we must face our own culpability…  we must name our own dis-ease…  or sin…  and we will sin and need to look at the bronze serpent…  and we will sin and need to look at Jesus on the Cross…  and die to the ways that are bringing us death…  and every time…  our demise will be transformed into a source of our salvation…

I used to think…  that in John 12:32…  when Jesus said…   And I… when I am lifted up from the earth…   will draw all people to myself…  that he meant when he was crucified…  but if the incarnation and crucifixion were all there was…  that would just be Jesus joining us in our condition of sin…  but resurrection is Jesus exalted from sin…  and the ascension is Jesus making a way for us to the Father…

I’ll say it again…  this was a four-part oratorio…  and not one random afterthought after another…  so I have to think that ascension was the lifting up he meant…  because he also said in John 14:2…  in my Father’s house there are many dwelling places…  if it were not so…  would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you…  prepare a place…  for us…

Out of love…  God could not help but incarnate to save us…  from pandemic…  from racism…  from climate change…  from division…  from ourselves…  and God’s love is not procured on the Cross…  but is revealed on the Cross… and how much we need this Jesus…  for we do need saving…

In some families…  Jewish or not…  there are traditions of kvetching… complaining against each other…  and what God has or has not done for us…  but a more hopeful tradition is called the Perennial Tradition…  and if you’ve never heard of it…   it recognizes recurring themes in all of the world’s religions and philosophies…  which say that there is a Divine Reality underneath and inherent in the world of things…  that there is in the human soul a natural capacity…  similarity… and longing for this Divine Reality… and that the final goal of existence… is union with this Divine Reality…

And if you’ve seen the movie…  The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel…  Dev Patel’s character Sonny Kapoor…  has one of the most theologically-true lines I’ve ever heard… that in some ways reflects the Perennial Tradition…  he said…   “Everything will be all right in the end… and if it’s not all right…  then it’s not yet the end.”

But this is the end…  of my homily…