Sermon Blog
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Sermon Blog
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Lent IV
March 14, 2021 “Your wife called. She needs you to come home now.” Sue, the parish secretary, said this in the hallway outside my office because she did not want to yell that down the hall. My phone was not hooked up yet because I had not been in my first parish job for much more than a week. The cigarette bounced on her lips as she said it while smoking hands free. She smirked a little, so I knew it was not a tragic “come home now.” We were working on our new house, and I assumed that she needed me to pick out a paint color or something. We were newly married, and still collaborated on such matters. Fortunately, we lived two miles from our new parish. When I arrived, Janice was visibly upset, flustered, and, clearly, anxious. Now this is a woman who, at the time, took care of premature babies in the intensive care. She could intubate, insert a chest tube, and start a pic line in any sized patient. This was a woman who climbed into helicopters and flew to outlying medical centers to retrieve sick newborns and keep them stable long enough to get to the neonatal unit. What in the world? Fighting back tears, she said, “I saw a snake on our front porch.” Though I wanted to laugh, I did not. We were newly married after all. She had told me that she was terrified of snakes. This was not the time to tell her that is called Ophidiophobia. Like many phobias it is irrational. As I have acrophobia, a fear of heights, in the same irrational way, I got it. She wanted me to find the snake and kill it or call the realtor and list the house for sale. It turned out that it was a baby rat snake, but no amount of telling her that those are the “good” kind of snakes would help. While calm returned with the passage of time, that visceral fear remains to this day. The wandering Israelites had snake troubles too. Their fears were real because most of the snakes they met in the desert were not the “good” kind. People were dying from poisonous snake bites and they begged Moses to get God to intervene. We cannot help but think that Moses was tiring of them using him like God’s bellhop. They had already complained that there was no food, only to complete the sentence with the fact that they detested “this miserable food.” While they had been freed from slavery in Egypt, delivered from the wrath of Pharoah’s army, escaped through the parted Red Sea, been given water to drink, and manna from heaven to eat, their response seems to be yeah, Moses, but what have you done for us lately. Get God on this right away. The story has a mythic quality that we often find in the most ancient stories. These stories were told over and over around campfires, even with wide-eyed children listening, long before they were written down. Moses fashions a bronze image of two staring serpents intertwined around a long staff. And, as the story goes, anyone who got snakebit was to look into the eyes of the bronze serpent and they would recover. From there, the story moves on, and we never hear if it worked, but this early form of aversion therapy brought calm to the hysteria, and more than likely, it reminded folks to be careful in the desert. As I learned when I visited there, most things that crawl and slither in the desert are deadly. Some stories are true as told. Good stories, even if embellished or exaggerated, are just as true, because they tell us something about ourselves. Going back to the beginning story in Eden, the snake represents the insipient craftiness of human sin. In that story, the serpent tempts Adam and Eve to believe that they can eat the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil and become all knowing and all seeing, just like God. When they give it a go, they become aware that they are naked (or nekkid as we say in the South), and they left to wander outside of paradise. When Moses sets up the bronze serpent, God’s people are put in mind of that beginning story as well as their current plight. They cannot help but be reminded of their sin, their self-will run rampant, and maybe, just maybe, they might substitute gratitude for grumbling. They have a long way to go, yet, but whining is lousy fuel for a journey with God. It is an ancient story, but it is true to our own journey with God. The first step is to remember that we are not all knowing and all seeing. It is important to look our fears and sins in the face of them to be more honest, more real, and humbled before our powerlessness. This is not a one-and-done thing. It is an everyday thing. It is a lifetime journey of becoming. That bad news is that we will never get it right. We will swing and miss more times than we get a hit. When John’s gospel has Jesus giving a summation of the journey, Jesus goes right back to staring the slithery and sliminess of our nature in the face, referring back to Moses and his whiners in the desert. But then Jesus delivers a walk off home run shot we know well as John 3:16. “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.” We know that one from the rainbow haired guy who used to hold up the placards in sports stadiums. Remember him? Unfortunately, that passage is often leveraged against anyone who does not believe, anyone who doubts, or dares ask questions. Can we really say that we believe 100% all of the time? While John 3:16 is good news, it is conditional and it not the whole thought Jesus delivers the completion of that statement comes in 3:17. “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved” that is, put right again. The world will not get more right because we work harder, pray more earnestly, or let that person cut in line at the grocery store. The world gets more right because Jesus does not point fingers and tell us we are bad. We do that to ourselves and others. The world gets right as Jesus is lifted up on a cross, staring us all in the face, and showing us the lengths to which God will go to love us. Rainbow hair man should have pointed to 3:16 and 3:17. Think of all the seekers and searchers that might have been welcomed with the full text. Alas, Rainbow man is now in jail for kidnapping and assault. Apparently, his now ex-wife, stood in the wrong place with the sign and he lost his temper. Things went downhill from there. A little John 3:17 might have helped him too. In the Book of Kings, we read that in a fit of graven image reform, King Hezekiah had Moses’ bronze snake pole destroyed. It seems folks were taking the symbol too literally and worshipping before it a bit too enthusiastically. Nevertheless, that symbol remains in what we know as the medical symbol. The snakes represent the judicious use of potent medicine and their shedding of skin represents the body’s ability to grow anew and heal. The COVID vaccine many have had, and we all need to get, helps teach our body’s immune system to recognize and stop the beast before it can take hold. Recognizing the form of the very thing that can make us ill, or kill us, is then, leveraged for good. The pain of a needle prick is a saving grace. Even though we are God’s body, we are not immune from fear, pain, anxiety, and all the rest. Sometimes, we are so human, it hurts. There is joy in there too. Lots of it. And joy is just as potent as pain. In the end, our physical life is a temporary condition, just as was God’s earthly life in Jesus. When our time comes, we will get the call. Come home now… where perfect Love casts out all fear -- for good. Amen. Comments are closed.
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AuthorThe Rev. John Thomas is Rector of Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood Archives
October 2024
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