Lent 4B – March 11, 2018 Panzer Liturgical Service
Number 21:4-9 & John 3:14-21 Faith Through Living... Orthopraxy
When was the last time you heard a good sermon from Numbers? Any sermon at all? OK, not today either, but it is important to hear a little something because Jesus prefaces this section of his conversation with Nicodemus.
Last week we talked a little bit about the 10 Commandments. It opened up a little window into what the former slaves of Israel were like. They were complainers. I can just imagine the conversations floating around the camp. “Moses has been gone too long. These commandments are not specific enough. Eating this manna every day is so boring… did God lose his password to Pinterest? Blah, blah, blah… “And so, from this story, it looks like they needed an attitude readjustment.
Now I’m not a big believer in God making bad things happen to people to teach important lessons. I think that enough bad things occur on their own to more than make the point. But part of this story is that the Israelites didn’t experience God as a comforting presence among them. So, when the snakes came, the people believed God sent the snakes to punish them, and like all of us afraid of snakes and punishment, we want to know how make it stop.
The people recognize their sin and begged Moses to ask God to take the snakes away, but instead, God told Moses to make a bronze snake and put it on a staff (tall stick) and that when the people looked at the snake on the staff, they would be healed. Their freedom from the snakes was being healed from their bites, not in destroying the snakes. Once again, God lead the people down a path different from the one they desired and their journey continued.[i]
My guess is that most of us don’t remember this story from Numbers, but the Jews of Jesus’ day would have. Recounting this story sets up a foundation for Jesus to build on. Think about the action of looking at the bronze snake. For those who had been bitten, it meant looking up from their own pain and fear to a symbol that represented the healing and wholeness of God. When Jesus says, “the Son of Man must be lifted up,” he is foretelling a time when he will not be standing in front of them but lifted up and in a different place than they could ever imagine him, giving a healing we will never really understand.
Nicodemus comes to Jesus in the dark of night to find out more about this Jesus everyone was talking about. It sounds a little like an undercover mission, because Nicodemus slips in from the shadows to engage Jesus in conversation. “You talk about new life, Jesus… what must I do to have it?” Give me the equation, the formula, the step-by-step process for achieving what seems impossible, being born to new life.
Jesus’ response is not formulaic, but relational. Life in Christ is not paint-by-numbers or like putting together a cabinet from IKEA with premeasured boards and a little bag of nuts, bolts and Allen wrenches. Instead, Jesus is the bridge between the two sides of life: Spirit and world, darkness and light, life and death, truth and wickedness, belief and unbelief.[ii] To have new life, we must come into the light.
From the very first story, we see humanity struggling with questions of life. Adam and Eve ate the fruit in the garden because they thought that wisdom had more power than relationship. Moses and his merry crew wandered through the wilderness for 40 years because they couldn’t – no, wouldn’t – participate fully in the relationship that God offered them, usually trusting more in their own desires and wisdom than in the promises made to them.
The cross of Jesus Christ changes everything about the way God relates to us. Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection are not just a model of sacrifice but are also about retuning our lives to God’s frequency, experiencing God in a new way. They teach us about trusting God’s promises and believing in the kind of life God calls us to live, even if we don’t recognize it at the time.
We hear "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,” and even the most high-churched among us can be lured into thinking that belief is the key that unlocks the door to faith… that there are theological requirements and caveats that define what it means to be in or out of the Kingdom.[iii]
But from this passage, I am not sure that we have it right. What if citizenship in the Kingdom is not an intellectual process at all, but instead is defined by living a particular kind of life? I showed the kids some pictures today. They were of me at various ages in my life, and a picture of me and Shawn on our wedding day, 23 years ago this month. In the older pictures, it’s hard to recognize the me you see today. And even though we are easily recognizable from our wedding portrait, I can assure you that we are not the same people that we were back then.
We’ve been talking in Confirmation class about the realities of growing up surrounded by the stories of Jesus, which is true for many of us. While other people may have a clear, concise memory of coming to faith in Christ, for many others, faith in Christ starts as a way of life and belief emerges from the daily practices of faith. When I applied to seminary, I expected that they might ask me to take some introductory religion or bible classes, since microbiology, biochemistry and blood banking don’t make for the most stellar academic entrance into religious studies. But they told me that my long walk of faith and willingness to learn would more than make up for my lack of book knowledge. In fact, almost half of the students in my first-year class were coming to seminary from other fields of study because their faith in Jesus in lead them down this most unexpected path.
Dallas Willard wrote some amazing things about discipleship. He was a scholar of Christian discipleship and he practiced what he preached. In his book, The Great Omission, he reminds us that at his ascension, Jesus said, “Go and make disciples,” not “Go and make believers.” Our great omission is not seeing the difference between the two, for others and for ourselves.
A friend reminded me of a quote that sums up the struggles and requirements of practicing our faith in the world every day: “There is absolutely nothing in what Jesus or his early followers taught that suggests that you can decide to enjoy forgiveness at Jesus’ expense and have nothing more to do with him.” (The Great Omission, pg 13). Somehow, we have made belief the thing which offers us entry into the Kingdom of God, with little or no expectation of anything coming afterward.
This week I realized that I have been preaching in this congregation longer than in any other time since I married and became a vagabond Methodist evangelist. I know this because I looked at my previous sermons on this passage and saw that the last time I preached on Lent 4 B it here in Panzer Chapel, to you my Liturgical friends. And I loved that sermon, which I thought about preaching again today, hoping none of you would notice. But my friend Johannah reminded me that a new lesson will always be unlocked from the scriptures if we allow it. Her questions and recommendation of a few offers unlocked a new message of encouragement and hope, reminding me that the gospel is both reliable and fresh.
I look at that picture of myself as a newly baptized infant, 3 months old, and I cannot see my face in that face. I look at my picture at 4 years old and see a wisp of who I will become. Even looking at the pictures of me on my wedding day, truly one of the most beautiful and life-changing days ever, I can just barely remember the person I was then. So many places, so many faces, so many opportunities to love and serve God. Some of them I have taken… some of them I have not. Even so, with the help of my fellow disciples, I keep pressing toward the light and away from the darkness. I keep preaching and teaching because those are the gifts that God gave me to grow my faith and encourage others in theirs.
This journey of life and faith has brought me so far. It has brought you far, too, maybe further than you think. And I think that’s what Jesus wants. One of the reasons that I think Shawn and I have made it to 23 mostly happy years is our willingness to grow and change, individually and as a family. And while I must admit that constantly moving and making new friends are part of the equation, I wonder if successfully intinerating through military and ministerial life isn’t more a byproduct of, rather than a reason for living a disciple’s life.
The wedding vows we all know so well ask something particular and peculiar from us. They do not ask, “Do you love each other?” They ask, “Will you love each other?... to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish…” We make those promises not know what’s going to come next. And they are hard, so hard that some days we wonder why we ever thought this was a good idea.
But if you keep working at it together, you grow past the difficult times and into a new life, with new habits and new dreams and visions together. And you keep repeating the process because no week or month or day of marriage or life is perfect. And because of that promise, you keep pressing on, even though sometimes it seems that for every bit of progress you make, it’s easy to slip back a little, too.
During the Lenten season, we have explored our multi-dimensional relationship with God. There are obligations and blessings: repentance, and renewal, sacrifice and salvation, discipleship and deliverance. This week we see it all in the context of God’s never-ending love for us in Jesus Christ. And while it seems that our progress is only inching along, God put everything he had into the game.[iv] Realizing that is what the Lenten season is all about. Incorporating that is called discipleship… let us live and love and work together in the Light. "For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him."
Peace, Deb
[i] Cameron B.R.Howard, Preach This Week, Commentary on Numbers 21:4-9, http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=3606
[ii] Robb McCoy and Eric Fistler, Lent 4B, Pulpit Fiction, https://www.pulpitfiction.com/notes/lent4b
[iii] Samuel Cruz, Commentary on John 3:14-21, Preach This Week, http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=3579
[iv] David Sellery, “A Game of Inches,” This Week’s Focus, Lent 4B, https://mailchi.mp/davidsellery/game-of-inches
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