Sermon for the Fourth Sunday in Lent
Numbers 21:4-9
Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22
Ephesians 2:1-10
John 3:14-21
Bonnie Simpson grew up in the Southern Baptist church, which is a mighty recommendation for the Southern Baptists, since Bonnie is a wonderful human being. That said, Bonnie reports that pretty much every sermon she heard growing up finally cycled back to “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, so that all who believe in him may not perish but have eternal life.”
In the traditional reading of this line, the meaning taken is simple: “believe that Jesus died for your sins, and you will be saved from everlasting damnation and given eternal life in heaven.” This unfortunately always seems to lead back to the Pharisee’s main sin: works righteousness. Practically speaking, in my experience, most Christians reduce the gospel to “do right and go to heaven, commit sins and go to hell.”
Today’s larger reading puts 3:16 in context however. It was part of a secret nighttime meeting between Jesus and a Jewish religious intellectual, Nicodemus.
Nicodemus was a Pharisee and he couldn’t deny that Jesus seemed to have the power of God behind him, even though he was clearly shaking things up. So he visits Jesus by night, understanding the danger of being publicly associated with him.
Jesus explains to Nicodemus that his deeds are possible because he was born from above, and if Nicodemus or anyone else wishes to enter into the kingdom of God, they must, like him, be born from above. But this proves too much for Nicodemus. It makes too much of a demand on him.
I identify with Nicodemus. I have always styled myself an intellectual. I love to figure things out. I had a powerful vision of Christ that propelled me into faith and ministry, but a lot of my journey has been in my head. But along the way, I discovered a spiritual path that wasn’t just about thinking. Thinking certainly plays a part, but the work of following Jesus is more than thinking.
The key to understanding John 3:16 is in the first word “for”, or better translated, “in this way”, referring to what went before the verse. Jesus compares his own “lifting up” to the lifting up of the serpent in the wilderness, forcing us to look back at the story from Numbers.
First of all, in John’s Gospel, the crucifixion, resurrection and ascension of Jesus is one thing: lifting up. He is lifted up on a cross, he is lifted up from death in the resurrection, and he is lifted up to heaven in the ascension. This lifting up, Jesus says, is like the serpent lifted up in the wilderness.
In Numbers, we hear the story of the Hebrew people, newly freed slaves, wandering the wilderness in a kind of boot camp for the kingdom of God. There is nothing to eat in this wilderness, so God sends a daily supply of food in the form of manna, but only the daily supply.
The people get sick of it. They start complaining that God isn’t coming through for them. They’re not getting what they think they’re entitled to. The food is horrible, the wilderness is unpleasant, God is not working out as king. This was a common refrain. In other stories of the wilderness, the people remember the Egyptian flesh pots with nostalgia, forgetting entirely how miserable they had been when they were enslaved.
God responds by sending poisonous snakes. Many people died. The survivors are terrified and recognize that their complaining was wrong, that they have angered God, and so they repent, begging God to do something.
I’m one of those annoying people who figure out the end of a movie long before we get to it, and if I were watching this movie, it would end with God removing the snakes. But it doesn’t. God leaves the snakes. The biting and the poisoning will continue. But he then gives the people an avenue for being healed of the poison.
Just look at the image of the snake on the pole, God says, and you will live.
Just look at the thing that bit you.
Look at the ways you work against God. Look at the way you are complicit in the evils of the world. Look at the way the world constantly snakebites you with its faithless fear and anger, its corruption, and the ways you fall right into its stream. Look at the ways you don’t accept the life you have been given. Look at the ways the world has shaped you in opposition to God.
Jesus says, just as the snake was lifted up, so it is necessary for the Son of Man to be lifted up. He’s challenging Nicodemus to see his own participation in injustice, his own going-along-to-get-along with the powers of evil, his willingness to sacrifice his own innocent people for the sake of an oppressive empire no different from Pharaoh’s. Jesus challenges him to reject the conformity he has embraced, and to be conformed to an entirely different perspective, that of heaven, to be born not of the world and of the flesh, but of God. To reject the demonic spirit that ruled over him, and receive the Spirit of God, even though it might cost him his earthly life.
In the Twelve Step Fellowships it is sometimes said, “The only thing you need to change is everything.”
I’m male, so I will never become pregnant. Thus, it’s very easy for me to condemn abortion, because condemning abortion makes no demand on me. The same could be said of any older woman who never really worried about resources, who had her children without trouble and enjoyed raising them. Easy for her to be against abortion, particularly when it means that she doesn’t have to worry about what happens to anyone after they’re born. It’s an easy ethical position because it makes no demand on her.
I’m heterosexual. Thus, it’s very easy for me to say that gay marriage threatens society, because I’m in no danger of marrying a man.
Believing a set of doctrines about something that will happen only after I die makes no real demand on me. This world’s going to hell, I can say, so there’s no point in resisting it. Believing in the by-and-by-in-the-sky makes no demand on my current life or perspective.
The Pharisees made all kinds of laws they themselves were in no danger of breaking, laws that permitted all kinds of evil for those in power, but were burdensome for everyone who wasn’t. Their public god was the God of Israel, but their secret god was the same as everyone else’s in the Roman Empire, Caesar, because Caesar delivered what God didn’t: wealth, power, and the illusion of security, at least for a chosen few, like Nicodemus himself.
Just as the serpent was lifted up, Jesus says, so it was necessary for the Son of Man to be lifted up, so that all who believe in him may have eternal life. Jesus was lifted up on the cross for insurrection against the Roman Empire, for declaring himself a king. The Pharisees and other leaders of the Jewish people led the chant at his trial: “We have no king but Caesar.”
I live in profound luxury by any metric. That luxury is provided to me by millions of people who struggle for basic necessities, all of them fighting for the luxury I enjoy, with little hope of ever achieving it. When my luxury is diminished in any way, I become angry, and want to blame someone. It’s far easier for me to blame someone less powerful than me than to see that I am in the grips of a system that is more powerful than I am, that plays constantly to my ego and my entitlement, constantly snakebites me with the sense that I don’t have enough, that someone less powerful than I am is trying to take what I have. Far easier to punch down than up.
My salvation is dependent on my looking at my own complicity, my joining in with the crowd’s chant, my denial that the mess of the world has anything to do with me. My salvation is dependent on dying to my way, the world’s way, the wide road, the easy path, the world I was born to. My salvation is dependent on my recognition that the way of the world I live in is corrupt, that humankind are children of wrath, as Paul said in this morning’s text, and I am one of them. That “me”, that child of wrath, has to die, if I am to rise with Christ, a newborn in God’s kingdom.
This is why I willfully avoid what Jesus is saying, why I want to take 3:16 out of context and turn it into a bumper sticker. All by itself, it makes it sound like God gave me an easy escape plan from this hellish world. Just believe some facts. But the belief Jesus is calling us to is not in facts, but in a person, and that person’s way to life, that person’s perspective, that person’s identity as Son of God. It is not simply to believe a doctrine. It is to believe that an entirely new way of life is the salvation of this world.
The classic formulation is that the world is hopelessly corrupt and will therefore be destroyed. But again, 3:16 doesn’t stand on its own. It is followed with the assertion that the Son of Man didn’t come to condemn the world, but to save the world. What world would Jesus be talking about, if not this one?
Jesus is talking to a fellow Jew, and not to some pagan Gentile. Nicodemus counts himself a believer in God. In every century since Jesus, most believers in God have been like Nicodemus, and fewer believers have truly followed Jesus. Nicodemus cannot understand Jesus, because he is born of the world’s self-centered fear. He can’t acknowledge Jesus in the daylight, but only in the dark when no one’s looking, because he is more afraid of the world than he is of God.
But Jesus calls us not to judge Nicodemus, because Jesus himself doesn’t judge him. It wasn’t his place, and it’s not ours. Nicodemus was already judged, because he is blind and deaf to Jesus. He is addicted to the status and wealth that Caesar gives him but he denies this to himself. He refuses to look at the snake that bit him, and so he is doomed already to die of its poison. From heaven’s perspective, he’s already dead, one more body, worthless to God, fit only for the garbage fire, because he loved the darkness more than the light.
Jesus is a single light in a great darkness, a darkness the vast majority of humankind, including me, stumbles around in. That darkness, no matter how great, is no match for the little light of Jesus. But to truly look at this light requires a courage no human being possesses by themselves, because it illuminates the evil we do, sneaking around in that darkness, and kills it dead. At the end of the day, we will likely choose survival in the world as it is than the abundant life of the kingdom heaven coming into the world.
Our fear of that humiliation is great. But we will not be able to rise into newness of life without the humility that results from that humiliation. In this way, in the humiliation of the cross, and its revelation of our complicity in the mob, in the resurrection, and its revelation that this crucified rebel was indeed God’s son, and in the ascension, we hope that we can rise into that same new resurrected life, so that new perspective, a new orientation, comes into the world, a world that firmly rejects it, in us.
All we have to do is look at the snake that bit us right in its reptilian eye. All we have to do is look at the upshot of our love of the darkness, the Son of God, dying on our cross. Once we have accepted the humiliation of that cross, we can begin the resurrected life Jesus offers us.
What is that life like? In our class on Richard Rohr’s Breathing Underwater, a number of recovering people have joined us. It’s interesting to see how the teachings of the book just light them up, how excited they are to talk about the sense of God at work in their lives, leading them and guiding them and giving them the resources they don’t have, to live not in their own righteousness, but in God’s.
The promise of resurrection is for us while we live on earth, and isn’t much earthly use if it isn’t. Yes to eternal life in heaven. It is indeed a great comfort to remember that God’s care extends beyond the grave. But before we can truly enjoy that comfort, we must shine Christ’s light in the grave we’re already in.
Because the way of Christ can let us out of the grave of judgment and wrath and anger and frustration of our ego’s small desire to merely survive. It can free us for peace and love and grace and mercy and generosity, as it has for so many that are here with us this morning, around this table of the Lord.
Amen.
Numbers 21:4-9
Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22
Ephesians 2:1-10
John 3:14-21
Bonnie Simpson grew up in the Southern Baptist church, which is a mighty recommendation for the Southern Baptists, since Bonnie is a wonderful human being. That said, Bonnie reports that pretty much every sermon she heard growing up finally cycled back to “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, so that all who believe in him may not perish but have eternal life.”
In the traditional reading of this line, the meaning taken is simple: “believe that Jesus died for your sins, and you will be saved from everlasting damnation and given eternal life in heaven.” This unfortunately always seems to lead back to the Pharisee’s main sin: works righteousness. Practically speaking, in my experience, most Christians reduce the gospel to “do right and go to heaven, commit sins and go to hell.”
Today’s larger reading puts 3:16 in context however. It was part of a secret nighttime meeting between Jesus and a Jewish religious intellectual, Nicodemus.
Nicodemus was a Pharisee and he couldn’t deny that Jesus seemed to have the power of God behind him, even though he was clearly shaking things up. So he visits Jesus by night, understanding the danger of being publicly associated with him.
Jesus explains to Nicodemus that his deeds are possible because he was born from above, and if Nicodemus or anyone else wishes to enter into the kingdom of God, they must, like him, be born from above. But this proves too much for Nicodemus. It makes too much of a demand on him.
I identify with Nicodemus. I have always styled myself an intellectual. I love to figure things out. I had a powerful vision of Christ that propelled me into faith and ministry, but a lot of my journey has been in my head. But along the way, I discovered a spiritual path that wasn’t just about thinking. Thinking certainly plays a part, but the work of following Jesus is more than thinking.
The key to understanding John 3:16 is in the first word “for”, or better translated, “in this way”, referring to what went before the verse. Jesus compares his own “lifting up” to the lifting up of the serpent in the wilderness, forcing us to look back at the story from Numbers.
First of all, in John’s Gospel, the crucifixion, resurrection and ascension of Jesus is one thing: lifting up. He is lifted up on a cross, he is lifted up from death in the resurrection, and he is lifted up to heaven in the ascension. This lifting up, Jesus says, is like the serpent lifted up in the wilderness.
In Numbers, we hear the story of the Hebrew people, newly freed slaves, wandering the wilderness in a kind of boot camp for the kingdom of God. There is nothing to eat in this wilderness, so God sends a daily supply of food in the form of manna, but only the daily supply.
The people get sick of it. They start complaining that God isn’t coming through for them. They’re not getting what they think they’re entitled to. The food is horrible, the wilderness is unpleasant, God is not working out as king. This was a common refrain. In other stories of the wilderness, the people remember the Egyptian flesh pots with nostalgia, forgetting entirely how miserable they had been when they were enslaved.
God responds by sending poisonous snakes. Many people died. The survivors are terrified and recognize that their complaining was wrong, that they have angered God, and so they repent, begging God to do something.
I’m one of those annoying people who figure out the end of a movie long before we get to it, and if I were watching this movie, it would end with God removing the snakes. But it doesn’t. God leaves the snakes. The biting and the poisoning will continue. But he then gives the people an avenue for being healed of the poison.
Just look at the image of the snake on the pole, God says, and you will live.
Just look at the thing that bit you.
Look at the ways you work against God. Look at the way you are complicit in the evils of the world. Look at the way the world constantly snakebites you with its faithless fear and anger, its corruption, and the ways you fall right into its stream. Look at the ways you don’t accept the life you have been given. Look at the ways the world has shaped you in opposition to God.
Jesus says, just as the snake was lifted up, so it is necessary for the Son of Man to be lifted up. He’s challenging Nicodemus to see his own participation in injustice, his own going-along-to-get-along with the powers of evil, his willingness to sacrifice his own innocent people for the sake of an oppressive empire no different from Pharaoh’s. Jesus challenges him to reject the conformity he has embraced, and to be conformed to an entirely different perspective, that of heaven, to be born not of the world and of the flesh, but of God. To reject the demonic spirit that ruled over him, and receive the Spirit of God, even though it might cost him his earthly life.
In the Twelve Step Fellowships it is sometimes said, “The only thing you need to change is everything.”
I’m male, so I will never become pregnant. Thus, it’s very easy for me to condemn abortion, because condemning abortion makes no demand on me. The same could be said of any older woman who never really worried about resources, who had her children without trouble and enjoyed raising them. Easy for her to be against abortion, particularly when it means that she doesn’t have to worry about what happens to anyone after they’re born. It’s an easy ethical position because it makes no demand on her.
I’m heterosexual. Thus, it’s very easy for me to say that gay marriage threatens society, because I’m in no danger of marrying a man.
Believing a set of doctrines about something that will happen only after I die makes no real demand on me. This world’s going to hell, I can say, so there’s no point in resisting it. Believing in the by-and-by-in-the-sky makes no demand on my current life or perspective.
The Pharisees made all kinds of laws they themselves were in no danger of breaking, laws that permitted all kinds of evil for those in power, but were burdensome for everyone who wasn’t. Their public god was the God of Israel, but their secret god was the same as everyone else’s in the Roman Empire, Caesar, because Caesar delivered what God didn’t: wealth, power, and the illusion of security, at least for a chosen few, like Nicodemus himself.
Just as the serpent was lifted up, Jesus says, so it was necessary for the Son of Man to be lifted up, so that all who believe in him may have eternal life. Jesus was lifted up on the cross for insurrection against the Roman Empire, for declaring himself a king. The Pharisees and other leaders of the Jewish people led the chant at his trial: “We have no king but Caesar.”
I live in profound luxury by any metric. That luxury is provided to me by millions of people who struggle for basic necessities, all of them fighting for the luxury I enjoy, with little hope of ever achieving it. When my luxury is diminished in any way, I become angry, and want to blame someone. It’s far easier for me to blame someone less powerful than me than to see that I am in the grips of a system that is more powerful than I am, that plays constantly to my ego and my entitlement, constantly snakebites me with the sense that I don’t have enough, that someone less powerful than I am is trying to take what I have. Far easier to punch down than up.
My salvation is dependent on my looking at my own complicity, my joining in with the crowd’s chant, my denial that the mess of the world has anything to do with me. My salvation is dependent on dying to my way, the world’s way, the wide road, the easy path, the world I was born to. My salvation is dependent on my recognition that the way of the world I live in is corrupt, that humankind are children of wrath, as Paul said in this morning’s text, and I am one of them. That “me”, that child of wrath, has to die, if I am to rise with Christ, a newborn in God’s kingdom.
This is why I willfully avoid what Jesus is saying, why I want to take 3:16 out of context and turn it into a bumper sticker. All by itself, it makes it sound like God gave me an easy escape plan from this hellish world. Just believe some facts. But the belief Jesus is calling us to is not in facts, but in a person, and that person’s way to life, that person’s perspective, that person’s identity as Son of God. It is not simply to believe a doctrine. It is to believe that an entirely new way of life is the salvation of this world.
The classic formulation is that the world is hopelessly corrupt and will therefore be destroyed. But again, 3:16 doesn’t stand on its own. It is followed with the assertion that the Son of Man didn’t come to condemn the world, but to save the world. What world would Jesus be talking about, if not this one?
Jesus is talking to a fellow Jew, and not to some pagan Gentile. Nicodemus counts himself a believer in God. In every century since Jesus, most believers in God have been like Nicodemus, and fewer believers have truly followed Jesus. Nicodemus cannot understand Jesus, because he is born of the world’s self-centered fear. He can’t acknowledge Jesus in the daylight, but only in the dark when no one’s looking, because he is more afraid of the world than he is of God.
But Jesus calls us not to judge Nicodemus, because Jesus himself doesn’t judge him. It wasn’t his place, and it’s not ours. Nicodemus was already judged, because he is blind and deaf to Jesus. He is addicted to the status and wealth that Caesar gives him but he denies this to himself. He refuses to look at the snake that bit him, and so he is doomed already to die of its poison. From heaven’s perspective, he’s already dead, one more body, worthless to God, fit only for the garbage fire, because he loved the darkness more than the light.
Jesus is a single light in a great darkness, a darkness the vast majority of humankind, including me, stumbles around in. That darkness, no matter how great, is no match for the little light of Jesus. But to truly look at this light requires a courage no human being possesses by themselves, because it illuminates the evil we do, sneaking around in that darkness, and kills it dead. At the end of the day, we will likely choose survival in the world as it is than the abundant life of the kingdom heaven coming into the world.
Our fear of that humiliation is great. But we will not be able to rise into newness of life without the humility that results from that humiliation. In this way, in the humiliation of the cross, and its revelation of our complicity in the mob, in the resurrection, and its revelation that this crucified rebel was indeed God’s son, and in the ascension, we hope that we can rise into that same new resurrected life, so that new perspective, a new orientation, comes into the world, a world that firmly rejects it, in us.
All we have to do is look at the snake that bit us right in its reptilian eye. All we have to do is look at the upshot of our love of the darkness, the Son of God, dying on our cross. Once we have accepted the humiliation of that cross, we can begin the resurrected life Jesus offers us.
What is that life like? In our class on Richard Rohr’s Breathing Underwater, a number of recovering people have joined us. It’s interesting to see how the teachings of the book just light them up, how excited they are to talk about the sense of God at work in their lives, leading them and guiding them and giving them the resources they don’t have, to live not in their own righteousness, but in God’s.
The promise of resurrection is for us while we live on earth, and isn’t much earthly use if it isn’t. Yes to eternal life in heaven. It is indeed a great comfort to remember that God’s care extends beyond the grave. But before we can truly enjoy that comfort, we must shine Christ’s light in the grave we’re already in.
Because the way of Christ can let us out of the grave of judgment and wrath and anger and frustration of our ego’s small desire to merely survive. It can free us for peace and love and grace and mercy and generosity, as it has for so many that are here with us this morning, around this table of the Lord.
Amen.
