Passion Sunday: Even When God Is Silent

Text put to music in an anthem by Sumner Jenkins

Even When God Is Silent

I believe in the sun even when it is not shining.  I believe in love even when feeling it not. 

I believe in the sun even when it is not shining.  I believe in love even when feeling it not.

I believe in God even when God is silent.  I believe in the silence.

  This text in the anthem was found on a basement wall in Cologne, Germany.  It had been written by someone hiding from the Gestapo.

  The experience of God being perceived as silent occurs when we experience no apparent activity of God on our behalf to save us from events that stretch from being merely inconvenient to unpleasant to downright horrifying.

The Risen Christ As a Trans-historical Protean Reality

5 Lent   B          March 25, 2012     

Jer. 31:31-34      Ps. 51:11-16        

Heb. 5:1-10        John 12:20-33     

 Lectionary Link

  The writer of the Gospel of John records an agriculture metaphor from the mouth of Jesus is our Gospel reading today.  “Unless a seed of wheat dies, it remains alone, but if it dies it bears much fruit.”

  If I were to expand that metaphor to understand the various Christian social realities that have come into social expression during the last 2000 years, I might say that the life of Jesus of Nazareth as a seed has become an entire forest of trees.  The one acorn of the life of Jesus that developed within the community of Judaism has now become a great forest of community trees.

  We now live in an Anglican/Episcopal tree of Christianity with many branches that exists in a forest of other trees all claiming one acorn or seed person as the origin and inspiration of our corporate life together.  That there are different kinds of Christian trees in this great forest is seen as a scandal of division to some, but to others the diversity of trees has to do with the different kinds of success of the message of the Gospel in different times, different places with different people.  Should we be surprised that from one acorn an entire forest of trees can arise?  Should we be surprised that from one genius in human history, the genius of Jesus Christ, that an entire forest of Christian communities has developed?  For people who want a forced unity of a mono-lingual Christianity, a world-wide Christian Empire, the great forest of Christian diversity is scandalous division.  But for those who attribute the success of Christianity to the ability to become diverse expressions in different places, such people see this diversity as a major reason for the success of the Christian Gospel.

  The Gospel of John is written long after the life of Jesus of Nazareth but it uses narrative teachings of Jesus of Nazareth to teach the theological practice of an established Christian community.  The writer of the Gospel is trying to weave together the relationship of what had already happened within the community of beloved disciple with the oral tradition of the life of Jesus of Nazareth.  The writer is trying to answer this question.  How did the fame of Jesus of Nazareth extend way beyond Jerusalem, Galilee and the Jewish Community?  The writer of John’s Gospel is also actually writing you and me into the Gospel.  How so?  The Gospel declares Jesus of Nazareth to be identified with the Word of God.  And so Word of God is a Person who speaks the oral words of language.  And yet the spoken words of Jesus had no infallible technology of memory; oral tradition is not very exact when compared with our recording technologies of today.  The writer of John’s Gospel used written words of language as a significant technology of memory. About the authors own words, the writer wrote: “These words are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God.”  This is where you and I enter into the Gospel of John because we are readers, and in reading the Gospel of John we help fulfill the Jeremian prediction of the laws of God being written or inscribed upon our hearts.

  The writer of John’s Gospel is tracing the fame or glory of Jesus.  How did this singular individual Jesus of Nazareth attain fame or glory beyond his time and place?  Why did this community of John continue to meet together in memory of Jesus even when Jerusalem had been sacked and leveled and when the followers of Jesus had scattered into many cities?  Ephesus is often believed to be the community of location for the writing of the Gospel of John, and it is far from Jerusalem.

  And so the Risen Christ was an always present oracle that spoke within the followers of Jesus, and the Risen Christ inspires a teaching in story form about the origins of his fame and glory.  The Greeks who came to Jerusalem saying, “We wish to see Jesus” are all of us who have come to manifest a curiosity about this person who is not really of our time and place.  We have been those who have said in various ways, “We wish to see Jesus…we wish to wonder about his relevance to our lives….we wish to share the relevance of his life to others.” 

  And so the writer of John’s Gospel is reflecting upon the origin of the fame and glory of Christ that was significant six to nine decades after Jesus was no longer present to see and touch.  How indeed can people have this trans historical experience and presume to know a person who is no longer present to sight and touch and face to face questioning?

  What we can say about Jesus of Nazareth in his appearances in the lives of people after he lived, is that Jesus is perhaps the most protean personality of all history.  Proteus was the Greek god who could morph into any form in order to avoid having to predict the future.  The word protean has come to mean, “becoming all things to all people.”  Jesus as the Risen Christ has truly become protean; he has become available in all of the forms that the words which are written on our hearts can become.

  Jesus as the Risen Christ has died to the limitations of being a historical person located in the body of Jesus of Nazareth so that his message and law of love can now be written upon the hearts of everyone who wants to partake of this protean presence of the Risen Christ.  Can any of us deny the protean reality and fame of Jesus of Nazareth?

  If we deny this protean reality of the glory and fame of Christ, you and I are to be most pitied for being at this altar today to find the Risen Christ in the bread and the wine.  And if we are finding the protean presence of Christ in bread and wine, where else are we finding the loving presence of God so lovingly communicated to us in such individual and personal ways that we are drawn to respond and worship and say, Thank you, O God in Christ?

  You and I may not hear audible angelic voices declare about Jesus, “I have glorified the name of God and will continue to do so for ever” but the proof of history as redounding to the glory and fame of the protean Risen Christ is more significant proof than angelic voices from heaven.

  The writer of the Gospel of John wrote his community’s experience of the protean Risen Christ as originating in the life of  Jesus of Nazareth and in so doing, he wrote your experience of Christ and mine, and everyone’s experience of Jesus into this Gospel too.  Viva la difference!  Viva the protean manifestations of the Risen Christ.  God’s glory has been achieved even as the law of Christ’s love and presence has been written upon our heart.  And to this we can only say, “Thanks be to God!”  Amen.

Puppet Show: Seed Cemetery

Gospel Puppet Show

March 25, 2012

Pam, the gardener, Stuart as Jesus, Catherine as Miriam, Caroline as Gully the sea gull

Pam is in front of the theatre, hoeing her garden.  In her garden there are little tomb stones in a row.  One Tomb stones reads, Beans: RIP.  Another tombstone reads: Peas: RIP.  Another reads Corn: RIP

Miriam: Hi, Miss Pam what are you doing?

Miss Pam:  It is spring time and so it is time to prepare my garden.  And as you see my garden is like a graveyard.  I have done lots of burying in my garden.

Miriam:  Burying?  Does that mean someone has died?

Miss Pam: Well not someone but something is going to die soon.  That is why I put up the tomb stones.  I’ve made one for the peas, the corn and the beans.

Gully:  Hi, Miss Pam, I hope you didn’t bury all of the seeds.  If I see a seed, I will fly down and eat it.  While you are hoeing the ground could you dig up some worms for me to eat.  Yum, yum, I like worms.   Do the children like worms;  I hope not because that will be more for me.

Miss Pam:  Gully, you stay away from my seeds.  I’ll have to put up a scare crow to keep you away.  But I do have some bread crumbs for you to eat.

Gully:  Thanks, Miss Pam.  But I’m like Miriam I don’t understand why you have tomb stones on the rows in your garden.  For me a garden means life, not death.

Miriam:  Yes, I still don’t understand your tomb stones in the garden.  It is kind of sad or silly.  Please explain what you are doing.  This is spring and it is not like Halloween when we do spooky things.  Why are you doing spooky things in your garden?

  

Miss Pam:  Well, I bought packages of little seeds.  And they are very tiny and I bury them in the ground.  And when I put them into the ground, the seeds are going to die.

Miriam: They are not going to die; they are going to become roots, stem and plants and vegetables.  How are they going to die?

Miss Pam: In two weeks if we were to dig into the ground here would we find the seeds?

Gully:  I don’t know what we would find? 

Miss Pam:  Did you know that Jesus talked about seeds dying in the ground and he said that his life would be like a seed that would die in the ground?

Miriam:  That sounds like a riddle to me.  How can we understand this riddle?

Miss Pam:  Maybe we could pray and ask Jesus to help us learn the meaning of his riddle.

Gully: Okay, Dear Jesus, please come and help us to understand your riddle about the seeds.

Miriam: Yes, Dear Jesus, please come.  We want to know the meaning of the dying seeds.

(Jesus appears)

Jesus:  Hello, Miss Pam, Gully and Miriam, I heard your prayers.  Did you call for me?

Miriam:  Yes, Jesus, we want to know the meaning of your riddle about the dying seed and your life?

Jesus:  Okay, I did say that my life was like a dying seed.  And this is what I mean.   Look at the pictures of the seed in the ground.  See in the first one, the little seed breaks and out pops a little tail.  Do you see it?  Do you know what happens to this little tail?

Gully:  No, what happens?

 F

Jesus:  It becomes the root.  And the root drinks in water and food from the ground called minerals.  And then look what happens, the top of the tail breaks out of the ground and it becomes a green shoot.  But the case of the seed is now like a hat on the head of the plant.  And when the head of the plant grows leaves then the seed case falls to the ground.  And the case is dead just like a cocoon is dead after the butterfly has left it.

Miriam:  But Jesus, how was your life like a dying seed?

Jesus:  Well, Miriam, you know that I died upon the cross?  But when I died did the world forget all about me like they would forget about this dead case of the seed?

Gully:  No, Jesus, you weren’t forgotten.  You became more famous after you died.

Jesus: Yes, that is true, Gully.  You see I was like the seed that became the root and the plant and the leaves.  Why?

Miss Pam:  Is that because you came back to life again?

Jesus: Yes!  And now I am alive in the lives of everyone who invites my Spirit to live in them.  I have become like a great tree; I am not like the seed anymore.  My life died but now I live again like a great tree, because I am now with all people who invite me to be in their lives.

Miriam:  Thank you Jesus for explaining the riddle for us.

Gully:  Boys and girls, do you understand the riddle now?  Do you see that a seed that dies becomes much more life in the root and the leaves?

Miss Pam:  That’s right!  Thank you Jesus for explaining the riddle to us.  Okay, I have to get back to burying my seeds!

Collecting Seeds or Growing Plants?

5 Lent   B          March 25, 2012     

Jer. 31:31-34      Ps. 51:11-16        

Heb. 5:1-10        John 12:20-33     

 Lectionary Link

  Several times in the Gospels, it is written that Jesus did not have honor in his own home, in his own time and in his own country.  And that is usually true of great innovators; they encounter great resistance in their own time and place.

  I have tried to use that same argument with my wife and children in the past—brilliant but misunderstood—and they tend to cite my cantankerousness rather than my brilliance.

  Another truth of history is that when we die, we become something other than what we were in our own time.  Why?  Because context changes everything.

  In their own contexts, Jesus and Paul did not get that exorcised over the common practice of slavery.  For many, many years, Americans did not get too exorcised over slavery or women’s rights; there was no context for a message of equal justice to be heard.  So contexts can indeed change drastically the meaning a person’s life and the meaning of their values.

  I believe that the New Testament books are proof of how contexts changed the meaning of the life of Jesus of Nazareth.  In short, after Jesus was gone, he became much better known than he ever was when he actually lived.  So, the fame of Jesus after he was gone superseded the fame that he had in his own time.  And the Gospel writings involve the attempt to connect his post-resurrection fame with the oral traditions of his actual life.   And we never really know how much of his actual life we are reading about or how much of the lives of his interpreters.  It is all mixed together and it is very hard or impossible to sort out.

  What we can observe historically is that a major shift in understanding Jesus occurred when Gentile followers of Jesus began to outnumber vastly the Jewish followers of Jesus.

  Since Jesus was a Jew with a message for Jews in his own time, how can the future Gentile context for Christianity be interpreted and seen in the life of Jesus?  If we understand this, we understand a major motivation for all of the New Testament writings.  If this were not the case, then Rabbis in synagogues today might be reading some of the New Testament writings as commentaries upon a particular messianic interpretation of Jesus.

  So the Gentile context changed the understanding of the significance of the life of Jesus Christ.  And we see that the writer of the Gospel of John understands this in writing close to the end of the first century and into the early second century about 6 -9 decades after Jesus.

    In John’s Gospel we have read about Greeks who came and wanted to see Jesus.  This occurs right after the account of the resurrection of Lazarus.  It is not surprising that Gentiles or that anyone would be interested in resurrection.  Resurrection is the El Dorado, the secret to eternal life.  Resurrection was the founding event of Christianity.  When the Greeks came to seek Jesus, the writer of the Gospel of John pens the discourse of Jesus about his glory or his ultimate fame.   And of course the ultimate fame of Jesus happened after he was gone.  The Gospel writer is trying to explain how the potentially famous Jesus became the actually famous risen Christ.

  And when one talks about potentiality one can use the metaphor of the seed.

  When someone invites you to their home to show you their gardening ability, they don’t take you into the garage and show you a massive supply of seeds that they have been keeping on the shelf.  They show you the results of the seeds; they show you the plants, the flowers and the trees.  They show you the plants that can reproduce many more seeds out of the one seed that was planted in the ground and died.    When one seed dies, it provides the next generation of life and many, many future generations of life.

  Why didn’t Jesus get left in the forgotten museum of history?  The purpose of Roman crucifixion was to make a person forgotten forever to the life of people.

  Jesus was lifted up on the Cross.  The Romans thought that by lifting Jesus up on the Cross, they could create a spectacle and so discourage any devotion to him.   On the cross the Romans lifted Jesus up to public ridicule; but when the seed of his body was planted in the ground, his resurrection gave birth to the Christ-life within the hearts of countless millions of people who came after him.

  The Roman and Gentile context that killed him, eventually was totally converted by him.   When we read the Gospel passion story, the writers seem to blame the Jews more for the death of Jesus, when it really was the Roman authorities who had all of the power.  This is an indication that by the time the Gospels were written, the Roman citizenry were the ones who were filling the ranks of the Christian communities.

  We come into an understanding of the phrase: Losing our lives to save them.   If a seed remains a seed forever, it has effectively lost its life.  So conserving is dynamically opposed to the nature of life.  We never make our potential actual, if we try to conserve a static state.  It is only through that continual loss of former states to gain future states that we can activate the dynamic gift and purpose of our lives.

  The message Jesus is very much in opposition to museum religion, where we try to hold things as static artifacts of the past, and we end up making our lives museum pieces that are alienated from the realities of our actual lives.

  So context changes everything.  Jesus, the Christ, became something else in the Gentile world than he was in his original Jewish context.  The New Testament writings, focus their interpretation on a suffering messiah in contrast to other interpreations of the messiah in the Jewish community and so the writings exist as a result of the split between Judaism and Christianity.  The New Testament chronicles the gradual shift of seeing Jesus of Nazareth as a Jew amongst Jews, to seeing the risen Christ as a Son of humanity and Son of God amongst all of the people of the known world.

  In the history of Christianity, we have seen many changes in the last two thousand years.  Historical contexts change the application of Christian meaning and yet still claim the original Jesus as the chief source of inspiration.

  In the history of my own life, the changing context of my life means that I understand Christ differently now than I understood him when I was sixteen, yet I am the same person who encompasses the diversity.

  I have become different in my later states than what I was in my former states.  So I have lost a lot; I have died to former states of how the understanding of my life has been constituted; but I have gained new states of understanding.

  The seed dying in the ground and giving rise to new generations of life is a metaphor for the life of Jesus becoming the life of the risen Christ.

  It is also a metaphor for the process of life itself.  Life is moving; pretending that we can remain static is but a state of denial.  Another word for this process of renewal is called repentance.  We are constantly being challenged to give up former states of how we constituted the understanding of our lives and take on new understandings and new purpose.

  The witness of Jesus Christ invites us to a realistic view about change in life; it invites us to expect the losses caused by change.  But the witness of Christ also offers us the hope of great gain in what we will yet become.  And this hope is anchored on the resurrection of Christ.

  Let us embrace the hope of great gain; the seeds of the past has split their sheathes and become surpassing life.  This kind of self-surpassing life is the life of repentance to which we are invited by the witness of Jesus Christ.  Amen.

Puppet Show: The Serpent Lifted Up

Gospel Puppet Show

March 18, 2012

Asha, Moses, Jesus, Nicodemus,   Boy: Asa,  

Asha: How many of you like snakes?  It is very easy to be afraid of snakes, since some of them are poisonous.  Today, I want us to learn something from our Bible stories.  And we have stories about snakes and about Christ.  But I’m going to have the puppets help me tell the stories.  Moses, are you around?

Moses: Here I am, can I help you.  I’m quite busy now.

(Release the snakes over the front of the puppet theatre)

Asa:  Ouch, I am so sick;  I got bit by a poisonous snake.  Can you help me Moses what shall I do?

Moses: Asa, you need to go over to the clinic; I prayed to God and God sent us a cure for the snake bites.

Asa:  Okay….ooooh this hurts so much and I’m getting drowsy.

Moses:  Hurry over to the clinic.

Asha:  Moses what happened?

Moses: We had some people who were complaining so they decided that they wanted to take a short cut and sure enough they walk right into a valley of poisonous snakes.

Asha: What did you do? 

Moses:  I prayed to God and he told me to make a snake out of bronze and put it up high so everyone can see it.  And he said that everyone who was bitten by a snake could look up at the bronze snake and ask God for help.

(put up the snake pole)

Asha:  What happened?

Moses: Well, you can see that I put the bronze snake up on a tall pole and sure enough when people look up they are being cured.  Well, I’ve got to go.

Asha: Thank you Moses.  I hope everyone prays to God for a cure.

      And now I think this will help us with our story about Jesus.  Remember that the snake was lifted up on a pole and everyone who looked at the snake and prayed to God got better.

(Nicodemus appears)

Asha:  Well, hello!  Who are you?

Nicodemus:  My name is Nicodemus.  I was just talking with my friend Jesus.  Jesus, could you come and meet my friend Asha, and all of the boys and girls?

Jesus:  Hello, Asha and boy and girls.  I hope you are here today to learn something.  Did you learn about the snakes from Moses?

Nicodemus:  Jesus and I were talking and he told me that God really loved this world.

Jesus:  That is true Nicodemus.  God does love this world.  God created the world so God loves the world.

Nicodemus:  But how much does God love the world?  There are lots of things that are sad that happen in this world?  How does God love a world with people who are sometimes sad?

Jesus:  God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son to this world.  And just as Moses lifted the bronze snake to save the people from their snake bites, the Son of God will suffer by being lifted up on a cross.  And anyone who looks with faith in Christ’s love for us will live again even after they die.

Nicodemus: Well, that’s really salvation.  One kind of salvation is being saved from snake bites, but the saving of our lives after we die is a most wonderful salvation.

Asha:  Wow!  That really is salvation.  And that means that God really loves us.  Girls and boys, can you remember how much God loves us?  Let us all say together, “Thank you God for loving us!”  “Thank you God for sending your Son Jesus.”  Amen.

John 3:16 As Evangelical Graffiti?

4 Lent             March 18, 2012  

Numbers 21:4-9  Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22

Ephesians 2:1-10   John 3:14-21

Lectionary Link

  

  Probably anyone who has watched a televised sporting event has at times seen a spectator holding a sign: John 3 colon 16.  Or John 3:16.  Tim Tebow, a quarterback has worn John 3:16 as eye shade when he plays football as a way of telling people about his personal Christian beliefs.  Displaying John 3:16 is a way for an avid evangelical Christian to mix a love for sports with the requirement of his piety to always be evangelizing.  So while watching golf shots, home runs and touch downs, the evangelical Christian sports fan can be evangelizing. (One may often wonder if in our sports crazed culture whether people actually love their sports and sports heroes more than Christ).   The most famous John 3:16 sign man was the rainbow man who wore a rainbow wig in the 70’s and 80’s and a John 3:16 tee shirt to major sporting events.  Of course in a biblically illiterate culture Jn period 3 colon 16 might be a foreign language.   But it is a code reference to all evangelical Christians about perhaps for them the most important verse in the Bible.

  I would not disagree with evangelical Christians about the importance of this verse and I think that all Christians are called to be evangelical in the sense of being ready to live in their lives and speak with their lips the good news about God’s love in Christ.  Each of us has a different way to be evangelical and we can share the good news in ways that are compatible with the gifts of our personalities.  Evangelical can be regarded to be a negative word if it means that you have to be “hell fire and brimstone” preachers or if you have to be persons who are obnoxiously wearing one's brand of religion on one's sleeves in a very pushy way.  It is something oxymoronic to be presenting “good news” in an off putting way. Some evangelicals do seem to have bad news.

 What we can say from our Gospel lesson is that the writer of the Gospel of John was evangelical, that is, the writer used a narrative about Jesus to present good news.  The target audience included non-Jews, followers of the sect of John the Baptist and other Jews who had not yet come to embrace Jesus as the Messiah.

  Since the Gospel of John was the last Gospel to come to textual form it includes some significant differences from the other Gospels.  In John there are no exorcisms, which probably means that such a practice was not a familiar method of healing for their readers.  There are no miracles in John; John uses a different word, he calls the special acts of Jesus, Signs.  As signs, the teachings about Jesus that occur within the story are more important than the particular uncanny event of the story.

  Also, there are more red letters in the Gospel of John.  In some Bibles, the words of Jesus are printed in red letters.  John’s Gospel has long discourses of Jesus with highly developed theological thinking.  Logically, one might assume that the earliest Gospels and sources would include more words of Jesus than Gospels that were written later.

  Since John’s Gospel was written much later than the other Gospels, the writer had to account for the fact that world had not yet ended with the coming of the Son of Man in the clouds.  The coming of the kingdom of heaven in the earlier Gospels has become in John’s Gospel an already happened parallel kingdom of God which was known by the presence of the Holy Spirit.  And so in the Gospel of John Passion narrative, Jesus can confidently say to Pilate, “If my kingdom were of this world, the world of Roman military power, then my angels would come and fight in your world of soldiers.”

  The Kingdom of God as having already arrived is the Good News of the Gospel of John.  Jesus promised Nicodemus that a person could be born into this kingdom by water and the Spirit. 

  In the Gospel of John, there is a great contradiction that is presented in this way.  Jesus said that his followers were to be in the world but not of the world.  They were not supposed to love the things of the world.  But in our famous Bible verse that we’ve read today, it states that God so loved the world that God gave his unique Son so that whoever believes in the Son will have everlasting life.

  So how is it that God can love the world and we cannot?  The way in which John’s Gospel deals with this contradiction is to propose that people can experience another kind of life or world within this world.  The Kingdom of God is no longer portrayed as an end of this world; it is a parallel world of God’s Spirit that we can know in this life.  So within our natural lives, we can experience abundant life, or the life of God’s Spirit, whom to know is also everlasting life or eternal life.

  The Gospel of John, like no other Gospel, presents Jesus as a person who represents most fully the life of parallel existence.  Jesus is the Eternal Word of God but he is also Jesus of Nazareth.  He is proclaimed to be the coincidence of God and Humanity in one person.  And the way that John states the good news is to inform us that we as human beings need to know how to live in parallel worlds simultaneously.  We need to live in the world of Spirit and Word as members of the Kingdom God, even while we live in very earthly and external kingdoms of this world.  The truth of this presentation is the truth of our lives; all of us have to come to know our interior lives in certain ways and their relationship to our exterior worlds. 

  The Gospel of John is trying to convince us that we can know in a significant way that our interior life is an experience of the comforting presence of God’s Spirit.  And in knowing this, we can relate to our exterior world with a motivation of God’s love for us and the comfort of God’s peace.  And even when the challenges of life present themselves, we can experience the Signs of living from our birth into the Kingdom of God.

  So here is the logic of John’s good news; God so loved the world.  How much?  He gave his unique Son, just as Abraham was willing to give his only son Isaac.  How much was God’s love?  How much was God willing to be identified with human experience?  Well, lots of people would say that death in some way expresses the completeness of natural life.  And God loved the world so much that God was willing to take a complete identity with human death.  And if God could deal with human death, then we would have an ensign or a symbol for us to look at as each of us contemplates the deaths of our loved ones and ourselves.

  So the death of Jesus was an elevated symbol of the fullness of God’s identity with human experience and gives us a place to glance to know that life continued after the death of Jesus.  There is an afterlife to Jesus. It is the Risen Christ known through the Spirit of God.  And there is an afterlife for us, because we know that there is something greater than death.

  The healing experience, the saving experience for the children of Israel who were plagued by poisonous serpents was to look at the bronze serpent lifted up on a pole.  The plague of the snakes came because of their disobedience; but the gift of healing came simply by looking in faith upon the uplifted bronze serpent.

  The writer of the Gospel of John took this story of the lifted bronze serpent and stated, “this is how the cross of Jesus functions for our spiritual lives.”  God’s life in the divine Son dies before our very eyes and yet only initiates another order of healing or salvation life, the life of resurrection, the life of the Holy Spirit, abundant life, eternal life even now as we live.

  This is the good news of the Gospel of John: we can know that God loves the world better than we can.  When we love it, we have the human tendency to linger our love into idolatry and we can lose our enjoyment of the world.

  And so in knowing a birth by God’s Spirit we can love our world in the Spirit without falling into the idolatry of addiction, and we can learn proper enjoyment so as to be able to discover what is truly good in our world and in our lives.

  Today, let us embrace perhaps the six most positive words of the entire Bible: “For God so loved the world!”   Now you don’t have to go around wearing John 3:16 signs but these six words can help us live with optimism and make us good Episcopal Evangelicals whose favorite words might be: “Preach the Gospel always and if necessary use words!”  Amen.

A Saving Glance at the One Lifted Up

4 Lent    B         March 18, 2012  

Numbers 21:4-9  Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22

Ephesians 2:1-10   John 3:14-21

 Lectionary Link

  We are familiar with serpents and healing because the American Medical Association uses the symbol of two serpents entwined around a rod.  This came from the Greco-Roman medical tradition.  The ancient myth of Aesculapius encounter with a serpent healing another serpent is the origin of the association of serpents and healing.  The habit of a snake literally resurrecting itself from it dead skin could be the inspiration for the regenerative powers associated with the snake.  The Greek word pharmakon can mean both poison and remedy.  Certainly the theory behind vaccination is to take some of the “poison” and it is a remedy in that the body builds immunity to the actual disease.

  Whether the healing serpent of Moses is related to the Greek mythological notion of the healing serpent, can not be ascertained. 

  The people of Israel, while they wandered in the wilderness toward the Promised Land, are portrayed as immature sheep and always ready to mutiny against God and their leader.  For their mutiny and their rebellion, they are often punished.  One of the punishments was a plague of poisonous serpents.

  Moses, the leader, is the patient father, who is always interceding with God on behalf of the rebellious people.  And when the plague of snakes occurred, Moses was given the remedy.  He was to place a bronze likeness of the serpent on a pole in the middle of the camp.  And those who looked at the serpent were to be healed.  “That’s stupid Moses!  Why would looking at the serpent cure me?”  The cure was not based upon rationality; the cure was based upon simply accepting God’s healing provision.

  One of the consequences of being biblically illiterate is that one misses the symbolic system that functions between the Old and New Testaments.  And if we don’t understand the symbolic system, then we cannot make sense of the meanings and methods of what the Gospel writers were trying to communicate to their communities.

  In the long discourse that is presented between the Pharisee Nicodemus and Rabbi Jesus, there is a comparison made between the cross of Jesus and Moses’ serpent upon the pole.

  Just as God wanted the Israelites to recover from their rebellion and resulting punishment by simply looking at God’s healing grace given for them, so the early Christian believed that God did not condemn people in their sin, alienation and rebellion; rather God wanted people to simply look in the direction where they might be saved or healed.

  So looking at Jesus lifted up in his death upon the cross was viewed as God's way to bring us health and salvation.

  It is a rather irrational act.  Foolishness to the wisdom of the Greeks; A stumbling block to the Jews, as St. Paul said.  It may seem ridiculous to us.

  But the essence of the Gospel is that God acts with grace to let us know that we have found favor.    We would rather say that we deserve God’s favor because we are good and we have done some good things.  It is admirable to be as good as we can and to do as much good as we can, but it isn’t our “good natures” or our “good deeds” that qualifies us in God’s sight.  God created us good, so goodness is an act of God, and when we depart from goodness in our nature and acts, it does not remove from us the original goodness in which we were made by God.

  So seeing Jesus upon the cross is simply understanding that God’s creation and God’s redemption are but God’s affirmation of our goodness and favor and acceptance.  That means it is up to us to accept the grace of God both in creation and redemption.

  This portion of John’s Gospel contains the most popular evangelical bible verse of all time: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that whoever believes in him will not perish but have everlasting life.”

  I think that the people who push the born again experience often do something that shifts the focus from God’s grace to the importance of the human decision.

  If someone offers me a million dollars; what is more important, the generosity of the giver, or my decision to take it?

  Some times the born again people think that we should celebrate the fact that we receive God’s grace even more than the generosity of God who offers us the grace.

  Yes, it is important that we receive God’s grace and it appears to be a very irrational decision to do so.  We would much rather believe in our own ability and circumstances for our salvation; but the experience of the generosity of God, and our acceptance of it is the very essence of the Gospel.

  So today, let us trumpet and highlight the grace of God’s creation and redemption, and let us simply accept it, and not trumpet our acceptance except with thankfulness to God who is the giver of all.

  God’s generosity does not make us proud Christians who are certain that our choices and ways are best; God’s generosity humbles us with thankful hearts and with joy that comes in an indescribable way.  And that is the experience of the Good News.  God in Christ is the Good News and we have the privilege to be caught up in that.  For us to reduce all of this to my church is better than yours, or my salvation is more complete than yours, is to misunderstand the generosity of God.

  Let us proclaim a generous God, who simply asks for us to give a receptive glance toward the divine grace today.  Amen.