Sermon for March 15, 2015
Fourth Sunday in Lent
Mr. Stephen Nagy, Seminarian:
John 3:16 is one of the most famous verses in Scripture. Quoted across pop culture from the rapper Wyclef Jean to the wrestler Stone Cold Steve Austin, from the fastfood chain In-N-Out Burger to quarterback Tim Tebow. You can probably find it up on more billboards than all the personal injury lawyers strung together.
And for good reason, for it could be called the Gospel in a soundbite:
- “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.” (John 3:16)
Beautiful, isn’t it?
But what about verse 14?
- Jesus said to Nicodemus, “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up.” (John 3:14)
Have you ever seen a billboard quoting Jesus comparing himself to a snake?
Jesus is of course referring to the bronze serpent story from Numbers. The Israelites are in the wilderness trying to get home grumbling as usual about pretty much everything, and as usual, God’s patience runs thin. So God sends the poisonous serpents. And as usually happened when things got really bad, the Israelites repent. Then something odd happens. In a “hair of the dog that bit you” moment, God tells Moses to build a bronze image of the serpent. Get bit? Check out the bronze serpent, and you live. Stare at a snake to cure a snakebite? This just seems so weird.
Why didn’t God just smite the serpents? Wouldn’t that have been the easy button for the Almighty? The people repent, and … Zap! But the snakes continue to bite the Israelites. By believing in God’s saving grace, the people lived. But so did the snakes. Why make it so complicated? What was God thinking?
More important for us, what might Jesus have been thinking? Of all the great material in Scripture that presages the Messiah Why did he choose this story to explain how he would redeem us?
Listen to verse 17:
- “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” (John 3:17)
In Christ’s suffering, death and Resurrection, God redeemed a flawed world, Not by condemning it, but by making it holy. Transforming it Loving it into beauty. Poisonous serpents and all.
Serpents have been around since the Garden of Eden. They represent our own sinfulness and the confounding yet undeniable sinfulness of this broken world. Their poisonous bites fill the wilderness of this vale of tears that we call earthly life.
God did not unleash a mighty warrior Messiah to smite the world’s serpents. Instead, Jesus joined his tears with ours, Sanctified our suffering through his own agony and death, And in his Resurrection, transforms the pain of life into the faith, hope and love of God’s eternal kingdom.
Redemption comes through the brokenness. Christ’s. And ours. It is Christ’s broken body that sustains us. Every Sunday, Amy breaks the bread with the words:
- The Gifts of God for the People of God.
Take them in remembrance that Christ died for you,
and feed on him in your hearts by faith,
with thanksgiving (BCP 364-5, OC 287)
When Christ died on the cross, the temple curtain was torn in two. It was that torn curtain That allowed the light of the Resurrection to break through.
The poet Leonard Cohen writes:
- There is a crack, a crack in everything.
That’s how the light gets in.
As children of the Resurrection, Our fractured lives, yours and mine, are the means by which God’s grace enters the world. And the world is made holy. Transformed. Loved into beauty.
Ephesians tells us:
- For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God. For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works. (Ep. 2:8,10)
With God’s grace, it becomes our very nature For Christ’s light to pour through the cracks of our brokenness.
I invite you to try an exercise. (I can get away with this because I’m the naïve seminarian.) Look at your fellow members of the Body of Christ. Go ahead, look around. (If we all do it, none of us will be embarrassed – or all of us will be equally embarrassed, which is sort of the same thing.) See the deep beauty of the faces around you. See the stories in our eyes See how our bodies bear witness to the joys, and infirmities of walking through this world.
Witness God’s handiwork in your sisters and brothers, in yourself and myself. Witness the light of Christ pouring through the lovely and perfect cracks of our humanity.
In this state of brokenness and light, humanity and grace, suffering and resurrection, consider that in Christ Jesus, we have eternal life – today.
I lift up our eternal nature because Jesus does so twice – in verse 15 and again in the great verse 16. Christ has already died and risen from the dead. So in a very real way, God’s forever kingdom of faith, hope and love is here now. Eternity, all mashed up with this earthly journey.
How might we walk through our days if we truly grasp that this supposedly ordinary life with its ups and downs and big long middle – its loves, joys, sadnesses and infirmities, its brokenness and it’s grace – that this ordinary life is also immensely sacred, part of the eternal life offered us in Christ?
Holy Week is fast approaching. In these remaining days of Lent, I invite you to look upon Christ lifted up for us Allow his tears to join with yours. See in each other and yourselves His Resurrection light pouring through the fractures of our perfect bodies. Catch a glimpse of the eternal life he offers in the ups and downs and big long middle of our days. And as members of the broken and perfect Body of Christ at St. John’s come together in prayer and thanksgiving walking with Christ during Holy Week, as he walks with us always.