4th Sunday in Lent Year B

The Rev. Melanie Dickson Lemburg The 4th Sunday in Lent-Year B March 10, 2024 Two of our readings for today are full of both dichotomies and paradoxes that invite us to wrestle with our lives and our faith in different ways than we might normally engage. In the Old Testament reading, we see the Children of Israel wandering in the wilderness and they are, once again, complaining. But their complaints are paradoxical: “why have you brought us out here in the wilderness? There’s no food out here!” And in the next breath: “we detest this miserable food that you keep giving us!” They make a critical error in complaining against God (up until this point, they’ve just complained against Moses), so God sends venomous snakes into their camp which bite the people and the people begin to die. They plead to Moses and God to save them, and God instructs Moses to make a bronze serpent and put it up on pole, and when the people look upon it, then they will live (and be healed?). The very thing that has wounded them has become the source of their salvation. In John’s gospel, we are plopped down in the middle of a scene that deserves some context. It’s the middle of the night, and a leader in the Jewish synagogue named Nicodemus has come to visit Jesus under the cover of darkness. Nicodemus is curious about Jesus and he has some questions for him, and the two get into a discussion. In their conversation, Jesus talks about being born anew or being born from above (which is a paradox), and Nicodemus leans into the dichotomy of how can you be born anew when you are already born and living? Jesus goes on to talk about darkness and light, intimating that light is preferred over darkness. (And yet, we note that Nicodemus only feels like he can come to Jesus under cover of darkness, so without darkness, their conversation probably wouldn’t be happening.) And then Jesus likens his coming death on the cross to when Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness—a story that Nicodemus would have been very familiar with. So what are we supposed to do with all this? How does it even make any sense to us or how can it be relevant for our lives and our faith? For most of us, it is our nature to try to make sense of the world by creating dichotomies, and we live in a world that encourages this: right versus wrong; good versus evil; light versus darkness: healthy versus sick; well versus wounded. (Dare I say it in this election year? Republican versus Democrat) When really so much of our lives and especially our growth is found in the in-between places, or in the gray areas. These in-between/gray areas are often places of wisdom, nuance, and understanding. Just think about all the things that can grow and thrive in the dark: seeds, roots, babies in the womb, intimacy. Think about the ways that modern medicine must often wound people further as a part of their healing: surgery, chemotherapy. Think about what it means to be empathic—how we can lean into the sorrows of another, sharing those burdens, and it can help someone be healed. In a world where we are encouraged to dichotomize and polarize, Jesus raises up the image of the bronze serpent on a pole and he points out how rather than polarizing, it becomes a reconciling, both/and experience—the serpent is both the distributor of a lethal snake bite and an instrument of healing. Jesus cross—a symbol of humiliation and torture and an instrument of death—becomes the tree of life upon which hangs the salvation of the world. Your questions for this week: think about a time in your life when you were both right and wrong at the same time? (Or when you needed both darkness and light? Or when something that wounded you also helped heal you?) What did that teach you about living in an in-between space? What occurrence in your life or in your faith now is inviting you to stop seeing it as a dichotomy and is inviting you into living in the gifts that can be found in the gray areas, in the both/and?