4th Sunday in Lent Year B

Lent 4B March 11, 2018 I had a former parishioner, who, when talking about the ways that God was working in his life or in our parish, would often say, “That God is a weird dude.” I couldn’t help but think of his saying in light of our lessons for this particular Sunday-the fourth Sunday in Lent. “That God is a weird dude.” In our Old Testament reading for today, we see the Children of Israel, wandering in the wilderness after escaping from slavery in Egypt, fresh off of a military victory that God has delivered to them. But, as is our nature, even in the face of such provision and continued care for them by God, they begin, once again, to complain. Numbers tells us that the people spoke against both Moses and God saying, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.” (Talking out of both sides of their mouths, much?) And at this point, the fifth time of their complaining in the wilderness, and I believe, the first time they have not only complained against Moses but have also included God in their complaints, God is finally fed up. And God sends a plague upon them, similar to the plagues God unleashed upon Egypt to help secure their release. God sends a bunch of “fiery snakes” upon them, and the people get bitten, and they begin to die. (Yikes!) The people very quickly see the error of their ways, run to Moses, and repent of their complaining. So Moses goes back to God, and God tells Moses what to do. The people have asked Moses to ask God to take the scary, fiery snakes away, but that is not what God does. Instead, God tells Moses to “make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.” Moses does this, and the result is that “whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.” The people are still getting bitten by the fiery, poisonous serpents. But God has given them a way to be healed of the poison and to return to wholeness of life. Talk about a weird dude, and a weird story. And then we’ve got the gospel story for today. Our lectionary plops us right down in the middle of an ongoing story—that time when Nicodemus, a Pharisee and leader of the Jews, comes to Jesus under the cover of darkness to try to learn more about Jesus. The two have a whole conversation about how, in order to encounter the Kingdom of God, one must be “born from above” or born again (as some translations put it). Nicodemus continues to misunderstand Jesus, and then our lesson for today picks up, with one of the most famous passages from all of scripture: John 3:16. But before we get to John 3:16, we get John 3:14-15, in which Jesus compares himself to that bronze snake statue on a pole that we heard about in our Old Testament reading saying, “so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” Weird dude. Weird stuff. Just what are we to make of all this? This past week in our forgiveness study, we looked at the first step out of four in the process of forgiveness. Interestingly enough, the first step in the process of forgiving one person who has hurt us is telling the story of how we’ve been hurt. We are encouraged to write down the facts and in that way, revisit the trauma. Now, this seems counter-intuitive, right? It seems that re-visiting old wounds and how we got them would stir everything back up and make it harder to forgive, but Archbishop Desmond Tutu assures us that is not the case. He writes, “When we tell our stories, we are practicing a form of acceptance. When we tell our stories, we are saying, ‘This horrible thing has happened. I cannot go back and change it, but I can refuse to stay trapped in the past forever.’ We have reached acceptance when we finally recognize that paying back someone in kind will never make us feel better or undo what has been done. To quote the comedian Lily Tomlin, ‘Forgiveness means giving up all hope for a better past’”.i This seems similar to the Israelites looking upon the thing which has caused them harm in order to be healed. It is certainly weird, but it works because God is involved in it. This connects to the gospel passage for today, too. One of the blog writers I read regularly, a Lutheran pastor named David Lose, writes about how when we read the parts around the oh, so familiar verse of John 3:16, this whole gospel passage can give us a new way of looking at the cross. He writes that it shows us that “the cross is not about punishment or payment but about healing…and only healing.” And he goes on to talk about how the Greek word that is translated as “judgement” in this passage, the word krisis, from which we get our own word “crisis” means less about the rendering of a sentence (like our word “judgment” suggests) and is more about separating and revealing. Krisis, like our word crisis, is about a decisive turning point, and so, he writes, “judgement, as it turns out, is about telling the truth.”ii So, the weird revelation in these two readings for us today is that God offers healing freely for all, but it often does not take the form in which we would expect. In fact, God’s invitation to healing for us means revisiting the story of the thing that has done us harm in the first place. Jesus on the cross is the icon of all this, how God insists on providing healing for God’s people in a way that is completely unexpected and even seemingly counter-intuitive. Your invitation for this week is to think about a wound that you bear and to revisit it, to look upon it, to tell the truth about it, and to offer it to God’s light and love for healing. i. Tutu, Desmond and Mpho Tutu. The Book of Forgiving: The Fourfold Path for Healing Ourselves and Our World. HarperOne: New York, 2014. P 88. ii. http://www.davidlose.net/2018/03/lent-4-b-3-overlooked-elements-of-john-316/