For those that asked for the sermon I delivered to St. John the Evangelist this past weekend, it's below. This particular Sunday was also Mother's Day in the United Kingdom so if the imagery is a bit focused on that you will understand why (I stand by the imagery, regardless of the holiday- but it is drawn out a bit more for the occasion). And in good high church fashion, I preached from the lectionary texts for the day:
Numbers 21:4-9
Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22
Ephesians 2:1-10
John 3:14-21
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| Many thanks to my dear friend Meredith for not only coming to the service, but taking this picture |
Numbers 21:4-9
Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22
Ephesians 2:1-10
John 3:14-21
It’s Mothering Sunday and it seems only right
that we come to the Old Testament in the Book of Numbers and the children of
God are being, a bit childish and petulant. Numbers has always felt like it was
written by someone who had recently traveled with small children because Israel
complains a lot. The food is never right. The journey is taking too long.
Someone is always being mean.
The Old Testament story of the Nehushtan is a
strange one in this journey from point A to point B. Immediately before this we
are told that God had listened to the Israelites and handed over the Canaanites
to them. Suddenly the text shifts and these same people speak out against Moses
and against God, asking why they are there. The story continues to unfold in a
fairly dramatic way. God sends poisonous snakes as punishment. After the
Israelites pray for forgiveness God commands Moses to construct a bronze
serpent on a pole for the Israelites to gaze upon to be healed. And then the
story continues with more wandering and more conquests. It would be easy to put
the strange story of the serpent statue aside except this statue, the Nehushtan, will appear again; first in Hezekiah,
when it is destroyed for becoming an idol of worship, and again in the Gospel
text, which we read, when Jesus is speaking to Nicodemus.
It may be worth pausing to think through why this story is the one Jesus uses, and I want to make the case that it has to do with how God responds to our hurt.
When I was around four years old someone thought it would be a great idea to buy me bandages with Disney princesses printed on them. I assume it was my grandmother who bought them because my own parents could foresee what was going to happen. I suddenly started having a lot of “accidents.” Bruised fingers, scraped knees, and mostly invisible scratches. There are photographs where I have seven or eight bandages on me and I was not a particularly rambunctious child prone to injuries.My mother indulged me a bit at that age because sometimes a four year old needs a bandage because the older children next door didn’t want to play a game with you or because your brother took your favorite toy. Four year olds do not always have the vocabulary to express their hurt. We have all seen a perfectly happy child become a screaming and crying puddle of anguish in a matter of seconds. Admittedly four year olds have the flair for the dramatic, but the dramatic doesn’t preclude a real center of hurt and emotion.
There are still points in our lives when we want an acknowledgment to our hurt even if it isn’t the right way to fix the problem. The Psalmist reminds us of this. God works in the lives of his children. The Lord delivers them from sickness and trouble. His love endures, and is a love that is active in the lives of those who call out to him. There’s a profound beauty when faith can be manifested in physical acts. We all want our prayers to be heard and answered in some way that we can see and touch and feel, even when they are only partially answered prayers.
We all want divine bandages for our hurts.
But we continue to hurt because we do not know how to stop asking for bandages and start asking for what we actually need to soothe the pain. The Israelites in the wilderness are lost and hurting. They have been taken from the only home they know and are wandering around in the desert. If we put ourselves in their context it doesn’t seem that unreasonable to constantly be asking God what they are doing in the wilderness; where the next meal is coming from; how they are going to possibly keep fighting these well established people groups. They’re scared children.
And God’s response is to produce sign after tangible sign. Manna falls from heaven; water springs from the rock; healing comes from the bronze serpent on a pole. Bandages to get them through the journey, but they fail to see that the efficacy isn’t in the object- it’s in the will behind the act. God, acting as a mother towards them, trying to soothe a hurt and a fear.
God’s bandage for their hurt.
And by the time we reach the Gospels, the community is still waiting for their hurt to be healed. Instead of crying out for food and health, the Israelites cry out in appeal for sovereignty. Their problems will be healed if they can simply regain control of their land and their people.
And this is not an unfounded plea. For almost six hundred years, the collective Israel had been occupied on an off by various groups, most recently the Romans. Now they ask, “how do we cope with being marginalized in our own homes?” Maybe the answer was to find a political figure to fight back, someone who would reclaim the kingdom and liberate them from the foreign rulers through force. Or maybe a more gradual approach through assimilation into the society, by earning the trust of those in power they could slowly regain power themselves. Perhaps instead of speaking about a direct political hope, the Israelites could appeal to God religiously and have a reformation and bring about change. So you create more and more complicated rules to follow, head to the desert, become an ascetic, or pray for a religious teacher to lead a revival of the faith, because if your practices can just be right enough you’ll earn God’s favor and the world will be set right. Do not the prophets speak of God’s favor turning back on those who return to him?
When Nicodemus comes to Jesus in the middle of the night, asking so many questions, we may not be surprised that he is confused about who Jesus is and what Jesus is teaching and is hoping that Jesus will be one of these figures. A champion to either usher in the divine miracle that the Israelites have been praying for or to tell them what they need to do to fix the situation. And then why isn’t the parallel to the serpent on the pole fitting? If it healed once, it will heal again.
But Jesus never provides a direct answer to a question. He answers questions in ways that require us to reevaluate what we are asking him. And this time will be no different.
Because while, Augustine claims we are a bundle of loves, a better articulation may be that we are bundles of insecurities- hurts and questions and anxieties. We don’t realize our afflictions and scars. We don’t realize what Jesus is telling us- that we’re in the dark. In our pain we’ve isolated ourselves. We are still trying to substitute bandages for actual healing. As though our actions, our works and deeds as Saint Paul will call them, will soothe our anguish and save us. Cut off from our ability to ask for what we need from one another and from God we fall more and more into the shadows. We think our bodies are bruised and our spirits are weary, but the painful truth is that our souls are dead.
The problem is not that the Israelites are distressed about their present situation. The problem is not that we pray for the big banal things in our lives to be fixed. The spectacular everydayness of the Psalms reminds of the loving intentionality of the on-going call and response of our needs with God’s omnipotence in the narrative of history. Our problem is that we are trying to diagnose ourselves and treat ourselves, but our examinations and self-administered and clumsy stitches are done in the dark. And in the darkness we realize that our patchwork will only leave scars but will not heal. Because in the darkness of 2 am, the questions are often no longer, “Will God send better food tomorrow?” or “Will the Romans leave the land?” or “Will I ever be able be able to afford a new iPhone?” Instead those 2 am thoughts are “Am I doing well enough?,” “What am I doing with my life?”, “Where will I get the strength to get through tomorrow?”
Questions of the hurt and fragmented lives that we lead, stumbling around alone in the dark, but maybe with some wisdom we realize that we can’t fix it ourselves. We cry out to God.
And it will not be a bandage that fixes this. We cannot fix this because we cannot articulate what the problem is. We know that it is something so deeply complex and internal to us that even the great scholars and philosophers of the church have struggled to name it. We call it original sin, or alienation from one another, or the problem of modern individualism- but all of those are labels reaching for the same truth that at our core we sense that we are broken vessels
But God- ever the patient and loving parent sets it right. God looks at those with whom he was once in full communion with and knows our hurt. Jesus is lifted up as the Nehushtan- to break the idea that what we think healing looks like is what God knows healing to actually be.
And this is God’s divine healing.
Only this time it isn’t the metal and wood that does the healing. What we imagine the object to be holds no value- it’s not a bandage for a wound. When Christ is lifted on the cross something broken and hurt inside of us which we cannot articulate is healed by a love which we cannot fathom or describe.
It’s a love not entirely dissimilar to that between a parent and a child. I have seen how a new baby will cry for his mother and be comforted because picked him up and held him. He can’t articulate what’s wrong, but there’s something in her physical doing that makes the situation better. In the midst of her own sleep deprivation she will rouse to soothe his anxious crying. A previous co-worker of mine told the story of how when her daughter was born she burst into tears because when she held her daughter for the first time, she knew that “her daughter was never going to be able to love her as a mother much as she loved her as a child.”
And in Lent we are reminded that we are still those anxious children and God is our ever patient and loving parent. We hurt and in this season it is good to remember that our anxiety doesn’t need to be placated by ways we understand. Israel didn’t understand God’s plan for a better life for them. Nicodemus didn’t understand Jesus. Two thousand years later the church is still wrestling with what it means to say that Jesus’ death brought life to those who believe in him and how to live that out rightly. We are still muddling our way through, starting and stopping sentences with awkward pauses and ums, missing words and missed connections, to-do lists and agendas to get things “right” when everything seems wrong. But the Gospel doesn’t call us to create a confession that gets it right. It doesn’t even call for us to get ourselves together. We come to it out of the dark, stumbling toward a light breaking into the darkness. Drawn to come to Jesus in the night as Nicodemus was, to look upon something and be healed as the Israelites were. The love and healing just calls us to believe that God is doing something with our inarticulate, hurting selves.
Love can be just as inarticulate as hurt is, but love is more powerful.
Amen
It may be worth pausing to think through why this story is the one Jesus uses, and I want to make the case that it has to do with how God responds to our hurt.
When I was around four years old someone thought it would be a great idea to buy me bandages with Disney princesses printed on them. I assume it was my grandmother who bought them because my own parents could foresee what was going to happen. I suddenly started having a lot of “accidents.” Bruised fingers, scraped knees, and mostly invisible scratches. There are photographs where I have seven or eight bandages on me and I was not a particularly rambunctious child prone to injuries.My mother indulged me a bit at that age because sometimes a four year old needs a bandage because the older children next door didn’t want to play a game with you or because your brother took your favorite toy. Four year olds do not always have the vocabulary to express their hurt. We have all seen a perfectly happy child become a screaming and crying puddle of anguish in a matter of seconds. Admittedly four year olds have the flair for the dramatic, but the dramatic doesn’t preclude a real center of hurt and emotion.
There are still points in our lives when we want an acknowledgment to our hurt even if it isn’t the right way to fix the problem. The Psalmist reminds us of this. God works in the lives of his children. The Lord delivers them from sickness and trouble. His love endures, and is a love that is active in the lives of those who call out to him. There’s a profound beauty when faith can be manifested in physical acts. We all want our prayers to be heard and answered in some way that we can see and touch and feel, even when they are only partially answered prayers.
We all want divine bandages for our hurts.
But we continue to hurt because we do not know how to stop asking for bandages and start asking for what we actually need to soothe the pain. The Israelites in the wilderness are lost and hurting. They have been taken from the only home they know and are wandering around in the desert. If we put ourselves in their context it doesn’t seem that unreasonable to constantly be asking God what they are doing in the wilderness; where the next meal is coming from; how they are going to possibly keep fighting these well established people groups. They’re scared children.
And God’s response is to produce sign after tangible sign. Manna falls from heaven; water springs from the rock; healing comes from the bronze serpent on a pole. Bandages to get them through the journey, but they fail to see that the efficacy isn’t in the object- it’s in the will behind the act. God, acting as a mother towards them, trying to soothe a hurt and a fear.
God’s bandage for their hurt.
And by the time we reach the Gospels, the community is still waiting for their hurt to be healed. Instead of crying out for food and health, the Israelites cry out in appeal for sovereignty. Their problems will be healed if they can simply regain control of their land and their people.
And this is not an unfounded plea. For almost six hundred years, the collective Israel had been occupied on an off by various groups, most recently the Romans. Now they ask, “how do we cope with being marginalized in our own homes?” Maybe the answer was to find a political figure to fight back, someone who would reclaim the kingdom and liberate them from the foreign rulers through force. Or maybe a more gradual approach through assimilation into the society, by earning the trust of those in power they could slowly regain power themselves. Perhaps instead of speaking about a direct political hope, the Israelites could appeal to God religiously and have a reformation and bring about change. So you create more and more complicated rules to follow, head to the desert, become an ascetic, or pray for a religious teacher to lead a revival of the faith, because if your practices can just be right enough you’ll earn God’s favor and the world will be set right. Do not the prophets speak of God’s favor turning back on those who return to him?
When Nicodemus comes to Jesus in the middle of the night, asking so many questions, we may not be surprised that he is confused about who Jesus is and what Jesus is teaching and is hoping that Jesus will be one of these figures. A champion to either usher in the divine miracle that the Israelites have been praying for or to tell them what they need to do to fix the situation. And then why isn’t the parallel to the serpent on the pole fitting? If it healed once, it will heal again.
But Jesus never provides a direct answer to a question. He answers questions in ways that require us to reevaluate what we are asking him. And this time will be no different.
Because while, Augustine claims we are a bundle of loves, a better articulation may be that we are bundles of insecurities- hurts and questions and anxieties. We don’t realize our afflictions and scars. We don’t realize what Jesus is telling us- that we’re in the dark. In our pain we’ve isolated ourselves. We are still trying to substitute bandages for actual healing. As though our actions, our works and deeds as Saint Paul will call them, will soothe our anguish and save us. Cut off from our ability to ask for what we need from one another and from God we fall more and more into the shadows. We think our bodies are bruised and our spirits are weary, but the painful truth is that our souls are dead.
The problem is not that the Israelites are distressed about their present situation. The problem is not that we pray for the big banal things in our lives to be fixed. The spectacular everydayness of the Psalms reminds of the loving intentionality of the on-going call and response of our needs with God’s omnipotence in the narrative of history. Our problem is that we are trying to diagnose ourselves and treat ourselves, but our examinations and self-administered and clumsy stitches are done in the dark. And in the darkness we realize that our patchwork will only leave scars but will not heal. Because in the darkness of 2 am, the questions are often no longer, “Will God send better food tomorrow?” or “Will the Romans leave the land?” or “Will I ever be able be able to afford a new iPhone?” Instead those 2 am thoughts are “Am I doing well enough?,” “What am I doing with my life?”, “Where will I get the strength to get through tomorrow?”
Questions of the hurt and fragmented lives that we lead, stumbling around alone in the dark, but maybe with some wisdom we realize that we can’t fix it ourselves. We cry out to God.
And it will not be a bandage that fixes this. We cannot fix this because we cannot articulate what the problem is. We know that it is something so deeply complex and internal to us that even the great scholars and philosophers of the church have struggled to name it. We call it original sin, or alienation from one another, or the problem of modern individualism- but all of those are labels reaching for the same truth that at our core we sense that we are broken vessels
But God- ever the patient and loving parent sets it right. God looks at those with whom he was once in full communion with and knows our hurt. Jesus is lifted up as the Nehushtan- to break the idea that what we think healing looks like is what God knows healing to actually be.
And this is God’s divine healing.
Only this time it isn’t the metal and wood that does the healing. What we imagine the object to be holds no value- it’s not a bandage for a wound. When Christ is lifted on the cross something broken and hurt inside of us which we cannot articulate is healed by a love which we cannot fathom or describe.
It’s a love not entirely dissimilar to that between a parent and a child. I have seen how a new baby will cry for his mother and be comforted because picked him up and held him. He can’t articulate what’s wrong, but there’s something in her physical doing that makes the situation better. In the midst of her own sleep deprivation she will rouse to soothe his anxious crying. A previous co-worker of mine told the story of how when her daughter was born she burst into tears because when she held her daughter for the first time, she knew that “her daughter was never going to be able to love her as a mother much as she loved her as a child.”
And in Lent we are reminded that we are still those anxious children and God is our ever patient and loving parent. We hurt and in this season it is good to remember that our anxiety doesn’t need to be placated by ways we understand. Israel didn’t understand God’s plan for a better life for them. Nicodemus didn’t understand Jesus. Two thousand years later the church is still wrestling with what it means to say that Jesus’ death brought life to those who believe in him and how to live that out rightly. We are still muddling our way through, starting and stopping sentences with awkward pauses and ums, missing words and missed connections, to-do lists and agendas to get things “right” when everything seems wrong. But the Gospel doesn’t call us to create a confession that gets it right. It doesn’t even call for us to get ourselves together. We come to it out of the dark, stumbling toward a light breaking into the darkness. Drawn to come to Jesus in the night as Nicodemus was, to look upon something and be healed as the Israelites were. The love and healing just calls us to believe that God is doing something with our inarticulate, hurting selves.
Love can be just as inarticulate as hurt is, but love is more powerful.
Amen
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