First United Methodist Church of Reno

⁴From Mount Hor they set out by the way to the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom; but the people became impatient on the way. ⁵The people spoke against God and against Moses, “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.” ⁶Then the Lord sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died. ⁷The people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed for the people. ⁸And the Lord said to Moses, “Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.” ⁹So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.

¹⁴And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, ¹⁵that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. ¹⁶“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. 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. ¹⁸Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. ¹⁹And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. ²⁰For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. ²¹But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.”

This past week I’ve been in poignant conversations with two beloved members of our church who are failing in their health – one with the exhaustion that’s all too often associated with old age, the other dealing with the ravages of a terrible disease, but both facing their situations with quiet courage and gentle grace. I could name others in our church family who, like these two, are in the midst of their own struggles and hope for extended life, but these women, remarkably, have been given a new energy to enjoy the precious time left to them and have chosen to deepen relationships that they have with those they love and who love them – such a gift!

I’m reminded, yet again, of the theme and setting of Thornton Wilder’s ageless play, Our Town. The setting of the play’s last scene is a New England cemetery. Sitting on the graves – in rocking chairs, no less – are the townspeople, young and old, who have died. They can see but can’t be seen, speak but can’t be heard. A young woman enters their ranks. She’s just died in childbirth and misses her family terribly. She greets her new companions, though, telling them that her first wish is to return to the living. They all strongly advise against it. The living don’t appreciate life, they say – they take too much of it for granted. All of God’s gifts are undervalued: sunsets, music, food, nature, friendship – the litany goes on. In spite of their warnings, the young woman leaves them anyway. She soon returns to be with her new-found friends in death, who alone seem to know the real value of life.

What do you think? Do we have to face imminent death, or even die, before we’re able to see life for the precious gift that it is? These two situations that I’ve just spoken about – one real, one imagined – might lead us to think so. Today’s readings invite us to ponder the gift of salvation; and salvation isn’t something that stands apart from our lives. It’s intimately tied up with them! As long as we see our salvation as something in isolation – that is, limited to just spiritual or religious concerns – then the Christ event will be hugely underrated.

The events of this past week, along with my pondering today’s scripture readings, have also reminded me of some passages from one of Mary Gordon’s richly evocative novels, The Company of Women. Toward the end of that book, a priest looks back on his life and the women on whom he relied and who made his life richer – both with joy and sorrow. In looking back he feels a deep grief and heartfelt repentance for the ways in which he was arrogant, the ways in which he turned away from love and yet fed on it without acknowledging it. Even in the depth of his regrets, though, he sees again the power of God’s love:

I have repented, and the love of God forgives even the sins of our cowardice and of the smallness of our hearts, the terrible temptation to self-hate. Only faith can save us from self-hate. In faith, I leave it all behind me, in the hands of God.^³

In a rabbi from Nazareth named Jesus, we have learned about a love that also asks us to forgive and to give up to God those things we cannot change or overcome by virtue of our own limited power and abilities to do so. In the midst of illness – or struggles of any kind – we might find an invitation to search and to love. To search, not to find fault or point the finger of blame, nor to agonize over why we weren’t stronger, or whether we just weren’t trying hard enough. No, we’re invited to look into our own weakness, our own vulnerability, and ask, “Where is God in the midst of this?” We might just find God showing us new ways to live and laugh even within the woundedness and limitations of our lives. That priest in Gordon’s book says at one point, “I understood the incarnation for, I believe, the first time: Christ took on flesh for love, because the flesh is lovable.”^⁴

You and I have been offered nothing less than a new life. We are “saved” by Jesus – another way of saying that we are immersed in the grace, compassion, love and very life of God. That’s why John’s gospel talks of this new life – eternal life – as if it’s already begun. Why not? There’s just no way of fully grasping the reality of eternal life unless we first grasp the miracle of our human birth, the absolute glory of being alive, and the sublime mystery of death. That’s the whole meaning of incarnation. Why is it so hard a lesson for us to learn? We are human beings and earth is our home. We have bodies and emotions, memories and dreams. Here is where eternal life resides – if we would only step out of the darkness into the light of life with God.

John speaks today of the evil that people do in darkness. We’ve tended to elevate “dark deeds” into terrible abominations that, all too often, others do – but not us. If we do admit to our own predispositions to do evil things, we usually think of those things from our past that haunt our consciences. Skeletons resting uncomfortably in the closets of our minds, we struggle – as we might our nightmares – with how to get rid of them. Here in the depths of Lent I want to suggest, instead, a different understanding of our relationship with that dark side within us all. It isn’t the stuff of our nightmares that we ought to be concerned about at all, it’s those blemishes within us with which we’ve become quite comfortable – things we might even savor – that take up room in the closets of our hearts and hunger for even more space. They’re the things that begin to gnaw at the heart, until they begin to take it’s place.

Lent is the time, then, for us to open up our hearts and to bring such dark secrets into the light of God’s cleansing love. That’s why I was struck so powerfully by the invitation this week from Joyce Rupp’s book, Open the Door (for those of us making that Lenten spiritual journey) that we all try to find ways of “Welcoming the Unwanted” within us. As she puts it:

These unwanted traits of ours throttle us with their unmanageable and mouthy insertion into daily life…they cripple spiritual development…

The most helpful approach is to get to know these unwanted qualities as thoroughly as possible. (What we fail to know or refuse to acknowledge only gains power over us.)^⁵

But the love of God in Jesus, the Christ, has the power to irradiate even our deepest, darkest secret places so that we might, first, accept them, but then be able to deal with them in creative and even life-giving kinds of ways.

I think that the poet David Wagoner captures and maybe even magnifies the messages given to us in and through Moses and Jesus today. His poem “The Man Who Spilled Light” may be an insight into those messengers of God whose words were alternately scoffed at and despised. He writes:

The man who spilled light wasn’t to blame for it.
He was in a hurry to bring it home to the city
Where, everyone said, there was too much darkness:
“Look at those shadows,” they said. “They’re dangerous….”
So he went and scraped up all the light he could find.
But it was too much to handle and started spilling:
Flakes and star-marks, shafts of it splitting….
Then everything seemed perfectly obvious
Wherever they looked. There was nothing they couldn’t see….
And the man who’d spilled it felt fine for a while,
But then he noticed people squinting.
…people were dazzled
But they were squinting, trying to make darkness
All over again in the cracks between their eyelids.
So he swept up all the broken light
For pity’s sake and put it back where it came from.^⁶

Imagine a world that had only light or dark. We need both – dark and light, light and dark.

In Jungian psychology, the dark or “shadow” part of ourselves is made up of all of our repressed weaknesses, shortcomings, and baser instincts. “Everyone carries a shadow,” Jung wrote, “and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.”^⁷ According to Jung, the shadow sometimes overwhelms what you and I do, particularly when our conscious selves are shocked, confused, or paralyzed by indecision. Paradoxically enough, though, Jung also believed that “in spite of its function as a reservoir for human darkness – or perhaps because of this – the shadow is the seat of creativity.”^⁸ The question for us today remains to be, then, “What unwanted part of yourself waits to be welcomed and tended”^⁹ by the Holy One? Our prayer too this day, may well be this:

Embracer of the Rejected,
teach me how to lovingly welcome
the parts of myself that I do not want.
Draw me to your heart of mercy
as I learn from what I tend to reject.
Help me to change what I can
and to accept the sum of who I am.
I open the door of my heart to you.
I open the door.^¹⁰

1 In both of our scripture readings for today, the concept of “salvation” is presented not only as an act of God but a very human experience. In the Ancient Near East it had distinctively political overtones; unfortunately, nowadays it almost exclusively has otherworldly connotations.

The last “murmurings” or grumbling against Moses and God made by the people of Israel in the wilderness is recorded here in the Book of Numbers. By denying them permission to go through his country, the king of Edom had forced them to make a detour through the wilderness. They started south from Mount Hor, where Aaron had died, and on this long way around, the people became impatient. It’s worth noting that the Hebrew word for “impatient” means “short of soul.” We may be able to identify, then, with the fact that their faith became weaker as their journey lengthened.

2 Here in the Gospel According to John, the bronze serpent is replaced by the cross and the exodus by the resurrection – Jesus takes the place of Moses and the covenant is sealed by a new kind of baptism and a new way of understanding the communal meal. The curious thing about John associating Jesus with the image of the bronze serpent, though, is that Moses’ serpent had the purpose of restoring life to those who’d been poisoned by snakebites. The bronze serpent was, then, the image of a poison that heals – which may be a fascinating commentary on the history of the discovery of everything from vaccines to antivenin.

A further curiosity might be the connection between the ancient patron of medicine and son of Apollo, Asclepius, and the symbol of the caduceus. Asclepius was the Greco-Roman god of medicine and was often represented holding a staff with a serpent coiled around it. Because of Asclepius’ skill at healing, and fearful that he therefore would make human beings immortal, Zeus killed him with a thunderbolt. But then, curiously enough, a related symbol was the caduceus, a wing-topped staff with two snakes winding about it, which was carried by Hermes, given to him (according to one legend) by Apollo. The symbol of two intertwined snakes appeared early in Babylonian myth and legends and is related to other serpent symbols of fertility, wisdom, and healing. What’s more, this staff of Hermes came to be carried by Greek heralds and ambassadors and eventually became a Roman symbol for truce, neutrality, and noncombatant status. And then there’s this additional curiosity: by regulation this staff with two snakes winding around it has since 1902 been the insignia of the medical branch of the U.S. army.

One last observation on the imagery used by John in his account here: the church has come to associate the phrase “the Son of Man” exclusively with Jesus, but in Hebrew that phrase was a common way of referring to all human beings – in the way that we once thought of the word “mankind” as referring to all people, not just men. It is intriguing to me, then, to consider that John may be saying to us that just as Moses “lifted up” the concerns of his people in the wilderness, “so must every human being be lifted up” – and Jesus has come to show us how it’s done.

As Paul succinctly has put it in his letter to the church at Ephesus:

For we are what [God] has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life (Ephesians 2: 10).

The First United Methodist Church of Napa, CAMarch 22, 2009One Great Hour of Sharing Sunday

The First United Methodist Church of Napa, CA
March 22, 2009
One Great Hour of Sharing Sunday