March 15, 2015 – 4th
Sunday in Lent, Year B
© 2015 Evan D. Garner
The other day a friend of
mine posted a picture on Facebook. Perhaps you saw it. It was a photograph of a
digital scale, and she included a celebratory description, indicating that this
was the first time in a long while that she had been on the “good side” of this
particular milestone weight. I must confess to you, my brothers and sisters,
that my first thought wasn’t congratulatory. Instead. I wondered aloud to
myself, “What is she thinking? I wouldn’t share a picture of my weight on
Facebook even if I lost a hundred pounds!”
You see, for me, weight
has always been an issue. I was chosen last for the kickball team. My cousins
made fun of the shape of my body. I cried because they didn’t make Guess jeans
in husky sizes. For almost my whole life, my weight has been one of those
personal failures that I do not share with anyone. In fact, I barely even share
it with myself.
But I love standardized
tests. I delight in performance evaluations. I look forward to high school
reunions. I even enjoy the machine in the pharmacy where I can hold really
still and breathe really slowly and get my pulse and my blood pressure down to
a level that astonishes most people. I love those things because I am good at
them—because they are ways that I can demonstrate to the rest of the world that
I am a success. But my scale is another story.
When I am in a good
pattern of running three or four times a week, I will hop on the scale—as long
as no one else is around—and look down at the number to see how I am doing.
But, when things get busy and I am not able to exercise the way I know I
should, I won’t go anywhere near the scale. I know it’s bad, but I don’t want
to see that number staring up at me. I’d rather pretend that things are worse
than they really are than know the ugly truth. I’m like the guy—and it’s almost
always a guy—who has had some terrifying symptoms for years but refuses to go
to the doctor because it’s not really real until someone in a white coat with
letters after her name gives it a diagnosis.
No one likes confronting
his physical or professional or relational failures. Even though we know that
they exist, we don’t want to encounter them. So what, then, does that say about
sin? What is it like to confront your spiritual shortcomings? What is it like
to come face to face with the ways that you have let God down?
You’ve heard the story
about the Episcopalian or Presbyterian not wanting to wait in a long line at
the liquor store. As soon as he walks in the door, he boldly declares, “Oh,
Brother Billy! What are you doing here—looking for sinners?” sending all the
Baptists running for cover. That reminds me of how much fun it is to go to
Publix right after church and catch…I mean, see…some of the parishioners who
didn’t quite make it to church on Sunday morning. All joking aside, it isn’t
fun to confront our sin or to have someone else confront it for us. Whether
we’re kneeling down in a confessional booth or making a “searching and fearless
moral inventory” and admitting “to God, to ourselves, and to another human
being the exact nature of our wrongs,” no one looks forward to sharing his
deepest failures with anyone else.[1]
You may not worry that the federal marshals will come and bang on your door in
the middle of the night, but there are truths about yourself that you don’t
want to share with another living soul. You have your own metaphorical mugshots
that you don’t want to show up on the internet. If Nathaniel Hawthorne taught
us anything it’s that all of us have at least one scarlet letter hiding under
our shirts.
And that brings me to the
bizarre story of the bronze serpent from Numbers 21. By this time in their
journey from Egypt to the Promise Land, the people of Israel had been walking
for a long, long time. Finally, they had arrived on the border of their
destination, but the King of Edom refused to give them safe passage through his
land. So Israel had to make a long detour out of the way. Understandably
frustrated, the people began to grumble against God and against Moses. “Why
have you brought us up out of Egypt?” they cried—not for the first time. “We
are hungry and thirsty, and we have nothing to eat except this worthless manna.”
At that point, as the
author of the story tells us, the Lord seemed to lose his temper, and he sent
poisonous snakes to bite the people, many of whom died. In a panic, the people
ran to Moses and said, “Moses, help us! We have sinned against the Lord and
against you. Pray to the Lord that he might take these serpents from us.” So
Moses prayed, and God offered him a solution: “Make a poisonous serpent out of
bronze and set it on a pole, and those who are bitten shall look upon that
serpent and live.” And that is exactly what Moses did, and, sure enough,
whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would gaze upon the bronze snake
and live.
There are many strange
stories in the bible, but this story belongs somewhere near the very top of
that list. God gets angry at his faithless people and sends poisonous snakes to
punish them. The people have a change of heart and beg Moses to save them. And,
after Moses prays to God, God tells him to make a serpent out of bronze—an
idol, if you will—and to affix it to the top of a pole. And somehow looking at
that bronze statue of a snake was enough to heal these snake-bit people. How in
the world did this happen, and, more importantly, how in the world did the
people who put the Hebrew scriptures together allow this story of salvation
through pseudo-idol-worship to stay in the bible?
Like all passages in
scripture, this story isn’t just a tale from history. It’s written in order to teach
us something. And I don’t think it’s an accident that the faithless people who
were saved found salvation by staring the exact consequences of their sin right
in the face. Healing began when the people gazed upon the same serpent that had
bit them. And where do you think that healing came from? That bronze serpent
didn’t have any power to save the Israelites. Idols are empty images of metal,
wood, or stone, fashioned by human hands. Only God has the power to save his
people, and salvation comes through faith, and faith requires repentance, and
repentance means taking a long, hard look at our sin so that we might leave it
behind forever.
None of us enjoys
encountering the totality of his or her failures. We’d rather hide from them or
pretend that they don’t exist or stick them in a closet where they will collect
dust. But the truth is that we are all snake-bit, and the only way we will ever
get better is by looking in the mirror and admitting our wrongs. Confronting
our sin is the first step. God asks us to believe in his promise of
forgiveness—to trust that no sin, no misdeed, no failure is big enough to
separate us from his love. If we are hiding our sin from ourselves and from God
and from one another, we aren’t trusting in the power of his forgiveness.
There’s a reason that Jesus told Nicodemus that the Son of Man must be lifted up just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness. Salvation begins when we feel the freedom that comes from acknowledging our sin to a God who has pledged to love us regardless of it. Gaze not upon a fiery serpent but upon the crucified Son of God. Behold not only the magnitude of his sacrifice but also the magnitude of your sin—our sin which held him there. Look upon the manifestation of your own misdeeds as they are nailed to the cross and be saved by the one whose love will always triumph over even your biggest failures.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.