3-25-07

Our Old Testament lesson for his morning is this strange passage from the Book of Numbers describing a snake on a stick. Call it the "snake kabob" passage if you will. Some biblical translations say "serpent," but we are talking snakes here, poisonous little fellows, as in asps, which are indigenous to Arabia.

The scene is set during the Exodus from Egypt. The Israelites are in the "Wilderness of Sin," better known as the Sinai Desert today. They are having a terrible time. They wonder aloud what they might have done better to stay slaves in Egypt than to face the hardships of the wilderness. I tell you, a few of us passed through there two months ago, and it has not proved up any.

This particular passage is known as a "murmuring" passage. There are "murmuring" passages throughout the Exodus story, as the Israelites are frequently reduced to griping and grumbling as they grope their way to the Promised Land. It's been awhile, but I find the "murmuring" passages preach well. Somehow they never go out of style.

On this occasion the children of God complain about the food. It's called manna. God provides manna for them to eat. Whatever manna is, as they tell their own story, it is plentiful.

Everyday laid out for them. They need only awake, stretch, and step forth from their tents, and there it is, the table set with food sufficient for their daily needs. God provides the chosen children their daily bread.

What do the children do? The children complain. Can you believe it? And some of you mothers are saying, "yes, you can."

Maybe we can, too. The chosen children are tired of manna-meal in the morning, manna sandwiches at noon, and manna soup for supper. Sick of it, they are. So they murmur about the manna. To enable them to get a grip God sends them a plague of snakes. Or, better yet, a plate of snakes.

Apparently God had attended one of those management seminars on costumer service, where the customer is always right. So, good news to the customer, God responds to the murmuring by pulling the manna from the menu. Bad news, God serves serpent instead.

The nasty snakes bite some of the Israelites, and they die, drop dead they do, causing the children to conclude, maybe manna is not so bad after all. God is impressed with their re-consideration, if not repentance.

So God instructs Moses, their leader, to make a snake out of bronze. Mind you, this is the Bronze Age, and Moses apparently possesses some Charlie Russell talent. So snake sculpted as order, Moses is told to place the bronze snake on a stick, to be held high above the people as a sign of forgiveness. Such that if anyone is bitten by a snake from here on out, he/she need only to look at the snake on a stick held aloft and be healed.

Well, a strange story, raising questions, if we want to pursue them, about talismans or ancient objects and their magical powers. But this is not how to read the Bible. We do not read the Bible to chase curiosities or magic. We read the Bible to get the point, which is the Word of God. And God's Word in this passage is, God forgives God's bellyaching people. God not only forgives, but God reveals God's forgiveness with a sign that will forever remind us God forgives, lest we forget, with the sign being the snake on a stick.

So you can surmise snakes had a different meaning in ancient times. They symbolized healing. In Greek mythology, the god Asclepius had powers to heal. His symbol was a snake entwined around a stick. The same was true for the Roman mythological god, Aesculapius. He, too, healed, with a snake kabob.

Then there was Mercury, messenger of the gods, who held a winged wand. Wrap it with two snakes, symbol of healing, and you get the caduceus, symbol of the modern medical profession.

Asclepius, Aesculapius, Mercury, Moses, take your pick, the snake was a frequent symbol of healing in the ancient world.

Boy, you can tell I have been preaching here for a long time. I've been reduced to sermons on snakes, ever seeking new ways, no matter how low, to communicate God's Holy Word. At least I have your attention. Thank you.

Let's go to the New Testament. John 3:16, one of the most beloved passages in the Bible, "For God so loved the world that God gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life."

A passage so familiar we forget the verse that precedes it, which reads, "And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life." Hmmm...interesting. Turns out we did not leave this snake stuff in the Old Testament. Here we have it right before our beloved verse, called by Martin Luther the "gospel in miniature," where Jesus on the cross is being likened to Moses' serpent on a stick.

What is going on here? Well, Jesus is talking to Nicodemus. You remember Nick. The man who comes to Jesus at night.

Nicodemus, wealthy and well placed, member of the Sanhedrin, the Jerusalem city council, who did not want anybody to know he was consulting Jesus, but who was curious about the new life of which Jesus preached, approaches Jesus at night.

Says Jesus to Nicodemus, "This is the way you get new life. Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, that God might forgive and heal his wayward children, so must I be lifted up upon the cross that God might forgive and heal the sin-sick world...for God so loves the world."

You see, God uses signs to reveal who God is. They are throughout the Bible. "This will be a sign unto you: You shall find a babe wrapped in swaddling cloths lying in a manger." The babe is a sign. "The Lord put a rainbow in the heavens as a sign that never again would God flood the earth." The rainbow, it's a sign.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus performs a series of miracles, which John calls "signs," for they reveal who Jesus is, and what it means that God has given God's only begotten son. The first of Jesus' signs is at the wedding feast at Cana, where he changes water into wine. The last of Jesus' signs is at Bethany, outside of Jerusalem, where he raises Lazarus from the dead.

From the first to the last of his ministry, Jesus performs signs to reveal to us God's grace, God's gift of forgiveness and healing, fullness and new life.

This is what a sign is. A sign is a revelation of God's presence. God was there. The sign says so. We seek signs. They encourage our hope. Signs give us the courage to keep going.

In the intensive care unit of the hospital, the patient lies unconscious in a coma. Do we unplug the life support? The doctor says, "All we can do is wait and see." They look for a sign. The patient lifts a finger. That's all, just a finger. They rejoice. It is a sign. Life is returning.

The father is troubled by his teenage son, who is being pulled away from the bosom of the family by forces of which the parents disapprove. They are on a church outing together, delivering goods to a home for disadvantaged children.

They see a neglected, unattractive, disabled boy sitting alone in a corner. The son does not hesitate, but readily greets the child without self-consciousness. He sits and plays with him. They laugh and talk for over an hour.

Says the father, "In spite of all the struggles between me and my son, I saw in that moment who my son really is." It was a sign, a revelation.

We live by signs, incidents, moments, gestures, events that capture and reveal how good life is and how good God is. The signs tell us what we hope for, and what we are capable of, by the grace of God.

Cities sometimes become symbols of our inhumanity. Pearl Harbor. Oklahoma City, Auschwitz. Today Bagdad. Sarajevo was once a scenic city in Yugoslavia before that country was shredded and quartered by revolution a decade ago.

A sign appeared in Sarajevo in the midst of it's war torn years. It is called "The Cellist." Named after a cellist, Vedran Smailovic. He was a cellist with the Sarajevo Opera orchestra.

During one siege in Sarajevo a mortar shell landed in the midst of a group of people lined up at a bakery to buy bread. Twenty-two innocent persons were killed. Sound familiar? Hungry people, waiting for bread to feed their family.

A few days later in front of the burned-out bakery, Smailovic placed a chair, sat down, and began to play his cello. For twenty-two days he came and played in front of the bakery. Each day commemorating a person killed.

Smailovic took an ugly scene, and planted a seed. 22 of them! He put something beautiful there in front of the burnt out bakery. Like the flowers, stuffed animals and cards that show up spontaneously at the scenes of humanity's inhumanities. It's what we do as children of God coping in a cruel world. We plant seeds, and water them with our tears.

Smailovic's gesture was reminiscent of another cellist, Pablo Casals. After civilians were bombed in Guernica during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, another city symbolic of our inhumanity and made famous by Picasso's mural, Pablo Casals left Spain, saying he would never return until fascism left his country. It was a gesture, and promise he kept, as Casals spent the rest of his long life playing for peace.

Casals once said if all the orchestras in the world would play Beethoven's Ninth Symphony at the same time, peace would come to the world. I say, it's worth a try. Back to Smailovic. He did not play Beethoven. He played Albonini's "Adagio For Strings and Orchestra in B Minor." Talk about signs. Fragments of Albonini's "Adagio in B Minor" were found in the ruins of Dresden, that beautiful and cultured German city firebombed to near extinction at the conclusion of WorldWar II for no good reason, thus becoming another negative symbol of what we are capable.

In the ruins of Dresden pieces of Albonini's music were preserved. Those who found the music took it as a sign that beauty is stronger than devastation, that harmony is stronger than chaos, that life is stronger than death. This is why Smailovic chose to play Albonini in front of the burned-out bakery in another war destroyed city - as a sign of our deepest hope that out of the ashes of our lives God's peace and presence can prevail.

There were sequels to the Smailovic story, with twenty-two cellists in Seattle playing Albonini's "Adagio in B Minor," as the story was picked up in Time Magazine. This was repeated in a few other cities in America as well, including Washington D.C. in January 1993, during the inauguration of President Clinton, played as a prayer for peace and understanding.

We live by signs. In times of despair, in times when life seems defeated, we look for signs, gestures, revelations of what is possible in life, what we hope for in life, what we are capable of as human beings in God's world, just as we look for signs of spring following a long winter.

As Christians we have a sign that captures the essence of all this. It is the cross. Two pieces of wood lashed together intended as the cruelest form of capital punishment known to the Romans. Instead the cross becomes a sign of the deepest, holiest, strongest, and strangest mystery of the universe that "God so loved the world that God gave his only begotten Son, that you and I should not perish but have eternal life."

The cross was planted in a city more than most cities acquainted with grief, Jerusalem, whose name means "city of peace." The cross appeared at a time when the city was occupied by foreign forces, who would later destroy the city, as it had been destroyed and rebuilt before in history.

It was a city filled with people from all over the old world who had come looking for a sign, seeking some hope for their life, looking for God to intervene, to come and save them.

And here was a man, a Nazarene, carrying a cross through the city. A man who had been whipped and beaten, betrayed and abandoned, humiliated and spat upon. Along the Via Dolorosa he bore his cross, to a place called Golgotha, which means "place of the skull," outside the city gates.

The Nazarene was nailed upon that cross, and as Moses raised the snake upon the stick above the children of Israel in the Wilderness of Sin, so the Son of man was lifted up that the whole world might be forgiven and healed, and receive eternal life.

This is the sign above all signs. The Lenten question is: given this good news, what are you going to do with it?

AMEN.