Sermon delivered on Laetare Sunday, the 4th Sunday of Lent B, March 11, 2018, at St. Augustine’s Anglican Church, Westerville, OH.

If you prefer to listen to the audio podcast of today’s sermon (and you should because it’s a lot better than the written text), click here.

Lectionary texts: Numbers 21.4-9; Psalm 107.1-3, 17-22; Ephesians 2.1-10; John 3.14-21.

In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Today is Laetare Sunday, the fourth Sunday of Lent (thus our fashionable pink/rose colored vestments). Laetare is the Latin word meaning to rejoice. But what is there to rejoice in during this penitential season of Lent with its emphasis on confession, repentance, and self-denial? Aren’t we supposed to be feeling bad about ourselves and stuff? This is what I want us to look at this morning.

Our gospel lesson for today contains one of the most famous and oft-quoted verses in all Scripture: “For God loved the world so much that he gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3.16, NLT). But then we read passages like the ones from our OT lesson, where the Lord sends serpents among his rebellious people to bite and kill them, and we wonder how a loving God does this. If we are going to begin to appreciate the basis for our rejoicing in the Lord, it is essential that we understand what is going on in our OT lesson, as well as our other lessons from today, so that we can get a more complete picture of what God’s love looks like on the ground and in our lives. Looking at the overarching story of Scripture will also prevent us from parroting ignorant beliefs that the God of the OT is an angry, vengeful God while the God of the NT is a nice God, you know, a God of love who really doesn’t care that much about our sins. As the German poet Heine observed, “I like to sin, God likes to forgive. Really, the world is admirably arranged.”

So the first thing we must say before we look at our lessons is that the wrath of God— God’s unremitting, implacable opposition to any form of evil and those who commit it (not to mention the dark powers behind those human agents)—is a dimension of God’s love for us and for all of God’s creation. If God does not hate racism or adultery, if God’s wrath isn’t relentless against those who peddle drugs or porn so that those who use them are enslaved by their power, if God does not hate when the rich exploit the poor or turn a blind eye to their plight, then God is not a loving God. End of story. What loving parent says to her child, go get addicted to heroin or go try to break up another marriage by having an affair, or go sell people into slavery to make yourself rich? By definition, love wants the best for the beloved and none of these things is good for us as God’s image-bearers. So let us understand that when we talk about the wrath of God, we are also talking about the love of God. They are two sides of the same coin.

But here’s the difference between God’s wrath and human wrath. While God hates the things that dehumanize, enslave, and destroy us (which all sin ultimately does), we must remember what God has ultimately done about the problem of Evil, which is really what we are talking about in this context. God in his great love for us has determined to deal with all the nasty, insidious, vicious, soul-destroying evil that plagues us, and that we sadly commit, by sending his only begotten Son to die for us. More about that in a minute. But before we look at God’s love revealed on the cross, I want us to look at our OT lesson to help us gain a deeper and fuller understanding of how God’s love revealed itself before Jesus’ crucifixion.

So what are we to make of that strange story in our OT lesson? What’s with all the snakes and stuff? Where do we see the love of God in this story? To understand what’s going on, we must remember the context for this story. God had rescued his people Israel from their slavery in Egypt by a mighty act of deliverance. God had brought his people through the Red Sea and destroyed an overwhelming force of Egyptians who were pursuing them to re-enslave them. If that weren’t enough, God had been graciously present to his people in the pillars of cloud by day and fire by night. God had also fed his people with manna, the bread of angels. God did all this because the Israelites were the descendants of Abraham, the people God had sworn to bring God’s healing love and blessing to a sin-sick world.

And what was the people’s response? They had forgotten all about God’s mighty act of deliverance. They had forgotten that God had called them to be a holy nation and kingdom of priests who mediated God’s presence to the world. They had either forgotten or apparently took for granted God’s night and day presence with them and now here they were, in the middle of a desert with all its discomfort and suffering, and they started to grumble once more against God and Moses. They didn’t want to be in the desert anymore. They didn’t want any more manna (you serving the same slop for dinner again, God??). Things were so bad that they wanted to go back to their slavery to end their current suffering! And we can relate. Think of our own lives, which the wilderness wanderings symbolize, with its attendant suffering and discomfort: health problems, financial woes or uncertainty, alienation, loneliness, addiction, frustrated dreams, and all the rest. We pray for healing and none comes. We ask for stability and healthy relationships but find only chaos instead. And what do we do? The atheist uses these things to remind us there is no God. How could a loving God, if he existed, allow these things? For those of us who believe in God, we too start to grumble against God and seek to take matters into our own hands, which always makes things worse because we are so thoroughly infected by the power of Sin. To be God’s real people who could embody God’s love and presence in the world, the Israelites had to trust God to get them to the promised land, despite the difficulties and hardships along the way. Likewise for us as God’s people today. In other words, life’s journeys require humility and obedience to God’s commands. But here’s the thing. Ever since the Fall, we humans have had an allergic reaction to being told what to do—by anyone, even God, and our capacity to obey and to trust God’s good providence over us is almost non-existent! And so God wrath against his people’s rebellion broke out in the form of an invasion of deadly snakes.

Now if we stopped right there, we would truly have a schizophrenic God, i.e., the angry God of the OT vs. the loving God of the NT. But that isn’t the end of the story. God heard his people’s confession of their proud rebellion against him and their desire to repent. And so in one of the strangest stories in all Scripture, God instructed Moses to make a bronze serpent and put it on a pole so that if a person were bitten, (s)he could look at the bronze serpent and live. What is going on here? First, let’s be clear about what the story isn’t telling us. We are not intended to see this serpent as a representation of God, in flagrant violation of the second commandment. Neither was the bronze serpent to be looked at as some form of magic, whereby God’s people would be automatically healed if they looked at it. No, the bronze serpent got its power to heal from God and healing would take place only if the Israelites who looked at it believed that God would heal them when they did. In other words, for God’s people to be healed they had to have faith in God and his power to heal. And for that to happen, God’s people needed humility if they really were going to function as and be God’s people. The same conditions exist for us today as well. In the story of the bronze serpent we are being told clearly that while God has punished his people’s disobedience (as he still punishes ours), God has also lovingly and graciously provided the means of healing because it is never God’s intention to destroy us. Sometimes, however, the darkness we love results in our own destruction, whether willingly or otherwise, but that is not God’s will for us (cf., Ezekiel 18.23, 33.11). No, in this strange story we see God punishing his people’s rebellion, precisely so they could be the people God called them to be, and giving them a means to be healed. To be sure, there is much we do not understand about this story. We all feel God’s absence from time to time. We all feel God’s judgment on our sin. We all wonder if God really will forgive our sins. And just as distressingly for us, we aren’t told how God’s efforts work on our behalf. How did the bronze serpent work to heal the Israelites? We aren’t told. We are just given the story and expected to understand that it is enough to know that when we are at death’s door God provides a remedy. This kind of faith in God’s love and power can only come through a humble spirit and a knowledge of the heart of God. If we believe God really is an angry ogre bent on punishing us every time we misbehave, we have no hope of ever really beginning to grasp the love of God made known supremely to us in the cross of Christ.

We also see this call for humble trust and obedience in God in our psalm lesson. It’s unfortunate that we didn’t read all 43 verses of this psalm because only then can we see what the psalmist is up to. Whatever the reason the whole psalm wasn’t assigned for today, here’s the point. In the psalm things are going badly wrong: wandering in the desert, prisoners sitting in darkness, people who are sick and dying, those being tossed about on stormy seas. But then comes the refrain: they cried out to the Lord in their distress and he rescued them. Let them thank the Lord for his steadfast love. Do you see the implicit demand for humble trust in the Lord’s goodness and love for us, a trust that is formed in the power of the Spirit and in the remarkable and consistent track record of our Creator who is also our Rescuer, even when our prayers are not always answered in the way we’d like? Never mind that in some cases we look at the mess of our own lives and realize we have brought that mess on ourselves by our selfishness or greed or pride or lust or myopic behavior. Never mind there are others who, like us, have brought their own misery on themselves (although not always). No, the refrain of the psalmist is this. God is our ultimate Rescuer who takes special delight in rescuing the totally undeserving. When God does that, especially when God does that, God’s love and grace are on display all the more powerfully. Paul says something similar in Rom 5.8 where he startles us by saying that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us! Who are we then as God’s people to refuse to extend that same mercy and grace to the underserving, ourselves included?

And now we are ready to look at our gospel lesson because it is not only a remedy to our suffering and sin-sickness, it is the only remedy, and therefore our only basis to rejoice in the Lord. As we saw with the story of the bronze snake, St. John does not tell us how God’s sending of the Son to be crucified deals with the problem of Evil, both our own and the world’s. We aren’t given an answer to our “why” questions. We are simply invited to see that in the death of Jesus, the Son of God, God’s wrath is poured out on our sins so that we can escape God’s just condemnation and experience God’s love for us. We are therefore invited to enter into a trusting and faithful relationship with God that sees the love and power of God in action so that we are healed by God’s chosen solution to the real and urgent problem of Evil.

To be certain, like the strange story of the bronze serpent, there is a great mystery here. Our Lord Jesus does not tell us, for example, that when he is lifted up on the cross, all persons everywhere are automatically and magically forgiven their sins and granted eternal life. Rather, our Lord says that whoever believes in him and his saving act on the cross to free us from our slavery to Sin and Death will be given everlasting life. This is no easy thing, given that the cross is an instrument designed to humiliate and degrade. It is the perfect symbol that represents the human race’s great hatred and disdain for the Lord, but it is also the very symbol of God’s greater love poured out for us. Perhaps this is the ultimate meaning for us during our Lenten journey, that the meaning of the cross will come upon us like a great shadow into which we must walk in the days to come. For right now, however, it is enough to know that we are traveling to the place where we see our Lord Jesus being lifted up so that we may be spared God’s condemnation of our sins, a condemnation many of us already impose on ourselves and which we fear we will hear from the Lord on the day of judgment.

But in the midst of our fear we hear the Son of God’s voice whispering to us in the power of the Spirit. Don’t be afraid, my beloved! I have rescued you from that condemnation. You will never hear it from my Father so stop pronouncing it on yourself! I know you find this hard to believe. You are so unlovable and unlovely in your proud rebellion and idolatrous self-help practices. But you are lovely in my sight because of my own blood shed for you to break the power of Evil over you and to free you from your slavery to the greatest enemies of all: Sin and Death. Yes, I know you still love the darkness, and frankly some of you love it more than others. But because I have been lifted up for you, you no longer have to fear my Father’s condemnation if you only believe, because I have taken that condemnation on myself. My apostle Paul told you the same thing in your epistle lesson today. Listen to him (and that brilliant preacher who is preaching to you right now)! Before you knew me, you were dead in your sins and helpless to give yourself life because you could do nothing to free yourself from your slavery to the power of Sin. What mortician expects a corpse to help with its embalming? We all know the dead are utterly helpless to do anything for themselves and so were you helpless to give yourself life before you knew me, even as imperfect as your knowledge of me currently is. But you are helpless no more. Like you heard last Sunday, you have been condemned into redemption with me. You have shared in my death so that you can share in my eternal life. You don’t deserve this gift and you never will because you love the darkness. It’s in your spiritual DNA. But I have been lifted up for your sake because my Father and I love you greatly. So look upon my cross and find your life, real life that not even your mortal death can interrupt. It is only in me that you can have life because my cross is the only way God has ordained to rescue you from your slavery to Sin. Therefore I invite you to give up your love of darkness and come to my light. I will be present to help you in the power of the Spirit. Trust me. My presence and power won’t be straightforward or always apparent to you. But I remain with you nevertheless. So believe and persevere. I’ll help you in that as well. Just come to me. Look at the Son of God being lifted up for you and dare to think the unthinkable: this is how much God loved the world. This is how much God loves you. Don’t make it a cliche like so many do. Make it the utter reality in your life so that it transforms you into a new creation one bit at a time. And then rejoice, because this, my beloved, is the Good News of Jesus Christ, and him crucified, now and for all eternity. To him be honor, praise, and glory forever and ever.

In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.