"Symbol or Sign and Seal" March 15, 2015

Numbers 21: 4-9 John 3:1-21 When my children were little, their favorite pastime was collecting snakes. Garter Snakes, Rat Snakes. In Wisconsin, there was a Hognosed Snake which grew to about 30” with a rattle on its tail, a Cobra-like neck and diamond markings, that would coil and hiss, but if confronted, it would roll over and play dead. From ages 5-9, the boys loved to keep these in their pockets, pulling them out at lunch, or when meeting company. The point of this morning's sermon is not for us to all go out and capture snakes! But rather for each of us to face our worst fears, we cannot get to the resurrection without the cross! So what are you most afraid of? Death? Threat to your health? The illness or death of your child? The illness or death of your spouse? Your spouse leaving? The loss of your income? Loss of your home? Loss of your retirement? Loss of productivity? Loss of reasoning? Fear of being found out? Loss of your faith in God? All that is what the snake represented. In the wilderness for 40 years with Moses the people of faith became bored. What a terrible indictment! God Loved the World. We are forever hearing challenge of Evolution, versus those who believe in Creation. The first issue of faith is whether Reality exists as an Accident or Love? With that backdrop, the Chosen People of God, people set free from slavery to do whatever they chose, became bored! Our beliefs, that which we are to be passionate about, that which fills us with awe and wonder and imagination and hope and desire, miracles beyond our understanding, became boring. I believe this is the underlying problem today. We have expectations of what is going to happen, there is nothing new under the sun. When the Prelude music ends and you see the pitcher of water on the Table, you know it is to be poured. When our Associate steps forwards, you know his first words will be “Good morning, Church!” Faith, particularly faith in God, is supposed to equate to finding meaning and purpose for living, has become routine. I think the greatest sin of the 21st Century is that we have bored God and bored one another with our lack of belief, our lack of trust, our lack of faith and imagination. From the Greeks, we adopted a Dualistic understanding... Where there is Good or Bad, Life or Death. The struggle of faith is lived in the in-between, in the cross lifted up between earth and heaven. When Abram and Sarai received The Promise from God with new names and new relationship to God, they became Abraham and Sarah, they became pregnant, but they did not yet have the child or Land. When Israel left Egypt crossing the Red Sea it was not into the Promised Land of Milk & Honey but into a Desert for 40 years. The problem of faith, like our fear of Winter, is this season will never end. We become a people longing for nostalgia of the past, struggling to survive in the present, without Hope. Lifting up the Cross, looking beyond our fears, we are able to imagine relationship with God without fear. What would it be, if we were a people without fears, we were a people trusting God? The People do what people have always done, they form a committee, but this is a “Back to Egypt” Committee. Not a committee for breaking tasks down, not a committee for how to accomplish, not a committee guaranteeing representation, but a committee gathered to find fault. “It will never work” “We tried that before” “We have never done it that way before” “It will cost too much” “We are too old” “We are too young” “Others won't appreciate it” “We do not know how” “We need to study this” Not much has changed in the last 8000 years of human development, has it? This same thing happened in Numbers 14, when the spies sent into Canaan came back complaining that there was already someone living in their land. The people began electing Captains to take them back to slavery, and God determined to bring pestilence and devastation upon them, but Moses interceded. Here, the same people were complaining, forming Committees to take them back to Slavery, for which God sent snakes which bit them on the ankles and they died! In response, the people came to Moses repenting and confessing they had sinned against God, so God told Moses to place a serpent on a pole, for the people to look up and be reminded of their fears, and witnessing their fears, they would not die. The problem with any symbol is that it only works as a symbol as long as it is understood for what it is. Generations later, in the reign of King Hezekiah, the people had worshipped the Serpent upon the pole, as if it were a Golden Calf, so as an act of faith in God, the King broke the thing. When I was very young, my father had been organizing pastor of a church in Missouri, and the church erected a sign for the church out by the road, with a brick flower garden 6' by 4' with a stone plaque with my father's name as pastor and the dates of his service. Decades later, I visited that church who were in a quandary because the road was to be widened and the brick flowerbed had to be moved, and they had come to believe the plaque was a headstone for the organizing pastor who was buried inside. The image of serpents on a pole always reminds me of the symbol for Medicine, Caduceus with the intertwined serpents on a Pole... but that is a Greek image from Centuries later. I am told the origin may be the Guinea Worm, which is a parasite, that is harmless when living in stagnant ponds of water. But if taken into the human body, these take up residence in your veins and arteries, causing terrible pain as they grow. If you try to cut them out they break off and remaining pieces grow. The only remedy, is to insert a shaft of wood like a toothpick into the serpent and slowly over several days twist, until the whole thing is drawn out wrapped around the shaft. The amazing thing is that through the work of World Health Organization, UNICEF and Medical Clinics like the one created through the missions of this church, in 2005 80% of the diagnosed cases of Guinea Worm in the world were found in South Sudan 5,600 cases, and in the last ten years this has been reduced by 99% to just 70 cases. Jesus used this same symbol explaining belief, being born from above, filled with the Holy Spirit, to Nicodemus. We take John 3:16 as being familiar, like a symbol for the whole of the Gospel, as if everyone knows its meaning: “God so loved the world God gave God's only begotten Son that who so ever believes should not perish but have ever lasting life.” To the Early Church, this passage would have screamed for attention! Because the images were polar opposites. “To Perish,” in Aramaic means more than death, this is complete ruin, absolutely and completely missing what God designed life to be! “The everlasting Life Gifted in Jesus Christ,” to those who trust & believe, is life as God intended, the redemption of Created Order. The point is not the duration of a life-time or eternal life, but the quality of life and relationships. The point of perishing is not a judgement inflicted by God, but those bored, complaining, without trust, like those in the Book of Numbers are already living in a state apart from God which is itself condemnation. By choosing to be bored, choosing control apart from God, these have chosen to not live in relationship, have chosen chaos instead of election. There have been those who have questioned that preaching can be academic and intellectual, in that way impersonal or not emphatic about the reality of the Holy Spirit. So allow me to confess, that my partner and I married shortly after college. We went to Grad Schools, had our children, had successful careers and worked on our home and family, but probably took life for granted, took each other and our faith for granted. But all the struggles along the way, health fears, fears for our children and extended family, financial worries, and employment scares, all of these have been opportunities for challenge and re-commitment. The point of Election is not to be complacent as Chosen, but recognizing God's love, recognizing the opportunities and challenges of life, What are you going to do? For the last ten years, we have had these baskets hanging on the North wall. They were a gift from John Dau's Mother, Anon, which she made in the refugee camps in Uganda for bringing to us to symbolize the binding together of her family and this church. Even more, one is filled with rice, one with red beans, as an offering that whomever enters beneath these doors would never go hungry. All of which is why we share the Sacrament of Bread and Wine. This is not merely a symbol of Body and Blood, but Jesus' Body and Blood are for us The Sign and Seal of our Covenant Relationship with God. The Bread, symbolizing the Christ's Body, is a Physical Sign and Seal of our Relationship through his incarnation and his suffering. Jesus had a human body, like all of ours, a body and life filled with suffering for our sake. The Cup which symbolizes the blood signature of the New Covenant, is Sign and Seal of our redemption, of our relationship and Hope. What does it mean to you to be married? What does your child, your spouse mean to you? What does your job, your career mean? Do you recognize your health? Of what importance is our faith in God? Are we taking life for granted or perpetually reborn not from logic and reason, but born from above, are you simply a reality like a rock or snow bank or are you a Gift of the Holy Spirit?