AU United Methodist Community

Rev. Mark Schaefer
Kay Spiritual Life Center
March 30, 2003
Numbers 21:4-9; John 3:14-21

I. INTRODUCTION

Somewhere we figured out that the best way to get attention for your message or for your idea is to put it as high as possible. So we invented billboards. We invented the Goodyear blimp. We invented sky writing. I’ve even heard that there is a company that wants to launch a gigantic Mylar balloon into orbit that you can buy advertising space on. So that every night as couples the world over are gazing up at the stars, they’d be greeted by a giant orbiting billboard that says “Pepsi” on it. In actuality, what would probably happen is some company would blow their entire advertising budget on it and promptly go right out of business, so that future generations would be stuck with a blight on the nightscape that said something like “Pets.com”

But we all know this practice. Get your message out there by lifting things higher and higher. It’s why giant foam rubber hands were invented. Why protesters make banners that are held on poles. I don’t know if you’ve ever marched in a parade or a protest where you’ve had to hold something up in the air like that. It can get pretty exhausting.

II. THE TEXT

I imagine that the Israelites were pretty exhausted at the stage of the journey we find them in tonight’s Old Testament lesson. This is actually the last of the so-called “Complaint Narratives”—the stories of the Israelites grumbling against Moses. This happens a lot in the Old Testament during those 40 years in the desert. Provisions get low, food gets low, and the people start grumbling: is this why you brought us out into the desert—to die? And Moses turns to God and says, ‘Help me out with these people, will ya?’ and God’s got Moses’ back so he does.

But this time is different: here we are told “The people spoke against God and against Moses.” The people are not just grumbling any more. They’re rebelling. And that turns out to be bad news for them. God sends “poisonous serpents” among the people—actually the Hebrew says, ‘fiery serpents’—probably because the bite burned. Actually, the Hebrew word for these snakes is seraphim. Yeah, and you thought seraphim were angels.

The people repent and pray to the Lord for release. Moses prays for them and God gives him a strange instruction: make one of these seraphs and put it on a pole. Whenever someone gets bitten, they are to look at it and they will live. What’s interesting is that God doesn’t take away the serpents—he provides a remedy and a restoration to health for those bit by them.

The serpent, then, becomes a symbol of God’s grace and forgiveness. The people have to live with the consequences of their rebellion, but God has given them a way out.

III. LIFTING CHRIST

It’s in that same way that John’s gospel tells us “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up.”
The people of Jesus’ time, no less than we ourselves, were in a world of danger and death. As with the people in Moses’ time, it was often our rebellious nature and rejection of God that led us into these troubles. When we’re surrounded on all sides by the fiery serpents of life and the consequences of our brokenness seem ready to inflict all kinds of pain on us, that is the time when we lift up Christ, the one who delivers us from death and brokenness and returns us to life and wholeness.

Like a banner before us, in the midst of a broken world we lift Christ up as the symbol of God’s grace and God’s healing.

A. The Pitfall

Now, there is a pitfall with this. There is an interesting footnote to the story of the bronze serpent in the passage from Numbers. Listen to this passage from 2 Kings:

1 ¶ In the third year of King Hoshea son of Elah of Israel, Hezekiah son of King Ahaz of Judah began to reign. 2 He was twenty-five years old when he began to reign; he reigned twenty-nine years in Jerusalem. His mother’s name was Abi daughter of Zechariah. 3 He did what was right in the sight of the LORD just as his ancestor David had done. 4 He removed the high places, broke down the pillars, and cut down the sacred pole. He broke in pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made, for until those days the people of Israel had made offerings to it; it was called Nehushtan.

“…for until those days the people of Israel had made offerings to it.” The symbol that God told Moses to make as a sign of God’s healing, over time became an idol that people offered to and that good king Hezekiah ultimately destroyed.

How often do we do that? How often do pay take for take a free gift from God and turn it into an idol? That’s what the Israelites did with the bronze serpent. They took something that was meant to heal and they corrupted it.

As Christians we are told to lift Christ, who we understand was sent to us by God out of his mercy and out of his desire to heal us and make us whole again. and our his as if it Christ’s not as God has asked us, as a sign of healing, but rather as a club something to hurt the other people with. How many times in our history have we lifted the cross of Christ non as a sign of God’s grace, but as a standard, before crusading armies?
How many times has the Church behaved not as a sign of God’s healing work in the world, but as an institution that causes harm? Or how many times have Christians lifted up their Christianity not as a faith which brings restoration and healing but as something with which to judge others and put others down? Too often, I fear.

Because when we lift something up it helps to remember what it is we’re lifting up. When the Moses lifted the serpent he did so because it was a sign of God’s grace and forgiveness for a rebellious people. Over time the Israelites forgot that and began to view it as a magic talisman, something that had power in and of itself, forgetting that it was merely a sign of the God who lay at the heart of the Israelite reality.

B. Lift Christ in Love

And we can do that, too. We know we’re supposed to lift Christ up but sometimes we forget what that means. We forget the nature of the Christ we are lifting up and we turn him into something that suits our interests. Christ the victor who will destroy our enemies. Christ the judge who will cast out the wicked. Christ the mighty and fearless warrior who will purge the earth of the Godless and unbelieving on the last day. There are a lot of people out there lifting up that Jesus. The Jesus who carries a sword. And there are a lot of people who live in fear of that Jesus, too. And that’s a sad thing.

For the Christ we are supposed to lift up is the one described in those oh so beautiful words found in the Gospel of John:
John 3:16-17 ¶ 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. 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.

The Christ we lift up is a Christ who seeks our salvation. A Christ who comes not in judgment and in wrath, but in mercy and compassion.

C. Loving the World

The Christ we lift up is also a Christ who loved the world. Who did not abandon it but redeemed it. As Christians, when we lift up Christ, we do so by lifting up our love for the world. We don’t abandon the world. We care about our bodies. We care about the environment. About all the animals in the Creation. We care about social justice and acts of mercy and charity. We love the world as God so loves it, and in so doing we lift up the Christ he sent in order to save it.

IV. CHRIST LIFTED UP

One summer I got a job working at my grandfather’s hardware and lumber store. (Let me give you a piece of advice: never get a job working for a family member, when your mother is also an employee.) I was the low man on the totem pole. My job involved a lot of carrying things. Two by fours. Two by sixes. Two by eights. Bags of concrete. Boxes of shingles. And my favorite: big ol’ pieces of sheet-rock. These four foot by eight foot pieces of drywall were really unwieldy. And they were heavy. At the end of a normal day at Wiley Bros., Inc., I was sacked out. At the end of the day was not a good time to ask me to lift anything. My arms were often sore and my back and legs were usually about ready to quit.

There are times when we can be that exhausted spiritually. When it seems to hard to lift Christ up. When we feel we’ve done our share of lifting and the last thing we want to do is lift up an example of compassion and mercy. It’s hard isn’t it? When your roommate has done that thing that annoys you the most for the thousandth time. When your parents continue to treat you like a little kid, rather than the adult you see yourself becoming. When that professor piles on a ‘last minute’ assignment just before break. When a world of fear and violence and insecurity have frazzled your nerves to the point where you just don’t want to cut anyone any more slack. How heavy does Christ seem at that point? How hard is it in those moments to lift up an example of love and forgiveness? How much easier to just lash out in anger or frustration?

I tell you, there are days when Christ seems to be more of a burden than others. There are days when I don’t want to forgive people. Days when I wish just this once, God would let me take vengeance. I don’t feel like lifting up the Christ of peace then. (That’s when I’d kind of like to lift up the kick-butt Jesus that some others seem to like.)

But there’s something worth bearing in mind. When we talk of lifting Christ up, we often think of exaltation. We think of a processional, of the parade, of the some kind of glorious exaltation. That we often forget that Christ was lifted up in a very different way. That one Friday morning he was lifted up and nailed to a cross.

Jesus went to his crucifixion for our sake. God raised Christ for our sake. Jesus endured one of the most brutal forms of capital punishment ever devised by human beings. Jesus did this for us. For you. For me. God has already done the heavy lifting, my friends. God has met us more than halfway. God sent his Son to live our life. The joys and the sorrows. To suffer our death.

When we are at those times where it seems so hard to lift Christ up, we simply need remember that Christ has done the lifting for us. That Christ gives us the power to lift him up, and ourselves up. And that God will raise us all up into new life.

“Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up,” says John’s gospel. Our salvation is accomplished by the Son of Man being lifted up onto the cross, and consummated by his being raised up on the third day.

V. CONCLUSION

We do not lift up a Christ who comes in power and glory, but one who comes in humility even to the point of death on a cross. This is the Christ we lift up. This is the Christ we show to the world. By living lives full of grace, compassion, humility, and love.

The world is a broken and dangerous place. Our disobedience has brought a number of poisonous snakes and the way is treacherous. We get bitten. We get wounded. And we seek to look to something to bring us healing and wholeness. and we look to the Christ whom we have lifted up, the Christ on the cross. and we remember of the words we have so many times: “ him for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever Believers in him should not perish but have eternal life.”