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March 22, 2009
Numbers 21: 4-9; John 3: 14-21

More light, more truth, is breaking from your Word.
More light, more truth --
Holy Spirit, help us hear what needs to be heard. Amen.

When I was thinking of ways to make that first scripture reading from the book of Numbers come alive today, I considered showing a video clip from the movie, “Snakes on a Plane.” 


For those of you who haven’t seen it, the basic premise is that a bad guy arranges for a crateful of venomous snakes to be released mid-flight on a passenger jet flying from Honolulu to Los Angeles in an attempt to prevent a witness to a murder from being able to testify.  Of course, dozens of snakes slithering through the cabin sets off all sorts of panic. Just thinking about being trapped on a plane with snakes crawling all around killing people is a pretty creepy thought.

Then the other night on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart showed a news clip from earlier this month about Burmese pythons that are crawling around Florida. It seems that they escaped from pet stores during recent hurricanes and now there are an estimated 30,000 of them wreaking havoc with other wildlife in Florida.

I’d imagine the people on the airplane or people encountering Burmese pythons in Florida may have some empathy with those Israelites who had been wandering in the desert for years.

It’s not that the Israelites did not already have enough to complain about. They were hungry, thirsty, lost, what food they got was not very good, they encountered hostile people as they advanced onto their lands and so ... they remembered the good old days when they had been slaves in Egypt. 

They blamed Moses, who thought he was leading them to freedom and the Promised Land. And in this story, they finally blamed God -- who it appears had had enough of their grumbling.  This story shows God’s disgust with these people . God turns loose an army of snakes – not on a plane, but with the same result.

Let me suggest that those snakes represent our fears.  That’s not such a big leap. While there are some people who like snakes, most people react with fear if they encounter even one snake. Make that a whole bunch of poisonous vipers or carnivorous pythons and the fear factor goes way up.

But there are many things that cause fear in our lives.  Just think for a moment about what some of them are for you.

It may be fear of losing your job or your income in this tough economy.

It may be fear of rejection in a relationship.
It may be fear of loneliness
It may be fear of a diagnosis.

It may be fear of people who vandalize a neighborhood or of intruders who enter a home.

It may be fear of assault while walking on a street or fear of another terrorist attack.

It may fear of ecological disaster.

It may be fear of death.

The list can get quite long. 

And because part of our human condition is that we respond to what we perceive as threats to our well-being, people can use our fears to make us as a collective group of people do things we might not otherwise even consider.

Sometimes that can be good. Our fears about what human actions are doing to our planet have sparked all sorts of changes in behavior by individuals, by businesses, by governments to try to avert disaster.  We move past the easy way of doing things to a better way.

Sometimes playing on our fears can be bad.  The use of torture by American interrogators over the last decade was justified in part by playing to our fears of terrorism. The Israeli assault on Gaza in January was justified by fears of rocket attacks on Israel.  Political attack ads all sorts of appeals to fear.

The story from the book of Numbers is about more than just  those fears that crawl through our lives. It is also about confronting those fears. 

I know, a quick reading of the story suggests that when Moses made a bronze serpent and put it on a pole, it somehow had magical powers that could heal those who had been bitten by the snakes.  Over time, this snake on a pole took on the status of a near idol for the Israelites, until a few centuries later King Hezekiah had it removed from the temple because people were worshipping it instead of God.

I’d like to suggest there is another way to look at that snake on a pole.  There is no magic in the bronze serpent. The healing comes from people confronting the thing that terrifies them the most.

It is so tempting for us to try to avoid facing our fears. They are not comfortable to confront.  We would rather flee from the snakes in our lives that have to figure out a way to deal with them.  And it is hard to figure out a way to deal with them that honors our better angels rather than letting loose the demons within us.

That brings us to the portion of the Gospel of John that we heard today. You heard the reference to the snake on the pole at the beginning of this passage, but then we got to one of the most famous and most challenging lines in all of the Gospels. It’s John, chapter three, verse 16. You see it on signs, held up in end zones at football games – John 3:16.

Remember how it goes? “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life.”

There are two trouble spots in that one verse.

One is the idea that God as a parent would send his child to die.  We recoil at that idea, although certainly parents who send their sons and daughters off to war with both pride and anxiety do so with a sense that they are doing this for a greater good. But the idea that God would send this son to die – that does not sit well with many folks in our era.

The other trouble spot is the suggestion that only those who believe in Jesus will be saved.  That runs so counter to so many other places in the Gospels, yet it gets used by those who want to suggest that only Christians have the ticket to eternity.

There’s a historical context for that. When the author of the Gospel of John was writing this, the new Christian community was trying to establish itself as a viable entity. It was not the religious powerhouse of the Christianity of the 21st century.  It was a small and threatened sect trying to hold on to its members in the midst of forces that could overwhelm it.  So this kind of exclusivist language in this part of the Gospel of John fit into that effort at preservation.

Then there’s that idea that God – whom Jesus portrayed as a loving parent – was sending a child to certain death. We might be better able to understood in the context of God as a trinity.

Now I know the Trinity – three persons in one God -- is a tough concept to understand and folks here vary in their acceptance of that.  But one of the things it means is that Jesus is not a separate entity from God.

My understanding is that God so loved the world that God came and lived among us and suffered right along with us, taking on the worst that humanity could throw at him and then moving beyond that in the resurrection.

So God comes among us as a gift to humanity and when we accept that gift, we join in God’s eternal life.  The idea of eternal life is one of the central themes in John’s Gospel. This is not some reward after death, our ticket to heaven.

As one scripture scholar writes, “ ‘Eternal’ does not mean mere endless duration of human existence, but is a way of describing life as lived in the unending presence of God.”  It’s not about who gets in and who doesn’t but about living our lives with a joyful sense that God is with us.


And that takes us back to our fears.  Facing our fears is pretty scary work if we have to do that alone.  Having a sense that God is with us, that God’s love is there for us no matter what happens in our lives is one step forward.  Then knowing that others will be with us on this journey means we do not have to take these steps alone.


Those companions are at their best when they can assure us of God’s love and then help us choose a path that enables us to confront our fears in ways that reflect the fact that all of us are created in God’s image. 

I’d like to end with a story much gentler than the one about snakes on a plane.

I am part of a group of UCC pastors around the county that helps with prayer forums and a real time prayer chapel on the Internet.  Yesterday morning, a woman with the screen name of zapzipmom posted a plea for help. 

This mother of two young children wrote of her struggles with anorexia and bulimia and alcohol and the arguments with her husband. And then she wrote: “I'm scared and need some kind of assurance that I'm still worthy, no matter how ‘bad’ I've been. That I deserve to be loved by God, despite everything I still hold on to that is still harmful. This is yet another call for help.”

Within a few hours, seven people from around the country had replied, each in their own way reassuring her of God’s love and offering to be touchstones for her in the days ahead. They are new-found companions on her journey.

The fears are real. 
A loss of income that threatens our well-being, 
a broken relationship that threatens our self-image, 
an attack in the night that threatens our safety 
are not imaginary or unimportant threats.  

We don’t make them go away by confronting our fears. But we may be able to find a way to go on living in the best way possible if we do not let those fears rule our lives.

The people in the desert looked at the snake on the pole and they were healed. God walked among us, encouraged us to live in the light rather than lurk or cower in the darkness. God’s love is there no matter how fearful the moment.

If we can cling to that love, we can pass through raging waters in the sea and not drown. We can walk amid the burning flames and not be harmed. We can stand before the power of hell with death at our side, knowing that God is with us through it all.