Lenten Meditation: As Moses Lifted Up the Serpent

On third Sundays at Open Table, our worship is influenced by the Taize (France) community.  The mood is meditative.  We pray through scripture, song, and silence.  Often I offer some commentary on scripture or a guided reflection, but no sermon.  Excerpted from yesterday's worship service, I share below 2 of yesterday’s lections with the accompanying commentary and guided reflection.  The rest of the liturgy included litanies, songs or chants from the Taize and Iona communities, other scriptures, more silence, and the opportunity for embodied prayer at several prayer stations.

HEBREW BIBLE LESSON      Numbers 21: 4-9         

⁴From Mount Hor they set out by the way to the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom; but the people became impatient on the way. ⁵The people spoke against God and against Moses, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.” ⁶Then the Lord sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died. ⁷The people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed for the people. ⁸And the Lord said to Moses, “Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.” ⁹So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.

COMMENTARY

I am phobic about snakes.  Even the nonvenomous types.  I avert my eyes if snakes appear on television.  I turn the page if a snake is pictured in a book.  I’ll dodge the glassed-in containers of snakes in a pet store.   And I’m ready to move out of my house if I see one in my back yard.  But here is a story that says people dying of snake bite must look at an image of the thing that is killing them in order to live.

Reading this story metaphorically and meditatively, we notice that our healing hinges upon our willingness to gaze directly upon the image of the thing that has been hurting us.  Of course, we look at a representation of the snake; we do not continue to subject ourselves to the harmful thing itself.  Instead, we consider honestly, straightforwardly the thing outside of us or inside of us that is not healthy.  Only by facing the truth of what is harming us will we be able to acknowledge and be released from its harm.

Lent is a time for looking inward and outward at things that are injuring or limiting us—or our world.  Most of the time the objects of our fears or discomforts make us want to turn the page or change the channel or move out of the house.  Most of the time we’d prefer just to end a relationship or give up a responsibility.  We don’t want to look at the person or situation that hurts us, and we certainly don’t want to acknowledge the toxins within us. But something in us might die if we don’t.  Something in our world might not be healed.

So Lent is a season for looking outwardly at personal relationships and daily practices and societal problems.  And Lent is a season for looking inwardly at our own tendencies and personalities that sometimes cause harm to us and others.  In the story of Moses and the people he was leading away from bondage, ALL were being harmed by their constant spirit of complaint and fear, by their lack of gratitude, by their over-reliance on Moses.

And those toxic attitudes slithered through the whole community, creeping up on them until the community would have died if they’d not realized what they were doing.  So they prayed that God would remove the venomous threat. Which God did not do.  Instead God instructed Moses to lift up—to make everyone face—this harmful thing.  And thus they were saved. 

In this Lenten season we, too, look up, figuratively, to realize that truth and self-awareness can be saving virtues. We can look to something higher and greater, something beyond all that is striking at our feet and twining around and constricting our hearts.  We look inward, outward, knowing our own truth, which God holds out to us. When we gain God’s lofty perspective, even the serpents of life ultimately become bronzed, immobilized, powerless anti-icons. Lent is a time for a spiritual de-tox.   Don’t look down.  The things swirling at your feet can overwhelm.  Look up.  See the thing as it can be: a habit, a trait, a personal challenge that does not have to harm you, that can in fact show you the higher perspective.

CALL TO REFLECTION

Let us examine our lives in the presence of Loving God, opening our hearts so that we do not deceive even ourselves.                   

GUIDED REFLECTION

Recall a time when you were able to face something “poisonous” in your life that was harming your spirit.  How were you able to “look at it and live”?  Consider how “anti-venom”—derived from the toxin—is activated when you can name the thing that threatens spiritual health. Now bring to mind anything that is currently having a potentially harmful impact on your spiritual growth: an attitude, a tendency, a pattern of behavior, a mindset. 

SILENCE

SUNG PRAYER

GOSPEL LESSON    John 3: 14-21

¹⁴And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, ¹⁵that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. ¹⁶“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. ¹⁷“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. ¹⁸Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. ¹⁹And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. ²⁰For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. ²¹But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.”

CONTEMPORARY READING    by Alice Walker

“I grew agitated each time [the minister] touched on the suffering of Jesus.  For a long time my agitation confused me.  I am a great lover of Jesus, and always have been.  Still, I began to see how the constant focus on the suffering of Jesus alone excludes the suffering of others from one’s view . . . I knew I wanted my own suffering--and the suffering of women and little girls, still cringing before the overpowering might and weapons of the torturers--to be the subject of a sermon.  Was woman herself not the tree of life?  And was SHE not crucified?  Not in some age no one remembers, but right now, daily in many lands on earth?”(Possessing the Secret of Joy, 1992).

COMMENTARY

“As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up.”  Like any metaphor, this one comparing Jesus on the cross to the serpent on Moses’s pole finds one main connection between two very dissimilar objects or ideas.  The community that wrote the Gospel of John believed that they had been “saved” because Jesus was lifted up on the cross.  What it means to be saved and how Jesus makes that salvation/healing/rescue possible is the subject of centuries of theology and innumerable writings.  It’s a subject we as progressive Christians have considered before and will continue to revisit because one of the ways our ministry in Mobile brings a saving word to our community is by retuning churchy words like “saved.”   Let me take a little liberty with John 3:16, rooting it in its biblical contexts, with my own paraphrase of one of the most well-known verses in the Bible: God loved the entire world so much that God gave to us a way of life, revealed by Jesus, and whoever lives in that way will not succumb to the venomous things but will experience love eternal.

So much more should be said about the third chapter of John’s Gospel.  But for today, let’s use the words of Alice Walker we’ve just read in order to consider how Jesus, lifted up on a cross, can keep us from perishing. 

I remember years ago when a pastor said something that later seemed quite obviously true but which shocked me at the time.  He said that Jesus’s death on the cross was not the worst suffering any human being ever endured.  And indeed the Bible never claims Jesus suffered more than any other person, though I had heard others claim that Jesus’s suffering was unique in its extremity and type.  But think about it.  Surely there have been some who endured physical torture greater than crucifixion.  Surely others have endured physical suffering for far longer than Jesus did.  Surely others have endured emotional and psychological trauma far greater than Jesus who, though hated and feared and betrayed by some, was loved by many.  Surely Mary’s suffering for her dying son was in some ways worse than his own.  And why would Jesus need to win the suffering contest?  Why, theologically speaking, would his pain have to trump the pain of a tormented and tortured victim of some other atrocity in human history in order for Jesus to make for us a way of salvation?   

The pain was not the point.  In fact, if we "lift up" violence, we will glorify it.  And if we make too much of Jesus’s agony, we can, as Alice Walker says, forget that others are being crucified today.  Our tears for Jesus can blind us to the suffering of others.  And even the smaller sufferings deserve our pity.  Let us not forget that others are enduring as best they can the lesser pains of human living. 

What is central to Christian teaching is that the God-in-flesh, the Christ, knows human pain and is with us in each and every suffering in this earth.  Because you and I are united in Christ, we, too, want to practice a compassion that joins our hearts with the ongoing birth pangs of a world laboring to birth God’s new humanity.  We begin to pray, with tenderness of heart, for those who are bearing burdens, large and small.  For God so loves the world . . .

PRAYERS OF INTERCESSION

We name aloud or hold in the silence of our own hearts those who are sick or in distress, those who are alone or in grief, those who are hungry and homeless, those overwhelmed by their responsibilities, those who are victims of violence and injustice.

SUNG RESPONSE

“Kyrie Eleison”  

Lent: The Little Covenant

Readers, some sermons are best understood in the context of the community. This sermon is situated in my congregation's immediate concern for a member recently diagnosed with a brain tumor, for immigrants in our city being harmed by an unjust state law, and for our commitments to ecological justice. Our denominational and congregational polity and needs also have shaped this sermon. --Ellen Sims

Texts:  Genesis 9: 8-16;  Psalm 25;  Mark 1: 11-13

The 40 days of Lent imitate the 40 days Jesus spent in the wilderness, which corresponds to the 40 days of rain that created the Great Flood.  For those of us trying to follow in Jesus’s hopeful way, here’s a heads up: his way is not without challenges. Mark’s Gospel tells us that immediately after his baptism, Jesus was led by the Spirit of God into the desert to face Satan and wild beasts: spiritual and physical threats (Mark 1:13).  We, too, sometimes move directly from the Jordan River to the desert, from the mountaintop to the valley, from baptism to temptation, from the heavenly dove to wild beasts.  Like Jesus, we are trying for this Lenten season to follow as the Spirit leads us out of our comfort zone.  Like Jenni, who voluntarily and quite inexplicably spent a week with the US Marines recently, some of us have willingly signed up for spiritual boot camp called Lent--to test our mettle, to discover more about ourselves, to strengthen our faith commitments, to grow in hope and in love. 

For those of us who want to experience the benefits of Lent, we’ve entered a tacit and temporary covenant with God and with one another.  We’re saying that for these 40 days we intend to kick our spirituality up a notch, to be a bit more dedicated to our current spiritual disciplines or maybe to try out a new spiritual practice.  Usually this is a private pact—unless we decide to give up Facebook for the next 6 weeks and owe our FB friends an explanation—or unless we must decline a brownie because we’ve given up chocolate.   But mostly our Lenten commitment is private.  And short term.  In a way, Lent is a way to enter into a short-term covenant with God. For some of us, that’s all we can sign on for at this time.

Covenant is a word used throughout the Bible and in various ways.  Its first use occurs in this very story of Noah when God pledges never to destroy the earth again by flood.  In some respects, God does not come off looking very magnanimous in this agreement.  God vows, “I promise never again to destroy the earth . . . by flood.”  Sounds like a contract that stipulates, in very fine print, “Offer does not cover destruction of the earth by fire, ice, plague, nuclear war, asteroids, invaders from another galaxy, or giant mutant hamsters.” Such a stipulation does not set my mind at ease.  After all, we in coastal Alabama know our homeowners’ insurance might cover flooding from a hurricane without covering wind damage.  Makes you wonder if our insurance companies took that little trick straight from the insurance policy God wrote for Noah.  Even so, the possibility of another Great Flood still lives in the human imagination. One of the most recent disaster films, set in the current year and titled 2012, tells yet another version of a flood that destroys most of humanity.  

However, to be quite serious now, I feel better about Noah’s God and that less-than-airtight covenant when I consider what might have influenced the Genesis writers’ concept of God.  The people who told this version of the Great Flood—and, by the way, virtually all cultures have a Great Flood story—likely patterned their image of God after the earthly rulers and powers that held sway over them.  Those rulers might have had moments of mercy, but their power was probably more impressive than their compassion.

But two features of that first covenant in the Bible do impress me. 

1)    This pledge is one that God initiates and that God offers with no strings attached.  Most covenants the Genesis writers knew about were political treaties between a king and his subjects or between a powerful nation and a vassal state.  Often the Israelites were obligated to more powerful nations through what was called a suzerainty treaty, and this typical Ancient Near East agreement between unequal parties colored their understanding of their relationship to the Lord God.  These political covenants were conditional:  IF you are loyal to me, pay tribute to me, fight my wars, etc., THEN I will protect you, give you land, etc. So, for instance, if Abraham’s descendants are circumcised, then God will make of them a great nation. 

But the covenant in today’s story is unconditional. God makes a promise that does not obligate Noah in any way. This kind of graciousness from a powerful party to a powerless party must have been as rare then as it is today.  If those who wrote Noah’s story had few if any examples of an unconditional promise of care from a superior power, then this kind of covenant represents an amazing evolutionary leap of moral imagination.  Here is a glimpse of a powerful God who would choose to offer mercy with no demands for loyalty or tribute.  Christians have wrongly characterized the God of the Hebrew Bible as a God of law and have wrongly argued that the idea of grace is unknown until the New Testament.  But we see that grace is right here—in the first book of the Torah.  The Powerful One makes a pledge of graciousness to the weaker one with no expectations, no requirements.

2)    The second striking feature of Noah’s covenant is its inclusiveness.  God covenants with every living creature.  God is concerned about every living creature.  The parties named in this contract also include every living creature on into the future.  God, in effect, included us in that covenant, according to today’s story. And this contract has an inherent logic to it. We join God in protecting the planet by recognizing our creaturely oneness, our interdependence as living beings.  It would be impossible for the Creative Force, the Lord of Life, to protect only human beings. Modern science concurs: we’re all in this together.  Our fates are tied up together.  Therefore, we participate in this godly covenant that binds together parakeets and porpoises and palm trees and people—when we live with an awareness of that common covenant.  If we forget this covenant that unites our fates, we have only ourselves to blame.  It is not God the Creator who is the Destroyer of our planet.  And the beauty of the rainbow calls us to hold out hope and to remember our interdependence.  Some in our denomination are going on a “carbon fast” this Lent to reduce their carbon footprint on the environment.  I think the God of Noah would approve.

With Noah’s covenant as backdrop, let’s now consider other kinds of covenants that are binding upon us.  Obviously some are legal and others are relational and often unstated, like the implicit covenants we make with friends when we stand by them through thick and thin. Like the implicit covenant you and I can make with immigrants in our state who are feeling targeted for political purposes.  We as Christians must always stand in an implicit covenantal solidarity with those on the margins.

Our own denomination’s governance is founded on covenantal relationships.  Individual congregations within the UCC[i] are in covenantal relationships that assume mutual support, equality, respect, and care as well as accountability.  “Covenant” in the United Church of Christ requires a willingness to remain in relationship, even when we disagree.  Open Table operates within a governing structure that is neither hierarchical nor independent. We do not take orders from anyone at the denominational level, yet we highly value the opinions and concerns of others in our UCC family.  Somewhere between the extremes of authoritarianism and isolationism lies covenantal polity based on mutual commitments within trustful relationships.

Those same expectations hold true at the congregational level. Some of you now considering membership at Open Table may want to hear a brief excerpt from our new member covenant, and current members may periodically need to renew those commitments. Our new members agree to try to “follow Jesus’ hopeful way” and answer the biblical call to “do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God.” This covenant continues as the congregation promises “to bear one another's burdens, hear one another’s stories, support one another in spiritual growth, and serve God by serving one another and our world.”  Friends, now is a time for us to remember we have made this pledge to Rosemarie and Linda.

Renewing our commitments to this congregation this Lent is another way we can deepen our spiritual commitments. But in case that membership covenant is too abstract, let me offer three concrete ways you might “practice” your faith life, in the context of this church, in a new or more intensive way this Lent:

First, you might practice the spiritual discipline of worship attendance.  If you generally attend once a month, try twice a month.  If you attend twice a month, try three times a month. Many of us returned to the church-going life after many, many years of NOT attending worship services.  And it may seem that even a monthly appearance at Open Table is something of a stretch for you.  But I’m going to ask you to stretch a bit more, at least for the next six weeks.  Because you will find that scriptures and sermons and songs get layered onto each other over time.  If you attend only occasionally, you will miss out on so much, including a richness of relationships that can grow only through consistent interactions.  And you will BE missed.  Your unique presence changes our worship experience, silent though you may seem in your pew with your own private thoughts.  Your presence also is vital to our growth and sustainability as a new church.  Many of our “regulars” worship on a pretty irregular basis, so when first-time visitors come, we seem a much smaller congregation than we are and therefore may seem a less viable congregation.  Certainly demands of family and work require us to miss services sometimes. But for this Lenten season I challenge you to consider your worship here at Open Table as an essential part of your commitments to kick spiritual discipline up a notch.  There is probably no greater way you can strengthen the vitality and ensure the future of Open Table than by lending us your presence each week.

Second, I ask you to consider increasing your financial giving this year—by 1%.  Yes, many churches recommend giving a tithe, 10% of your income.  Some even require that level of giving.  Some of you are doing that.  But the UCC is recommending this year that we all simply look at what we gave to our church last year, and increase that amount by a mere 1%.  The idea is to stretch a bit from wherever we are right now.  Your offerings represent a spiritual practice of generosity that enriches the giver even as it serves others.

Finally, I hope you will consider lending us your leadership and talents.  Speak to me or a member of the church council if you have ideas to offer or talents to share.  We have many opportunities for service.  Right now we need at least an additional person or two who can work with our children.  We would love someone to do web design for us. Someone who can head our marketing team.  Someone with photography skills.  Someone who can coordinate meals and ministry for our sick. Additional folks to help set up and clean up on Sundays. Others who can lead and participate in acts of social justice.  Think about your gifts and Open Table’s needs.  Come talk with me.

Traditionally Lent was a time to prepare catechumens for baptism on Easter Sunday.  Although here we make no big distinction between members and nonmembers, we believe membership kicks that commitment up a notch.  Lent is an ideal time to consider becoming a member at Open Table.  I would be happy to talk with you about that possibility. I would love to celebrate some new members on Easter Sunday.

Lent is the church’s “little covenant” when we try out, for 40 days, a new level of commitment—to prayer or Bible study or life within a community of faith. Sometimes we create a wilderness period for ourselves in order to find in that spaciousness new strength for the journey ahead.  Other times, life’s wilderness periods are thrust upon us.  Our dear Rosemarie has found herself suddenly in the desert where she may feel threatened by the wild beast in the form of a brain tumor.  We will do our best to make sure she and Linda are not alone in the wilderness. 

I pray that your Lent brings you a new level of commitment and new experiences of God’s loving presence.  

PRAYER

O God, our hope is in you and in your great compassion—our hope for the world that bears the stains of our carelessness, our hope for a community riven by racism, our hope for our church that aspires to serve you, our hope for all who are undergoing physical and spiritual challenges.  Especially we pray for Rosemarie’s healing.  Bless Linda as she stands with her and bless us as we stand beside them.  Keep your rainbow before us. Amen

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[i] www.ucc.org