Click To Print 

Click To Hear

“Snake handling Savior” those are the words that have been on the web site and marquee this week. I guess most of us are hoping that they are only words, just the sermon title and not the promise of some weird and wonderful new departure in the life of our congregation! “Not, anything Pastor Yolanda can do, I can do… with snakes!” Then we heard today’s two scripture lessons, neither of them are hallucinations or nightmares, but in both the snakes are still a’slithering.

In Numbers we have fiery serpents biting at our ankles and a bronze serpent on a pole. Can you imagine explaining that bronze serpent to your Prescription Plan? Likely, only so many visits to the bronze serpent per year would be covered! The serpent on the pole is no new wonder-drug... it is not a new medical procedure. But the children of Israel came to see that by looking at the serpent, they were acknowledging their belief that their help came from the Lord. They knew that the turning of the head towards the serpent was a turning of one’s heart towards the mercy and power of God, and that was where they found healing, not from the bronze snake, but from the promised word of God. When they were bitten by the poison snake, they knew they were unable to help themselves. They knew that they had no power, no knowledge, and no resources to save themselves. By looking at the bronze serpent, they were casting themselves upon the presence and power of God bringing health, healing, and wholeness.

Fast forward now, through many centuries and listen in on the night-time conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus. We hear Jesus say, just as the serpent was a life giving sign for the dying Hebrews, so the Son of Man lifted on the cross will be a life-giving sign for all who will look and believe. Jesus informs Nicodemus that the Son of Man will function in the world and for the world, for all creation as the bronze serpent.

When the Son of Man is lifted up on the cross, He will be the most hopeless human being in creation, lifted up and placed on the cross by the powerful and self-righteousness of the military-religious-industrial-economic complex. Jesus lifted up on the cross will be despised and forsaken by his friends. Jesus will be teased and tormented by his jailers; laughed at and ridiculed by his enemies, watched, the focus of speculation by the apathetic and cynical public: “He saved others; let’s see if he can save himself!” Jesus lifted high on the cross on the hill; stripped of all powers, reduced to his absolute bare humanity. He is not James Bond on the cross, with a bag full of tricks able to save himself. Jesus is not Superman nor the Incredible Hulk.

If there is to be any future for the Son of Man, if there is to be something good to come out of this lifted up man on the cross, it can only result by the action of the gracious and redemptive God. If there are to be any new chapters in the Jesus’ story, those chapters will have to be written by God in a new act of power. If there is to be new life for Jesus, healing or redemption for Jesus, it cannot come from the distorted self-deception of the world and its powers, it can only come as a gift from God.

Just as the serpent in the wilderness is transformed from an object of death to an object of healing, so the cross is transformed from an object of death to an object of life. Just as the serpent became a symbol of healing for the Israelites, the cross has become a symbol of that life which comes only from gracious, self-giving God.

The cross is the supreme irony. It represents the abounding, gracious love that God has for the world, while at the same time depicting the hateful anger that rose up against that love. And here we come to the heart of our gospel: the scandal of the cross. Could not God have done it some other way, without the cross, without this terrible suffering and death? Why is it that by his stripes we are healed... that it takes Jesus’ punishment to save us from punishment?

Jesus on the cross is God as victim. God is there, God is the victim of God’s love. God is the victim of the world’s pride and hatred which stems from all those inclinations we have to imagine that somehow WE know best. Only with Jesus on the Cross, can this whole terrible mess, our whole terrible mess, be revealed. Only on the cross can this terrible mess, our terrible mess, be dealt with once and for all. Only on the cross was God’s love able to corral and overwhelm and abolish all the sin and despair and death that otherwise would forever menace our lives and the life of the world. Only through the bloodied but empty Cross was God’s new life made possible for all.

Jesus is therefore not only the good shepherd, but Jesus is also the good snake. Jesus surprised us, came in among us, slithering in to our illusions of stability and safety. And in response, we reached for the ax to beat him to death.

Jesus opened his mouth, and spoke gracious words that also cut us like a sword; venomous, prophetic words. And in response, we beat him, and whipped him, and lifted him up high on a pole. But in the turning of God’s grace, what we believed were His poisonous, prophetic words of venom, became the anti-venom, the means of salvation. And even those who killed him, at the foot of the pole, were able to look up and say, “Truly this is the Son of God.”

The death of Jesus on the cross would be witnessed by a number of people. For some, it would be just another crucifixion, just another execution. For us who believe, for us who would gaze upon the Savior, this crucifixion has much greater meaning. For us it is not an isolated event in time and space, but it is the event that provides meaning for all other events in history. The cross is both a sign of salvation and salvation itself.

We go through the wilderness of our daily lives. We struggle with the complexities and the monotony of each day. We listen to the world talk as though there were nothing possible in the universe outside its own glib explanations. We listen to so called experts who now tell us that there are no absolutes and the only reality we have is one we create for ourselves. We discover that our entertainment, news, politics and corporate ethics are all poisoned by the idea that each of us must make our own way in the world and that by making our campaign contributions we too can buy a piece of the action!  Even then, even now, we can and should turn our heads and look at the Son of Man lifted up for us, discovering that there is hope for us that the power of God has come into our world to do a new thing.

My friends, when you feel like you are up to your necks in a snake pit, bitten by the green-eyed monster of envy of all the consumer goods that you do not yet have, when you are wounded by the haughty arrogance of pride and self-sufficiency, when you are bitten by the serpent that crawls out of a bottle or any one of the thousand snakes that menace us, there is an alternative, there is another way!

You can look at the Son of Man. Your faith can be awakened or re-awakened. You can receive a powerful new assurance. Grace abounds, grace more than enough to heal you and to heal us all. In Jesus there is a power beyond our own power that can come into our lives and give us new life. This power to bring us to a new life is the power of love. The turning of our heads to look at the Son of Man is the turning of our hearts to the God who continues to act to give us a new life which will replace our old life, which is poisoned. At the cross God gives us a new future rather than the dead end we are facing. At the cross God offers us new life and life more abundant instead of the life so poisoned by our past mistakes, bringing us not to the place of skulls, but to the empty tomb.

We are not being invited to diminish or ignore our fears, but to face them, openly and honestly and to lift them up to God. When we do, God will lead us through the desolate and deserted places of our lives to a place of new life, hope, and blessing. The Son of Man on the cross reminds brings us the salvation that was not some afterthought on the part of God. Rather, our salvation was God being God.

Yes, we do have a snake handling Savior. My friends, I ask you and urge and plead with you, I beg you: Look upon Jesus, the Son of Man, risk Jesus and know that you are loved by God, that you belong to God, that your life is with God, now and for all eternity, that God has a purpose for you, that God has a purpose for this amazing world. Look upon Jesus, the Son of Man. Risk Jesus and so know and receive God’s mercy, God’s forgiveness, God’s salvation. Welcome God’s new life, receive it and live it today and always!  Amen.