Oak Chapel United Methodist Church

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Buried deep in the Old Testament, in the Book of Numbers, is an age-old story about Moses and the Hebrew Children (during their forty-year trek in the wilderness), confronting a nest of venomous snakes. God provides Moses with a miraculous cure, an antidote to the poison, and thus, once again, God rescues his rebellious, stiff-necked people on their way to the Holy Land. We probably would not know the story at all, had Jesus not referred to it in his famous conversation with Nicodemus – in John’s Gospel. That’s what makes it important.

Told quickly, the story recounts how Moses decided to flank the land of Edom, to go around it, rather than confront the Edomites. This, we assume, was good strategy, but it made the trip longer, and the people grew impatient. They rebelled against God and Moses (God’s man), complaining about the food and asking why they had been brought out into this barren wilderness only to die. “Were there not graves in Egypt,” they asked? This angered God who sent the snakes. The snakes bit the people, and many died. Terrified, the Hebrews repented and God relented -- told Moses to make a bronze serpent and mount it on a pole. Those who had been bitten could come, look at the serpent’s image, and not die. And so it was.

This is what Jesus said to Nicodemus (just before he said, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life” – what Martin Luther called “the Gospel in miniature”). Immediately before saying that, Jesus said to this famous teacher of Israel, “…just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” He was, of course, speaking of his crucifixion, his “lifting up.” Men and women who knew they were dying would look at Jesus on the cross and live.

I don’t know of a better image for sin than a nest of venomous snakes. Snakes frighten us, as do sins, yet we are fascinated by them. Snakes, like sins, lurk where we least expect them, they operate best at night, and they sneak up on us. If we are able to avoid one’s bite we may, even in our escaping, be bitten by another. So it is with sin. And, like the bite of a poisonous snake, sin leads to death. It is from the fatal poison of sin, after we are bit (We are all “snake bit” by sin.) – it is from the poison of sin, after we are bit, that Christ saves us. Moses and his serpent on a pole didn’t eliminate the snakes (though that’s what the people asked for), but rescued those who were bitten from an otherwise certain death. The Son of Man “lifted up,” Christ on the cross, does not rid the world of sin (and the trouble sin causes) but provides the antidote that saves us from an otherwise certain death. “…just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whosoever believes in him may have eternal life.” Jesus, please note, doesn’t just rescue us from death; he also gives new life.

SIN is not smoking cigarettes, lying, cheating, stealing or sleeping around. These are “sins”, not “SIN.” SIN, in the Biblical sense, may include these behaviors, but is a much richer concept, and far more inescapable. In the Bible, SIN is anything short of the Garden of Eden, anything different from what God intended, whatever was not supposed to be. Smog is pollution in the physical world. Sin is pollution in the moral world. So death, and disease, in the Biblical view, are manifestations of SIN. (Nobody died or got sick in the garden!) That’s why Jesus can ask, “What’s the difference whether to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ and ‘Rise up and walk?’” Honest mistakes and failures of judgement are manifestations of SIN. They weren’t part of God’s design. There’s no food chain in a sinless world. The lion and the lamb lie down together unafraid, as (presumably) they did in Eden. SIN, in this larger sense, ruins everything. It cannot be avoided and is the root of all our sorrows. A nest of vipers.

A seminary class-mate of mine, far too persuaded by all those psychologists we had to read, became consumed with self-doubt. One day, in class, he said to Dr. Carl Michaelson, “I can never be a minister. I’m nothing but a fake, and in my heart I know it. When I do good, I do it not really for others but to make myself feel better. When I say nice things it’s because I want to be thought well of. Even when I pray I’m dishonest: I lie to God, or try to fool God, or impress God. I can’t stop serving myself.” I was in the classroom that day, and heard him say it, and it seemed to me a devastating confession, but Michaelson didn’t seem a bit disturbed and said to him, “All your saying is, ‘Lord, have mercy on me a sinner.’”

Before seminary, when I was in college, someone said to me, “People do everything they do for selfish reasons.” And I thought, if that were true, it was the end of religion – because, to me, religion was something that would make us good – and unselfish. Now I know that, if it’s not true, it’s the end of religion, because I now understand faith (the Christian faith, at least) as that which, although we remain sinners, sets us right with God, and, thus, by his grace, frees us from the power of sin and from the trap of selfishness.

Poisonous snakes are still there and they still bite (The world is fraught with danger and full of sadness), but we have an antidote in the cross of Christ. Jesus said, “In the world ye will have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.” “He is the propitiation for our sins,’ the book says, “and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.” Why do our Roman Catholic friends love their crucifixes? Because they see in the crucified Christ one who is truly lifted up, glorified, as no man was ever lifted up or glorified before or after. A man or woman cannot get any higher. They see in the crucifix God’s love condensed. That God would love us so much as to give his only Son….And, while this gift has implications for all the world, it is in its essence a personal thing. “He died for me.” Charles Wesley said he never understood the power of the cross until, one day, he realized that “if Jesus and I were the only two people on earth, and it should become necessary for one to die so for the other to live, Jesus would die for me.”

In the film, The Bridge, the main character is a keeper of a railroad bridge, one which opens and closes by turning on a central pivot. The man’s clear instruction from his superiors is to leave the bridge open as long as possible, so ships can move freely up and down the river, but to close it at the last moment when a train approaches so it can pass over. This man and his wife have a two-year old son who is the joy of their life. One day the man arrives at work, sits down at the bridge controls, and realizes it is just time to close the bridge, for a train is fast approaching. But as he manipulates the controls, he looks up and sees that his little toddler, his deeply loved little two-year-old boy, has apparently followed him to work, and is playing right where the sections of the bridge will meet. If he closes the bridge, his son will surely die, but if he doesn’t hundreds will plunge to their deaths. With an indescribable look of horror on his face, the father closes the bridge. The next scene, and the last scene in the film, is even more disturbing. It takes place inside the a passenger car as the train speeds across the bridge. People are laughing, and playing cards, and telling jokes, unaware of and oblivious to the unspeakable sacrifice that had just been made for their saving.