Look and live

I really, really don’t understand what is going on in our first reading, do you? I mean, one minute you have God being absolutely livid with the Israelites for building a golden calf to worship, and threatening to destroy the lot of them, and the next minute you have God telling Moses to build a bronze serpent for people to look at to be healed of snakebite. And the snakes themselves were, we are told, sent by God because the people were grumbling! I mean, hello? If God punished us for grumbling like that, not a one of us that wouldn’t be reaching for the snake-bite serum at some time during the week! I rather suspect that this is a story that sort of crept in by mistake. Or, perhaps, they found a statue of a bronze snake in the Temple and made up this story to explain how it came to be there. And, of course, the fact that it is there means that God meant it to be there, no matter what its provenance!

Of course, the people who wrote down what’s called the Deuteronomic histories, which basically means the Pentateuch and some other bits of our Bible, do like to make a perceived punishment fit an alleged crime. Moses doesn’t quite make it to the Promised Land, so God must be punishing him for something. The people of Israel take 40 years to get there, there must be a good reason for it. And so on and so forth. And in this instance there was a plague of snakes. So the people must have been grumbling.

I suppose grumbling is a sin, really, when you come to think about it. After all, it is either futile or hurtful and can often be both. The Israelites were mooing on about how much better off they’d been in Egypt, totally forgetting that there they had not been free, and moaning on about the strict rations that they were getting in the desert. Talk about hurtful to Moses, and utterly futile, too, as nothing was going to change. They weren’t going back!

We grumble, too, most of the time. It wouldn’t be us if we weren’t chuntering on about the weather, or the trains, or the health service! Just look at your Facebook page, especially when we had that snow a couple of weeks ago! All things we can do absolutely nothing about! I dare say that’s pretty harmless.

But then, there are the times when people could do something about it, but, instead, they grumble. It is easier to expect the other person to do something than it is to get up and do it yourself. Although, quite often, if you want something done properly, it is a lot easier to do it yourself!

And sometimes we grumble about each other, which is all very well, but the things we say have a nasty habit of being relayed to the person we said them about, hurting them, and causing us all a great deal of bother. It’s best to try – heaven knows, I know how difficult it is – to try not to say anything behind people’s backs that you wouldn’t say to their faces. Which is all very well when it’s one’s spouse, because one does, as often as not, grumble at them, but one doesn’t tend to grumble at other people.

So yes, by and large, maybe grumbling is a sin. But to be bitten by snakes for it? It doesn’t sound so much like God to me. But there you are, the story got put in the Bible, and physicians liked it so much that they adopted the snake on a pole as their emblem. And, of course, one of the reasons it is important is that Jesus refers to it when he is talking to Nicodemus, as we heard in our Gospel reading: 

"And 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. 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."

That, of course, is why the story still resonates with us today, as it is a type, or picture, of the crucifixion. I remember one sermon I heard on this passage where the preacher pointed out, quite forcefully, that the Israelites didn’t have to do anything with the snake – they didn’t have to go up to it, or touch it, or lick its tail, or anything like that. All they had to do was look at it, and instantly they were healed of their snake-bite. And similarly, we too, the preacher said, just have to look to Jesus, and instantly we are saved.

And so Jesus himself tells us. All we have to do is to believe. To look to the Cross.

It is, of course, God who saves us. We can do nothing to save ourselves. Nothing. The Israelites in the desert could do nothing to save themselves from the snakes. They didn’t know about anti-snakebite venom back in the day. If they were bitten, the probability was that they would die – unless, of course, they could just look at the bronze serpent.

There would, of course, be those who refused to look. They had been bitten by a snake, very well, they were going to die. Or perhaps they thought they knew better: looking at an image wasn’t going to help, was it? Maybe if they did this or that instead, that would help. You’ve got to DO something, after all.

But no, if they wanted to live, all they had to do was to look. They could do nothing to save themselves, all they could do was look at the serpent. And, similarly, we can do nothing to save ourselves – whatever we may mean by that, and I’m not always quite sure – all we can do is look at the Cross. And God does the rest.

It’s about love, isn’t it?   What we remember on Mothering Sunday isn’t just our mothers, although that, too, but above all, the wonderful love of God, our Father and our Mother. After all, there are people whose mothers have died; people who didn’t or don’t have a good relationship with their mothers; and above all, people who would have loved to have been mothers, but it didn’t happen, for whatever reason. Many of those will not be in church this morning. The Church isn't always very tactful about Mothers Day, I'm afraid – I used to find it very patronising, especially considering that for the rest of the year I was rather left to get on with it, and was told that the loneliness and isolation and lack of fellowship was “the price you pay for the wonderful privilege of being a Christian Mother!” As if....

The worst Mothers Day sermon I ever heard was from a young curate who had just discovered his wife was expecting their first child – sadly, he moved away during the course of the year,

as several of us were longing to hear what he would have had to say after several months of the reality of parenthood!

But one of the things that those of us who are parents will know about is unconditional love. We know that, no matter what our children may do, we will go on loving them. When they are young, we may have to punish them if they behave badly; when they are older, how much we see of them very much depends on them, not on us. But we never stop loving them, no matter how infuriating they are.

I am vividly reminded of Jesus saying: 

“Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for bread, will give a stone? Or if the child asks for a fish, will give a snake? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!”

“How much more”! We find it very difficult to comprehend God’s love, the love that says you only have to look to live. The love that reaches out to us infinitely more strongly than we are able to reach out to God. Jesus said that

“Those 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. And this is the judgement, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.”

But the thing is – light! After all, if you think about it, when you are in a dark room, you switch on the light, and the darkness has gone. People might have preferred darkness, but it is easier to make it light than to make it dark. And in the light, all you have to do is look, look at the Cross – and you will live! Amen.

Whenever you see a rainbow

There’s a song they used to sing in Girls’ Brigade, when my daughter was a member many years ago, and the chorus went,

“Whenever you see a rainbow

Whenever you see a rainbow,

Whenever you see a rainbow,

Remember God is love!”

We heard, in our first reading today, how God put a rainbow in the sky to remind everybody, including God, that the world would never again be utterly destroyed by floods. It’s a very early story, of course, one of those that is probably more nearly a legend than anything else. God had made the world, but the people were so sinful that God wanted to wipe out all life on earth and start again – it’s been done before, of course, just ask the dinosaurs! Anyway, God told Noah to build the ark, and take animals in it – either a breeding pair, or 7 of each species, depending on which account you go by. There are two that seem to have got a bit mixed up here! And, as you know, the rain came down – in torrents, according to the song I quoted earlier – and only Noah and his family were saved, plus the animals. And Noah sent out various birds to see whether the waters were going down, and when they did, the Ark eventually landed on the top of Mount Ararat, possibly in modern-day Turkey, and everybody went out to start all over again.

But people hadn’t changed – Noah drinks too much of the first wine he’s able to make, and falls asleep naked in his tent, and one of his sons mocks him rather than finding a convenient blanket. That didn’t happen until after the rainbow, though. First, when they land, Noah gives a sacrifice, which is pleasing to God, and God promises “As long as the world exists, there will be a time for planting and a time for harvest. There will always be cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night.” And then God places the rainbow in the sky as a sign of this promise.

The extraordinary thing about Noah’s flood is that almost every ancient culture has its flood story. They may be a folk memory of sea levels rising catastrophically after the end of the last Ice Age, when all the waters that had been bound up in the glaciers melted and many communities were submerged forever. There’s a theory that it’s a folk memory of the Black Sea being formed when the waters burst through the Bosphorus. I wonder, even, if there is not a folk memory of the Mediterranean basin being filled – we know that at certain times in history it has been empty. Or it’s possible that the flood myths came from people finding seashells and so on far inland. Nobody really knows, but we do know that in prehistoric times some areas that are now under water were dry land, and vice versa, as the world has changed. There is even a submerged country, known as Doggerland, in the North Sea, dating back as recently as ten thousand years ago, when Britain was joined to the Continent by more than an undersea tunnel!

Of course, there have been plenty of devastating floods since then, many even here in the UK. We have the Thames Flood Barrier which is supposed to be able to stop London being flooded, at least for the foreseeable future, but there have been floods in the West Country and in the North of England within the past few years. And only a couple of years ago the shops on Herne Hill were devastated by a burst water-main which flooded the road – you may even have seen it. And we no longer think God sends the floods – what sort of a monster would we be worshipping who sent floods and other tragedies, earthquakes or hurricanes and so on? We know that there are natural causes for these tragedies, even if we don’t quite understand some of them, and we also know that God is there in the middle of them with us.

Sometimes, I know, it is easy to wonder what God is thinking about not stopping these tragedies from happening. Even the Bible is full of attempts to work out why bad things happen to good people, right back to the book of Job, a couple of the Psalms, and, of course, Jonah. It’s probably something we will never know this side of heaven!

But we do know that God came down to live among us as a human being, and to share our experience! Our Gospel reading reminded us that Jesus came to John for baptism – not, of course, for forgiveness of sins, for he did not sin, but as a sign of his submission to God, and arguably that all should see that he had gone through the formalities. And after his baptism, and the announcement that he was God’s beloved son, he was sent into the wilderness for forty days. Mark doesn’t go into detail about the temptations to which he was subject, but we know from Matthew and Luke that basically he had to learn how not to use his divine powers. He wasn’t about making stones into bread, even though he later could, and did, provide food for a vast crowd. He wasn’t about throwing himself down from a high tower, and expecting God to save him. He wouldn’t even do that when he was nailed to the Cross. And he most certainly wasn’t about worshipping anything other than God!

So Jesus spent his forty days in the wilderness, and when he came out, John had been arrested for disturbing the powers-that-be one time too many, and so Jesus began his own ministry of preaching and teaching and healing the sick. Knowing, of course, that at any time he, too, could be arrested and put to death, which probably happened some two or three years later.

This season of Lent is the time of year when, among other things, we remember Jesus in the wilderness. It’s a time of preparation for Easter, a time when, perhaps, we focus a little more deeply on spiritual things. Perhaps you go to a Lent study group, or maybe you are planning to give something up for Lent – it might be chocolate, as a friend of mine does every year; it might be alcohol; it might be meat; it might even be social networking. But why? Why are you giving these things up, if you are?

When I was little, we were only allowed to give things up for Lent if we put the money we would otherwise have spent on them to a good cause. Which, since I found – and still find – it impossible to determine how much I might have spent on, say, chocolate, which I only buy irregularly anyway, since I found it impossible, I never gave anything up! And I am quite sure that, were I to give up social networking, I'd not spend the time in prayer or devotional reading, but faffing about playing computer games!

But self-discipline is a good thing. So we are told, and so it is, of course. But if it is all about you, all about me, that's not much good, is it? And, of course,it's all too easy to do things for all the wrong reasons. If we start complaining about how much we're missing chocolate, or booze, or whatever it might be, that's not the idea at all. The idea is to keep it totally to yourself, don't let anybody know unless you have to. Keep it between you and God.

I personally prefer to do something positive for Lent, like reading a devotional book, or finding something to be thankful for each day, or something. But whatever you do or don't do, the idea needs to be that it brings you closer to God. And if it doesn't do that, if it doesn't work if you keep it secret, then leave it.

The idea, basically, is that whatever we do or don’t do for Lent, it should be a reminder of God’s love for us, and, ideally, something that helps us to grow, spiritually. It shouldn’t be just about giving up something for the sake of it – that’s worthwhile if you give the amount you save to charity, of course, but does it help you spiritually? Does it remind you of God’s love? Does it remind you, even, of what Jesus went through – perhaps a small pinprick of discomfort when you’d really like to eat chocolate, or whatever, that reminds you, however dimly, of the agony that Jesus went through on the cross?

God placed the rainbow in the sky as a reminder to Noah – and to all of us who have come after him – that the world will not be destroyed. And, incidentally, as a reminder to God, too: “Whenever I cover the sky with clouds and the rainbow appears, I will remember my promise to you.”

The rainbow is a reminder of God’s covenant with us, and of God’s love to us. Noah wasn’t any better or any worse than anybody else at that time – he did believe God and obey God when he built the Ark, but he was still a sinner like you or me. He still got drunk as a skunk when he had the opportunity! But God still put that rainbow in the sky.

Whenever you see a rainbow – whether in the sky, or a flag, or a badge – whenever you see a rainbow, remember God is love. Amen.

What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth

The text of this sermon is substantially the same as this one.