WORSHIP

Selected Sermons

“The Vertical Pole”

By Rev. Mary Louise McCullough

March 22, 2009

Fourth Sunday of Lent

Numbers 21: 4-9

John 3: 14-21

I’m not sure who we have to thank or blame for this morning’s lectionary readings – the story of how a snake on a stick in the desert acquired magical healing properties, and the passage in John’s gospel – holding up God’s extravagant love and grace, but appearing to wrap that gift in airtight plastic with a keep-out sign for someone who doesn’t proclaim Christ.

I wonder if we’d ever see this strange Moses story if the gospel writer had not used it in his interpretation of Jesus’ purpose and work on earth. So there it is. We have to deal with a bronze snake that could cure snake bites, and with Jesus being nailed to a cross and what that meant to the gospel writer who was being oppressed, we think, by other religious authorities, and what it means to us, what it says to us about the nature of God, about ourselves, and about our relationship with God.

The fact is, these two texts point to the cross like a giant neon arrow blinking in the sands of the desert. They remind us that religions typically have an “axis mundi” or sacred place that serves as their glue, their center pulling everything together. The axis mundi is a place that powerfully draws together all the strands of life and identity for a religion’s followers, giving them purpose and definition.

Devout Muslims have the Kaaba in Mecca, the holiest place on earth where they travel to receive transformative power. For some tribal religions, the axis mundi is a great pole standing in a central place where stories are told of gods descending to earth, or the pole marks the spot where it is believed that creation began. When people gather around the sacred pole, they reconnect with creation and divine power.1

For the ancient Hebrews, our forebears, the axis mundi was at first not a place but a story – of the liberation of God’s people, a story sparkling with potent symbols of God’s saving power – the bronze snake, the ark of the covenant, the temple. Then the axis mundi became the land itself, the promised land, Jerusalem.

For Christians, there is no geographic center, no one place which serves our needs – but we do have a pole – a pole that stands in the shape of a cross, pointing at the sky but also extending out, horizontally. As Christians trying to live and understand our story today we need to deeply consider the cross – how it connects the human realm and the divine realm. How it tells us about ourselves, about Jesus, how it reveals the nature of our God.

This week we are going to consider the vertical pole and next week, we will think about the crosspiece –  the horizontal part of the cross where Jesus’ hands were nailed.

In the story of Moses and the bronze serpent, the vertical pole makes a powerful statement. We might sum that statement up with the words, “If it does not kill you, it will make you well.”2

God has been punishing the complainers for their stubbornness in not seeing the graciousness of their being removed from generations of slavery, and led to the desert to prepare for the new life of freedom that awaits them. All their basic needs are being met but no matter what God does, the people want something else. They are given bread but they prefer something more tasty, spicy with a better texture. They are given water but they prefer the tonics and juices of their imaginations.

Over and over, Moses attempts to teach them that they must tame their less mature instincts, grow up and seek the higher purpose in their liberation, get their minds on something besides their own comforts and desires. Over and over, the people whine and resist. They dig themselves deeper into a wilderness of their own making. The result is that they must continue in the desert longer and longer, for it is only when they mature spiritually, when their understanding of this call to new life begins to take shape, that they will be able to move on.

We see here, the nature of sin. In the midst of the abundance of life, creation, God’s overflowing gifts, our nature is to want something else. Our nature is to miss the point, to be distracted by a thousand other desires and supposed needs.

“If it does not kill you, it will make you well” the saying goes. After the snakes begin inflicting their poisonous bites, God tells Moses to construct a pole with a bronze snake. It will require that the people let their attention be riveted by the very thing that they most fear.

The bronze serpent is their cure for the deadly bite of the snakes. Once the people have recognized their sin and confessed it to Moses, the snake itself, the thing that bit them, becomes the very thing that saves them.

The incident with the snake is necessary to focus all their attention on the understanding they most resist. “Once Moses makes it possible for them to gaze fully upon what they are afraid of, they gain access to its healing power.”3

What are we as a church, most afraid of? What are you as an individual most afraid of? Are we so far from these ancient relatives who most feared the serpents in the desert?

A recent Harris poll trying to pin down what we are afraid of revealed that 36 percent of adults in this country name snakes as their number one fear. This extreme is called Ophidiophobia, and it is said to afflict 49 percent of all women and 22 percent of men. I think whoever carved this serpent story into the stones of our tradition knew all about the power of fear … how it can rule our lives, how it separates us from God. How it separates us from each other. How it can move quickly and imperceptibly from the rational to the completely irrational. How fear can shape our lives.

We protect ourselves from what we fear, but without God’s intervention, God’s grace active in our lives, our reality would take on the shape of what we most want to avoid. Because the power of sin in the world is so strong, the power that distorts, the power that deceives, that voice in our heads that tells us we’re no good so why not just do what other people do and leave it all to chance – the power of sin in the world means we are all fighting distortions of truth every day of our lives.

But as this ancient story shows us, God’s power is greater. If only we will call on it, access it, let it become our mainstay. Not expect it, like the Israelites, to give us temporary pleasures and solutions, but join forces with it so that over the long haul we are partners in the life giving work of our Creator.

One of the things we are most afraid of today is violence. One of the things we hate most today is violence, and suffering. Not only the kind of suffering that is expected to be a part of every life, but also the more terrible suffering, the kind we see where there is war. The kind we see where there is systemic injustice, genocide. The kind we see with institutions such as slavery, institutions such as poverty, which get their roots buried so deep in our societal structures that it takes generations to cut them out.

There are systems of injustice around us today that we were born into, so it’s almost impossible for us to see them for what they are until something cataclysmic shakes everything loose. Something like the times we’re going through right now.

That’s where the cross comes in. It is our hope, it is our promise, as Christians, that we can mature, that our understanding can deepen, that this journey of life has a purpose, an end that matters, and that while we are alive, we do not have to be defeated by the kinds of distractions, the kinds of evils, the kinds of desires – the sin – that we all know deep within us – whatever it is that diminishes life, that tells you you’re no good, or that all this is a sham – the same thing the Israelites were subject to – this stuff is not as powerful as the power of God demonstrated through Christ. Through the cross and resurrection.

We will never in this life be free of our humanness, but in the cross, if we will look at it, we discover something about that humanness. God entered it fully. That is a profound affirmation.

The cross completely affirms our humanity, and also liberates us from the very thing that threatens all the time to destroy us.

“If it doesn’t kill you, it will make you well.”

We are vulnerable. Left to our own devices, we do not do this well. We have seen that.

But in the cross, we discover that God fully entered into the frailty of our condition. Fully. All the way. Jesus did not simply teach and prophesy and shake things up and get executed. He died in the most painful and ignominious way.

The Roman empire used crucifixions all the time as a means of executing people. Poles were driven into the ground permanently for this purpose and Roman law made these poles a place of death, destroying the soul, destroying hope, destroying the mind’s ability to even imagine real freedom.

It is never the way of empire to gently walk a people through the wilderness of growth and maturation toward the deepening of understanding. That is the way of God. It is the way we seek, all of us, it is the thing we crave, the yearning that will not be satisfied by all the lesser satisfactions we can buy with our wealth or wish for in our minds.

The death of Jesus shows us how far God goes for us – every day. The pole of death melts in the face of the life set loose in the resurrection.

But we risk losing the power of this central mystery of our faith today because we are so fearful of violence, our hearts are so untrusting of anything that seems to require violence, that we turn away from the cross, many of us, because we get confused. We forget who was responsible for the cross.

And in fact, the church has produced a number of atonement theories throughout the years in an attempt to explain – atonement theories being ways to explain what happened that day … why the earth shook and the heavens seemed to tear open as the holy curtain in the temple, that holiest of places, was torn.

And none of our ways of explaining it has yet satisfied all of us for all time. That is why we come back to it, year after year, Lent after Lent.

I invite you now to enter into a brief time of quiet meditation with me as we consider the cross together. In the safety and assurance that we all come with our sense of confusion, our sense of ignorance in the face of such a mystery, let us know that this is what we are to do, as the gathered people of Christ’s body in the world.

We are to be that body, for each other, and for all people. It was broken so that we might see that the life that is important for us is a life of compassion and mercy. In its place we have received the Holy Spirit that encourages us, nourishes us, holds our hands as we come to this mystery and protects us that we might be fed, that we might grow strong, that we might become God’s partners now and forever.

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1  Gail Ramshaw, 40 Days and 40 Nights

2  W. Sibley Towner, Feasting on the Word, 103

3  Barbara Brown Taylor, Feasting on the Word, 103