Calvary Episcopal Church
Memphis, Tennessee
March 30, 2003
Fourth Sunday in Lent

God Was Lifted Up, and God Lifts Us Up
The Rev. Canon William A. Kolb

Gospel: John 3:14-21
(A copy of this sermon is also available in audio.)

We hear in the gospel reading that Jesus has to be lifted up. I wonder how many of you know how very, very literal that is. My understanding is that when they nailed Jesus to the cross, the cross was lying flat on the ground. After he was nailed to the cross, they lifted it up. That is theological, and it makes a lot of sense. It would have been more difficult to do it any other way. What we hear in the Gospel reading today is that if we will look to Jesus; if we will look at Jesus; if we will lift up our heads--which proves you don't always have to close your eyes when you pray--and look up to Jesus with trust and dependence, we will live, and we will live in a special way. Our lives will be changed, and we will be helped. We will, as Paul says in the epistle, "Be saved by grace," not by anything we do, "through faith."

When Jesus was nailed to the cross and lifted up, when he allowed himself to be crucified and lifted up, there was more than his body being lifted up. Scripture and good theology tell us that along with his body were lifted up all of our sins. You have heard it said, "Christ died for our sins." That's what they're talking about. On Jesus' back were our sins. God sees us through the filter of Jesus Christ as good, because Jesus took our sins upon him. So Jesus was lifted up, and through that, God lifts us up.

In this gospel is quoted something about the Old Testament. That's not unique. But in this case, it's hard to miss the reason for it, because they really go together. But before I quote the line that is almost exactly the same, we have to go back a bit, and we have to talk about human nature, the kind of funny kind of human nature.

You know, things change over the aeons. We have (plasma) HDGV available if you want to mortgage your house. We have cell phones. We have cell phones that take pictures. We have all too mechanized war tools. We have all kinds of changes in the world. Everything has changed so much, just in my very short lifetime. And God knows that the people who are dying now at 103, 105, 112, because the nutrition has been so good and the vitamins have been so good, the changes they have seen, unbelievable. But there are some things that never change.

There was this group of people in Egypt. They were called the Habirus, and that name came to be Hebrews. The Habirus were oppressed. They were beaten. They were slaves. They built the pyramids, and they were miserable. And along came a most wonderful man named Moses.

Moses was wonderful because he was courageous. He was wonderful because God spoke to him and he took God seriously. Moses knew it was God, and he did what God told him to do. He took all of those people away from slavery to the Promised Land in which he believed, because God told him it was there.

I don't know if God told him about how many people were already there and what they would have to do about that, but that's a whole other story for another day.

Moses took it upon himself to risk his life to save the Habirus from slavery in Egypt.

Everything was going fine until supplies ran low. Let me quote from The Message Bible: (You may remember the Living Bible from the 1960s, which was very popular because it read like a novel. The problem was, it was a novel. It was not scholarly. The Message Bible, which just came out, is very, very, very scholarly and reads like a novel.)

The people became irritable and cross as they traveled. They spoke out against God and Moses. "Why did you drag us out of Egypt to die in this God-forsaken country? No decent food. No water. We can't stomach this stuff any longer."

That's a very vivid description of how they were acting. I'm sure Moses said to himself, "You know, what have I done for you lately," right? But being the leader that he was, he listened to them, and he spoke to God.

And God--well, let me put it this way--the next thing these people knew, there were snakes all over the place, biting them. Now, being a people who were very much engaged with God--God was a big part of their lives. They very much believed in God. They were the first people in the whole world to believe in the one God--they figured God was sending a message and they repented. They realized they had been ungrateful and needed to repent. They went to Moses, and they said--of course, a little bit of the motivation was to get rid of the snakes, but part of it was they repented--"How can we repent? How can we tell God we're sorry? And how can we get rid of these damn snakes?"

Moses, being a good leader, listened to them and talked to the boss again. And God said, "Make a snake head out of fiery copper and put it on top of a flagpole and all who are bitten by snakes but look up at the snake head will live." So Moses did, and they did.

Now, God really could have done it a little more efficiently. (Forgive me, God.) To go from point A to point B, all He had to do was take the snakes away, right? Yes. But He didn't. The snakes continued, but there was a solution. In the gospel, we hear St. Matthew say: (This is where the New Testament refers back to the Old Testament)

In the same way that Moses lifted the serpent in the desert so people could have something to see and then believe, it is necessary for the son of man to be lifted up, and everyone who looks up to him, trusting and expectant, will gain a real life, eternal life.

I want to suggest, in getting near closing, that the idea of helping yourself with your own problems is not a Freudian original. In fact, we have to look our problems square in the face if we are to overcome them. "What does that have to do with the serpent in the desert," you say. "What does that have to do with Jesus being lifted up?" Because God set it up that the people had to take part in their own solution by looking up at that snake head.

We have to look up to Jesus and our own sins on his back to have a chance at doing what is necessary for God to help us, because we can block God's help. He loves us to pieces, but if you have a teenage kid who doesn't want to be helped, he's not going to be helped. Even in the desert with the serpent, they were looking at the very problem they were trying to solve. It was by looking their problems square in the face that their problem was solved.

We humans are very good at denying our problems, getting angry at our problems, drugging up our problems. But when we look them in the face and agree with ourselves and God to deal with them, God will help, and they lose their bite. I commend to you the wisdom and the greatness of scripture for everyday living. Amen.

Copyright 2003 Calvary Episcopal Church

Gospel: John 3:14-21
Jesus said, "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 not 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. Indeed, God did not send the Son of into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. 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 judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. But 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." NRSV

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