Numbers 21:4-9
From Mount Hor [the Israelites] set out by the way to the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom; but the people became impatient on the way. The people spoke against God and against Moses, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.” Then the Lord sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died. The people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed for the people. And the Lord said to Moses, “Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.” So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.
John 3:14-21
[Jesus said to Nicodemus:] “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.
“Indeed, God did not send the Son 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 and do not come to 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.”
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One year ago yesterday, a flurry of emails and phone calls were exchanged between the FLC staff and executive team. In response to the ominous news of a new and dangerous global virus they were calling Covid-19, we made a quick decision to suspend in-person worship, and all church programming, effective immediately.
That Sunday evening at 8:00 p.m., parents received word that all Decorah schools would close for four weeks.
Stores and restaurants downtown followed suit.
We all rushed to the grocery store to stock up as we prepared to lay low for the next months weeks. We thought we could head the virus off.
And then the goalposts moved.
The rest of the school year.
Summer.
Maybe we’d be out of pandemic before the holidays, we thought.
Or by the end of the calendar year.
And now here we are, four weeks-turned-a-full-year. Finally, vaccinations becoming a reality. Finally, more and better hope that an end might be in sight.
This is where Moses and the Israelites find themselves in our reading from Numbers today; near the end of their wilderness wanderings, with the promised land there in their sights, after nearly forty long years of waiting.
Of course, they weren’t supposed to be in the wilderness for forty years.
After their liberation from Egypt, it actually only took a couple years for the Israelites to reach the edge of the promised land. The land, as promised by God, was lush with grapes and flowing with milk and honey. But there were also giants living there. Giants, apparently, were a major deal-breaker for the people. They rejected the land, and by extension, rejected God’s promise of victory. So in response, God blocked them from entering the promised land for a full generation, forty years.
Forty years is a long time to be in the wilderness.
In our reading today, we are at year thirty-seven and a half or so.
The people who were sick of the wilderness four decades ago are now really sick of the wilderness. Their steady daily diet of miraculous manna and quails is getting really old. They’re bored. They’re tired. They’re whiny.
They wonder aloud whether Moses has actually led them out into the wilderness not to free them but to kill them. They talk openly about how much better they had it back when they were slaves in Egypt. At least there they had good food.
The people grumble mightily against Moses and against God. And God is having none of it. Like, none of it. Like, make-the-ground-teem-with-poisonous-snakes-none-of-it.
God is super angry. Because the people are grumbling against the very things that God has given to them as blessings: food, water, protection, provision of every sort. They are even rejecting their very liberation in favor of nostalgic images of Egypt.
The Rev. Dr. Cheryl A. Lindsay writes, “The generation that escaped captivity forgot how they longed for this new freedom and clung to the memory of the certainty that this new life lacked. In the midst of a difficult transition, how often do we romanticize the past rather than hope and dream for a better future? How readily do we ignore the blessings in favor of dwelling on our sacrifice? “(UCC Sermon Seeds)
The wideness of the wilderness can make us want to close ourselves off and narrow our focus. Because being asked to live in uncertainty can be really overwhelming. Transitions can be so, so hard. transitions are so, so hard. Uncertainty can be unbearable. Sometimes it is so much easier to dwell on the past and to fixate on the snakes that nip at our heels. Sometimes it is so much easier to narrow our focus and fix our gaze down at the ground. Sometimes it is so much easier to stop looking around and to stop dreaming. Sometimes is it so much easier to turn our eyes from the vastness of God, even if it means carrying even our blessings as burdens on our backs.
This is why the healing symbol of the bronze serpent is so powerful in our reading today. It heals the people from their snakebites, though we might note that it doesn’t rid the land of snakes.
But more than just healing their physical ailments, the bronze serpent, raised up high on a pole for maximum visibility, forces the people to lift up their heads, to look away from the ground, to widen their field of vision.
In her book, The Shaping of a Life, Phyllis Tickle writes, ”Those men and women and children who believed [Moses] and believed in Yahweh's message through him looked up at the pole with its burnished snake and not down at the desert vipers who were besieging them. They elected by a combined act of will and faith to look, not down where the agony was…but up where they might live.”
The snakes are real and the grace is real.
What this text is all about is the power of God to lift our heads from the snakes, even for a moments’ time, to see again the wideness of the world, to restore perspective, to remember and recognize God’s blessings anew.
Far from being an admonition to find silver linings or to “count your blessings,” as if your pain doesn’t matter, the text says, “your pain is real.” The snakebites are real. The hunger in your belly is real. The weariness of walking is real.
But grace is real, too.
Can you imagine how that bronze must have gleamed in the desert sun? The way that the light must have bounced off of it, sending echos of light bounding and twirling over peoples heads and shoulders?
A family member sent me a video this week of their new kitten, chasing spots of light around the kitchen as the afternoon sun shone through a sun catcher and cast prisms across the cabinets.
I think is how grace comes to us in wilderness times: as glimpses of light that catch our eye even in the depths of pain or anxiety, shimmering and flickerings that cause us to look up and to look around. Grace comes to us as touchpoints of light that lift our gaze to the we see the cosmos stretching above us in all its infinity, the sky reaching beyond the horizon to assure us that there is light and beauty there, beyond the farthest thing our eyes can see.
Nicodemus comes to Jesus in the wild shadows of night, and there, Jesus talks to him about about the love and grace of God that seek to draw all people and creation into the warmth of the light. Jesus, like the bronze serpent before him, reflects and refracts the light of the Creator. And these dancing flashes of light catch our gaze and open our eyes and awaken our hearts to the wideness of God’s mercy and healing and promises of salvation, that spread over us like the warmth of sunshine on a new spring day.
This love and this light reconnect us with the blessings around us, and they rekindle our gratitude.
We have fifty-two candles flickering in our worship space this morning. One for each week of this past year of pandemic wilderness. These candles help us visualize and memorialize the difficulties we’ve faced together this past year. They represent our struggles and our resiliency.
They also, for me, represent the flickers of light that have danced through this past year, each week bringing with it moments of blessing, hope, and gratitude.
These candles represent the meals and groceries delivered to neighbors. They represent the check-in phone calls and texts that we received. They represent the joy of ministries sustained in new and virtual forms. They represent encouraging cards and notes, beautiful things we saw in nature, things we created, new appreciations for loved ones, loads of laundry folded, loaves of sourdough bread baked, holy tears, candles lighted in prayer, new connections and friendships, moments of laughter and joy when we finally found a mask that fit our face, moments of relief when hand sanitizer and toilet paper and soap returned to store shelves.
These candles remind us that we have made it this far in the wilderness by God’s grace. They remind us that whatever we face ahead of us, whether with pandemic or building project or pastoral call process or whatever other wilderness times we will travel as a congregation and in our own personal lives….
God will continually lift up our heads to see the lights, and to see the vast wilderness as new opportunity for trust, and for love, and for drawing close to the one who leads us through it all.
Dear ones, today, I pray that you can be light for others. I pray that glimmers of light shine across your vision. And I pray that, even for a moment, your gratitude and joy are rekindled.
Because there are blessings here.
There is beauty.
There is a horizon.
And we will, in God’s due time, make it beyond this wilderness.
The flickers of light are there, by God’s grace.
We can lift our eyes to meet them, by God’s grace.
And, by that same grace, we can follow them wherever they lead.