The Rev. Dr. Austin Leininger
Sermon of the 4th Sunday of Lent
11 March 2018
Readings:
Numbers 21:4-9
Ephesians 2:1-10
John 3:14-21
Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22
Today is Laetare Sunday—a lightening of the deep purple of this Lenten season of deep wilderness to embrace the oasis-hope of respite and redemption that characterizes our readings for this week.
Over the past weeks, we’ve confronted the darkness of temptation, fear, and abuse of power in our gospel readings, paired with the covenanting of God deeper and deeper with Abraham’s descendants, the children of Israel. Today, out of the darkness, we hear the calling back to the light of redemption, hope, and reconciliation. An oasis of refreshment in the midst of our Lenten wilderness.
In two intricately connected pairs of readings, our Psalmist and Paul capture a sense of the hope that allows us to make sense of the other pairing from Numbers and John’s gospel.
Psalm 107, in its entirety, is a song of redemption. In addition to those from today’s portion of the Psalm, whose experience sounds similar to those in our first reading, the parts that are skipped today round out the experience of God’s redemption to those hungry and thirsty, those languishing in self-imprisoned darkness, those bereft of courage, and even the land itself, as a barren wasteland rehabilitated, redeemed, and settled by God’s people. The whole Psalm is a thanksgiving for God’s grace, accompaniment, steadfast love, and willingness to redeem all those from the four corners of creation who seek to turn back to God from whatever has taken them far from God’s embrace.
These themes are echoed in our first reading, where the children of Israel are growing weary of their desert journey, and even the bread of heaven with which God fed them daily had become to them miserable, and as “no food” at all, which was their complaint. Complaining against God and against Moses, they repeat the cycle that has kept their hearts fickle since leaving Egypt, torn between the dangers and uncertainty of freedom in the wilderness, and the hard but predictable life of slavery in Egypt.
In previous cycles, they were thirsty, so God gave them water from a stone. They were hungry, so God rained down manna from heaven. They were tired of manna, so God gave them quail. They were attacked by armies, so God gave them military victory. And today, in the fifth cycle, they are beset by poisonous snakes, so God gives them healing and immunity.
Quickly falling back into unrest and complaining against Moses and God after their military victory, the arrival of the serpents is seen, and is reported in the pages of Numbers, as an act of God in response to the people’s lack of faith. Responding in faithful prayer, Moses takes as a symbol that which convicted them of their lack of faith, the snake, and raised it up for them so that, through their faith—which was not so much lost as forgotten in the midst of their frustration with the journey—they might look upon it as a transformed symbol of their restoration in relationship with God.
Much like our Psalm, Paul’s words to the community in Ephesus are words of encouragement and redemption. Although the Psalmist speaks of crying out to God, Paul names it as finding God’s grace through faith, which bridges the themes of redemption and faith between the pairings of our Psalm and Epistle, and the pairing of Numbers and John, in which symbols of death themselves are transformed though faith into symbols of life, redemption, and salvation. But Paul also takes the finding of God’s grace though faith one step further, which will draw us into John’s gospel.
While the ruler of the power of the air may be a lost concept on us today, Paul was writing to a community whose cosmology included the Greek understanding of the powers, both benign and malevolent, populating the space from the Moon to the Earth. The ruler of the power of the air is a reference to the worldly draws that take us out of relationship with God and keep us focused on our own selfish desires. As Paul asserts, the gift of Christ’s coming into the world was no longer a reliance simply on us crying out to God from our self-imposed prisons of darkness, but God actively seeking us out, and reaching out to us to draw us back to God.
Today’s gospel comes shortly after last week’s reading ends. Jesus has cleansed the temple, confronted the religious authorities, and now is meeting with Nicodemus, a Pharisee, by night to teach him. Like our reading from Numbers, which John recalls, John’s gospel talks about the transformation of symbols through faith—the symbol of the cross, of state power sanctioning execution of those it deems criminals, and which Christ again foretells as his own demise for courageously loving, teaching, and living without fear of the power of Rome or any other worldly power.
As those from Numbers were saved by their faith from the attacks of the poisonous snakes through the symbol of death—the snake itself—raised up in the wilderness, so too, those under the shadow of death, living in fear of the power of this world (the bridge Paul makes in Ephesians), are redeemed, saved from death’s power, by the symbol of that power transformed by faith, into the cross of God’s redemption of all of humankind, calling us back from the darkness and into the light —a reversal of the language of the Psalm in which those in darkness call out to God.
In keeping with the lighter theme of this Sunday, we had an oasis experience with Anthony just this past Friday. Anthony has been struggling for nearly ten years with autism. It makes normal social experiences incredibly stressful, overwhelming, and potentially shaming for him in the event of a meltdown. Just for a couple examples, for the first six years of his life, he couldn’t successfully have a birthday party with friends, and, even with a small group of family, we couldn’t sing Happy Birthday to him above a whisper. A simple game of tag quickly turns into an experience of really being chased-down, and his fight or flight reflex kicks in with unfortunate consequences. Moving to Santa Cruz has probably been the hardest on Anthony because he finally, after four years at the same school in Fort Collins, had a group of friends who understood him, loved him, and went above and beyond to help him succeed.
Yet, even amongst those close friends, Jane and I had never left him on his own—the support that he might need in any given social situation has simply demanded that we be close at hand.
Last summer, Anthony turned 9 here in Santa Cruz. All year he has struggled with the lack of friends, missing his crew back in Fort Collins, and has commented each time Marie and Luke have had a social gathering, wishing he could do the same. But he has also been incredible at school, at home, and in new social situations. He has been communicative, responsible, helpful at home, and has been able to handle his stress in ways that we have been hoping for nearly ten years that he would be able to learn. He’s finally been able to put together all the tools we’ve been helping him assemble, and as we say at home, he has been kicking autism’s butt this year!
The social turning-point for him at school came just after Christmas break. Anthony had asked for a kickball for Christmas, which he got to unwrap from my Mom, and which he began asking us to bring with us when we picked him up from school. Although competitive games have always been a struggle for him, he has worked through his frustrations with four-square and two-touch (a version of kickball using a backboard on the playground), and a group of regular friends have started gathering around him after school to play. At first it was just because he was the kid who brought the ball. Now it is because they find him engaging, fun, friendly, and generous—even despite the occasional temper flare-ups when he feels cheated.
Earlier this week, one of those regulars, a boy named James, invited Anthony for a play date at his house. It is the first time in his nearly ten years of life that Anthony was able to walk away from school, walk away from Jane and I, with just a friend and his mom and no additional support, for some fun one-on-one time with a friend.
In the nine years and seven months he’s been alive, this is the first oasis of hope and redemption we’ve seen for what lies ahead for this amazing, courageous, kind and generous kid. As much as we have cried out to God and every other source of help for Anthony over these past many years in the wilderness of parenting him through autism, this time the simple grace of a friend’s invitation and this new place Anthony has risen to caught us completely by surprise. As he walked happily away with his friend, without so much a glance back at us, Jane and I both cried.
In the lighter tone of today’s celebration, we are reminded, even in the midst of the wilderness, that God is seeking us out, calling to us, bringing light, forgiveness, love, and the promise of God’s care to us, and calling on us to do the same for those around us.
May this spirit of redemption, light, and hope carry us through the coming weeks as we remember the darkness that came before Christ’s resurrection, and may we look up, in our own times of darkness, to find God, not only ready to save, but actively reaching out to us, to lift us up again.
Amen.