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Hespeler, 21 March 2021 © Scott McAndless – Lent 5
Jeremiah 31:31-34, Psalm 119:9-16, Hebrews 5:5-10, John 12:20-33 (Click to read)

I don’t know exactly how old I was, but I know that I was pretty young. And I remember sitting in church one day and having a thought. My thought went like this. I looked up at the minister where he stood in a pulpit that, from where I was sitting anyways, seemed to tower over me.

He was wearing a long black robe that made him look very severe and very serious. And he was going on preaching in his sonorous voice. I have no idea what he was saying. In fact, I don’t think I generally had any idea what he ever said which is maybe one of the problems that led to my thought. But I remember distinctly the thought that I had. I thought, it must be so nice for him to be able to know that he is going to heaven.

Now, why did I think that? As I said, it had nothing to do with what he was saying. As far as I know, he always preached a gospel of grace and certainly never proclaimed that only people like him would get into heaven.

Living with Expectations

No, it had more to do with what I inferred from the actions and words of others. It was just that I knew that I was living in a world where a lot of people had expectations of me. There were expectations of how I would behave, that I would “be good.” There were expectations about how I would perform in school and in other areas of my life. And I was keenly aware of how I fell short of those expectations.

And, when I did fall short, I lived in fear of punishment, not necessarily physical punishment mind you, but people certainly did have ways of letting me know when they were displeased with me. And, when that was the life that I was living, it really wasn’t a big step to take all of those assumptions I had about how the world worked and map them directly onto God. I just assumed that God would be inclined to punish me more than anything else.

Now, I don’t say any of this in order to imply that my parents or others around me somehow did me wrong. They were, of course, greatly concerned for me. They wanted me to do well in life, to not be afraid of some hard work, to do the right thing and, well, to be a good person. The expectations that they put upon me as well as the rules and boundaries they set, were really about trying to make sure that I was safe, happy and well-rounded.

Whose Fault?

It is not necessarily their fault that I experienced some of that as judgment of me that made me feel bad about myself. It was not their intention, though, to a certain extent, it may have been inevitable. There seems to be some tendency in humanity, when we are presented with reasonable boundaries and helpful rules and regulations that are meant to guide us to live well, to quickly jump to the conclusion that we are being judged, found wanting and threatened with punishment.

Sometimes this conclusion is driven by the people who are trying to guide us and who are afraid and that they may not succeed and so they go overboard with threats and criticism, and we end up jumping to our conclusion. Sometimes, it comes from ourselves and our own lack of self-confidence and our fear that we’re not going to measure up. In both cases the root problem is actually fear.

Torah and God’s People

The history of God’s relationship with the people of Israel kind of worked like that. When God chose the people of Israel to be God’s chosen people and a vessel for good in the world, God wanted those people to do well, to build each other up and remain faithful. And so, we are told, God gave them something called the Torah to live by.

The word Torah is commonly translated into English as law. But the Hebrew word actually means something closer to guidance or teaching. You see, the point of it was not that people just follow certain regulations and abide by certain limitations. The point of it was that they would live well and in communion with one another. The point of the Torah had never been mere obedience, it was supposed to be about helping people live their best lives.

But, like I say, what is given as guidance and teaching with the best of intentions can often be received by us as obligation, restriction and judgment. If it happens with children growing up and with Christians who hear the gospel of grace, you can be sure that it sometimes happened with the ancient people of Israel. I’m not saying that this was a flaw in the Jewish faith.  In ancient times and still today, Jews who take the Torah seriously can experience it as a joyful thing, as something that helps them hold onto their identity and makes them be who they were created to be. Experiencing such guidance as a burden is not a Jewish problem, it is a human problem.

Jeremiah’s Prophecy

And it is in that sense that we need to understand the passage that we read this morning from the Prophet Jeremiah. Jeremiah is speaking for God when he says, “This is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my Torah within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”

The traditional Christian interpretation of this passage is that Jeremiah is looking forward to the coming of Jesus in it – saying that Jesus will set us free from living under the obligation of the law. And it is not as if that interpretation is entirely wrong, there is a very real sense in which Jesus brought a fulfillment of this passage, but it is also true that Jeremiah understood that people didn’t need to wait for the messiah to come in order to live out this promise.

It had always been the desire of God that people live the Torah from their hearts and not simply by following written down rules. And if anyone opened their heart to God, God would be willing to give them the kind of Torah that could be written on their hearts instead of just being chiseled onto tablets of stone. Yes, Jesus did come to set us free from living under the tyranny of rules and regulations. But that had always been the intention of Torah.

What Jesus has done

What then can we say that Jesus added to make that all much more possible? In our reading this morning from the Gospel of John, Jesus says this: “Now is the judgement of this world.” I think this says something important about why Jesus came. He says that his coming is connected to judgment, but it’s not actually about the judgment that we usually assume it is. It is not the judgement of individuals.

Yes, of course, people are responsible for their own actions, but the bigger problem is and always has been the system by which this world operates. That is the system that I struggled with when I was younger because it told me that I was not good enough. That is the system that often arbitrarily condemns people to live lives dominated by guilt and shame. It is the system that continually fails to help us be the best people we can be. And so Jesus declares, “Now the ruler of this world will be driven out.” That world system, with all of its flaws, will be dismantled.

And then Jesus goes on to explain exactly how his coming has made that possible. “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” For what is the crucifixion of Jesus but the most potent demonstration of God’s love that there has ever been in the history of the world.

God’s Steadfast Lovingkindness

That love has always been there. If you read the Old Testament with understanding, you realize that such deep abiding love has been behind God’s every action from the beginning. It was out of love that God created us in the first place. Had God wanted obedient drones, we could have been programmed to follow every command but, no, God valued love for us more than compliance from us and so we were created as free beings.

The Old Testament covenant, the basis of the relationship of the people of Israel with their God, was founded on what they called hesed, often translated as the steadfast lovingkindness of God and it was out of that love that God gave them the Torah, again not to control them but to guide them into the best way of living. Love is the underlying premise to every action of God throughout the Bible. It is we who mess all of that up and turn it into a story that is concerned only with judgment and obedience – a story that is the very opposite of love.

So, the love and the grace have always been the key to the story, the problem is just that we have a hard time receiving that story and, just like I did when I was a kid, we turn it into a story about buying your way into God’s good graces by your good works.

Jesus upon the Cross

So what does Jesus do to change all of that? Jesus is just purest and most unrefined image of the love of God that we have ever seen. That image is made most perfect in Jesus loving his people enough that he was willing to be crucified for them. That is what Jesus means when he says, “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”

The image of Jesus upon the cross is an image that is so clear, so compelling, that it becomes this powerful magnet drawing people towards God. They come, not because of a sense of obligation or fear or judgment, rather they come as a response to such pure love. And that is how Jesus, lifted up on the cross, becomes a fulfillment of everything that Jeremiah was looking forward to, even as Jesus continues to be part of the very same story of God’s steadfast lovingkindness.

People still live under the tyranny of the law

Jesus on the cross is a story that is, of course, almost two thousand years old. But, two thousand years later, there are still people who are living under the tyranny of the law, under the tyranny of the fear of not measuring up and thus not being worthy of love or acceptance. As was true of me as a young boy growing up in the church, many of those people are Christians. The cause of that problem is our failure to truly understand the meaning of Jesus upon the cross. The problem is not that the image wasn’t clear, nothing could have been clearer, the problem is in our own hearts.

As long as we carry around in our own hearts the idea that we are not good enough and that we do not measure up, that true message of love will not penetrate. Jeremiah was absolutely right we need a new heart, and we need a Torah inscribed upon our hearts.

A Spiritual Exercise

So here is our spiritual exercise for today. You have brought a heart with you today, or at least I hope you have made one. This is got to be one of the easiest crafts we’ve done during this season of Lent after all. So, even if you haven’t brought a heart, I encourage you to make one and do as I instruct you after we are done. Here’s what I want you to do. Take your heart and take a pen or pencil, and I want you to write the Torah on your heart.

How do we do that? Do we write down some particular command or rule, maybe even the golden rule of doing unto others as you would have them do unto you? Is that it, do we need the perfect rule? No, here is what I want you to write on your heart – are you ready? Write this: “I am loved, accepted and approved by God just as I am.”

That is it. “I am loved, accepted and approved by God just as I am.” That is the message that Jesus has sought to put through to your heart from the cross. And if you can accept the truth of that statement, that will be the first step towards you having a Torah in your life that you follow with all your heart spurred by joy and not by obligation.

Heavenly Father, write your Torah on our hearts with your steadfast lovingkindness. Amen.

Our lessons for the week of March 21, 2021.

Lenten Garden, week 5.

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Hespeler, 14 March 2021 © Scott McAndless – Lent 4
Numbers 21:4-9, Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22, Ephesians 2:1-10, John 3:14-21

This morning, we read perhaps one of the most beloved Bible verses of all times: John 3:16. “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.” And I certainly understand why people love this verse so much. It is an almost perfect expression of the gospel and of the grace and love of God. But I’m going to be honest here, there is another verse in that reading that I would say I love even more than verse 16, and that is the verse that comes right after it. “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.”

Being saved

The thing I love about that verse is that it describes just how limitless God’s love really is, that it is able to extend even to the whole world. It also brings us to the term that I want to focus on this morning and that is the word “saved.” This verse makes it quite clear that Christ’s purpose in coming had to do with saving people, indeed with saving the whole world. But I find that that past participle, saved, and the connected noun which is salvation have become a bit problematic for the church today. You see, they are words that have taken on special meaning in the life of the church where they mean something very different than they would to people outside the church.

When we talk about salvation in the church, we are usually talking about saving people from their sins or their guilt and we often mean getting people to heaven after they die. Do you realize that, outside the church, when somebody uses the words, “You saved me,” they are almost never talking about sin or heaven? But when we use those same words speaking to God in church, that is almost all we ever mean. It’s a little bit funny.

What did John mean by “saved”?

But what does being saved mean in the passage we read from the Gospel of John. Is it the churchy definition, or the one that people actually use in the world? Well, to answer that, I think we should look closer at the verse before the more famous one. Just before the verse about how God so loved the world, we have a verse that goes like this: “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up.” So, whatever sort of salvation is being spoken of in this passage, it must be something like what was there when Moses lifted up a serpent in the wilderness.

Snakes in the Camp

And that brings us to the odd passage that we read from the Book of Numbers this morning. It is, in many ways, one of the typical stories of the wandering of the people of Israel in the wilderness. The people get upset and mad at Moses and they start to complain. And then, following the pattern of many other stories, God sends some sort of punishment.

But this punishment is really kind of special. “Then the Lord sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died.”That is how the story is usually translated and, it is a pretty horrific story, kind of like the stuff of nightmares. Can you imagine being stuck in a situation where your whole camp is overrun with poisonous snakes? It makes my skin crawl just to think about it!

It is actually “Seraphim Serpents”

But that translation is not quite as simple as that. Because the word for poisonous is not in the original Hebrew text. What it actually says in Hebrew is that God sent seraphim serpents among the people. Hmm, seraphim, where have I heard that word before? Oh yes, I remember. It is a word that is used a number of times in the Bible to describe various supernatural beings. There seem to be two kinds of angels in the Bible, cherubim and seraphim. We even often still use the singular form of those words in English when we speak of cherubs and seraphs. So what it literally says in the original Hebrew is that heavenly beings in the form of serpents invaded the camp. Now what are we supposed to do with that?

If our experience with the pandemic has taught us anything, it is that anytime you have a large group of people living in a communal setting, like nomads camping together, there is a very real danger of various kinds of sickness spreading quickly with devastating effect. I suspect that is the kind of thing that is being described in this passage. Again, as we all know, such a situation can be extremely bewildering and frightening and that is the kind of terror that we see in this passage as the people despair.

Some Kind of Spiritual Attack

Because they couldn’t really understand what was terrifying them, they naturally described it in supernatural terms. The use of the word seraph, a word for a supernatural being, is basically their way of saying that they are under attack in many ways. It’s not just a physical sickness, it’s also a terror of the heart. A camp infested with seraphim is a camp that is in the midst of a spiritual battle where they feel under attack in their minds, their bodies and their spirits.

That is the horror that is being described in this passage. And that is what prompts them to seek for salvation. “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.’” And, in response, God tells Moses to make a representative of these seraphim creatures out of bronze and put it on a pole.

The Problem with Moses’ Response

Now, I have so many questions about this. Is this not the same Moses who gave the commandment about how you shall not have any “graven images” of heavenly creatures who is making this graven image of a seraphim, which is a heavenly creature? It is indeed a bit of a problem and becomes a very real problem later on in Israel’s history. But, on a certain level, what Moses does makes a lot of sense. The people are scared of what seems like a supernatural enemy that is beyond their understanding, and Moses takes their abstract fears and makes them something concrete, something that they can look at. And it is that that saves them.

mRNA Vaccines

In a way, it is kind of what researchers like Moderna and Pfizer have done by creating messenger RNA vaccines to save our population from Covid-19. This is an amazing new approach to making vaccines where the vaccine doesn’t actually contain any of the virus. What it does rather is teach your cells how to make a protein that is part of the virus. It is like you are actually creating an image of the thing that is attacking you. That image teaches your body that there is a way to defeat it. That is how an mRNA vaccine works. And that is basically what Moses did when be made a bronze image of the thing that was attacking them and that image taught them that it could be defeated.

You see, salvation in the Bible actually means what we generally mean by salvation in the real world. It is not limited to spiritual things like forgiving sins or getting people into the afterlife, salvation is actually about God meeting us wherever we are. If you are sick, salvation comes in the form of healing. If you’re drowning in the water, salvation is someone reaching out a hand or a life preserver. If you’re terrified of something, salvation may come in the form of giving you a way to manage that fear. And that’s kind of what Moses did for the children of Israel.

How is Jesus on the Cross like that?

And the Gospel of John tells us that when Jesus was nailed up on the cross, it was just like what Moses did with that bronze seraphim serpent. That means many things. It means, first and most important of all, that you don’t just need to look for one kind of salvation from Jesus. No matter what anyone might have told you, Jesus didn’t just come here on earth to offer you a way to heaven. Jesus didn’t just come to save you from your sins. I mean, yes, if those are the very things that you need at this particular moment, then Jesus did come to offer you that kind of salvation, but please do not limit yourself to seeking that from Jesus.

We All Need Saving

We all need saving at various points in our life. In fact, I might even go so far as to suggest that there is always something that we need saving from. The fact of the matter is that if you are struggling at this moment in your life from anything, then you can know that Jesus actually came to meet you in that struggle. Are you struggling with loneliness and isolation? Lord knows that many are in these days! Jesus came to save you in that.

I know that there are a number of people everywhere who have struggled in these difficult times and have developed certain ways of coping – maybe through drinking a bit more or self-medicating in some other ways, others have developed compulsive behaviors or patterns of relating with people that are not all that healthy.

These coping methods have helped you to get through this time and that is okay, but maybe you are starting to realize that some of the habits you developed are not going to serve you well going forward and you’re beginning to see the need for a change and realize that that change may not be easy. Well, that is also a way in which you need to be saved. And I’m here to tell you that Jesus came to save you from that.

Getting that Salvation Going

Indeed, any sickness you may be struggling with whether in mind or body or spirit is something that Jesus has come to save you from. But, of course, the question is how do we get that saving process going? The Gospel of John tells us that it works like it worked for the people in the wilderness when Moses made the bronze serpent. They needed to look at this thing that represented their deep-seated fears, and that triggered the healing that they needed. John is saying that looking at Jesus when he is lifted up on the cross (that must be what it refers to) triggers the same mechanism of salvation.

What I think he means by that is this: that picture of Jesus upon the cross is a perfect depiction of everything that we struggle with, whether it be pain, rejection, addiction, depression or frailty. If you see Jesus upon that cross, there is no denying that he entered into the very worst of what it means to be human. And the very idea that Jesus could do that while being, at the same time, both entirely human and entirely divine, means that he experienced all of the physical and spiritual and mental challenges we face.

Like the bronze serpent, the sight of Jesus upon the cross puts all of that into a concrete image that we can relate to and that helps to calm our fears and understand that we can handle this because we are not facing it alone. That is the salvation that Jesus offers to you and he offers it to you today.

A Salvation Exercise

So let us engage in a salvation exercise. Many of you have made a serpent to bring today. We are going to use that in our focus exercise. I want you to look at your serpent. Or, of course, you can imagine a serpent on a stick in your mind. If it makes you feel more comfortable, you can imagine Jesus on the cross. As we shall see, it is all the same thing. But whatever it is you are looking at, focus your mind on that image. Leave aside all other thoughts as best as you can.

Now I am going to ask you to think of something that is keeping you, right now, from being all that you believe you are supposed to be. It might be something in the world around you, it might be something in your body, in your mind or brain, or it might be in your spirit. Can you find one thing? Think on that one thing for a moment.

Now, would you join me in a silent prayer? Pray this: Lord Jesus, save me from… and insert that thing. Pray it again and a third time. Jesus does save. Now look at your image. Let that be your reminder right now and in the week to come that Jesus does save you. When you doubt that he does, look at that image. Let it remind you that the things you struggle with – the things that seem so big to you – are but little things to Jesus.

Lord Jesus, thank you that you save your people. Amen.