Life begins with love. For God so LOVED.
From the beginning of time and light and far-flung spinning galaxies billions of years in the making to the beginning of each you – life begins with love. For God so loved the world.
To be alive is a gift, never to be taken lightly – but always rejoiced over and celebrated and cherished. What a gift that we all get to be here together, tonight, alive! To wake-up and to still be wide-eyed on this earth is a present we get to unwrap each morning.
God loves – and out of God’s love – life flourishes and expands. God enters into loving and rich relationships because God’s love cannot lie dormant, but must find expression in life-giving relationships – with this universe and world God has made, with us as people, with you as a unique person. And any words that we might speak of this God and this God’s love are really just riffs on an anthem that has been ringing since the beginning of creation.
For God so loved the world, and out of this love, God offered God’s self to us, becoming fleshy and fragile and hairy and human in the person of Jesus, showing us life, giving us life.
And maybe at this point I’ve lost you. Because you’ve seen that verse of John 3:16 printed on styrofoam soda cups and sharpied on sneakers and and tattooed on biceps and slapped on billboards across America and thrown about as if it’s a cure-all-pill or used as a litmus test if you’re the right kind of Christian. Maybe you’ve experienced the words God and love and life as dangerous when abused and hollow when overused.
So if our text today from John’s third chapter doesn’t hit you as fresh and invigorating – maybe the wild story from the book of Numbers speaks to your questions. If God’s supposed to be about life, then why does God send snakes to a people journeying through the wilderness? If God creates and relates out of an abundance of love, then why does death strike so viciously so often?
In Numbers 21 the people of Israel have grown weary and tired and are grumbling against God. The years-long journey through the desert is not a fun road trip – they’ve come to detest the food that God has given them and are complaining that now there’s no food or water at all.
So God sends snakes. The snakes have a fiery poisonous bite and folks are dying from these snake bites. I’m not going to wade into the thorny theological issues of whether or not a loving God intentionally sends death as a punishment. But it’s worth being honest that there’s lots of things in our natural world that can kill us humans… from snakes in the Sinai peninsula to storms and fires that are worsening with climate change…
One summer in college I worked on a conservation corp trail crew. For our final week, we were building fences in the grasslands of northern Wyoming. After a particular soggy day spent working out in the rain, we all returned to our camp, eager to seek shelter. I ducked under my tent’s rain fly and began to unzip the inner tent so I could sit down and take off my mud-caked boots.
There curled up next to my dry sleeping bag was a thick rattlesnake! I jumped backwards and leapt out of the tent. My heart pounded with adrenaline. I grabbed a nearby shovel, ready to chop at the snake if I had to. Then I noticed the snake wasn’t rattling and wasn’t even moving at all. There behind me stood all of my crewmates doubled over in laughter.
The snake was dead. They had stuck it inside my tent as a joke, picking it up off the dirt road where it had been run over by a truck. It took at least an hour for my heart rate to return to normal.
A poisonous snake might have been a practical joke to my crewmates… but to the people of Israel these snakes were a life and death matter. After lots of people were dying from snake bites the people recognized that something had to change. They told Moses that they’d sinned him and against God. They asked Moses to pray on their behalf to God, petitioning God to take the snakes away.
This was a prayer for God to take away the instruments of death afflicting the people. Lent is a time of honesty – and that includes telling the truth about those things that can kill us and are killing us. Are we honest enough to ask God to take the snakes away? What are those creatures you’ve encountered whose bite leads to death?
A lot of our lives are spent rushing around in metal death traps, our highways littered with markers bearing names and flowers, monuments to speed. God, can you take away these cars?
God, can you take away the guns we turn against others in anger and turn against ourselves in despair?
God, can you take away the screens that numb us to the pain and beauty around us, trapping us in loneliness and worry?
God, can you take away predatory economic systems where people work themselves to the bone while being stuck in debt?
God, can you take away all those substances that grip us in their false promise of release?
God, can you take away all those crosses where Jesus in his many disguises continues to be crucified?
God, can you take away these snakes?
But God in the wilderness does not answer the prayer that the people ask Moses to pray. God instead tells Moses to make a serpent out of bronze, to stick it on a pole, and then whenever the snake bites someone – that person would look at this bronze serpent and they would live. God gives God’s people in the wilderness the gift of life, but God doesn’t remove what they had assumed was the source of their pain and suffering and death. God invites them to look directly, head on, at that most feared thing – and to see that it has always been God’s love and God’s saving power that enables us to live.
In John 3, Jesus is having a nighttime conversation with Nicodemus, a fellow student of the Law, and Jesus describes himself by using this snake story from Numbers, “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness,” Jesus says, “so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”
It’s not easy to look at suffering, to look and see Jesus raised up on the cross like a serpent on a pole. It’s horrifying and grotesque. Jesus in this passage pushes us to a point of crisis about the human capacity to remain in the dark about how brutal things can really get and really are.
We as humans would rather look away and live in denial of the consequences of our own self-justification and our attempts at hoarding power than face what we’ve done in the brightness of day. “Those who do evil don’t come to the light,” Jesus says, “so that their deeds may not be exposed.” When we see Jesus and his life of creative healing and teaching we see the fullest expression of God’s creative love. And on the cross, Jesus holds a mirror to us, showing us the horrors and the hope of humanity.
To look up at a snake on a pole is to be healed by staring directly at the corrosive fear and blame that can bubble up in the wilderness. To look up is to embrace honesty and to learn to trust God as the giver of all life. To look up and gaze on Jesus as God’s son sent to save the world is to glimpse an alternative to the venomous logic of violence. To look up is to have faith that Jesus has broken death’s grasp on our lives, bodies, souls, and imaginations. To look up is to be led by the power of Christ’s resurrection into the life-giving way of peace.
Jesus insists in this conversation with Nicodemus that God loves the world so much that this invitation to abundant and eternal life extends to all people. God’s love that overflows in the life of Jesus comes not as judgment but as life to the whole world.
And the sort of life we live in response to this gift of love is a life of faith and belief in Christ. I’m not talking here about getting our Christological formulations just right or praying a specific prayer or singing all four verses of the right hymn in perfect harmony. Belief and faith in Jesus is not a set of intellectual precepts we agree to, but a way of living where we’ve staked our all of our hopes and dreams and fears and future prospects on the Human One from Nazareth who was Crucified and Rose Again.
We have faith in Jesus because when we look at him at the cross we not only see Roman violence but we also see God’s presence in the worst of suffering….we look up and see a love that knows hunger and thirst and pain….we see there a love that conquers even death.
“For God so loved the world that God gave God’s only Son, so that everyone who believes in him, may not perish but have eternal life.”
Life is not a possession to cling onto. Life is a gift to be received from God. So live in wide-eyed hope at the audacity of the God of life, from whose love sprang forth this whole universe, by whose love we’re given meaning and purpose for our present work towards justice, and in whose love our day-to-day struggles are woven into the promise of eternity.
For the life we find in Christ is not a mirage of some far-off heaven – but it is the invitation to live joyfully, graciously, justly, generously, bravely and lovingly right here and right now. For God so loved the world – that we might be fully alive now without fear of death and that we might also be embraced by God into eternal life.
And as we yearn for that day when the nursing child will play near the hole of the cobra and the weaned child will put his hand on the viper’s den (Isa 11:8), I encourage us to believe in Jesus, because in him we receive the gift of life. I encourage us to look up at the bronze serpent hoisted on the pole and not avert our eyes from all those places of suffering in our own lives and in the world. I invite us to confront those things that scare us most and I pray that even there we would be able to see the power of God to heal and bring life.
The people of Israel asked Moses to pray to God to take away the poisonous serpents from them. And Jesus prayed to God, “Abba, Father, for you all things are possible, remove this cup from me; yet not what I want, but what you want.” And we too pray that every creature of violence would be taught the way of peace and that every cross of torture would be torn down. And we pray for the faith to seek God’s will on earth as it is in heaven.
For God so loved the world that God sent God’s only son. And we rejoice in this gift of life, a gift graciously offered to the world.