“Seeing the Signs”

Numbers 21:4-9, John 3:14-21

March 30, 2003

St. Paul United Methodist Church

Rev. John Fleming

For those of you who do not know this about me, I am a night owl. When the rest of my family has been tucked in safely in their beds and bid good night, I go downstairs to be by myself. It is my time of the day. I would like to tell you that I go down the stairs with my Bible in one of my hands and a hymnal in the other. I would like to tell you that I go to the bedroom turned office on the lower level of the parsonage, close the door, sit at my desk, and spend hours in prayer for everyone of you. I would like to tell you that that is what I do most nights. But since it is not true, I cannot say it from this pulpit. The truth is that most nights, I go downstairs, with a coke or a sprite in one of my hands. I plop down on the couch that is down stairs, reach for the remote control, and watch television. I would like to tell you that I have my favorite show that I watch every night at the same time, but I cannot tell you that, either. Actually, it might be more accurate to say that I flip through the channels until I find something that I might watch for a little while. I want to go on record here as saying that I do not know what us men did before there were remote controls. When our remote control is lost, I will spend hours looking for it among the seat cushions and under the chairs.

I was flipping through the channels the other evening, looking for something to watch. I was near the high channels on our cable subscription when I came to the Animal Planet Channel. Have you watched that channel? What caught my eye was the Crocodile Hunter. Have you seen his show? The host is a man with an Australian accent who has more energy than ten men. Obviously he loves his work and the message of his show is always the same one, that reptiles are our friends. I came to that channel the other night. I saw that his show was on and for a few minutes I stopped and watched. This time, however, the crocodile hunter was not battling crocodiles. In this particular show, he was showing a timid, young lady how to catch rattlesnakes. He captured a snake or two and then encouraged her to try. His instructions seemed simple. All she had to do was to grab the snake behind his head so that he could not turn and strike her arm or her leg. This young, inexperienced woman, reached for the back of the snake but she squeezed the serpent’s head a little lower than she should have. In slow motion the snake’s head turned and bit the fat part of her hand. The crocodile hunter turned to the camera and said, “Don’t try this at home!” He does not have to worry about me trying anything like that at home or anywhere else.

You will know this; snakes have a certain reputation. They are perceived as being sneaky, crafty, slippery, and elusive. If someone calls you a snake in the grass, rest assured, that is not a compliment. I heard of a seminary student who served a church in west Texas. He flew in weekly to attend classes and flew home on the weekend. In the summers, when he was not in school, he served as a volunteer fireman in his town. In one of his classes, the story of Adam and Eve was discussed. Naturally the discussion turned toward the snake. The teacher asked what his students thought of snakes. This young pastor and volunteer fireman said, “I fight fires in my hometown. The general rule for all of us is that if you are on your way to a fire, with a house that is engulfed in flames and lives are at stake, and you come across a snake, then you stop and kill the snake!”

Which leads us to our Old Testament lesson for this morning, taken from the twenty-first chapter of the book of Numbers. I will be honest with you, I hardly ever preach from two lessons in a sermon. Generally the lessons do not fit as nicely as our lessons do this morning. This is a strange passage whose context is the exile of the Israelites. It is taken some time during their wilderness wanderings. Commentators say that this is one of the grumbling or one of the murmuring passages. There are several of them in the stories of the exodus. Grumbling and murmuring was par for the course on the trip. Poor old Moses, the tour guide, had to listen to all of this. You might remember the words of our first lesson. The writers of Numbers writes, “...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.” You see, the people, without Moses’ permission, were forming a Back to Egypt Committee. We do that in the church. When things are not going so well, we remember what it was like back then and try our best to return there, somehow. The Israelites particular complaint was the food. God provided manna for them every morning. There was always enough of it for the day. Left over manna spoiled. On Saturdays, enough manna was provided to get families through the Sabbath. No one is really sure what manna was or how it tasted. The people are complaining, “Is this all that we are going to get, just manna?” Maybe at weddings they sang, “Give us this day, our daily manna...and forgive our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” Manna for breakfast. Manna for lunch. A manna casserole for dinner. Manna sandwiches. Manna-pot-pie. Manna soup. They were tired of manna and so they complained. God heard their complaint and sent them serpents. Obviously the Lord never attended a seminar where they teach you how to listen to your customers. God’s response to their complaints was to pull manna off of the menu and to send snakes. No matter how bad things are, they can always get worse, I suppose, is one of the messages here.

The writer of this story tells us that the snakes came and some of them bit the Israelites so that many of them died. Which, of course, led the people to consider that maybe manna was not all that bad. They went to Moses, repenting of their complaining, and asked him to pray to God for them. They want Moses to ask God for deliverance. I want you to see this. God does not take the snakes away. You are supposed to notice that. Instead of removing them, God has Moses make a bronze snake and place it on the pole so that the people, when they are bitten by the snakes, need only to look at the snake on the stake to be saved. This is an interesting story. It is strange, I think. It is curious. One of its messages is that the only way to healing is for the Israelites to face the very thing that was killing them.

Then there is our New Testament lesson, taken from the third chapter of John’s gospel. Just after Jesus has finished his conversation with Nicodemus, we find the words, “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.” I think that John is saying to us that when Jesus was lifted on the cross, it was like Moses lifting the serpent in the wilderness. That is the reason that John has Jesus quoting this scripture. It is there as a sign for the entire world to see. From the sign comes forgiveness and healing. All you have to do is to look at the cross, and healing is there. I think that that is interesting, too, God did not take away the serpents. They were still biting the heels of the people of God. And God did not take away sin. It is still all around us, biting our heels, and getting the best of us. In fact, Jesus talks about how sin gets the best of us when he says, “Light has come into the world, but people love darkness.” All the while Jesus says, “Look at the cross.”

I don’t know if you will remember this or not, but it is John, the gospel writer, who loves signs. The other gospel writers talk about the miracles of Jesus and their gospels contains dozens of stories that include them. But John’s gospel is different. In his gospel, the miracles are called signs and there are only seven of them. Each of them is carefully chosen and is there to say that Jesus is the Son of God. The first sign, you might remember, happened when the wine ran out at a wedding the Jesus and his disciples attended. Jesus’ mother is also there and encourages him to do something about the problem. Jesus says, “Woman, what concern is that to you and me? My hour has not yet come.” But it had come and it was supposed to announce that the kingdom was here and the waiting was over. That is the first sign. The last one happens in the eleventh chapter of this gospel. There Jesus arrives to find out that his friend, Lazarus, had died. Lazarus’ sister, Martha, says to Jesus, “If you had been here, my brother would not have died.” Jesus says, “I am the resurrection and I am life; whoever believes in me, though they die, yet shall they live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?” Then Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead as a sign, that he is the Son of God.

What are we supposed to do with these words this morning? We have two stories, one that seems strange and another that is so familiar. Here is what I think. I think that both of them point to something more powerful than they themselves are. I think that it is not the serpent on the stick that you are supposed to notice. I think that the serpent is a sign that points to something more powerful. I think that you are supposed to look at the second sign, found in John’s Gospel, and to understand that the cross points to something stronger than it is. “For God so loved the world...”

You have noticed this, haven’t you? Signs are those things that encourage us to believe and to keep going. They are those things that help us not to give up hope. I think that we cling to signs as anchors of hope. Maybe it happens like this. Perhaps it happens like it did with one of my former church members down in Camden whose heart surgery went bad. I was his pastor. His family and I regularly went to see him in his intensive care room. Tubes filled his veins. His chart was thick. There was a machine that helped him to breathe and he was in a coma. No one really knew what was going to happen. We all feared the worse, but we would not say the words. The doctors said, “All we can do is to wait.” They were not hopeful. His daughter walked up to her dad and reached for his hand. The family was all around her, keeping watch over his bed. They were looking for a sign. They glanced at the monitors for it. The daughter who was holding her father’s hand said, “I think that I felt a squeeze. I think daddy squeezed my hand!” That is all that happened, but they rejoiced because it was a sign that life was returning and that healing was happening. We look for signs to give us hope.

We live by signs, especially in hard times. We look for signs that will reveal what is possible for us. But the sign we look for the most is the one that says to us that God has not forgotten us and that His grace is still available to us. As Christians, we believe that there is such a sign and it is the cross, the simple cross. “For God so loved the world...” Jerusalem was filled with people who came there looking for a sign. Some of them were hoping for some kind of hope for their lives. They were looking for God to do something and to come and save his people. In fact all cities are filled with people looking for signs. Here is the sign. A man carrying a cross through that city, through it’s gates, to a hill called Golgotha, where, as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, the Son of Man was lifted up so that the whole world might believe. Let us pray.