"Snake on a Stick" David Evans
John 3:4-21
Linda and I spent several days last week hiking and exploring some of the unique geography of the Big Bend. It is not called “el desploblado,” the deserted or desolate place, for nothing. It is an unforgiving landscape. It is sobering as you enter the Park to be handed a brochure warning you about the dangers that lurk within the Park boundaries. Those dangers include flash floods, loose rocks, heat stroke, and hypothermia. It includes black bears and mountain lions. Lion attacks are rare, the brochure comforts, but the Park has recorded two in recent years. If you encounter a mountain lion, you should hold your ground, wave your arms, throw stones, shout and make yourself look as large as possible.
Other threats are scorpions, centipedes and venomous snakes. Four species of rattlesnakes and one species of copperhead. Frankly, I could deal with any of the above. But the venomous snakes really got my attention. So I find it intriguing that our gospel text for this morning is filled with “snakes on a stick.” From Moses in the wilderness to Jesus and his conversation with Nicodemus, snakes are front and center on this 4th Sunday in Lent. First you have this “snake on a stick” sequence in John, in which Jesus refers back to a very strange scene in which Moses and the people were in the wilderness and venomous snakes were terrorizing the faithful.
That is followed by John 3:16, a verse familiar that all one has to do is hold up a card-board sign in the end-zone of a football game with John 3:16 written on it and even the most biblically illiterate among us has at least some idea about the content of those verses. And all one has to do is begin the verse: “For God so loved the world…” and many of you could complete it. Perhaps you memorized it as a child. Or perhaps John Stainer’s rendition of it into music has engraved the words into not just your minds but onto your hearts. “For God so loved the world, that He gave his only Son…”
That is the part we Presbyterians like. But there is more. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son…” If we were writing our version, that is where the verse would stop. But it goes on. “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only son, that whoever believes in him should not perish…”
Perish? Yes, perish. It seems like a lot of things are perishing lately. Retirement hopes. Supposedly secure positions. Savings portfolios. And it is terrorizing. Yes, God so loved the world… But is seems there are forces at work that are way beyond our control.
We have all known someone who is perishing. The very word perishing has such a harsh sense of finality to it. Yet that is precisely the point. Just spend one day with someone going through withdrawal and you have an existential sense of what it means to be perishing. Heidi Neumark (Breathing Space: A Spiritual Journey in the South Bronx, p. 46) says: “There is no point in romanticizing poverty. It stinks and it kills.” She tells of meeting Burnice, who had dropped out of high school as a teenager when her first baby came along. A series of men battered her heart and broke her bones, much as her alcoholic father had done. She sought relief in crack and ended up selling her body to get it. She moved to the Bronx, where Heidi was the pastor of a Lutheran church, in order to escape an abusive husband. But she could never escape drugs.
One day, after dropping her children off at school, Burnice came to the Lutheran church Heidi served because the church was giving out Christmas gifts. Burnice’s plan was to pick up the presents for her children, sell them and buy enough drugs for an overdose. It was her solution to being sick and tired of being sick and tired.
This, friends, is what it means to be perishing. It means there are no other options left. It means you are no longer in control of your own life, if indeed you ever are. It means you are out of hope. It means something drastic has to happen in order for your life to be saved.
In John Irving’s novel The World According to Garp, Garp is at the beach and he warns his son about the “undertow”. That powerful current just beneath the surface of the sea that pulls you under and whose force is so strong that no amount of thrashing and flailing can counter it. The son, however, imagines a terrifying monster who lurks beneath the sea waiting to suck him under. He calls this monster the “Under Toad.”
More often than we realize we need a fierce and holy God to save us. Too often I have been guilty of preaching a tame and domesticated God. But we need a God of the wilderness. When terror prevails and the threat of perishing is real, we all wants a God who lifts a snake on a stick. A God of the wilderness. A God who can lead us “through the valley of the shadow of death.” A God who does not flinch in face of the “Under-Toads” threatening to suck us under. A God like this does not fool around with schemes to “improve” us. A God like this saves us from perishing. Who doesn’t want a God who puts a “snake on a stick” to protect us when we are perishing.
Because people do perish and people do need saving. A God like this is not necessarily subtle in the attempt to save us from that which terrorizes us. Barbara Brown Taylor tells of the spring she spent some time on a barrier island (in Exilic Preaching: Testimony for Christian Exiles in an Increasingly Hostile Culture, p. 86ff) much like Padre Island. While there logger-heads were laying their eggs. One night when the tide was out she watched a huge female heave herself up on the beach, dig a nest, and deposit her eggs. Afterward the turtle became disoriented and instead of heading back out to sea, she wandered into the dunes, which was hot as asphalt.
Barbara poured water on her and covered her with sea oats. Then she went to fetch the park ranger, who returned in a Jeep to rescue her. As she watched in horror, he flipped her over on her back, wrapped tire chains around her front legs, and hooked the chains to the trailer hitch on the Jeep. Then he took off, yanking the turtle forward so that her mouth was filled with sand and at one point her neck disappeared underneath her so that it seemed as if it would break.
The Ranger hauled her over the dunes and down onto the beach. At the ocean’s edge he unhooked her and turned her right side up again. The turtle lay motionless in the surf as the water lapped over her body, washing the sand from her eyes and making her skin shine again. Then a particularly large wave broke over her, and she lifted her head slightly. Slowly she revived. Ever fresh wave brought new life to the turtle, until one of them made her light enough to find a foothold and push off, back into the water that was her salvation.
The trip to safety must have been terrifying for the turtle. And yet sometimes it is hard to tell whether you are being killed or saved by the hands that turn your life upside down. Our hope, through all our own terrors, is that we are being saved. And Lent is the season to see through all our illusions about what will save us and to know for certain what will not. AMEN