Look Up and Live
by Jim McCrea

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

In recent weeks and months, I have become something of a news junkie. I typically only watch two hours of TV per night and all of that is the news or commentary. I watch it the way I would hope that everyone does — with my critical faculties fully engaged to filter through the things I’m being told, in order to decide for myself what seems to be true and what is simply someone’s vaguelydisguised attempt at persuasion in the act of so-called reporting.

Of course, probably nothing has been more in the glare of the news this past week than the $165 million in bonuses that were paid to executives of the financial giant AIG, using the government’s bailout money. In essence that means that tax money — mostly paid by people who will never approach the million-dollar income level — were made to pay huge sums in order to reward the very people who helped bring on our financial crisis by their ethical blindness and perhaps even by skirting our financial laws.

The whole thing seems patently unfair, although unless someone can find a legal reason to challenge the contracts that required those bonuses, there may be no means to recover the bonus money. So it comes off like an affront to the American sense of justice and fair play.

As this past week has amply demonstrated, it’s easy to become outraged over the excesses of the financial markets. And it’s even easy to see those bonuses as being a paradigm of the greed that has undermined our economy and placed our country in such a precarious fiscal situation.

But it occurred to me, as I watched more and more people denouncing the AIG bonuses that this situation just might have something to teach us about God as well. Although we rarely like to think about it, in our secret hearts — and sometimes even in the broadest of daylight — each one of us has done things for utter self-serving motives, things that have hurt others and perhaps even ourselves.

And yet, God remains with us throughout it all, offering us grace to bail us out from our sins. And, because God’s supply of love and grace never runs out, God will continue to allow us to receive withdrawls from that bailout surplus as many times as may be needed.

In fact, if you want to push the analogy a bit further, God’s grace is the only way to provide bailout for our sins and while we gratefully accept it for ourselves, that grace remains controversial when God offers it to certain other people, those whom we see as irredeemable. It’s hard to imagine that anyone of us who depend on totally on grace could wish to deny grace to anyone else, but there it is. It’s part of human nature.

Our Old Testament lesson today offers a different sort of irony. This is a story that really revolves around fear. I don’t think you can truly understand the various Old Testament stories of Moses and the people of Israel wandering in the wilderness unless you remind yourself over and over that the Israelites were freed slaves.

Their ancestors had been slaves in Egypt for some 450 years, so none of them had had any experience with freedom. For their entire lives — and the lives of their parents and grandparents and greatgrandparents and on and on back through time — they had been a dependent people.

As horrible as slavery could be, at least the Israelites could count on their masters providing the basic necessities of life for them — things like food and shelter and clothing. Although we sometimes struggle to provide those things for ourselves, we take for granted the skills we need to obtain them.

In contrast, the freed Israelites slaves never took those things for granted. Not only did they have to learn some of the skills required from scratch, but they also had to do that in the harsh and unforgiving environment of a Middle Eastern desert.

When we read about God winning their freedom from a deeply reluctant Pharaoh and rescuing them from the pursuing Egyptian army by parting the Red Sea, or providing manna from heaven and water from a rock, we think they should be endlessly grateful.

Instead, we read about one series of complaints after another. Those complaints are not signs of instant amnesia. Instead, they’re signs of something we can truly relate to — signs of the same sort of fear that lurks behind the phrase, “We’ve never done it that way before.”

Those freed slaves were being asked to transfer not just their political allegiance from Pharaoh to God, but also their willingness to be fully dependent on an invisible God for all aspects of life — from the most spiritual to the most mundane things, things like food and water. That’s a hard thing for anyone to do, even in the face of repeated, astounding miracles. After all, who’s to say that those miracles will never stop?

Our story today is a strange one. It’s as if all those complaints of the Israelite people had come alive and begin to attack them in the form of poisonous snakes. That may be a little odd in and of itself, but the truly weird part comes in when God provides a unique antidote.

He tells Moses to create a bronze snake and place it on a pole. God then promises that anyone who looks at that snake-on-a-stick will live. At first glance, it appears as if God is blessing some sort of sympathetic magic — the very thing God became angry over when the Israelites earlier created the golden calf as a way to control God.

The bronze snake also seems to be a blatant violation of the second commandment which forbids the creation of a idol of anything in the heavens or on earth or under the earth. Clearly a snake-on-astick should fit in there somewhere.

Except that, as the one who gave the rules in the first place, surely God has the right to wave them now and then — like our City Council did recently — rightly or wrongly — when they signed a contract with a new marketing company in spite of the city ordinance that requires competitive bidding. The City Council believes they created that rule, so they have the power to wave it.

But far more importantly, the bronze snake on the pole wasn’t created to serve as an idol, so it couldn’t have broken the second commandment in the first place. An idol is something that is intended to take the place of a god.

The bronze snake, on the other hand, was intentionally lifted up on that pole as a way of forcing those who would look at it to lift up their eyes. Symbolically, the idea was to make them think about God, the source of their freedom and of the solutions to their problems.

Now the truth is that some 550 years later, that pole was still around and by that time, it had indeed been transformed into an object of worship. So King Hezekiah had it destroyed as a part of his reform of the worship in his time. That story is found in the eighth chapter of 2 Kings. But that’s far into the future for Moses and the Israelites.

In Moses’ day, the bronze snake simply represented the fears of the people being held up to heaven. In effect, it represented turning their fears over to God. And God’s promise was that, if they gave their fears to God, those fears wouldn’t consume them.

We often like to think that we’re better than those biblical characters who are doing something stupid — something they should know better than to do. After all, we have the benefit of hindsight and, in the case of those Old Testament characters, we have the added benefit of knowing about the salvation offered by Jesus. We know about the forgiveness that comes from Jesus’ being lifted up on a cross. As the gospel of John points out, that crucifixion was something of a parallel to our Old Testament lesson: If we turn over our sins to the cross, we too will live. Grace will reign.

That certainly is a powerful theological point, worth repeating over and over. But more than that, we need to go back and learn the same lesson that the ancient Israelites struggled to learn out there in the desert. We need to begin to believe that we truly can trust God as we go through our day-to-day problems. We truly can trust God with everything — both our large and small problems and everything between.

Certainly we can when we’re wrestling with grief or ill health — whether that disease is our own or that of a loved one. But we also can when we’re pacing the floor, trying to sort through the pieces of our lives in the apparently-vain hope of making sense of it all. Or when we find joy in the brilliance of a sunset or a bird’s song. When we’re doubting that we’ll ever find work again or worrying over how to pay the taxes. Or when the baby cries and cries and can’t be comforted.

Come what may, God is present with us, supporting us, and giving us guidance and wisdom. Unfortunately, like the ancient Israelites, we try to substitute any number of things for our dependence on God. We try to depend on our possessions, our jobs, our money, our families, our success or what have you. But nothing else can substitute for God.

According to Larry Warren, “Those who study human beings say that we can be aware of three of four things at a time. […] When we miss something right in front of us because we are paying attention to too many other things it is called perceptual blindness. Some scientists refer to this as ‘inattentional blindness.’ Scientists have been researching this, and other similar phenomenon — and the theory seems to be that there is no perception without attention. In our lessons today I hear the invitation to pay attention to God in the words, ‘Look up!’

“What fills your attention today? Is it fear? Is it pain? Is it hopelessness as things are happening to you or a loved one that you have dreaded? Do you feel alone? Are you blinded to a God who invites you to look up and live? Is it impossible for you to hear the words ‘I love you! I love you!’ said by God?”

We may not have a bronze snake to look up to to remind us of where our true support comes from, but we do have the cross as a reminder that our sins have been lifted up and given to God through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ.

As you go through the week ahead, remind yourself to lay down all your fears and all those things that you may have allowed to replace your trust in God. Then open your eyes to God’s abundant grace all around you and open your heart to accept it completely. Look up and live. Amen.

(Comments to Jim at jrmfpc@gmail.com.)