When I was a young man, there was a popular animated TV show called The Simpsons. In fact, if I’m not mistaken, it’s still running, currently in its 35 th season, making it the longest running American sitcom ever.
The main character is Homer. He’s the buffoonish, but beloved dad of the dysfunctional, but lovable Simpson family, which includes Homer’s wife Marge, and three children, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie.
Perhaps you’ve watched an episode or two of the show—or even more. Maybe you’re a regular viewer. In any event, I assume that most of you are familiar with the show.
In one episode, Homer opted out of going to church with his family. He stayed home instead to watch the pre-game show and eat waffle batter. Dozing off in his chair, he dreamed that God pealed off the roof of this house and appeared in the TV room, furious at him for skipping church on a Sunday morning.
We laugh at Homer’s shenanigans, but what the scene represents rings true for many of us.
Several years ago Baylor University conducted a survey. They wanted to determine the views of God that Americans hold.
They organized the results under four headings. Homer’s view of god was the most popular. For almost 1/3 of Americans, the Authoritarian God is wrathful and ever watchful. He wants people to stop sinning, and thinks government should be on his side. Then there is the Benevolent God, who still makes demands, but will forgive us rather than smite us, at least most of the time. Next there is the Critical God, who watches the world, but does not intervene. Last there is the Distant God, a cosmic force without any interest in human affairs.
Now even though Homer has been the proverbial whipping boy in our culture, we should not be too hard on him. Nor should we be too critical of any of those in the Baylor survey.
For if we are honest, we have all entertained views of God that do not exactly correspond to the living God.
That is why we need the Scriptures. The Reformers never failed to insist on this point. Calvin regarded the Scriptures as a corrective lens, that brings God, as well as us, into focus, so that our view of God corresponds more and more with God as he has revealed himself to us.
According to the Scriptures, God intends good for his people, not harm, to give them a future and a hope (Jer. 29:11). He rescued them from cruel slavery under the Pharoah. He faithfully led them in the desert. When they were thirsty and needed water, he caused water to flow from the rock. Whey they were hungry and needed food, he gave them manna, which he spread like a blanket on the desert floor each morning.
He showed himself trustworthy. The people had enough evidence of his care for them to trust his promise to bring them into that broad and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey, where he would give them rest.
But they didn’t. They responded with unbelief and repeated acts of rebellion. All this culminated in their refusal to go up into the land God had promised them.
For this reason, God marched them back into the desert, in which they wandered another 40 years, until every last one of those in that rebellious generation had died.
In our Old Testament lesson, the children of that rebellious generation are now grown up. And they are once again close to their destination. To me more exact, they are on the final leg of their journey—from Kadesh to the plains of Moab.
But they do not enter the land by a direct route. Instead, they travel from Mount Hor along the route to the Red Sea and go around the land of Edom.
Yet another detour in a seemingly endless–and endlessly frustrating—journey.
This proves too much for them. They can’t take it any longer. They lose their patience.
When our load becomes too heavy to bear, when our stress becomes too great, when the difficulties we face continue to mount, and when there is no end in sight, we, too, grow impatient.
We reach our breaking point. But at that point we have to be careful or we’ll do something we’ll regret later. Often, we wrongly find in someone the cause for our misery. We lash out at the one closest to us and say that it is his fault that our life has gone so terribly wrong.
This is what the people of Israel did. They blame God and his servant Moses. To God they say: “You brought us up out of Egypt to die in the desert!”
But God rescued them from the Egyptians and promised to give them a land of their own.
“There is no food and water!”
But God faithfully provided for their daily needs, even giving them manna, which he spread out like a blanket on the desert floor each morning.
Ungrateful for the manna, the people complained: “we detest this miserable food!”
When we are going through hard times, we’re tempted to curse our cruel fate. That is to say, we blame God. “God, why have you done this to me? Why have you made my life miserable?”
But does God want to make our lives miserable? Does our view of God implied in our anguished questions correspond to who God really is?
God meets us in our experience. Indeed, if he did not, he would not be real to us, and we would have no reason to come to church to worship him. But we have to be careful here, because sometimes our experience is harsh—maybe even more than sometimes.
What then? Do we conclude from our experience that God is harsh?
But God is not against the people; he is for them. He does not want to harm them, but to bless them, to give them a future and a hope, as we have already remarked.
Israel needed to see their harsh experience in light of God’s past faithfulness to them, and in light of God’s promise to them.
So do we. We should recall God’s faithfulness to us in our past. And we should look for God’s promises to us in the Scriptures, the corrective lens through which we can see God more clearly when our own harsh experience distorts our perception of God.
The people suffer the consequences of their distrust. Poisonous serpents appear among them, biting the people, so that many of the Israelites died.
Parenthetically, experts today tell us we should avoid toxic people. Toxic, according to the dictionary definition, means poisonous. Poisonous people tend to spread their poison. When we allow them into our lives, their toxic behavior can poison us, so these experts say.
To be sure, there is wisdom in this counsel; we should certainly learn to recognize the people who can harm us, and limit, where we can, their influence in our lives.
But aren’t we all more or less toxic, depending on who you ask? Our fears, our negativity, our distrust—all these come out in various ways and can harm others, break down community, and discourage others, as well as ourselves, from reaching the goals God has put in our hearts.
A community of toxic people cannot make forward progress together to the promised land, as the Israelites painfully discovered.
It is good to identify toxicity in others and in ourselves. But it is even better to know the one who can draw out the poison and heal us, and then to help others know this one, so they too can find hope for their own healing.
The people turn to Moses and ask him to pray for them. More than that—they confess that they have sinned.
This is remarkable. Have they finally come to an awareness of their habit of rebelling against God? Have they finally begun to learn from God’s past faithfulness? Can we see in their action a sign of spiritual maturity?
When we turn away from God, when we withdraw our trust from him, we expect God to be angry, or, at the very least to be disappointed. Like Homer Simpson, we imagine him to be wrathful and ever watchful.
But when we fall, the best thing we can do is to turn to God in prayer, in confession—or if we cannot do it for ourselves, ask someone we trust to pray for us.
God responds favorably and graciously to Moses’ prayer for the people. He instructs Moses to make a bronze serpent and place it on top of a pole. Those people who got bitten by a serpent may look up at it and live.
In our gospel lesson, Jesus refers to this episode when he speaks about his own crucifixion.
Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, Jesus says about himself, so must the Son of Man be lifted up. This is the first of three times he spoke of being lifted up in John’s Gospel (John 3:14, 8:28, 12:32).
Here Jesus compares himself with a bronze serpent from that strange story—a story about the cure of a rebellious people who had been bitten by poisonous serpents.
Do we see what he is saying? Moses raises on a pole a replica of the poisonous serpent—the very serpent that earlier was biting and killing the people as a result of their rebellion—that serpent is now raised as a banner of healing. They only have to look at it and live.
Just as our rebellion against God has released into the bloodstream of humanity toxins that have poisoned us and our relationships with one another, a rebellion that ultimately resulted in the lifting up of the Son of Man on the cross, so also does our gazing at him there in obedience to the Gospel result in our cure.
Extending the metaphor, we may say that the Son of Man absorbed in himself our poison and neutralized it. He can because he is God’s own Son. He does because he went willingly when God sent him for us. He is the antidote. He is the antivenom, which, when we receive our dose from him, do not die, but live.
You see, God intends good for his people, not to harm them, but to give them a future and a hope.
Jesus expresses this truth in these words: “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”
It is worth noting here that “saved” in the original can also mean “healed.”
We need this healing. People everywhere around us need this healing. Pain, abuse and trauma are in the stories that so many tell about their past. Just ask our administrative assistant Sara, who now visits their homes as their social worker.
Some turn to substances to cope. Addictions to substances and compulsive behaviors can be attempts at self-medicating, at self-soothing. They are looking for a cure.
Ultimately, they need to know the one who can draw out the poison and heal them. They need to believe in the God who so loved them that he have his only Son for them. In this love is found their—and our—deepest healing.
Nowhere in the Bible is God’s love expressed so directly as in our Gospel lesson today.
God loves us beyond all understanding. In his Son God has demonstrated this love. He has made it visible and audible and perceptible that he loved the world, that he did not wish to be God without it, without us, and without each individual in particular.
God treasures us so much that he wants us to be with him, to share in his very life.
The light of this message shines in a dark world. John likes the play of contrasts. He is also fond of irony.
The cross is an instrument of pain, torture and death. Matthew tells us that when Jesus was crucified, darkness came over the land at noon and lasted three hours.
But in the cross, we God’s light—the light that overcomes darkness.
The cross is a sign of defeat. But in the cross we see the triumph of God’s love over the forces that resist it—not least our own rebellion.
If that is the case, then why is it that whenever and wherever this gospel is preached, it issues in judgement?
Actually, the word here is better translated as “crisis.” Those who are brought to a crisis have come to a point at which they have to make a decision.
If they make the decision to stay in the darkness, and refuse to come into the light of the gospel, they bring judgment on themselves, not God. They are self-condemned.
It was a dark world then, and it is a dark world now. We are not naïve. Evil will shun the light, and those who do evil will not come into the light, because they want to keep their behavior secret.
All this is true. But this gospel about God’s love is to be preached and celebrated in every time and place. It is life and light and truth—how can we not share and celebrate it?
It is not our job to condemn those who reject it, but rather to be so confident of its power as to hold firm in the belief that in the end the darkness will not overcome it.
This good news about God’s Son who is lifted up on a cross to die that we might have eternal life—this is good news that we have to preach and teach and celebrate, so that all may come to repent and believe with us. Amen.