The middle of exile (Jeremiah 32:31-34 & John 12:20-33)

During the summers when I was a Hendrix College student, I left the bucolic confines of the Hendrix campus and returned to Northeast Arkansas to work for the Arkansas Highway Department on a bridge crew.  It would be difficult to imagine a starker contrast between the two environments.  The red brick, tree-lined path between the philosophy building and library was replaced with tarry blacktop leading to decaying rural bridges over ditches and creeks.  What’s more, each week the bridge crew worked four, ten-hour days, from 7 a.m. until 5 p.m. in the oppressive summer heat standing on asphalt above water with the sun both beating down and reflecting up.  The minutes of those days ticked by at a maddeningly slow crawl.  Those long summers felt like exile from the life I loved and was supposed to be living.

During those summers I operated a jackhammer and an acetylene torch, but the worst job was flagging.  Flagging on remote county roads was incredibly lonely, because the flagger was fifty yards away from the rest of the crew.  And, it was dangerous, because the rare car that appeared often careened down the road unaware of or unconcerned with the promising young college student frantically waving his red flag.  Flagging was also dangerous because the others on the crew sometimes forgot about the flagger and failed to provide him minor graces in the sweltering heat such as, oh, water.

In my overheated delirium, I would sometimes daydream and occasionally hallucinate, and it was on one such morning while flagging in rural Craighead County north of Jonesboro that a small Chrysler K-Car emerged from the haze and approached our worksite.  At first, I wasn’t sure what I was seeing inside the car.  Was it penguins?  Surely that couldn’t be.  I wiped the sweat from my eyes and peered in again.  And, sure enough, stuffed into that small, powder blue sedan so tight that they could have been circus clowns was a whole bunch of full-habit-wearing nuns.  I’m not sure I’d seen that many nuns collectively in my entire life at that point, and I’d surely not seen so many together, literally sitting on one another’s laps.  The driver smiled at me angelically, and I waved them on.  For the rest of the morning, I wondered at what I’d seen.

Lent surely is a long season.  It’s six weeks in duration, including Holy Week, but the sense of it is longer still.  If we’ve given up something meaningful, Lent is so long that we feel the lack.  If we’ve taken on a discipline, Lent is so long that it begins to chafe.  If we’ve done neither of these things, Lent is so long that we truly begin to feel guilty at our lack of observance.  And if we are theologically attuned, Lent is so long—and this is, of course, the point—that we experience with Jesus the long march to the cross.  The season becomes more and more ominous as the weeks progress.  The mood gets ever-darker.  The sensation of impending doom crescendos.  At this point in the season, on the fifth Sunday of Lent, Lent can be as oppressive as the Arkansas summer heat while standing upon blacktop.

This is the sense that our readings initially convey today.  In the Old Testament reading, the prophet Jeremiah writes during the Babylonian Exile, at a time when many of the Jewish people have been forcibly removed from the their land while others have been relegated to third-class citizenship.  This state of affairs has been going on so long that Jeremiah’s neighbors are despondent.  They’ve forgotten what blessing looks like.

In John’s Gospel, today’s focus is individually on Jesus.  By now in the Gospel, Jesus has a clear sense of where his ministry is headed: straight to a Roman crossbeam of wood, a painful and humiliating end for him and the dashing of all hope for his followers.  Jesus has attempted to explain what is coming to his closest friends, but no one wants to hear it.  No one wants to believe it.  And so, no one empathizes or truly walks with Jesus in these moments of fear and dread.  Jesus experiences his own personal exile.  He is truly all alone.  In a moment of heartrending vulnerability, today Jesus admits, “Now my soul is troubled.”

For both Jeremiah and Jesus, exile could, and perhaps by rights ought to, lead to despair.  In the midst of the withering heat, or on the march to the cross, or on the fifth Sunday of an interminably long Lent, or in whatever we are facing in life that feels like an endless exile, how do we fend off despair?  How do we persevere?  How do we thrive?

The great American Baptist preacher Tony Campolo has a sermon entitled, “It’s Friday, but Sunday’s coming.”  Friday in that sermon is Good Friday, the Friday when hope is dashed, when Jesus is killed; the metaphoric Friday in which so much of our own lives seems to be lived.  For so many, so often, life is a prolonged Good Friday of pain, or illness, or disappointment, or exile from the things we love and that give life.  Tony Campolo acknowledges Friday in all its reality, in which—like standing on asphalt over water—the heat and glare of life exhaust and confuse and render us practically delirious.     This is what Jeremiah feels in the midst of a broken people.  This is what Jesus feels, all alone in his knowledge of what is coming, as his soul is troubled. 

But in each and every line of Tony Campolo’s sermon, even as he acknowledges the unavoidable, irrepressible reality of Friday, Campolo adds, “but Sunday’s coming!”  And the Sunday after Good Friday is always Easter Sunday.

This is the promise to which Jesus holds fast.  After lamenting his troubled soul, in his next breath, Jesus speaks of glory. 

This is what the prophet proclaims.  From exile, Jeremiah speaks God’s voice and says, “I will be their God, and they shall be my people…They shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest; for I will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more.”

This is not Pollyanna optimism.  Jesus knows that the pain of the cross will dwarf the pain of his present loneliness.  Jeremiah’s exile continues, and he has no way to know when God will restore God’s people.  These are realities that must be faced.  But for those who find their lives in the Living God, these realities are not the deepest reality nor the most enduring.  Beyond any exile, beyond any pain, beyond any challenge, God’s reconciling, restoring, joy-giving love awaits.

At lunchtime on that 1992 summer day in Craighead County, our Highway Department bridge crew loaded into our truck and sought a shaded area in which we could rest and escape the sun for a few minutes.  We drove to a small, nearby county park.  All of us were surly and uncomfortable, complaining and bickering about the relentless heat and endless day, but as we pulled into the park our mouths were suddenly stopped and our eyes widened.  What I’d seen earlier while flagging had not been a hallucination.  In the middle of the park was a playground, and on the swings, the merry-go-round, the slides, and even the monkey bars were all those nuns![i]  In full habit in the summer heat, more nuns that I could count were frolicking around, grinning and playing like schoolchildren.  Can you picture it?  Whatever you are imagining, it was more than that.  I’ve never seen anything else like it, either before or since.  It was surreal.  Those nuns were dressed in black that extended to their ankles.  They had to have been at least as hot and uncomfortable as we were.  And yet, in the midst of that endless and sweltering summer, they laughed with abandon.  They found joy.

At nineteen, I thought those ten-hour days of grueling manual labor in the Arkansas heat were the worst life could get.  (My, how life has, time and time again, proven me wrong!)  But even then, God revealed hope to me, and God did so through the laughter of a playground filled with nuns.  As they awaited the resurrection, in their heavy black habits they played and frolicked and acted like blessed children.  They knew that in a world so often like Good Friday, Sunday is coming.          It is!  Wherever you are in this season of Lent, wherever you are in the Lent of your own life, however endless your Good Friday has seemed, Sunday is coming.  Easter is coming.  Hold fast, friends.  Wipe the sweat from your eyes.  Look for the signs coming down the road.  Easter is coming, and by the grace of the God of love, we will know joy. 

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[i] I later learned that the nuns were sisters of Holy Angels Convent, a house of Olivetan Benedictine Sisters located north of Jonesboro.  The convent still exists, presently with twenty-one sisters.

Of snake boots, Jesus, and open faith (Numbers 21:4-9 & John 3:14-21)

“Poisonous serpents moved among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died.”  

 These are the words from the Book of Numbers this morning.  Sometimes Holy Scripture provides us metaphors so clear that they scarcely need interpretation.  You know what I’m talking about: With last Tuesday’s primaries we have entered another election season.  The serpents are moving, and the venom has begun to flow!

I don’t intend to malign dedicated and self-sacrificing public servants, of whom there are many.  I thank God for them, and I commend their willingness to serve.  But there are fewer and fewer of them, it seems to me, and more and more of those who would slither and bite, serving themselves and their tribe rather than the body public.  Their rhetoric gets into us like poison, and we find ourselves fevered by venom from both ends of the political spectrum.

I wish this were constrained to the secular world, but it isn’t.  Within the broad sweep of Christianity, there are plenty who loudly invoke the name of Jesus as the source and backstop of their ideologies; their opinions of the various people who populate our world; and their determination of who is in and who is out of God’s favor and, even heaven itself.  Such folk speak the name of Jesus, but their messaging often comes across as a kind of Christian venom.  It makes many of us deeply uneasy.  We recoil from conversation with such Christians, keeping a bit of distance, as if we fear a quick strike that may undo us.

I’m a bird hunter.  I love to walk quail fields in the high grass.  And I always wear snake boots of thick canvas and leather, designed to withstand the fangs of a copperhead or timber rattlesnake.  I think for many who find themselves gravitating to the Episcopal Church, we think of the Episcopal Church as ecclesiastical snake boots.  Many who aren’t cradle Episcopalians have been bitten at points in their lives by other forms of Christianity.  The wounds are often lasting, and in here we’re safe from the poison.  That could be the new Episcopal Church slogan: “Join the Episcopal Church: We’ll be your snake boots!”

But it’s worth looking again at the prescription God gives Moses for the health and well-being of the Israelites.  As the Hebrews are getting snake-bit hither and yon, God says to Moses: “‘Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.’ So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.”

What’s that all about?  We’ll come back to it in a bit.  First, let’s look at the Gospel text, which explicitly hearkens back to the Old Testament reading from Numbers.  Jesus himself says today, “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.”

That statement is followed by perhaps the most well-known verse in the Gospels, one that I learned as a small child watching football on television, when a 1980s character known as “Rainbow Wig Guy” frequented the endzones of NFL stadiums holding up a sign that read “John 3:16.”  And here it is today, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

People have visceral reactions to this verse.  For some, it is a great comfort, but for others, it seems to have been claimed as the exclusive property of that brand of Christian to which I referred earlier, serving as the very tip of the fang, spoken to pierce and do damage by implying that if one doesn’t believe in exactly the right way—namely, the way of the one striking out believes—then one is condemned.

So, what are we Episcopalians to do?  Are we to stay huddled and a bit confused, protected within our church  walls that serve like the thick hide of snake boots?  Is that what God is calling us to do?  Is that what discipleship to Jesus looks like?

To get at the answer, we need to remember to whom Jesus is speaking in John’s Gospel this morning.  A few verses before today’s reading begins, Nicodemus approaches Jesus.  John says that Nicodemus is “a Pharisee” and “a leader of the Jews.”[i]  This means he is both well-educated and a person of status and standing in his community.  It’s important to note that Nicodemus is genuinely admiring of Jesus and recognizes that Jesus is someone special with a special message.  Nicodemus says to Jesus, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.”[ii]

All the signs point to Nicodemus being at the cusp of a spiritual awakening and a profound faith, except for one crucial nugget of information: John 3 tells us that Nicodemus visited Jesus in secret, “under the cover of night.”[iii] 

Nicodemus wants to follow Jesus.  He wants to be a disciple.  He wants to live by grace.  But Nicodemus is wary and afraid.  He worries that folks will lump him in with all the other religious messianic crazies walking around.  He’s afraid of how his life may change.  He’s afraid of getting snakebit, and thus he wants to remain anonymous.  So, Nicodemus puts on his snake boots, so to speak.  He plays it safe and visits Jesus only at night, when no one will know.   

And this is when Jesus says to Nicodemus, “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.  For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

What, then, is the connection?  Why does Jesus point Nicodemus the Pharisee, who knows his scripture by heart, to this image of Moses and the Israelites?  It foretells the cross, obviously, when Jesus will literally be raised up on the wood the way that Moses lifts the bronze serpent on his staff, but there’s more to it, too.  In the Old Testament story, in which the Israelites are constantly finding themselves struck by snakes, God’s antidote is not for God’s people to hide in darkness or in the armor of snake boots, to recede from the danger and threat.  Rather, God has Moses lift up a blazing icon of sun-burnished bronze and call God’s people to gaze upon it and flock to it, to cleave to God’s grace and power openly—even brazenly—as the way to health and life.  God promises that when one does so, no venom can harm.

And that is what Jesus is saying to Nicodemus as well.  It is what John’s Gospel is saying to us.  Perhaps no one in the Gospel story represents Episcopalians more than Nicodemus.  Like Nicodemus, we are thoughtful and educated, worldly and of standing in our community.  Like Nicodemus, we find Jesus compelling and find ourselves drawn to God.  And like Nicodemus, we are tentative.  We’re often unsure of our faith and so we prefer it to be relatively anonymous.  We don’t want to go toe-to-toe with those “other” Christians who speak so openly of “Jesus this and Jesus that.”  And we surely don’t want to risk non-Christians lumping us in with those other Christians!

And as with Nicodemus, Jesus tells us that we can’t have faith halfway.  We cannot follow Jesus under cover of darkness.  In the end, there is no such thing as mumbling, privatized, anonymous discipleship.   To believe—to adore, to trust, to follow Jesus, which is, we must never forget, what believing truly means—requires openness, gratitude, joy, and a willingness to name in whom we place our faith.  It means gazing upon the cross in the light of our everyday and knowing that, so long as we cleave to God’s grace, no venom can touch us.

If we will come to Jesus in light of day, if we will gaze upon Jesus, if we will speak of Jesus openly and with the brazen confidence of those who feel God’s love, then we will be inoculated from the effect of those who misuse the name of Jesus in venomous ways.  Through our lived and spoken faith, the world will come instead to know the Jesus we know, here in this place: The Jesus whose words always heal, whose love always accepts, whose grace always uplifts the downtrodden.

Nicodemus will show up twice more in John’s Gospel.  The third and final time we see him, he is preparing Jesus’ crucified body for burial.  Finally, he has openly given himself to the one whose life, death, and resurrection saves him, and saves us.           

We don’t have to wait.  As we approach Easter, let this be the time that we say to those we meet, those who are searching, those who need a word of grace in their lives, that here at Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church, among this community of faith, we know Jesus.  In a world of vipers, God’s love heals us and makes us whole.  In the light of day, we look to God’s grace.  Openly, we love one another in Christ’s name.    For God so loved the world!

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[i] John 3:1

[ii] John 3:2

[iii] Ibid