Sermon: Jesus Christ, Anti-Venom

To this day our guild of professional healers, trained at the best western schools of medicine, use a symbol as their professional standard bearing two snakes coiled upon a sword. The allusion in the emblem is to the Greek God Aesclepius, son of Apollo (aha, a son of a god), aka the Roman god Aesculapius, both divinities associated with medicine and healing. You will find this symbol in your doctor’s office…

The Latin word serpent means creepy crawlie, but the Hebrew scripture refers to the serpent as capable of flight. They’re said to infest the Negev and to sting like blazes. The pests are probably poisonous insects that can crawl and fly. To counter the uproar among the bitten Israelites, God tells Moses to fashion a bronze serpent and affix it atop a staff, perhaps the famous staff of the Red Sea crossing, to serve as an antidote.

We might make an analogy to inoculation theory or perhaps to the placebo effect. Whatever, it works. It helps people heal. As we know, healing is complicated and mysterious and full of grace all at once. The serpent aloft became for the people a sign of their purgation and salvation…

Let’s imagine in our mind’s eye an amalgam of every crucifix we’ve ever seen, only Aesculapian. Picture Jesus, son of man and son of God, entwined with Adam the earthling, in an embrace, affixed atop a pole, let’s say upon the cross, uplifted on a highly visible hill outside Roman occupied Jerusalem. Like Isaiah in the temple, we in this sanctuary are given an image of the divine potential, of divine power, made accessible to humankind, in the embrace of our progenitors in flesh and spirit. Like the first, Jesus is called the second Adam, Everyman, or preferably, Everyone. And the flying serpent, the seraph, stings our lips with pentecostal fire, giving the gift of the gospel proclamation…

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The back up lessons for the gospel, from Numbers and Ephesians, are fairly arcane.

In the gospel, Jesus is having a conversation with Nicodemus. He likens the raising of his public profile in Jerusalem to the serpent standard that Moses upifted in the wilderness. What’s up with that, we ask? Is it simply ancient superstition?

And the epistle alludes to a gnostic world view. (It’s implied also in the chiaroscuro of John’s gospel, with its interplay of darkness and light.) Scholars argue about its gnostic undertones. One commentator on the epistle identified the talk of the “aeon,” the spirit of the age, as representing a post-Persian, Hellenistic cosmology, mixed with Jewish messianic apocalyptic.

That’s a mouthful. But it is our devotion to mine these lessons for their relevance, for their confrontation of our age, and for the good news we trust they contain. We’ll miss the gift of their meaning if we don’t break their code. The take away will be worth the excursion.

What is this serpent on a stick story?

Let me first whet your appetite by making a contemporary connection. To this day our guild of professional healers, trained at the best western schools of medicine, use a symbol as their professional standard bearing two snakes coiled upon a sword. The allusion in the emblem is to the Greek God Aesclepius, son of Apollo (aha, a son of a god), aka the Roman god Aesculapius, both divinities associated with medicine and healing.

You will find this symbol in your doctor’s office. Maybe Moses’ serpent isn’t so alien after all, if it’s still embedded within our cultural experience many centuries later.

The Latin word serpent means creepy crawlie, but the Hebrew scripture refers to the serpent as capable of flight. They’re said to infest the Negev and to sting like blazes. The pests are probably poisonous insects that can crawl and fly. To counter the uproar among the bitten Israelites, God tells Moses to fashion a bronze serpent and affix it atop a staff, perhaps the famous staff of the Red Sea crossing, to serve as an antidote.

We might make an analogy to inoculation theory or perhaps to the placebo effect. Whatever, it works. It helps people heal. As we know, healing is complicated and mysterious and full of grace all at once. The serpent aloft became for the people a sign of their purgation and salvation.

While we’re on the subject, the bronze serpent is called a seraph in Hebrew, the plural being seraphim. Seraphim became part of the temple iconography, accentuated to resemble large, winged dragons. They figure prominently in the call of Isaiah (ch.6). Isaiah has a vision in the temple. In it, a seraph touches a burning coal to his lips, stinging him, healing him from his sins, and bestowing upon him the gift of prophecy.

Isaiah was a contemporary of King Hezekiah, a reformer, who soon purged the temple of much accrued symbolism. Think of the king as a predecessor to Oliver Cromwell, who cleaned house in the English reformation. Among other artifacts, Hezekiah removed the bronze serpent attributed to Moses. He thought it might harbor covert associations with the religion of the Ba’al. He tried everything he could think of to keep the nation free of Assyria. I wonder how Isaiah felt about the purge.

Hearing this story from the book of Numbers, we are assisted by these reverberations, from Israel’s prehistoric wanderings, through its national heyday, complete with temple and monarch, then fast-forwarding into its Roman occupation in the later lessons. In the Gospel of John, this serpent image turns up in a conversation held by night in Jerusalem, between an inquiring member of the Sanhedrin and a messianic rabbi from Galilee. And then fast forward again to the serpent image evident in our own day, the emblem of the healing arts and the cooperation of healers with the divine mystery.

Recall the Hippocratic oath, another holdover from ancient times, solemnly sworn by medical caregivers. First, do no harm. Wise counsel, though anyone who has committed to live by it finds its observance harder than it appears, given the limitations of our knowledge and skill. Now think of the Decalogue, the ten commandments, and the summary of the law, aka the great commandment. These are cousins to the Hippocratic oath, wise rules for living well, counsel for cultivating godliness, for healing.

Israel’s journey is archetypal of the human journey, its interior as well as its exterior landscapes. They wandered through the wilderness en route to the land of promise. They left Egypt in the exodus, soon to be celebrated in the annual Passover observance. And they left foreign lands to the north, returning from successive exiles. Being in the wilderness is a time of transition and deprivation, a time of hardship and disorientation, when people have left behind their past, with no going back, and yet have little to urge them forward other than a dream of a better future elsewhere. At times the dream resembles a mirage. They doubt their course, their leadership, their quest, and their God. That kind of predicament sounds timely and relevant, wouldn’t you agree? We’re living this theme now, on multiple levels at once. Score for the relevance of lessons!

Let’s imagine in our mind’s eye an amalgam of every crucifix we’ve ever seen, only Aesculapian. Picture Jesus, son of man and son of God, entwined with Adam the earthling, in an embrace, affixed atop a pole, let’s say upon the cross, uplifted on a highly visible hill outside Roman occupied Jerusalem. Like Isaiah in the temple, we in this sanctuary are given an image of the divine potential, of divine power, made accessible to humankind, in the embrace of our progenitors in flesh and spirit. Like the first, Jesus is called the second Adam, Everyman, or preferably, Everyone. And the flying serpent, the seraph, stings our lips with pentecostal fire, giving the gift of the gospel proclamation.

The allusion Jesus uses in his conversation with Nicodemus carries a remarkable claim. John is the last gospel to be composed, well after the crucifixion. The imperial crucifixion, intended to strike terror into the hearts of a subjugated people, an execution staged deliberately in high profile, becomes instead, for some, the source of an otherworldly energy. Let’s call it the Christ energy. But its source is the same healing energy made available to Israel in the wilderness and to Isaiah in the temple.

The energy at the heart of the universe flows through the uplifted body, God and human become as one. For those who respond to it, the energy becomes the resource of resistance to every form of oppression, the liberating joy of every conviction expressed in the face of danger, the soothing balm for every occasion of healing. What onlooker at that mortal uplifting would have guessed the gruesome event would precipitate a revolution, would turn the world and its worldview upside down?

It all depends on how you look at it, you see, whether you grasp the paradox of it. That’s the means of sorting, who gets it and who doesn’t. Earlier in that same week, Nicodemus just missed it. All the principalities and powers of the age are marshaled against the suffering love of a godly person, someone who preferred to die in ignominy, yet remain in solidarity with God’s investment in humanity. Is it a waste or a glory? Does force prevail or the power of love? Is it worth it in the end? To the eyes of faith, the raised emblem is the meeting place of God and humanity in the suffering love of Christ. It becomes the source, the prescription for what ails us, the cure all, the best medicine. So the epistle claims that by grace through faith we are healed and saved.

The defeat of coercion by the free allegiance to God’s own suffering love is made plain for all to see. Gil Bailie, a Roman Catholic theologian working with the sociological theory of Renee Girard of Stanford, suggests that the coercive deception of culture begins to unravel from this decisive point, the crux of history, and that a new culture is convened in solidarity with the victim of cultural injustice and oppression. Coercion backfires, bested by the alliance of humanity with God.

The epistle refers to this pervasive and deceptive world view as the spirit of the age or aeon. It may help illustrate this contention if we will return, in retrospect, to how captive we’ve been by the spirit of earlier decades, say, of the forties or fifties or sixties or seventies or eighties. And it may help to think of the first transformative cross-cultural experience you had, an encounter that woke you up to the diversity of views about life, about human potential, about the role of culture, about transcending former dimensions of consciousness, about getting a new perspective upon a formerly held world view.

The word culture derives from the word cultus, or cult. Israel cultivates a culture of redemption. Christians cultivate a culture of redemption. In our 21st century setting, we associate the word culture with the biotech industry and with what we call advanced medicine. These lessons, with their arcane symbology, remind us that the culture of godliness grows a different kind of antibody. The culture of faith, hope, and love creates healthy cells to become an essential part of the planetary immune system, helping it to heal. The culture of love, freely offered, is the best medicine in the world, and God holds the patent. Our job is to testify to its saving properties and to give away free samples.

Like Israel, as Christians, our testimony to the miracle cure of God might go something like this. Once I walked with impatience, in the spirit of resentment and complaint. Then by grace I was dosed in perseverance. Then over time, I was cultivated in the spirit of gratitude and thanksgiving. And then, by God, I began to feel better.

The promise of a cure began to come true in my life among fellow travelers. We made better progress together than when we suspected we’d be left in our disease to fend for ourselves. When we trusted God as our healer and companion, we learned to trust one another. We began to enjoy the journey. We passed hope a round like a canteen and love around like fresh baked bread. When we falter, we return our eyes to the gold standard, to the human being entwined in compassion with our brother Adam. What a lifesaver he is, the human one we call messiah/Christ, the antivenom.

It turns out that all roads don’t lead to Rome, but rather into Jerusalem by way of the Sinai and by Golgotha. The most direct way through the wilderness, from past
adversity to promised future, is to trust the good, to walk in hope, to extends ourselves to fellow pilgrims in love. We follow the uplifted ensign, aspiring to live as he lived and if, necessary, to die as well as he died. The surest way to get to the promise is to live into it, becoming as one, a sign of God’s healing power, good, strong medicine for the world. By grace, we learn to do less harm. By faith, we are given energy to do some good. We offer our sacrifice of thanksgiving that we are now so alive and one in Christ.

- The Rev. Dr. Katherine M. Lehman, March 22, 2009