Sermon for 4 Lent B; March 14, 2021
Good Shepherd, Acton
May the words of my mouth, and the meditation of all our hearts, be acceptable in your sight, O God, our Strength and our Redeemer. Amen.
The photos on my phone from a year ago capture how quickly things changed. Snapshots from February vacation week show my 80-something parents, my niece, and my three kids and I enjoying a day at a very crowded New England Aquarium in Boston. And the weekend we took my Dad to the New England Boat Show at the Boston Convention Center. We climbed all over the boats, touching handrails, ducking into tight cabins with other guests, breathing air that very well could have contained COVID droplets. We had no idea what was coming and consider ourselves very lucky.
Even my pictures from March 11, 2020 show how little we understood. That’s the day I took off from work to chaperone my daughter’s class trip to the Harvard Natural History museum. We were a little aware of the need to be extra cautious. I brought along some hand sanitizer and some disinfecting wipes for lunch time. But otherwise we roamed the museum freely. I had no idea that after that day off, I would never return to a normal work day at Old North Church again. Within 24 hours, like you here, we made the decision to cancel worship. I remember the Senior Warden arguing passionately that the announcement not say we would be closed “for the foreseeable future” because she considered that too extreme.
March 14- a year ago today, my photos show three of us volunteering at Old North’s outreach program that morning, distributing food to North End seniors. We decided not to invite the guests into the building, as we normally did, but to distribute the bags from the doorway. Within a month two of the guests, residents of a neighborhood senior residence, would be dead from COVID.
That afternoon I sent my husband a text from the Acton Trader Joe’s with a photo of completely empty shelves. “This is getting scary” I wrote.
None of us, perhaps outside of public health experts, could have foreseen the year that would follow. And I suppose it’s good we did not know. I cannot imagine what it would have felt like at the beginning of everything had we been told how long we would have to endure. That it would be six months before our kids would go back to school- and even then only 2 days a week. That over 1/2 million Americans would die- (even now, we are averaging well over a thousand US deaths a day as of this weekend). That, actually, it would be far beyond “the foreseeable future” before church would regather again in person. And those fun day trips with my parents, for which they had moved from their home in CT to enjoy with their grandkids, those would be replaced by grocery drop-offs on their front porch. The toll on our collective mental health, economy, elders and children is especially hard to bear. It has been a very long year for all of us.
So on this one year anniversary of the week everything came to a halt, it is fitting that our Old Testament lesson takes us into the wilderness with Moses and the Israelites. Perhaps we can relate to their plight more honestly than we ever have before, having spent the last year of our own lives in the wilderness of pandemic.
You’ll recall that the Israelites spent forty years wandering, and complaining their way to the Promised Land. Enslaved in Egypt, their ancestors suffered and toiled for four hundred years until Moses led them to freedom. They crossed the Red Sea in triumph, only to wander for another forty years in the dessert wilderness.
God assured them the Promised Land lay ahead, but it would be a long, dangerous, hard journey. It’s likely that few, if any, of those who escaped Egypt would live to see it. Forty years is a long time- can you imagine if our quarantine lasted that long?- and back in those days, with shortened life spans, at least two generations would come and go before they reached the Land of Milk and Honey.
To say, as our Scripture does, “the people became impatient on the way” is a rather big understatement! They murmured and complained constantly. “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.”
This behavior drives Moses crazy. For 40 years he endures the complaints of his people, who frequently blame him for their hardships. He doubts his own ability to lead such a stiff necked and stubborn people. But God empowers him to continue, so Moses endures their whining and encourages them to maintain their trust in God. But now, they are starting to “speak against God.” It is one thing to speak against Moses, and his brother Aaron, but quite another to speak against God and distrust God’s guidance and promise.
When God sends manna from heaven for them to eat and provides water in the desert for them to drink, they complain and doubt whether God is with them, even though the evidence of God’s care for them is literally falling out of the heavens upon them. And when, in the verses just before today’s passage, God answers their prayer by helping the Israelites defeat a Canaanite army, they fail to offer thanksgiving, and instead speak out against God. So God gets angry. Very angry. God sends snakes. Lots of them! And poisonous ones at that. And they bite the people and many die.
Suddenly there are snakes everywhere, and the people quickly realize their need to repent and they beg Moses to pray to the Lord to take the snakes away. God must have known this would be a good way to get the people to be more faithful. If daily food and water in the desert aren’t enough to remind them to give thanks to God, then poisonous snakes ought to get their attention! God knows our human nature well. How often we neglect to offer thanksgiving when good things happen, but we sure are quick to turn to God when we need help.
Perhaps, particularly so, when snakes are involved, as I know full well. I am terrified of snakes. All snakes. Doesn’t matter what size. What kind. Whether a pet, or a harmless garter snake in my yard, or a lazy sleeping snake behind thick glass in a zoo. They all scare me equally, whether poisonous or not.
Or at least that is what I thought until the night we discovered a rattlesnake coiled up near our campground in the Grand Canyon. I shared about that trip in a sermon a few weeks ago. I neglected to mention The Snake.
Our guides on that trip said the usual, unhelpful things when the rattlesnake was spotted: “Don’t bother it and it won’t bother you.” “It’s more scared of you than you are of it” - Which I doubt. That snake probably saw people every night at that campground and I was encountering my very first wild rattlesnake within an uncomfortably short slither away from where I planned to sleep. When I pointed this out, one of our guides offered this especially reassuring piece of advice: “If you notice a snake in your sleeping bag, just lie still and let it crawl out first.” Needless to say, my fear of harmless garter snakes in no way compares to the terror of being in the presence of a wild, loose rattlesnake.
So I get the fear of the Israelites. I can relate to their desperate plea that the Lord take the serpents away. I’ve been known to pray that prayer myself, under far less dangerous circumstances. And if God ever feels I’m not devoted enough to my prayers, a snake or two will certainly get me praying right away.
Luckily, for the Israelites, God answers their prayer. He hears their confession, their admission of sin, and he commands Moses to make a bronze serpent and put it on a pole so that from then on, “whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.”
And just like that the very thing they were afraid would kill them, becomes the means to healing and life. Sound familiar? It’s the paradox of our faith. The story of the cross as well. An image of terror and death that becomes the way to new life- for Jesus. And for us.
God takes the objects of our fear and death and turns them into the way to new life. Thus those who look at the serpent of bronze will live. And those who gaze upon the cross of Christ will live eternally.
And perhaps this gives us a way to think about this year of pandemic as well. Because God will never abandon us in our suffering and death. God will never leave us to face our hardships alone. God will not allow our fears to conquer us. And throughout this year of isolation… this year of sickness for so many, and death for too many, God has been in the midst of us.
It’s a bittersweet milestone we are passing this week — a full year into the pandemic. And even though there is much reason to hope that it will all be over soon… there is a lot that has been lost forever. My own emotions have been all over the place this week— I’m delighted by the prospect of a more normal life come summer and encouraged by the increased availability of vaccines. Yet, I am exhausted when I consider all we have endured, the burdens we have carried, and the challenges which lie ahead.
I have always appreciated the stories of the Israelites in the wilderness. -Maybe not the part about the snakes so much- but it feels very real to me that God’s chosen people grumble and complain, get lost, and can be both incredibly faithful and hopeful and also distrustful and unfaithful. They slog along toward the Promised Land. It takes a very long time. It is hard. It is not always fun. There are snakes along the way— the really scary kind. And yet they persevere because that’s the stuff of which we are made. We are people who live by God’s promise. Who try our best to be faithful, and succeed sometimes, but fail along the way too.
We wander. We complain. We try and fail and try again.
And God never leaves us.
Not Ever.
And that’s a message that I am grateful to hear right about now. -A year into the pandemic. When we are worn out from wandering. And hopeful, but still a little fearful too. We’re getting tired of the manna of this wilderness and are ready for some fun again, but we are not at the end of our journey just yet.
And that’s ok. Because God will see us through to the end. As God has always done. And God will always do. Helping us face all that scares us so that we, too, may live.
Thanks be to God. Amen.