What Does It Mean to Believe?

Thanks to the writing of D. Mark Davis and the resources provided by Gil Bailie at "Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary," where I got even more help from Sarah Dylan Breuer and Tom Truby.

JOHN 3:14-21

“And 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.

“Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.”

This is the Word of the Lord.

What does it mean to believe? Is it a simple process of mentally agreeing to a set of doctrinal statements, does it involve training ourselves to think and act differently? Is “belief” something more – or something wholly different?

Our passage this morning starts out with Jesus making reference to a frankly troubling passage in the Book of Numbers: the Children of Israel, making their journey to the Promised Land, are complaining that there isn't anything to eat or drink, and what there is to eat – manna – is terrible. God responds to the complaints by sending a plague of poisonous snakes.

And even though one of the things the Jewish people were never ever supposed to do was to make graven images, when the people repent and ask Moses to ask God to save them, what does God tell Moses to do?

Yep. A graven image. Of a snake, on a pole. God doesn't take the snakes away, but when someone is bitten, all they have to do is look at the snake on the pole, and they won't die.

By the way, many years later, one of the Kings of Israel, Hezekiah, destroyed the bronze snake that Moses made, because people had started worshiping it – which was why God had said not to make graven images in the first place. But I digress, sort of.

Jesus is referring to this incident in the life of the Jewish people to draw a parallel between the lifting of the snake on the pole as a means of saving the people from death, and his own lifting up on the cross as a means of salvation to the world. We know this because the very next sentence Jesus utters in today's passage is possibly the most well-known Bible passage in the universe: John 3:16. “For God so loved the world – a better translation might be “God loved the world in this way:” – that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

Now, I would argue first that we do a disservice by quoting John 3:16 by itself. It is an incomplete thought, made whole by the next verse: “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

And it's my inclination to stop there, honestly. As uncomfortable as I am with the idea of God sending poisonous snakes because a bunch of people are tired of eating manna for every meal – manna sausage for breakfast, manna sandwiches for lunch, manna pot roast for dinner, bamanna bread for dessert... I see 'way too much condemnation in popular Christianity today as it is, so all the talk about nonbelievers being condemned in the next verses feels like overkill. It frankly sounds a little like God sent Jesus as a reason to condemn people... turn or burn, agree with my set of doctrinal statements (because that's what the word “believe” has come to mean) or go to Hell...

And I don't think it's that simple. I don't think God can be distilled down to a choice between a benevolent Grandparent or a heavenly vending machine or an angry, vengeful deity with his hand poised over the “smite” button.

And I do not think we are using the word “believe” in the right way. Yes, “believe” does mean “to have confidence in the truth, the existence, or the reliability of something, although without absolute proof that one is right in doing so,” that is technically correct... but I do not think it is theologically correct.

As I understand it, the Greek word group pistos tends to be shaded less as “belief” and more as “faithfulness” and “trust” – because in doing so, it denotes more of a relationship than a state of thinking – so why, when we see its verb form, pisteuo, should we satisfied with the word “believe?” Is faith in the risen Christ, the One who was lifted up for us, a simple matter of intellectual assent? Is Christianity a mental exercise, is it just a way of thinking?

What does it mean to “believe?” It means to trust.

And while we're on the subject of Greek... I am not a Greek scholar, but more than one scholar and commentator that I have read this week brings up a very important point about krino and krisis, the words translated “condemn” and “condemned,” respectively. Both Gil Bailie and Mark Davis, for example, make a very compelling argument for krino and krisis to be translated rather as “judge” and “judgment,” respectively.

And make no mistake, this is not a matter of rewriting Scripture, but of making a choice in translating Scripture – it's a question of, if I may quote Paul from the epistle to Timothy, “rightly dividing the Word of Truth.”

The word “krino” doesn't, in and of itself, have a negative connotation. It's more ambiguous, like our English word “judge.” We can judge things in positive and negative ways, but the word “condemn” just means “condemn.”

So here's the way the verses might read: “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever trusts in him may have the life of God's new age. For God loved the world in this way: he gave his only Son, so that everyone who trusts in him may not perish but may have the life of God's new age. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Those who trust in him are not judged; but those who do not trust are judged already, because they have not trusted in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.”

Do you see the difference? To say God condemns isn't wrong, necessarily. God condemns a lot of things – idolatry and injustice, for example. But is God in the business of condemnation? Is there a divine game of whack-a-mole going on, with you and I playing the moles?

It's interesting to note that, when the snakes came on the Hebrews in the wilderness, they didn't go to Moses talking about the evil that God had visited upon them, they said, “We have sinned...” Whoever sent the serpents, they understood them to be the product of their own actions, their own choice to complain. Theirs was the active role, not God's.

“Those who trust in him are not judged; but those who do not trust are judged already, because they have not trusted in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.”

Who or what we trust has consequences, doesn't it? If we trust in money, or power, or politicians, or drugs, or alcohol, or food, or fame, or security, what are we in fact placing our faith in? One more dollar, one more rich old man who might vote our way this time, one more buzz, one more bite, one more FaceBook like, one more lock on the door? Because in the end, when they close the lid and lower the casket, what are any of those things worth?

Putting our trust in the risen Christ saves us from the cesspool of self-absorption, rescues us from the idolatry of things, and releases us from the certainty that this life, this existence, this here-and-now is all that there is and ever will be. When we put our trust in Christ, we enter into relationship with the eternal.

Make no mistake about it: following Jesus is not a program for self-improvement; it's an invitation to a relationship; it is inclusion in a community. It's dislocation from a worldview that perpetuates injustice, death, and alienation, knitting us into a network of relationships that bring healing, reconciliation, and abundant life rooted in the eternal.

Think about how many things are set by our birth in this world: We are born in a geographical location that can accustom one person to unjust privilege and prevent another person from access to clean water, education, the chance to live to adulthood. One person is born to a family that instills a sense that he or she is loved, while another person's family leaves them with a sense that he or she is deeply inadequate. We are born with a skin color that will also condition our sense of who we are, what we deserve, whom we may love or fear. This world is set up in ways that try to lock us into patterns of relationship based on our birth -- patterns that separate us from one another and from God.

How might the world be different if those patterns were disrupted, if you and I could be sisters and brothers in healthy relationship? ... Let me put it this way:

What would our relationships look like if we shared one birth and were raised in one loving, supportive family? What would the economy look like if we took seriously the fact that we live and work in a world that is our common inheritance, instead of a set of disconnected chunks of land and resources to be conquered like a board game? What would the world look like if we saw every child as our own little sister or brother, if "family first" included them all as our own flesh and blood?

That's what it means to put our trust in Jesus. Jesus offers us freedom from relationships that ensnare, and the choice to relate to one another as beloved children of one loving God. It's a choice not just for a new name, it's a new world of new relationships, of new and abundant life.

“And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever trusts in him may have eternal life.”

The serpent in the wilderness represented more than just a poisonous snake. The Hebrew people had become poisoned with doubt, with fear, they had become disgusted by the gift that God sent them every morning with the dew – manna. Looking at the serpent meant looking directly at the worst of themselves, it meant facing what they were and trusting enough to turn away from it.

God did not nail Jesus to the cross. We did. Think about it: it was the rage of the scribes and Pharisees against a man challenging the religious status quo, it was the greed of Judas, it was the fear that the chief priests and the Sanhedrin had of upsetting the Roman occupiers, it was the fear of the crowd that turned Pilate's resolve to capitulation, and it was the bloodlust of that crowd shrieking “Crucify him!” that killed Jesus.

When Jesus is lifted up on the cross, we see what happens when we put our trust in our pedigree, our won wealth, our own theological and doctrinal purity, like the scribes and Pharisees. We see what happens when we put our trust in cold hard cash, like Judas. We see what happens when we put our trust in political systems and corporate power structures, like the chief priests and the Sanhedrin. We see what happens when we bow to the whim of popular opinion, like Pilate. We see what happens when we give ourselves over to sensationalism and the thrill of immediate gratification, like the crowd.

This is the Good News: God's love is so complete, so irrevocable, so egregiously immense that it survived the worst that we could do to God's only begotten son! We look at the cross, and we see the worst in ourselves, the product of the idols and the temporal things we put our trust in, but we do not see our end in those things. Rather, in moving our trust from the temporary, the self-serving, the idolatrous, to the risen and living Christ, we find the light of God's eternal love, and the truth that indeed sets us free.

This is what it means to believe.

So You Wanna Go Back To Egypt?

The title's a nod to the late Keith Green, whose music and ministry helped shape my early days in the faith. His song of that name was playing in my head the entire time I was writing this sermon.

I appreciate the writing of David Kalas, and the joke I "borrowed" from the Rev. Dr. Delmer L. Chilton, in helping me write this week's sermon. And yes, I "borrowed" "bamanna bread" from Keith Green.

The very idea that I could hope to unpack the depth of Jesus comparing his crucifixion to Moses' lifting of the bronze serpent in the wilderness is sheer folly at best, and deadly hubris at worst. I barely scratched the surface, and likely bungled some bits even at that. Happily, the congregation is good at forgiving me when I do that. They've had a lot of practice, y'see...

Here's the audio of the sermon:



Check this out on Chirbit
 

Ephesians 2:1-10

You were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once lived, following the course of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient. All of us once lived among them in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of flesh and senses, and we were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else. But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ — by grace you have been saved — and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God — not the result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.

John 3:14-21

“And 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.

“Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.”

Numbers 21:4-9

From Mount Hor they set out by the way to the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom; but the people became impatient on the way. The people spoke against God and against Moses, “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.” Then the LORD sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died. The people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned by speaking against the LORD and against you; pray to the LORD to take away the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed for the people. And the LORD said 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.

This is the Word of the Lord.

It’s a pretty safe bet that, if you open up the book of Numbers at random and put your finger down on a page, you’ll be pointing to a passage where the children of Israel are worrying, doubting, and/ or complaining. Honestly, I don’t know how Moses put up with it all those years.

Especially in this instance! They complain about having no food… and in the same sentence say they hate the food. Um, what?

Well, yeah, there was food, enough to go around. Manna. Every day.

For breakfast, manna waffles, with a side of manna eggs and manna sausage, washed down with a nice hot cup of manna coffee. For lunch they had manna sandwiches: manna between two slices of manna. Or you could get real adventurous and have a manna club sandwich – three slices of manna! For dinner, manna pot roast. Maybe for dessert, manna pound cake or bamanna bread…

Yeah, manna. Lots and lots of the same old thing every day.

And instead of the monotony pushing the people to look forward with hungry anticipation to where they were headed, the Promised Land, a land flowing with milk and honey, they grumbled about what they’d left behind, back in Egypt.

Sure, they’d been slaves. Yeah, they’d had to work constantly on the Pharaoh’s building projects, backbreaking labor that drove them to an early grave. But man, remember the food? Olives as big as your fist! And the bread! So soft you could use it as a pillow. Oh, how we miss the food…

Imagine: God had brought them from slavery in a foreign land, through the Red Sea, had provided for their needs, protected them in battle, and was sending them (or, well, their children, anyway) to a glorious new land of abundance, full of fields they had not plowed, homes they had not built, orchards they had not planted…

It reminds me of the story about this company that had fallen on hard times. There wasn’t enough work to keep the people busy, but rather than lay everyone off, the owner told the employees, “I am sure things will improve soon. In fact, I’m going to keep everyone on full salary; just come in on Wednesdays to maintain the machinery and keep the place clean.”

From the back of the group, someone said, “Do we have to come in every Wednesday?”

The children of Israel wished they could go back to Egypt, undo all that God had done for them, even if it meant being captive again. So the Lord sent serpents. Poisonous snakes.

Now, I’ve read a lot of preachers and bloggers and commentators who are very uncomfortable about this passage. It brings up a lot of questions about the nature of God, and causes people to struggle to reconcile our idea of a loving, New Testament God with an angry, vengeful and capricious Old Testament God.

And what does it say about a God who would send snakes? Real, live, poisonous snakes, the kind that like to kill people? After all, they were just doing some whining, for crying out loud! Isn’t that like burning down a house to kill a mosquito?

I want to suggest to you that if God’s intention had been to kill the children of Israel for their doubt and complaining and unbelief, for wanting to go back to familiar slavery, comfortable servitude, the soothing routine of the crushing burden and the cracking whip to their backs, then God could have – would have – simply killed them. All of them. Instantly. Or, if God’s plan was for the children of Israel to die slowly, in terror and agony, God could have simply offered no remedy, ignoring Moses when he came to plead on the people’s behalf.

So, was God simply looking for an apology? For repentance? Well, if that was all there was to the story, then the serpents would have disappeared the moment they all ran to Moses, admitting they’d been boneheads and begging him to intercede. Asking, in fact, that God take the snakes away.

No, the snakes don’t leave, and people didn’t stop being bitten, but God does provide a cure. A strange, counterintuitive cure.

The cure had nothing to do with raining antivenin down on the encampment, or teaching the people how to extract the venom from the bite, the way the old Boy Scout’s first aid manual did.

The cure was another snake. A metal one. On a pole. When someone got bitten, they had simply to look at the metal snake on the pole, look at the image of the thing that was causing them to die… and they would live.

God did not want the people to die, you see. God wanted the people to trust.

In the dark of night, something like eight hundred years later, a figure emerges from the shadows in the narrow streets of Jerusalem and knocks on a door. A young man answers, wiping sleep from his eyes, and a few minutes later the shadowy figure steps into the courtyard of the house, and settles next to the fire to speak with Jesus.

Nicodemus was a man with questions. I imagine him as a fellow who had spent his life following the rules, keeping the rituals, playing the game the way it was meant to be played. But lately, he’d seen the edges of his carefully woven tapestry beginning to fray. He saw his fellow Jews who, just like him, were doing all they knew to keep the Law, make the sacrifices, pray the prayers, but things just kept getting worse. Food was scarce, all the money went to the foreign occupiers, the leaders of the very Temple of God were in collusion with the Romans, and there was no end in sight.

Perhaps Nicodemus had been in the Temple the day Jesus had overturned the tables of the moneychangers, had heard him yelling about making the house of God into a Super Wal-Mart, and had known, deep in his heart, that this dirty, nondescript rabbi from some Podunk town in the middle of who-knows-where was right.

But there in the courtyard, warmed by the fire and the cups of wine, Nicodemus grows ever more confused by the things that Jesus says. Being born all over again? Born of water and the Spirit? What does it all mean?

I wonder if it all clicked for him when Jesus referred to Moses’ snake on a stick? After all, hadn’t Nicodemus been thinking that the world was a sick place, snakebit with corruption and greed, dying beneath the crushing force of Roman occupation?

All of Judea prayed for the Messiah to come, to re-establish the throne of David, drive out the oppressors, and institute the eternal, perfect, but earthy, Kingdom.

They’d asked for God to send the Roman snakes away, but God hadn’t, and every day it all seemed to get worse and worse, and it wasn’t hard to imagine that God really had forgotten the Jewish nation, or worse actively wanted to destroy them, kill them all.

“And 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.”

Perhaps, Nicodemus thought, God didn’t want them to die. God wanted them to trust.

Crucifixion had been perfected by the Romans over the centuries as a way to not simply kill their prisoners, but to humiliate their enemies and terrify their subjects. Crucifixion was doubly terrifying to the Jewish people, because the book of Deuteronomy says that anyone who was hung on a pole was cursed – so not only did they endure the pain of death, those that believed in life after death knew that their afterlife would be doomed as well. All in all it was an exquisitely slow and painful way to die, and the Romans made sure and did it on a hill, on a cross big enough that everyone could see the suffocating, naked body of whatever cursed soul had crossed the Roman governor that day.

“And 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.”

What does this mean to you and I, today?

It doesn’t take long to come to the conclusion that the world we live in is cursed, even today. While much of the world struggles to find enough food to eat, other parts of the world deal with an epidemic of obesity. While part of the world woke up this morning dealing with the after-effects of too much to drink on St. Patrick’s Day, in other parts of this same planet there isn’t enough clean water to drink. While part of the world worries that the video games our children play are too violent, in parts of Africa children are kidnapped in the night and forced to fight and kill on behalf of armies rebelling against a government not much better, in practice, than the kidnappers themselves. Power and wealth protect and enrich themselves, while the middle class disappears and the poor grow ever poorer.

Even when we don’t struggle to feed our families, even when clean water is as far away as the nearest tap, even when our children can sleep in their own beds, knowing that Joseph Kony won’t sneak in during the night and steal them for his army, there’s plenty enough curse to go around: the curse of resting our self-worth on the things we own, where we live, our race or our gender.

We are snakebit, and we die a little more from the poison of greed, affluence, and self-absorption every day.

The image of the snake saved the children of Israel from death. All they had to do was look to it. All they had to do was trust… to have confidence… to believe.

In Galatians we read that Christ became the curse, in order to redeem us from the curse of the law.

Christ became the curse, became the image of the very thing that is killing us.

“And 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.”

We who live under the curse must look to Jesus, who became the very image of the thing that is killing us, and far from simply keeping that poison from destroying us, looking at the Son of Man lifted up brings us the promise of the Kingdom, the assurance of eternal life.

And please understand, this is not an exclusionary event, something done to separate the “good people” from the “bad people,” to offer a way of quantifying “us” and “them.” I have said this before, there is no such thing as “us” and “them.” All of us, left to our own devices, will move immediately as far from God as possible, will wallow as deep in the poison of the curse as we can get, and do so as quickly as we can. In the language of this cursed world, we are all “them.” And, as the book of Romans reminds us, God demonstrates God’s love this way: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Or to use the words of Jesus, “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. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” And later in the Gospel of John, Jesus states, “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”

So we who have looked upon Christ, lifted up, the image of the curse, we who have been brought from death into life in Christ, have a choice to make.

We can continue living as if we are under the curse, letting the advertisers and the infomercial producers tell us what to buy and how much to spend on it so we can be better than the other people who didn’t buy this or spend that. We can continue letting the politicians and pundits and talk show hosts tell us whose fault everything is, who to hate, who to distrust, who to fight… or we can lift Jesus up, in doing the things that are true, and draw everyone – everyone – to Him.