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March 30, 2003 Sermon:
"Count Down to Easter - Serpent: The Agent of Death"
Scripture: Numbers 21:4-9 Larry M. Gerber

We're in the month of March, so it must be time for Madness: The NCAA basketball tournament is a week away from its finale. We are down to The Final Four: (at the time of this writing, the final four have not yet advanced)

These four college teams have battled through the brackets to reach the Sweet Sixteen, the Elite Eight, the Final Four, and now two of them will go on to the National Championship Game.
But this particular March, our nation is facing another fierce contest, one that is played with bombs instead of basketballs. Participants are members of the Armed Services, not Division 1 athletes. Rather than trying to reach New Orleans to win a championship, our troops are attempting to make it to Baghdad to topple a tyrant. It's a very different kind of March Madness. Now don't get me wrong. I'm not passing judgment on the political and military strategy of the day. I know that Christians in our country are deeply divided about the morality of invasion, making theological arguments both for and against a preemptive strike against Iraq. Some say that our troops are doing the divinely sanctioned work of liberation, using their weapons to free the oppressed, protect the innocent and punish the guilty. Others argue that our Lord Jesus would take a stand against the war, since he opposed the use of violence and stressed the importance of peacemaking. Regardless of where we stand, we're now all feeling the insanity of instability. Our sense of well-being and personal balance is being thrown off by terrorist threats, Code Orange alerts, and official instructions about putting duct-tape on doorways and water bottles in the bathrooms. Anxiety is eating us up as we worry about how to protect ourselves and our loved ones in the event of an attack by a dirty bomb or a chemical or biological weapon.

This is a time of March Madness, for each and every one of us. Too many of us are glued to the 24 hour news coverage of a brutal war, that is projected to last for weeks, if not months. We will drain our sensibility if we drink in too much of the daily happenings. We are in danger of over saturating ourselves with the daily war happenings, at the expense of our own well being.

We are living in unstable times at home, as well as abroad. In times of instability, it is important to remember that Jesus was never a passive or powerless victim of events. When he faced challenges, he rose up to meet them, with the skill and confidence and energy of a college athlete. In fact, he played a game much more extreme than the basketball being played all this month in arenas across the country. Jesus played SlamBall. According to The New York Times, SlamBall is played on a custom-made spring- loaded court, with baskets 10 feet high and four rectangular trampolines in the court in front of the baskets. Players wear soft helmets and body padding, since football- and-hockey-style body contact is allowed, and they concentrate their efforts on bouncing, leaping, hitting and dunking. "Conceptually, it sounds like a wild and crazy and wacky idea," says Mason Gordon, the creator of SlamBall, "but when you put a bunch of sports into a blender, it works." (Liz Robbins, "Are You Ready for Some SlamBall? Basketball Just Got Extreme," The New York Times, July 31, 2002, C14)

In John 2:13-22, Jesus steps onto a court that is every bit as action-packed as a SlamBall stadium. He enters the Jerusalem temple during the Passover of the Jews - - a religious festival that must feel like March Madness to the residents of that city. The historian Josephus estimates that as many as 2,700,000 pilgrims congregate in Jerusalem for the festival -- an absolutely immense crowd. And since animal sacrifice is an important part of the Passover celebration, huge numbers of cattle, sheep and doves have to be made available to the faithful. Passover is a slam-dunk, spiritually speaking. It's a fantastic festival, commemorating God's liberation of Israel from Egypt, the most awesome event in its history. For faithful Jews, both then and now, it's nothing less than a religious adrenaline-rush. But Jesus is pumped about something else when he enters the temple. Finding some folks selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others changing money at their tables, he gets as fired up as a SlamBall player hitting the trampoline and performing an 8-foot vertical leap. Making a whip of cords, he drives the sheep and the cattle out of the temple. He also pours out the coins of the moneychangers and overturns their tables, before saying to the people selling the doves, "Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father's house a marketplace!" (John 2:13-16).

He's never passive, never powerless -- even in the face of daunting challenges. This is the SlamBall Jesus.

Our Sanctuary is not unlike the temple of Jesus' time. It is a house of prayer, not a place for political pronouncements. The church is a place where people encounter the living God and experience transformation through that encounter, a place where the power and the presence of the Lord is felt in preaching and prayer and song and congregational spirit. If our focus is on politics, we're going to get slammed. But if we concentrate on connecting people to the Lord God Almighty, we're going to soar.

Our goal will not be unlike that of Jesus, finding peace in this energetic activity, until the madness ends.

Let' shift our attention to today's scripture for a little while.
Hoaxes have been with us for ages, involving snake oil, missing links, long-lost diaries, computer viruses and incredible e-mail offers. Which leads us to wonder: Can we trust the story of the snake on a stake?

A little over a hundred years ago — long before there was a Fear Factor reality game show, Clark "The Rattlesnake King" Stanley is said to have held crowds spellbound at the 1893 exposition in Chicago as he slaughtered hundreds of rattlesnakes and processed the juices into a cure-all called Stanley's Snake Oil Liniment. An ad for Stanley's snake oil described it as "a wonderful pain-destroying compound." It was "the strongest and best liniment known for the cure of all pain and lameness." It treated "rheumatism, neuralgia, sciatica, lame back, lumbago, contracted muscles, toothache, sprains, swellings," and it cured "frostbites, chilblains, bruises, sore throat, [and] bites of animals, insects and reptiles." Wrong. There was no snake oil in Stanley's Snake Oil Liniment. In 1917, tests of a federally seized shipment of Snake Oil Liniment revealed it to be mostly mineral oil containing about one percent fatty oil — thought to have been beef fat — along with some red pepper and possible traces of turpentine and camphor. Clark Stanley was no Rattlesnake King. He was a certified quack.

We have as many, or more hoaxes today. Says journalist Thomas Hayden, who has received more than his share of phony "virus alert" e-mails: "The Internet's power is more readily harnessed to proliferate hoaxes than to quash them." In a golden age of hoaxes, where is the truth to be found? Can we trust the stories we hear about snake oil, missing links, long-lost diaries, computer viruses, incredible e-mail offers — and bronze serpents? No. no, no, no, no — and yes.

The story recorded in our text about the serpent on the pole sounds quirky, but Moses was deadly serious. The whining needed to stop. The Hebrews had been complaining about the lack of good food and water in the desert, and they are getting so frustrated that they ask the insolent question, "Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness?" (21:5).

Scared to death, the people stampede to Moses and confess how bad they have been: "We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us." So Moses prays for the people, and God answers this prayer by giving a most incredible set of instructions: "Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live." So Moses makes a serpent of bronze, puts it on a pole, and sure enough: When a person bitten by a serpent gazes in faith upon the snake on a stake, the snake-bitten victim survives (vv. 7-9). The mistake here is to think people were looking at a snake. They weren't. They were looking beyond the snake to the power the serpent signified: the power and reality of God.

It's like us today, we look up to the cross, but we focus on that which goes beyond the cross. The cross does not heal, but as we look up to it, we focus on that which went beyond, the Risen Savior. The point for the Israelites is the same as the message for us: Faith in God satisfies and heals. It's no scam. When the people of Israel lift their eyes to the serpent, they are really lifting their eyes to God. They are trusting God to heal them, and their trust is rewarded with healing and new life.

In his conversation with Nicodemus, Jesus makes the same point. "Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness," he said, "so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life" (John 3:15). For both ancient and postmodern men and women there is a process at work in the journey to healing and redemption. Then and now, one has to acknowledge the presence of an infection.

In the March Madness, which will continue into April, and beyond, in the re- building of Iraq, and in many ways, the re-building of America, and the rest of the world, in a time of unprecedented terror and instability, we must deal with the agent of death.

Today, no doubt there are many who do not understand that their souls are dying, or — even if they do — refuse to admit that God through Jesus Christ is the SoulCure they desperately need. But acknowledging the infection alone is not enough. One ­â€” then and now — must look and live.

Energized by faith, the head must turn toward the cross and look at the One who died for us all. We must not allow the serpent, the agent of death, get a hold on us. We must focus on the One Eternal God, who will sustain us and uphold us, even in these days of darkness and fear.

Take the most famous verse in the Bible. Substitute the word "look" for believe and you have it: "For God so loved the world," says John, "that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who looks on him will not perish but have eternal life" (John 3:16).

God loves us. Jesus died for us. In him we have eternal life. No hoax.

Let me know what you think. The church Email is: SLUMC@att.net, Phone: 480.895.8766