Lent 4 March 22nd, 2009

Lent 4
March 22nd, 2009

For 20 years Will and I toured each winter with the Squam Lakes Natural Science Center doing a show on winter ecology.
My favorite part was at the end, when we’d all stand at the door as the children left, holding strips of fur or pieces of bone for the kids to touch. My job was to hold the live snake who had a feature role in the production. I invited everyone who passed by to touch the snake’s scales to see if they were slimy (they weren’t).
I was amazed how many kids and teachers scooted out in back of the line to avoid me and the snake. No way were they touching that thing!

Fear of snakes lies deep in the human psyche.
The story of humankind’s first sin in the Book of Genesis personifies the voice of temptation as the hiss of a serpent. “Tassssste of the fruit . . . .”
So when the Israelites began to complain of life in the wilderness where God had led them after liberating them from slavery in Egypt, God responded to their constant whining by sending poisonous serpents to harass them.
It seems an appropriate punishment, doesn’t it? A people, miraculously fed with manna in the wilderness, hissing out complaints, being attacked by serpents.

Too often we move quickly to the happy ending, the bronze snake lifted up in the desert, everybody feeling better and temporarily repenting. So let’s pause here a minute in the desert with the snakes hissing at our feet.
The Israelites in the desert rail 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.”
Angry and bitter, they scapegoat poor Moses as if it’s all his fault.
There’s a good description of them and people like them in the second lesson from the Letter to the Ephesians: they are people living in the passions of the flesh, following the desires of flesh and senses.
Now there is nothing wrong with the desires of flesh and senses—after all, God created them— but there is a lot wrong with living as if that is all there is. The Israelites refuse to remember their past, the suffering and slavery. They refuse to appreciate their present even surrounded as they are with God’s constant presence and care. They refuse to have faith in the future God has promised in a land “flowing with milk and honey.”
“Children of wrath,” they’re stuck in their own discomforts and wants, their anger and resentments against God, Moses, and each other.

That lesson from Ephesians reveals that sin is not so much a set of actions we can choose or reject, but a kind of pervasive muck in which we all get stuck, a vicious inheritance in which we all participate, a snake pit of greed and selfishness, hatred and wrath.
Here’s an example: All we have to do is walk out these doors today and go to Hannafords or the diner or café—or coffee hour—and I’m sure somebody will be talking about the AIG bonuses. It’s a colossal economic, political and moral mess. And just about everybody seems to be implicated. Politicians and journalists rail against financial managers for their greed, while at the same time they themselves are seething with wrath and oozing with self-righteousness.
Oops—here’s a good example of what I mean—look at me! I’m seething with wrath and self-righteousness. I’m hissing with anger and whining about how awful others are while conveniently forgetting my own frequent falls into self-righteousness and greed.

We are all “living in sin.”
Usually that’s a quaint expression referring to people living together without benefit of marriage.
But I find “living in sin” a helpful description of much of our lives.
“Living in sin” is living in a nest of vipers, where we poison one another.
I just finished reading Brideshead Revisited by the English writer Evelyn Waugh. Towards the end of the novel, a family incident shocks the main woman character, Julia, into looking, really looking, at her life.
Appalled, she cries out that she is “living in sin: “’Living in sin’ [is] not just doing wrong,” she says. “Living in sin, with sin, by sin, for sin, every hour, every day, year in, year out. Waking up with sin in the morning, seeing the curtains drawn on sin, bathing it, dressing it, clipping diamonds to it, feeding it, showing it round, giving it a good time, putting it to sleep at night. . . .”
Julia realizes that “living in sin” poisons and destroys everything, even the God who loves us: “Mummy dying with it; Christ dying with it, nailed hand and foot; hanging over the bed in the night-nursery; hanging year after year in the dark little study at Farm Street with the shining oilcloth; hanging in the dark church where only the old charwoman raises the dust and one candle burns; hanging at noon, high among the crowds and the soldiers; no comfort except a sponge of vinegar and the kind words of a thief; hanging forever; never the cool sepulcher and the grave cloths spread on the stone slab, never the oil and the spices in the dark cave; always the midday sun and the dice clicking for the seamless coat.”

If that’s all there is to life, “living in sin,” what is the point? If we are all serpents to one another what hope is there?
Lent gives us a gift, a hard gift: the knowledge that as humans we hold two wildly contrary truths together at the same time: Sin is real, it’s all around us and clings to us and we cling to it and it seeks to kill the spark of life within us---that’s the first thing. The second thing is that the God who loves us will do whatever it takes to save us from its venom.
What did Jesus say in the gospel 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.” And then the clincher—the reason why, the words that make all the difference, that means that the snake pit is not the only life option: What did Jesus say? Why did Jesus come to us? Because “God so loved the world.” God so loved the world.

Let us pray in the words of Guy Tillson’s prayer for the Seventh Station of the Cross:
Holy Lord Jesus, beneath the weight of your cross, you falter again, exhausted and weary from the burden you bear. You took upon yourself our human weakness so that we might enjoy the very holiness of God. In our darkness, may we turn to your light; in our exhaustion, may we find rest in you; in our lack of purpose, reveal your way to us; and, in our failings, may we rise up forgiven. Amen.