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Last Sunday we left the people of Israel at Mount Sinai where
they had received the commandments of God. They spent about a
year at this holy mountain. (They arrived at Sinai in Exodus
19:1; they did not break camp until Numbers 10:11.) In our text
for today, they are on the move again through the trackless
wilderness. Their wilderness wanderings were the best and the
worst of times for these chosen ones of God. On the one hand it
was the time when God and the people were on close and intimate
terms. God delivered them from Egypt. Looking back on this
decisive moment in their history, the people of God made this
memorable confession:

And you shall make response before the Lord your God, "A
wandering Aramean was my father; and he went down into Egypt and
sojourned there, few in number; and there he became a nation,
great, mighty, and populous. And the Egyptians treated us
harshly, and afflicted us, and laid upon us hard bondage. Then we
cried to the Lord the God of our fathers, and the Lord heard our
voice, and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression; and
the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an
outstretched arm, with great terror, with signs and wonders ...."
(Deuteronomy 26:5-8)

So the chosen ones experienced God's great care and attention,
through the Exodus from Egypt to the holy mountain of Sinai where
they received guidance for obedience and service. God did not
supply all their wants, but God saw to all their physical and
spiritual needs -- at a time when they were helpless and had
nowhere to turn.
But it was also the worst of times. Wilderness wandering,
whining and complaining went together. But what is really
surprising in all this grumbling is the disgusting regularity
with which the Israelites wanted to return to the security of
making bricks out of straw under the orders of the oppressive
government of Egypt. It seems that the security of slavery was
more important than the freedom of the wilderness. (The Bible
does not read like some romance story. It is uncomfortably and
candidly honest!)
So in our story today, "they were on the road again," avoiding
the enemy territory of Edom, grumbling and impatient as usual.
They were wearing out and so was their leader, Moses. Moses was
probably wondering why he ever left the flesh pots of Egypt or
the quiet, tranquil life of a shepherd herding his father-in-
law's sheep. Again and again Moses had learned that it is a lot
easier to deal with woolly sheep than woolly people. They accused
him of inept leadership when they ran short of water. He
continued to get it when they ran short of food. He was a leader
who was also caught in the middle. If he wasn't busy convincing
his people that God had really called him, he was busy arguing
with God that the people were worth calling.
Once again Moses heard the familiar lament, "Why did you bring
us out of Egypt to die in this desert, where there is no food or
water? We can't stand any more of this miserable food." Their
attitude reminds me a bit of my student days at college and our
consistent complaining about the miserable, tasteless, starchy
food we were being served in the cafeteria. But nobody took our
complaining too seriously!
The children of Israel were not so fortunate. God heard and
God acted and now we have the strange story of the snakes.

"Then the Lord sent poisonous snakes among the people and many
Israelites were bitten and died." This Old Testament story is a
difficult one for our modern, scientific ears. God's people were
certainly behaving in an obnoxious fashion, but the punishment
seems a bit severe. Does God really turn rattlesnakes loose among
people? Can one be healed simply by looking at the bronze or
copper image of a snake that is mounted on a pole? That sounds
like magical hocus-pocus, a voodoo kind of healing that believers
in God are supposed to avoid. Well, we can make the technical
point that God sent the snakes, but it was the people who stepped
on them! It also seems clear that it was God and not the snakes
that caused the healing.
Perhaps it might be of additional help to learn that snakes
have a rather interesting, if ambiguous religious history. The
snake was cursed by God to forever crawl in the dust for its role
in the sin of Adam and Eve. Here in our story the snake is
elevated on a pole for healing purposes. We know that even today,
the image of the serpent is the healing symbol for our medical
profession. We still have snake cults among some religious people
in Appalachia who handle the poisonous reptiles as a sign of
their strong faith in God.
There is some evidence that there was a snake cult operating
among the people of Israel. It was probably the "physical
healing" dimension of their faith. The Bible tells us of this
kind of snake worship in the temple of Jerusalem during the reign
of King Hezekiah. (2 Kings 18:4) Apparently, it was getting out
of hand, because the good king had the image destroyed.
Archeologists have uncovered bronze images of snakes in an
abandoned copper mine that could have been the location of this
particular crisis, but this is a highly speculative conclusion.
We are dealing here with a lot of tangled history that will
probably never be completely unraveled. But there is considerable
evidence that the appearance of snakes in this wilderness crisis
was something more than just a coincidence, and something more
than voodoo magic at the hands of an unseeing and uncaring God.

Now you have probably heard more about snakes than you wanted
to. But down through history to the present time, snakes continue
to exert both their frightening and fascinating power. In our
gospel reading for today, we have the surprising connection
between the snake on the pole and the Son of God on the cross. If
nothing else, John in his gospel makes clear the primary point,
and that is that God provided the means of healing after the
people had repented.
That is what happened in our Old Testament story. Once the
people of God discovered how awful it was to live with snakes,
they came to their senses again and confessed to Moses, "We have
sinned for we have spoken against the Lord and against you; pray
to the Lord, that he take away the serpents from us." Living with
snakes proved to be no picnic! It prompted an attitudinal change.
It doesn't always work that way. Sometimes increased suffering
produces even greater bitterness and alienation. Here, however,
it called forth the spirit of repentance and confession.
It is important to note that the prayers of the Israelites
were not answered in the way they requested. The snakes were not
removed. Instead the image of a snake was created out of bronze,
lifted upon a pole and all who were bitten and then looked upon
this image would survive. But of all creatures of God that could
have been lifted up -- a snake! A snake is lifted up to be the
sign of healing, of salvation! That is very strange to us. It
strikes us as just a bit more than unusual. Lift high the snake!
To hear it said that way is offensive to our ears. It sounds
crude and awful. A teenager would describe it as "gross."
But in his gospel, John takes this "gross" incident and tells
us, "And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so
much the Son of man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him
may have eternal life." (John 3:14-15)
Undoubtedly this connection between the Old and New Testaments
is the most important insight in our Biblical readings for this
Sunday. In the Old Testament, the snake is lifted up. In the New
Testament, Christ is lifted up.

Lift high the cross! There is something gross about that too.
It's just that we have put so much gold plating around it and
hung it around so many necks as decoration that it no longer
looks or sounds offensive. I suspect this is one of the reasons
the empty cross has replaced the crucifix in so many of our
churches. We don't want to see or even be reminded of the
suffering and dying Christ who was nailed to it. But it was a
lowly Jewish carpenter who was executed on such a cross as a
common criminal. Yes, the chief symbol of our church today, the
cross, was the electric chair of the first century.
So the great missionary Paul saw the cross as a "scandal to
Jews and folly to the Gentiles" because it was hard for them to
accept a suffering redeemer, a wounded healer. They and we are
more comfortable with a God of power and majesty, but what we
have is a carpenter's son from the little town of Nazareth -- one
who came humble and meek and whose life ended high upon the
cursed tree.
Yes, the story in front of us this morning is strange to our
ears, but strange or not, our story continues to reveal a God who
is faithfully consistent. In the 40 years of wandering in the
wilderness, through all the moaning and complaining of the called
ones, God remained faithful to the agreement (promise) that was
made with them.
For the children of Israel the wilderness was that time
between God's deliverance from Egypt and their entry into the
promised land. In our life, the wilderness is that time between
the dying and rising of Christ and when Christ comes again. So we
are now on our wilderness journey. We live in the in-between-
time. In our wilderness trip, we too have our "snakes" with which
to contend -- snakes that poison our lives. We also do our share
of groaning and complaining. Yes, we live in our wilderness too,
only the geography is different.
So lift high the cross! Look upon this cross and see there the
sign of our healing, the sign of our salvation. Among other
things, the cross is the great symbol of God's continuing
faithfulness to us. This God who refused to give up on the
Israelites of old, will not give up on the baptized ones of the
present.

Yes, lift high the cross! Let it remind us that our God knows
that living can be hard and our suffering can be great. Our God
in Christ has experienced wilderness living. God has appreciation
and understanding of our feeble attempts to live and love in a
wilderness full of snakes.
So lift high the cross! The uplifted cross proclaims to us
that God's love for us is not based upon our successes, our
social standing, our bank account, our prestige -- not even on our
grade averages at school. The cross is and remains the symbol of
God's great and unconditional love for us.
Lift high the cross! See there your Redeemer and know "that
whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal
life."
Lift high the cross. Amen.