Readings for this week
Have your eyes adjusted yet?
How are your other senses feeling?
We describe this worship service as In the Gloaming. Gloaming is most often used to refer to twilight, that time between sunset and darkness. It can, however, be used to refer to the time around dawn when the sky is lightening before the sunrise. Gloaming describes the way objects appear to glow like coals in the changing and indirect light.
One thing we know about human biology is that when one sense is diminished, the others work a little harder. We notice things that usually blend into our accustomed sensory experience. At the early service, people told me they noticed the pipes on the walls, the glow of the candles, the light coming in through the stained glass.
Becoming aware of different things than we usually notice is reminiscent of a Lenten discipline that changes our perspective on our everyday life and interactions. We become more attuned to our interactions and notice how our actions, attitudes, and faith change our relationships. Tuning in to our brokenness is a necessary step toward restoring health and wholeness.
In this latter half of Lent, our readings have begun to anticipate the betrayal, arrest, and execution of Jesus, and his eventual resurrection and ascension. Today we see the tension between sin and salvation beautifully illustrated.
The reading from Numbers finds the people of Israel again complaining about God and Moses for having brought them out of Egypt where, in their enslavement, they enjoyed a variety of foods. Now, in the desert wilderness, they rely on God to provide water and food that comes in the form of plentiful but boring manna. Inundated by poisonous serpents, they realize their sin and repent. God instructs Moses to make an image of a serpent and put it on a pole so that “whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live” (Numbers 21:9).
The creature that was the consequence of their sin is also the means to their health and life, their salvation, which is restoration to their community with God. Notice also, that health and life is offered to any person who looks at the serpent of bronze.
You may recall that several weeks ago, I touched on the meaning of the word ‘salvation.’ The root word of salvation salvare means to save. As in save from death, heal, restore to health or wholeness. Salvation equals restoration to life, healing and wholeness.
John 3:16 is often used in some Christian circles as a theological battering ram about Jesus’ salvific purpose. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but have eternal life.” This statement is incomplete without 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” (John 3:17).
God loves us. Not in judgment or anger or condemnation, but with self sacrificing love that redeems and saves us. The word John uses for love in this passage is agape - the same word he uses when, 10 chapters later, Jesus tells his disciples to love one another as he has loved them.
This agape love is offered, not to a chosen few, but to the world. The kosmos as John wrote, refers to all people and all creation. Just as the serpent of bronze promised healing for any person.
God’s love and the promise of healing always exist because God wants nothing more than to live in relationship with us, and for us to live in whole and loving relationship with our selves, those we love, and the whole world. God desires us to know and live the fullness of a life that includes grace and forgiveness, justice and mercy and peace.
God offers salvation to all people, for the life of the whole world.
Opening this salve of love, which otherwise gathers dust on the shelf of our proverbial spiritual medicine cabinet, requires gazing upon our sins, acknowledging them and desiring healing of our relationship with God.
As that first serpent in the Garden of Eden revealed, we humans succumb to temptations to complain about the bounty God has given us, to desire something more or different or shinier, to chase after the death-dealing promises of power and wealth and self-sufficiency.
Gazing upon our sinfulness is tough. It is hard and painful work to look at our own short-comings, the ways we fail to follow God’s invitation to live with justice and grace and humility (we unpacked this idea in last week’s sermon on the 10 Commandments).
And then to acknowledge all of our human failings. And, as we gaze upon the cross to acknowledge that those same human failings are the same ones that put Jesus on the cross, that led to his arrest, his execution and death. His being lifted up a sign of God’s healing grace for all people.
All people. Because there is nothing that we can do or say or think that makes us too broken, too sinful, too unworthy for the God who meets us in the middle of pain and brokenness to offer us life, wholeness, grace, forgiveness.
As we sit here in the gloaming, our senses working in different ways, noticing things that are usually invisible. Pay attention to what you notice. What you notice about the physical beauty in this space, what you notice about the words and the liturgy, what you notice about your own self and how you respond. What calms you. What moves you. What pricks at you in a way you should think about it some more.
God continues inviting us all back to relationship and community, to wholeness and health with ourselves, with one another, and with God. As Holy Week nears we prepare ourselves to offer our sins and frailties to God and ask for forgiveness. To see our human brokenness lifted up as a sign of God’s unrelenting love for us and a sign that we will indeed be healed and made whole, by God’s grace.
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