By Nathan J. Hill
I preached this at Wilson Boulevard Christian Church during my first semester at seminary. It uses the Bronze Serpent text, which is pretty challenging to preach on.
The kind of religion I grew up with in the midst of Oklahoma was one we may all be familiar with. Sometimes, we like to call it that “old time religion.” If we could sum it up, it’s all about “me and Jesus.” That kind of faith I grew up around was pretty simple - you take Jesus Christ as your personal savior, then you stop sinning. And if you couldn’t stop sinning, well, you better pretend like you stopped sinning.
It’s a personal faith. Maybe you’ve run it into too.
Of course, as I got a little bit older, I began to ask bigger and bigger questions. I began to ask questions about society – I began to probe into my faith a little bit more. The questions went beyond just me and Jesus and started getting into me, Jesus, and the world. Like, for example – when the threat of war looms, what is a Christian response? When Christians are persecuted in foreign countries that my government supports with aid, how should I reconcile my civic values and faith values? Can I be a Christian and live a lifestyle that widens the gap between the haves and the have nots? And if not, how the heck do I live my life? What do I do? What would Jesus do?
I am still working through my own answers to these questions, but let me tell you – once I started asking these kinds of things, my little personal faith was churning water. It was struggling to make sense in that larger picture.
Don’t get me wrong – personal faith is a cornerstone of our spiritual journey. Our relationship with Christ is the place to begin working out our lives as people of faith – but that journey should also propel us outward. So in essence, our faith journey should be made up of both struggles – the personal and the community.
Our scripture passages, from the Old and New Testament, support this dual struggle.
Consider the story of the Bronze Serpent – what a strange little story. The people are in the desert, being led by Moses to who knows where. They are struggling along, and then the murmuring and grumbling begins. Oh man, that must have been a terrible situation. Of all things, the people start questioning God, and even worse, they start complaining about the food. The food! I mean, what do they expect in the desert – a buffet? A Chipotle? And then it gets worse – the snakes come. As people begin to die from the venom, the people repent, God relents, and Moses sets up a strange display, a bronze serpent, so that those who are bit by the snakes will be healed when they look at it.
What I think is so interesting about this story is that it speaks of our community sins that we can often bear. I know we have all been in situations, where a few individuals started some complaining and murmuring, and the whole thing turns into spoiled milk. It’s like some sort of sickness. Community sin is like this – like the poison of the snakes. It gets under the skin and starts working its way toward the heart. Before we know it, our community is losing vitality – we are suffering. Our spiritual walk feels weak. We are missing something. Heck, sometimes, we don’t even know it before it’s too late.
In the gospel passage, I think we can clearly see this continued struggle play out. Jesus came so that we may have light in our lives. Jesus came, yes, as a personal savior. But Jesus also came for the whole world, so that the whole world might be saved. Jesus is about the personal and the community. And like poison, we know that darkness seeps into our lives, every little corner, and sometimes, we love it, don’t we? We like the darkness – we like what the darkness can provide us. – but it is Christ who calls us to that different path.
I think many young adults in our society know that we as Christians can get things all mixed up. We like to talk about radical love, forgiveness, and reconciliation – but then we go to our 9-5 jobs and often support a society that leaves those values in the land of the fancy ideals. We end supporting a system that leaves many of our world neighbors poor, while we rake in the benefits. Now, again, I don’t know all the answers, because these are difficult struggles – but our challenge is to do something, to be bold in action, to follow Jesus. And in the end, I think there are many watchful eyes in our communities, who are looking for someone who just dares to walk that different sort of path. Who dares talk about a life of faith that is more than just “me and Jesus�
So that’s our challenge – to look up - to Christ for our way, for our healing, for our hope. I know we each, especially me, have that darkness, that poison in our lives, from our grumbling and complacency, from our love of the dark. And if we aren’t careful, it will consume us and lead us far from the path that Jesus taught. In my life, as I went through that questioning, what it took was for someone to say, “Nathan, look up – look at Christ.†And I truly began to find my way, however difficult. In Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, we have our story of salvation, a story that pricks our imagination, that calls us into community, that calls us to live out radical love, and that challenges us to be people of faith with some depth. Christ’s story is one that stretches across boundaries, to those of any race, ethnicity, gender, income, or situation. Christ came for me, and Christ came for all of us. We don’t have to be consumed by the darkness and poison of sin, greed, and inequality. We can look to Christ and find that different path through our desert.
At the recent Salt & Light event a couple of weeks back, Michael Foss, the keynote speaker and pastor of Prince of Peace Church in Burnsville, Minnesota, summed it well – he said, “We are not to go make a difference in the world – we are to go and make a different world.â€
So, I challenge you this morning – as people of God, as a community, both here at Wilson Boulevard and in the world – to walk with me, to walk together, to struggle to live out a life that transforms us as individuals and transforms our communities in which we live through the awesome power of Jesus Christ, the one we can look up to. Amen.
