God Invites Us to Participate in Our Own Healing
4From Mount Hor [the Israelites] set out by the way to the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom; but the people became impatient on the way. 5The people spoke against God and 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.” 6Then the Lord sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died. 7The people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed for the people. 8And the Lord said to Moses, “Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.” 9So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.
Numbers 21: 4-9
[Jesus said:] 14“Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, 15that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.
16“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.
17“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: 14-17
Few people get chicken pox anymore. And you know the reason why? God gave some men and women the talent and the wisdom to develop a safe and effective vaccine.
Diane sat at my table in 6th grade, she sat across from me. It is funny the things you remember when you start reflecting back. My sixth grade self looks at Diane one day and she had a pock mark on her face. She had one, just one, little indentation on her cheek, all smoothed over and healed but still an indentation. I pointed it out to her which she already knew, and she said what made perfect sense to me, it was a scar from a chicken pock that she had scratched off. I sometimes wonder why we don’t see more of those scars. No one really gets chicken pox any more, thankfully. Thanks to the vaccine, but that wasn’t always the case.
Chicken pox once took out the Penn State Men’s volleyball team. They were ranked number one in the nation and gunning for their first national championship. I took an exercise science class in the same gym where the volleyball team practiced. It was spring semester either 88 or 89. And one day in April, we were told that the floor of the gym was contagious for chicken pox. If we had not had chicken pox, we were going to get it. Right around finals. I had already had it. The team had two starters who had never had chicken pox and they missed the regional final that would send them to the Final Four. When the team lost the regional final, the number 1 ranked Nittany Lions Volleyball team’s season ended. They missed out on their best chance to live out their dream. Today that seems like a small loss compared to what people have lost to Covid. Covid is like our venomous serpent, our serpent that attacks the faithful and the unfaithful alike. And we talked about the losses we have faced, not just the lost of health, the lost of life, but the loss of security and the loss of relationship with one another.
Every generation has their stories of pandemics and epidemics. You have heard mentioned The Spanish Flu of 1918. You may have heard those stories. with Also, Polio had an epidemic year in 1952, over 50,000 cases and 3,000 deaths. Parents feared for the health of their children. The newspapers in 1952 published photographs of celebrities like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers going to polio wards in towns and visiting those who were sick. Actually, I still remember in elementary school around 1974 or 75 going to the nurses office and taking a pink sugar cube. Apparently that sugar cube contained a polio vaccination.
What other epidemics or pandemics have we had. When I was a little older, HIV and AIDS of the 1980s hit our psyche hard. We are still trying to right the world of the scourge. After I had graduated college, you heard about ADD and ADHD and ritilin and aderal as the medication of choice for treating attention deficits. I don’t know if it was an epidemic, or if we just finally started talking about it. The same holds true with depression and prozac along with bi-polar disease and lithium. We have always had people who struggled with mental health, but now we have medications to help them. I guess that makes it easier to talk about it—when we can do something.
The Scripture book of Numbers gives us this frightening story about serpents, poisonous serpents, and people died, many died. And God gave Moses a solution that made absolutely no sense. I am an intelligent well read person and I have no idea how this solution, how this cure worked. I know more about messenger RNA vaccinations and why they are safe and how they work. To be frank, I will probably do a lousy job of explaining mRNA to you, but I can make an attempt, and then joke about how I ended up with the Johnson and Johnson vaccination in my arm, which I know less about. I have no idea how that bronze serpent worked. The people say to Moses, “tell God to take the serpents away from us.” Instead God tells Moses, probably in a really calm voice, “make a serpent of bronze, place on a tall pole where everyone can see, and when they look to the serpent they will live.” Really? I can just hear Moses asking “Really, that is the plan,” (maybe not out loud, but to himself). You want people who get bit by a serpent, to look to a serpent. But Moses did it, and people lived.
This story has two divine truths, two spiritual realities and that is why Jesus grasps ahold of the story in today’s gospel (John 3: 14-21). First truth, God intends you to participate in your own healing. That matters now, so I will say it again, “God intends you to participate in your own healing.” I have met several people who give God the credit for curing them of cancer, and almost all of them went through chemotherapy or radiation or both. Even in the earliest books of the Old Testament, God creates healing where people have to participate in their own healthiness. People said “take the serpents away,” God through Moses said, “Here is what you do, Look to the bronze serpent.” You do not need to know why it works, just look to the serpent, and do not argue with God that “wouldn’t a bronze eagle or bronze mongoose make more sense.” Just look to the serpent, and you will live. God invites you to participate in you own healing. Read the story of Namaan and Elisha in 2 Kings Chapter 5. Elisha tells Namaan who has leprosy across his body, “Go bathe yourself seven times in the River Jordan.” And Namaan says “What?”
I got my vaccination last week. I am still wearing my mask. I still wash my hands and I can show you just how dry the skin is because I wash my hands, I wash my hands, I wash my hands. I got Johnson and Johnson because it was the first one offered to me. We participate in our own healing. We also participate in the healing of our community. You can choose not to get the vaccination, and accept that risk for yourself, but remember you also place at risk those around you who also have not had the vaccination and right now that includes every youth and child under the age of 16, because they cannot yet receive the vaccination. (Even after May 1, they will need to wait before the vaccination is authorized for them.)
I said that there are two divine truths, first that we participate in our own healing. Second, God through Moses made the serpent available to everyone, both those who complained about the miserable food as well as those we stayed faithful. They all could look to the serpent, and they would live.
We lift up Jesus Christ for everyone to see. Those full of faith and those unfaithfull as well. Our gospel passage has a word of judgment here—a word of light and darkness—but do not get caught up in that. The Greek verb lives in the past tense, past tense with present reality. God found the world, his creation lacking. And God so loved the world, that he sent his only son that all those who believe in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not sent his son into the world to condemn the world but in order that the world might be saved through him.
You have heard me say this before: I adamantly teach that you do not quote John 3:16 without quoting John 3:17. These verses go together.
God did not send Jesus into the world to condemn those who do not look to him. Instead, Jesus sent us into the world so that when people look to us, they see Jesus. We participate in our own healing, and we participate in the healing of the community. This is about what physically ails us and is also about the sin that ails us spiritually. We participate in that healing as well when we look to Jesus. When we look to his light and walk in his life. Jesus, the light of the world, sent us into the world so that people when they look to us see Jesus. And when they believe in us, they believe in Jesus, whether they realize it or not.
After all, that is how the serpent worked. When people looked to the serpent and lived, they did not believe in the serpent. They believed in God and learned to trust God.
We celebrate these two spiritual truths and realities. God invites us to participate in our own healing—body, spirit, mind. We participate in that healing for our own sake and for the community around us. God makes this healing available to all of his creation through Christ our Savior and his presence in us today and always. Amen.
