The Rev. Jimmy Abbott
The Fourth Sunday of Lent
March 10, 2024
Numbers 21:4-9

When I was in elementary school, every summer, my family would pack up the car and make the long drive from Dallas to Los Angeles; to see my extended family. There is not much between Dallas and Los Angeles. Sitting in the back of the car, on those long, hot road trips, the only thing that saved me was my GameBoy, my little video game set. Perhaps my parents had been tired of my complaining so much from the backseat, about being bored, that they gave me that GameBoy just so I would quit asking them, “how much longer?”

So when I think about the Israelites, wandering in the desert with Moses for forty years; well, I suppose I’m sympathetic. It sounds miserable. And like a petulant child in the backseat of a long car trip, they complain. They say to Moses, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness?” And then, in one of the funniest lines in the Bible, the Israelites say, “For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.” Huh.

This is actually the last complaint story, the last time the Israelites complain against Moses and against God during their long journey in the desert. Poisonous serpents, which are common in that part of the world, start biting the people and they cry out to God for help. “So 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 21:9). I feel like I lived this story. My parents were the ones who forced me into those long car trips, and yet they were also the ones that provided me with my precious GameBoy, the thing that saved me on that very same car trips. 

Not too long ago, I was up in our attic doing some spring cleaning, and I came across that GameBoy. The memories came flooding back to me. The feel of it in my hands. The funny little songs in each game. It’s those mix of emotions – the memory of absolute boredom, the diversion from my GameBoy, the time with my family – it all came back.

As we know it did for the Israelites, too. See, that bronze serpent, that big snake on a stick that Moses made, well, they kept it. They carried it with them through the desert, they carried it over the Jordan River into the promised land; they carried that bronze serpent through their military campaigns; they kept it around for hundreds of years. Eventually, they built their Temple in Jerusalem and they put the bronze serpent in there. Like, a sort of keepsake from their wandering in the wilderness.

But, this is where the story turns. The people of Israel didn’t just keep the bronze serpent in the attic. Apparently, the people of Israel started worshiping the bronze serpent itself. They were making offerings to it, praying to it, worshiping that thing. Sure, God had provided it to them in an hour of need. Yes, it had saved them from the snakes in the wilderness. Yes, it was a reminder of God’s protection and guidance. But it had become an idol. And so the story goes that around seven hundred years before Jesus, one of the ancient kings of Jerusalem breaks the serpent and throws it away. Imagine that – this thing, provided by God, made by the hands of Moses. But, it had become unhealthy for them (II Kings 18:4). 

  I promise I’m getting to my point. All throughout the Old Testament, the single greatest sin that the people commit is idolatry; when the people start worshiping other things. That serpent on a stick had once been a great gift to them, but not anymore. Because rather than worshipping the One who gave it, the Lord God Almighty, the giver of all good gifts, the people started worshiping the gift itself. Because it wasn’t the bronze serpent that saved the people, and healed them and brought them through the desert into the promise land, it was God who did that. 

This is where that story comes alive today. Like the Israelites, we put far too much trust in our things to save us. And again, it’s not that things in and of themselves are bad. The spiritual danger comes when we start worshiping the gift rather than the One True Giver. It is not your home, or your car, or your vacation destination, or your savings account, or your job title that will save you when the snakes of fear and disease and disaster come into your life. I’ve been a priest long enough now to see that no matter how much or little we have, we all go out the same way. This story, this long and strange story about a serpent on a stick, is both a warning and a promise to us. Do not worship your things, worship the One who is gracious enough to provide you with anything at all.

And you can tell, how important this story about the serpent on a stick is in the Bible. Even Jesus talks about it. “And 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” (John 3:14-15). That word, “believes,” it’s not so much a head word as it is a heart word. Believe means to trust in, to have confidence in, to have faith in. When you are telling a child, “I believe in you,” you are not saying, “ I think that you exist.” No, you’re saying that you have confidence in them, you have faith in them, you trust in them. That’s what Jesus is getting at. I don’t think that Jesus is giving a litmus test here – that the only way to eternal life is if you think God exists. That’s so superficial, it has no purchase on our lives. Jesus is calling us to trust with our hearts, to believe in our hearts, to not fall into idolatry. It’s this radical message. That no matter how much you have or don’t have, Jesus was raised up on a cross for you. Everything else is idolatry.

As I’ve grown older, I don’t play my GameBoy anymore. I’ve grown up. That’s what the Israelites didn’t understand. The serpent on a stick helped them before, but they couldn’t let it go. They didn’t grow up. So maybe more than anything, what I’m saying this morning is simple – we all have to grow up. And have the courage to know that the ways things were, won’t be that way again. This is true, for our bodies as they age, for our church as it changes, for our society, as we move forward. None of that means that God is no longer faithful, no, God is still faithful. It’s just that we need to open our eyes again, to see what God is providing now. “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.”