4 Lent Yr B

The reading from Ephesians reminds me of one of my favorite movies, The Princess Bride. There is a scene where our hero, Westley, after he has endured the torture of Prince Humperdinck and thought to be dead, is brought by his friends to Miracle Max. Miracle Max wants to know why he should help our hero, and the answer is true love. Miracle Max informs Westley’s friends that he is only mostly dead, “It just so happens that your friend here is only MOSTLY dead. There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive. With all dead, well, with all dead there's usually only one thing you can do. Go through his clothes and look for loose change.”

I wonder if we don’t spend much of our lives mostly dead. According to Ephesians we do. God comes into our midst to show us the possibility of new life, the possibility of abundant life. As does this very familiar passage from John, the translation in the Message is, “This is how much God loved the world: He gave his Son, his one and only Son. And this is why: so that no one need be destroyed; by believing in him, anyone can have a whole and lasting life.” The answer to mostly dead is true love, and God has given us true love in the gift of Jesus. God has shown us what abundant life really is, that is the Good News.

What seems odd is that the antidote for the snakebite was the snake on a stick. And the antidote for being mostly dead is the hard wood of the cross. It is the work that Jesus does on the cross. It is the hard news is that new life, abundant life, doesn’t look anything like what our culture would have us believe.

The collection of stories from scripture we have before us today really speaks to each other, sometimes this happens, but sometimes it doesn’t. In Numbers we are presented with another telling about the whiny Israelites. Why Moses, why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? There is nothing to eat, and we detest the miserable food we have to eat. And then there were poisonous serpents among the people, and they were bit and many died. The people realized their shortcomings, and they asked Moses to pray on their behalf to take the poisonous serpents away. God’s answer to Moses’ prayer was not to take the snakes away. Instead, God instructed Moses to make a poisonous serpent and set it on a pole and to instruct the people who have been bitten to look at it and live. Those who did lived.

I think the theme of this day is that God comes as love into our mostly deadness, and does not take away the pain and suffering of our lives, God does not take away the poisonous snakes, God teaches the Israelites to live with the snakes. What God does in these stories is to show us that life is about living fully, completely, and abundantly in the midst of our circumstances, in the midst of our tragedies, in the midst of our challenges, in the midst of our sure and certain death. When we do that, we have glimpses of abundant life. God through Jesus shows us how to live fully alive in the midst of the mess. Living fully alive is to look directly at the poisonous snake and live. Avoiding it or denying it brings only death.

Once again I am reminded of the wisdom and beauty of Lent. Removing the clutter and distractions from our lives afford us the opportunity to see and to listen. What looks like and seems like mostly dead teems with life and newness. What feels like barrenness and dryness is being watered with the deep water of Jacob’s well in Samaria and the life giving water of baptism. What seems like a field with no hope of harvest, eventually will bear fruit and hope. But it all rests in the mud and the mess and the yuck.

We have the power to look at the snake and live, but it is not by our own power, but by God’s grace in Jesus Christ. Once again Ephesians, by grace you have been saved and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God. God shows us in these stories that as we come to live less for ourselves, when we give up on it’s all about me, when we realize that we are not so important anyhow, we begin to live the gift of new life. 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. This eternal life that is spoken about in the gospel of John is a present reality. It is not about after a life here on this earth, eternal life is about being fully alive with God in the present. It is about being mostly dead and being born again as Nicodemus learns from Jesus in the verses right before the ones we heard today.

Like the Israelites wandering in the wilderness and encountering the poisonous snakes, we too maybe need to survive the death of our bodies, or confront the death of our bodies as we do on Ash Wednesday, so that we begin to be able to really live. These dark places are nothing we seek out for ourselves, but they are the reality in which we live our lives. This Lenten journey takes us to the dark places, so that we may be filled with the Light. This Lenten journey shows us our mortality, so that we may know what it is to be fully alive. This Lenten journey takes us through the muck and the mess, so that we may be the fertile ground in which God’s grace takes root. This is the gift of God.

In the midst of this Lenten journey we are filled with the light and the love of God, we are empowered to be the light and the love of God in the context in which we find ourselves. We are to live fully and to love mightily, as we have first been loved. The Israelites were afraid in their wilderness, their fear caused them to whine and to be disappointed, their fear caused them to grasp for things that they thought would make them immediately happy, their fear caused them to worship things that were not God.

We are in a wilderness place of fear in our country today. There are poisonous snakes around us. But we are not to be mostly dead; we are not to let fear kill us. Instead we are to live together as a community, being empowered by this amazing love that is shown to us by God in Jesus, and we are to be empowered to find God in our midst. We are to empower others to discover the light and the love that God offers to each of us and to the whole world. We are to be transformed by the light and love that God offers.

The Lord is full of compassion and mercy: Come let us adore him.