SERMON "The Lenten Walk with The Condemning"

March 10, 2024

Point Reyes (CA) Community Presbyterian Church

Rev. Douglas Olds

The AUDIO of this sermon (which departs from the following text at places) is linked HERE  

[n.b. correction: for the use of the word "trumpet" in the audio, replace with "festal shout."]

 

First Reading Numbers 21:4-9

4From Mount Hor they 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.

 

NT Reading: Gospel of John 3:13-21

13 No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man.14“And 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. 18Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. 19And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. 20For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. 21But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.”

---

Our readings this morning explore how the spirit of condemnation, lifted in the hand’s of God’s OT people, works in God’s creation by grace, lifted up in the NT Christ. These stories tell us what God is not and what God is. The OT story of the serpent lifted up is what God is not and what is defeated, and the Christ lifted up is what God is and how God is victorious. The supposed divine condemnation versus the God of sacrificial love who pulls out every stop to keep God’s creation alive.

 In the Book of Numbers, the Israelites are wandering in the desert after they have been liberated by the miracle working of Moses, but they quickly fall away with very tragic results by building the Golden Calf while Moses is up on the mountain of Sinai receiving the commandments of God.

This is a most serious transgression—these idolators have turned away from their relationship with Moses’ God who liberated them from the Egyptian system and return to that system seeking security in an idea of a god who is fashioned of gold as if it will, by being worshipped with gold annealed to its body,  dispense gold back!  This is the false transactional theology that “feeds” a deity. Transactional theology is the epitome of idolatry. Idolotries of transactional relationships with God and neighbor are everywhere today, monetized. It comes forth in every generation, even in Christianity if not especially.

This offense of the Golden Calf leads to what the Torah presents as a 40 year period of wandering and testing in the desert. Only after the entire Golden Calf generation has died—Moses too--are their children and grandchildren allowed to cross the Jordan River into the promised land under Moses’ lieutenant, Joshua.

During these wanderings, the Israelites reveal themselves to be “stiff-necked,” recalcitrant, grumbling, back-biting, gossipy. This is not an inherent character, what Darwinians might call “genetic” (with all the tragic results of reducing a people into their DNA), but the wandering people who had been slaves (and which included non-descendants of Jacob) were people who shared a historical language, now a language being shaped by liberation and their realization that they were living with and in and by God—the God of Abraham and Jacob. This is important: “ethnos”--nation--in the Bible is a language grous, not kinship structures, and certainly not an administrative unit organized by politics. Think of this whenever you hear the word “ethnic.” Do they mean it as a DNA lineage, or in the Biblical sense of language group?

It is thus ever important to parse the speech acts in the Bible. And in this reading from the Book of Numbers, we have no quotes, but we have an implied culture and expression of gossip and grumbling. And the symbolic dimensions of lifting up the serpent  symbol after the grumblers were bitten indicate three important theological points:

1)        Grumbling, gossip, scoffing, innuendo, sneering, snark, slander, and haughty poses of bemused detachment valorized as ironical but withdraw from fellowship reveal a spirit of condemnation in their practitioners. What is condemning will be mirrored. What is healing will be mirrored. This derives from the metaphysics of the heart.

2)        Mirroring is the operation of “accountability,” and the virtue of accountability is to recognize and accept that mirroring, as the course of God’s justice. The wandering Israelites, in their verbal doggerels of condemnation, reveal their spiritual participation in the serpent’s spirit transmitted to humanity by the disobedience of Adam. We are, as Luther says, enslaved by that spirit which acts out in all forms of condemnation, violence, backbiting, conspiratorial thinking, plotting, revenge. The list is long.  To the extent that the Israelites can come to appreciate that their spirit of condemnation—which we might call the demonic—is of the serpent and that the serpent comes against them as a warning and mirror, they can learn accountability to a different spirit. It takes 13 centuries to get the Egypt of the Golden Calf out  of them and get them to the place of the Golden Rule of the pure living lamb. 13 Centuries of mirroring—doubling back in the desert of generations to learn accountability. This wandering and mirroring and warning repeats over and over again in the histories, wisdom, and prophetic books in the OT. Look for it. It's why many think history repeats, but indeed it is our shared experience of doubling back in the wilderness, our conduct being mirrored until we learn accountability and are released into the sunshine of grace, learning grace, attending to grace, walking in the way of Jesus. History does not repeat, but generations have to learn the lessons of accountability ever anew.

3)        God, with God’s primary attribute of grace, heals the injustices of the serpent spirit by sending a program that awakens the awareness of the Israelites beset by snakebites. God initiates repair by sending a symbol for recognizing our condemning nature and overcoming our false sense of  justice that mirrors the condemning demon—which all human culture shares in biases and prejudices and preferring its privileged ideas of favored social orders and kinship. The serpent of condemnation is overcome in this story by an act of grace in a visual (and certainly deliberated) symbol: the lifting up of the serpent as the vanguard of the advancing people who are trusting God’s promised victory over the serpent. They are receiving God’s assurance that the serpent demon always condemining is conquered, and that those who encounter from the outside this vanguard and symbol may come to deliberate its meaning. We are those outside that vanguard, reading of this imaging of grace and accountability and deliberating of the virtues and the theology nested in this story.

 

Application: new demons of condemnation have morphed in modernity—changed their tune: We see it boredom and the affects of irony (acedia) which may not condemn, but it resists accountability to participate in progress and healing. Acedia has societal implications that posits a virtue in withdrawal from a culture it doesn’t understand. Withdrawal in chronic melancholy has a foundation in condemning, of finding fault with the world, rejecting the world.

Acedia, a blend of bored withdrawal and ironic detachment from things that ever go wrong. This is a religiosity of fatalism: that things never go our way as we’ve planned them. Because, don’t’ you know, they are bringing God’s judgment on us. Their Beliefs are flawed; their love is flawed. Yours and mine, gossipers agree, are the preferred ends because they are God’s ends. Our forms are God’s forms. Our social orders are God’s social orders. Religious authoritarians see themselves and their preferences guarding "God's order" against the excesses of mob democratic rule.

This bias is the danger of Platonic thinking which underlies all condemnation of otherness. Platonist reactionaries going by his name of "republicans" take confidence in the continuation of forms and institutions, so when these fall or are replaced or reformed, the condemning spirit can their sensibilities and comforts that are hurt by change brought by the new. Evil, then, is seen all around encroaching in these new neighbors flooding in. We see it in the over the top alarm about immigrants and open borders these days.

Condemnation and conspiratorial innuendo is "acedia's sin," indicative of love grown cold within a Christian community. Its cult of fatalism is fostered by obfuscation and obscurantism to inhibit original thinking that only derived from a supposedly evil, surrounding culture. 

The tongue's gossip likened to a "chilling rattle," referencing James's depiction of the tongue as a destructive force.

Things seemingly ever go wrong because our ethics are misplaced: we think we have the knowledge of God to bring about God’s will in terms of forms and orders. But we image God not by our foresight of consequence—our knowledge of what the future holds in terms of forms and orders. Instead, we are to image God by our virtues that heal and reconcile the local by the Golden Rule in the moment.

 I wrote a book on this Pastoral Christology centered in virtues to guide Christians away from strategic thinking that ever tempts to become the authoritarian, top-down and coercive serpent of hegemony. Yes, this demon in us will be mirrored to us until we come to feel the power and sublimity of God’s love “lifted up” on the Cross. And then we will lay down our strategic plans that, because it is based on our ego preferences on not on the common good of others. We will move on from anxiety and the consternation we feel at unintended consequences because by virtue we align with God. Our accountability to this God’s justice proceeds by seeing how the blowback of consequences is earned, and is intended to awaken us from false consciousness of beliefs that our intended consequences are not God’s.

When love grows cold within the Christian community, it withdraws into expecting the worst. Love grown cold acts outs in gossip that mirrors the inner condition of its speaker. Love grown cold acts out fatalistically by sitting static and secreted in front of a screen, interjecting condemning  and malicious comments about secret evils lurking in conspiracies in neighbors.  Social media’s "anger-tainment" and performative malice perpetuate a cycle of cynicism and judgment.

The "chilling rattle," a snake, a destructive spark, takes hold, spreading into conflagrations of conspiratorial thinking and accusation. The coldness of the rattle mirrors the coldness of heart. When you hear its rattle, you are in the presence of the condemning, who project their own suspicion into the hearts of others.

There is a Christian Ethic Against Conspiratorial Thinking:

The cultural endorsements of violence and hegemony are grounded in conspiratorial projection about “enemies” plans for another social reality. The Christian ethic of love your neighbors is the foundation of anti-conspiratorial gossip and strategic planning. God says, do not repay evil for evil. I will repay. God’s got this. The strategic outworking of God’s world is in love. Love will conquer the serpent in every generation.  As my friend John Anderson says, “the victory is in the bag.” The Kingdom of God is here in love, and it will NOT be extinguished. Not possible. Though every new generation needs to learn accountability to God’s justice before receiving the magnificent pardon of God’s grace: what John said in our second reading:  14“And 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.

What the Cross washes out in this love grown cold in fatalistic withdrawal and postures of innuendo is the tendency to scorn others. What washes out is the possibility of reconciliation with human others who differ from ourselves or our expectations. What is washed by the Cross is the disheartening fear that God is the supreme condemnation, that we under wrath, and this false picture creates so much dysfunction.

The Psalmist has learned to appreciate this message of the desert wanderings and mirroring switchbacks that builds accountability of awareness:

 

Psalm 107: 17-22

17  Some were sick through their sinful ways,

          and because of their iniquities endured affliction;

18  they loathed any kind of food,

          and they drew near to the gates of death.

19  Then they cried to the LORD in their trouble,

          and he saved them from their distress;

20  he sent out his word and healed them,

          and delivered them from destruction.

21  Let them thank the LORD for his steadfast love,

          for his wonderful works to humankind.

22  And let them offer thanksgiving sacrifices,

          and tell of his deeds with songs of joy.

 

And the apostle Paul says this to his church in Ephesus: (Ephesians 2:1-6):

 

1You were dead through the trespasses and sins 2in which you once lived, following the course of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient. 3All of us once lived among them in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of flesh and senses, and we were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else. 4But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us 5even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ — by grace you have been saved — 6and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus,

My conclusion this morning is ever to embrace the sacrificing goodness and provision of God who will get us out of every abyss into which we fall. But along the way, we come to embrace the Virtue of Accountability as our Lenten Walk in a condemning culture.

Purple is the liturgical color of Lent, a color of swollen wounds that signify penitence but otherwise traditionally associated with royalty. Like I’ve preached before, semiotic (symbolic) meanings are inverted by the NT. Lent is a training of kings—My King is righteousness, Melchizedek lives in shalom-- by defeating the angry, condemning and violent schema (1 Cor 7) of contemporary dynasts and those souls which aspire to such. This purple is the liturgical color of swollen and wounded royalty, which our Lord brings us forth into share his realm. We are battered, and we reach out to the battered, and sustain them as our subjects from our placement as their servants: in Jesus Christ we are responsible for the oppressed, for the battered, and for the enslaved, because God’s creation is entirely intended by God to come in to this world of mutual service, grace, and provision. We align against that messianic vision of a universal course for creation at the risk that we are excluded when we follow an unaccountable path that condemns others’ ends as less valid than our own. Our own gifts, our own children, our own backgrounds, our own monumental forms and institutions, our privileging of our own stories. We have been bitten by snakes of accountability that come from God. Let us recognize how we’ve been left to live for the other story—the righteous, true and beautiful story, of Christ lifted up for our sakes. And may we lift him and up that we may be lifted up ourselves in our service to God and neighbor that sustains and liberates and flourishes all creation. May it be so for you and me, AMEN.