The Fourth Sunday in Lent-The Rev Melanie Lemburg
The Rev. Melanie Dickson Lemburg
The 4th
Sunday in Lent-Year B
March 10, 2024
Two of our readings for today are full
of both dichotomies and paradoxes that invite us to wrestle with our lives and
our faith in different ways than we might normally engage.
In the Old Testament reading, we see the
Children of Israel wandering in the wilderness and they are, once again,
complaining. But their complaints are
paradoxical: “why have you brought us
out here in the wilderness? There’s no
food out here!” And in the next
breath: “we detest this miserable food
that you keep giving us!” They make a
critical error in complaining against God (up until this point, they’ve just
complained against Moses), so God sends venomous snakes into their camp which
bite the people and the people begin to die.
They plead to Moses and God to save them, and God instructs Moses to
make a bronze serpent and put it up on pole, and when the people look upon it,
then they will live (and be healed?).
The very thing that has wounded them has become the source of their
salvation.
In John’s gospel, we are plopped down in
the middle of a scene that deserves some context. It’s the middle of the night, and a leader in
the Jewish synagogue named Nicodemus has come to visit Jesus under the cover of
darkness. Nicodemus is curious about
Jesus and he has some questions for him, and the two get into a
discussion. In their conversation, Jesus
talks about being born anew or being born from above (which is a paradox), and
Nicodemus leans into the dichotomy of how can you be born anew when you are already
born and living? Jesus goes on to talk
about darkness and light, intimating that light is preferred over
darkness. (And yet, we note that
Nicodemus only feels like he can come to Jesus under cover of darkness, so
without darkness, their conversation probably wouldn’t be happening.) And then Jesus likens his coming death on the
cross to when Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness—a story that
Nicodemus would have been very familiar with.
So what are we supposed to do with all
this? How does it even make any sense to
us or how can it be relevant for our lives and our faith?
For most of us, it is our nature to try
to make sense of the world by creating dichotomies, and we live in a world that
encourages this: right versus wrong; good versus evil; light versus
darkness: healthy versus sick; well
versus wounded. (Dare I say it in this
election year? Republican versus
Democrat)
When really so much of our lives and
especially our growth is found in the in-between places, or in the gray areas. These in-between/gray areas are often places
of wisdom, nuance, and understanding. Just
think about all the things that can grow and thrive in the dark: seeds, roots, babies in the womb, intimacy. Think about the ways that modern medicine
must often wound people further as a part of their healing: surgery, chemotherapy. Think about what it means to be empathic—how we
can lean into the sorrows of another, sharing those burdens, and it can help someone
be healed.
In a world where we are encouraged to
dichotomize and polarize, Jesus raises up the image of the bronze serpent on a
pole and he points out how rather than polarizing, it becomes a reconciling, both/and
experience—the serpent is both the distributor of a lethal snake bite and an
instrument of healing. Jesus cross—a symbol
of humiliation and torture and an instrument of death—becomes the tree of life
upon which hangs the salvation of the world.
Your questions for this week: think about a time in your life when you were
both right and wrong at the same time? (Or
when you needed both darkness and light?
Or when something that wounded you also helped heal you?) What did that teach you about living in an
in-between space? What occurrence in
your life or in your faith now is inviting you to stop seeing it as a dichotomy
and is inviting you into living in the gifts that can be found in the gray
areas, in the both/and?
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