The following sermon is a reflection on John 3:14-20 entitled Under the Big Top
One day while I was in Kenya I came face to face with a Cobra – or at least that is what the locals said it was. I was working in a wood shop cleaning up after a day of building pews and as I gathered the discarded wood a thin black something shot further into the wood scraps left over from a day of making pews. With caution I began to gather the wood slowly until I uncovered a young but still very intimidating three foot black Cobra. The second I saw it I couldn’t keep my eyes off of it. It curled up and propped itself up like in those nature shows. I knew this was going to end poorly for that snake but I kept my eyes locked on its smooth, long body and watched every move it made until it was dead/fell asleep with an intensity that I can only imagine that is reserved for moments of terror. In the moments before it was dispatched, I watched for any sign it might be moving, or striking, constantly making sure that I was far enough away from its advances, securing my position, and if I am truthful not really too concerned with my fellow Cobra combatants.
It is because of this experience that I come up with only one word when I think about our Old Testament reading for today – bravery. Despite the fact that the word bravery does not appear at all in the Bible, I think that there are many cases of the people of God stepping out in courage and showing bravery. In my opinion, the story from Numbers is one of those times. Surrounded by poisonous snakes and the bitten piling up fast, I would imagine that their instincts were a lot like mine. Secure the perimeter, find a safe space where there were no snakes, keep you eyes fixed on the snakes that you can see and never move your gaze higher than your ankles. But what does God ask the Israelite people to do? God commands Moses to place the bronze snake on a stick and raises it high above the ground – far higher than your knees let alone your ankles – and commands the bitten to look upon it and they will live. I guarantee you that at first there were a lot of quick glances and then back to scanning the ground. I think of the first person to actually raise his or her eyes to the snake on a stick and the only thing that comes to mind is bravery.
It takes guts to look up. It takes rejecting the tried and true formula to step out into a space that hasn’t been proven snake free and begin living…living knowing that God is asking that we lift our eyes when we so very desperately want to stare at our feet.
Friends, the story of God’s people is a story of bravery. It is a story of people who have taken their eyes off the safe, the familiar, the comfortable, people who forgot the story of how the generations and generations have carved out an existence, and embraced the story of a people with brave eyes lifted up. It took guts for Abraham to follow a God who had been altogether silent up across a desert. It took guts for Esther to defy her husband and king and save a people. It took guts for Ruth, a stranger in a strange land, to say “I will go where you will go.” The life of faith is one of eyes lifted, looking straight ahead, knowing, trusting, believing that the snakes that slither on the ground underneath are no longer your domain. It takes guts to believe in God. It takes guts to pray for God’s will. It takes guts to be a Pharisee like Nicodemus and journey in the night to Christ and declare that he is a teacher sent from God and on whom God’s presence dwells. But do you want to know what I believe takes the most bravery, the most guts, the most daring and resolve? To believe in this single, revolutionary fact means that we forever take our eyes off of the snakes of our own generation. To believe that God so loved the world that God sent his only begotten Son – to believe that God loved the world, the entire world is in this day and age an act of immense bravery. Bravery not because we are all so very different for that is what the politicians, the fear-mongers and the frighten tell us, but because we are all so very the same - for we are all loved by God.
John 3:16, perhaps our most famous verse, says in no uncertain language that God so loved the world. The claim is unmistakably universal. God loved the entire world and the love that God pours out on you and your family and friends, the love that the oppressed doubt, the love that suffers insult and injury time after time but was and is so strong that it gave us Christ is the same love that is experienced across every border, every ocean and throughout time. We are all fall under the love of God yet the universal love of God that unites us all is often just a novel concept, or an unwelcome challenge for those that cannot raise their eyes above the ankles. For when we stare at our own feet we only see ourselves, our own situation, and never the fact that there are others who have snakes all around them too, and never ever do we see people bravely looking up, and as often is the case we don’t ever realize that we are not alone in God’s love. Brothers and sisters, we must be brave enough to live knowing that God loves the entire world despite what we may think, or what governments tell us, or what we may read, or secretly maybe even hope for. For believing that God loves only us, or our nation, or our church and only our church is cowardice plain and simple – for it is never brave enough to take its eyes off the their own lives and despite their fears have a look around.
Allow me to try to wrap all this up. I got an email from my Dad a number of months ago telling me that he had joined the Circus – literally. The Kelly Miller Circus travels around the nation and my Dad had been hired to serve as the something akin to the business manager. My father has always loved the circus and any job that involved Elephants was too hard to resist. During one of our phone calls he mentioned off hand that the crew was raising the tent for the day’s shows. Dad told me that despite seeing this take place day after day he never really stopped being amazed at it and always found himself with eyes turned up each and every time we walked into that tent. Under that tent, every act performed no matter how different it was to the one that came before it. I like to think of the love of God like that big tent. Under the big top we are all gathered no matter how different we may think we are. But for some the size of the tent is daunting – Dad tells me that some people are afraid of its enormity, believing that anything this expansive cannot be solid, safe, and hold up against what lies outside. For some, the canopy of God’s love is more than they can muster, and yet it is true. The overarching, universal love of God can be scary yet we must be brave because in the end hope lies in bravery, and we are in need of hope. We must be brave enough to live knowing that God loves the world and that God’s love is the single most significant force for change and transformation that the world has ever known. In the end it takes guts to be loved.
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