When Serpents Bite

Text: Numbers 21:4-9; John 3:14-22

I remember back in my early days of ministry in West Virginia having a conversation with a woman about church membership that certainly opened my eyes.  I asked if she and her husband had ever thought about becoming members of the church and her immediate response was “Why would I need to do that?”  The question caught me off guard a bit.  I had grown up in and around the church and I just assumed that everybody knew that once you came to faith in Christ Jesus you joined the church.  Not being prepared for that question I decided to use humour to buy myself some time so I replied, “Oh, so that you can vote and hold office.”  I was not prepared for the question, “what benefit to me would there be in joining the church?”

What it is to be a member of a church is a difficult concept to get across these days as Western culture has become so anti-institutional.  Ever since 1965 people have stopped joining things, church and civic organizations the same.  The reasons why are very complex and beyond our timeframe for this morning.  So consider yourselves spared.  Nevertheless, I would not be far off if I said that within and without the church the default understanding of church membership is simply getting one’s name on the membership roll and accepting a few more responsibilities in the area of giving, attendance, and sharing duties.  In this case, church membership simply equals club membership and the basis of the church club would be the practice of religion. 

Oddly enough, this utterly unbiblical understanding of church membership has arisen in Western culture alongside of the struggle for religious freedom.  In order to ensure a person’s basic human right to believe what they want to believe in a world where there are many ways of being Christian as well as many religions, Christian faith has been reduced to simply being a matter of private belief, the church has been reduced to just another voluntary association, and Christianity has been reduced to simply being one expression among many of the same universal truth.  It is this mindset that must be countered to understand what membership in the church is all about.

First, today one must be ready to give account of how the Christian faith is not simply one expression among many of a universal truth called god.  It is about the one and only God who is not a part of this creation really acting within history to save and transform his creation that has fallen into futility because of humanity’s rebellion.  His actions to save began a long time ago with people named Noah and Abraham, and then Moses and ancient Israel.  It culminated when God revealed himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ God the Son become human.  As Jesus Christ God has acted uniquely to save humanity once and for all from the futility of sin and death.  Through him we are given eternal life which is knowing God the Father and God the Son by participating in their realtionship through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit ( see John 17:3).  The Triune God of Grace is really acting in real history and matter, in time and space, to make all things new and will ultimately do so on the Day of Resurrection when Jesus returns.  We live by faith until that day with the guarantee of the Holy Spirit with us and working healing in us, in our bodies and particularly works of reconcilliation in our relationships.  In and among us us is now where God has chosen to dwell.  As our reading from Ephesians said at the beginning of this service “we are being built together spiritually as a dwelling place for God” (Eph. 2:22).  The Triune God of grace is acting concretely within history to deliver his creation in, through, and as Jesus Christ and this is the foundational truth of the Christian faith.  No other religion says this.  So, to be a member of the church one must believe this and the only way one can believe this is by God graciously giving us the faith to trust the love of the Father revealed in the Jesus Christ, a gift that comes to us by the work of the Holy Spirit upon us.  Apart from God’s revealing himself to usthere is no true faith.

Second, the church is not a voluntary society where people of like-minded beliefs have joined together for the worship of God.  The church is a fellowship that God creates by calling people to faith and in the same act calling them together for the express purpose of being a fellowship that reflects his image by the love he creates in and among them.  We are the body of Christ and each of us individually is member of it (1 Cor. 12:27).  The earliest understanding of church membership is that we are each body parts of the one body of Jesus Christ resurrected. Keep an image in your mind of resurrection where in communities all over the place God is rising up the body of Jesus Christ through which God reveals himself to the world through our life together, a life that is shaped by the cross.  We together as a church globally become like a resurrected Jesus, the New Humanity as opposed to Adam the Old Humanity walking around in our communities.  To be a member of the church is to be called together by the Father and joined together in the Holy Spirit to be the body of Jesus Christ to our community.

Finally, the Christian faith is not a matter of private faith.  It is a matter of shared faith.  Private faith simply says, “I believe this and so I do this.”  The Christian faith says, “We believe this so we do this.”  We believe that God so loved the world that he sent his only Son so that all who believe in him may not perish but have eternal life.  We know this because we have found healing by looking towards him.  Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so has Jesus Christ been lifted up.  To be a member of a congregation is to make a promise to a group of Christians to whom God has called you.  The promise is to live by Jesus sole commandment that we love one another, the love he proved and demonstrated to us by going to the cross for us.  It is the promise “I will love you as I know the Lord has loved me and, as we all know, we will fail miserably at this task so I promise to forgive, as I know I have been forgiven”.  We promise to do this undconditionally and even if we do not receive in kind from our sisters and brothers in Christ.  Just as one does not go spouse shopping after marriage, so we do not go church shopping after making the promise of membership within and to a particular congregation.  Even if it gets to the point where we say “I can’t stand that preacher’s sermons.  In fact, I can’t stand him.”  Even if it gets to the point of “I’d get more out of shopping at Wal-Mart on Sunday morning than spending time with that dying brood.”  Even if it gets to the point of detesting that miserable fellowship.  God has still called us each to this fellowship and in faith we have made the promise that we each will look to the cross together and find healing when those serpents start to bite because “we been thinking on Egypt”.  The real relationship involved in life together with the congregation to which Christ has called us each to live as his disciples is the closest thing to Jesus Christ we will know until we meet him on that day.  It is in the body of Christ that we meet Jesus Christ, him crucified and resurrected for us.  Being a member of a congregation is a serious matter.  It is a promise akin to the promise of marriage.  It is a promise to love and pray for and be together with those whom God has called us to and whom he calls to us so that we might come to know Christ and be formed in his image.

            

Believing

Text: John 3:14-22

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten (one and only or unique) Son, so that all who believe in him shall not perish but shall have eternal life.”  This verse is a, if not the, cornerstone verse for Evangelical Christianity.  It describes quite precisely what God has done in, through, and as Jesus Christ to save the world because he loves it.  I consider myself to be an evangelical Christian rather than Liberal or Conservative because I truly want people to know Jesus Christ as their Lord and Saviour, to know the love of God the Father, and to have and live eternal life through the presence of the Holy Spirit within them.  I am evangelical, but I do not throw my hat into the camp of what goes by the name of Evangelicalism in North America.  I am rather a Trinitarian or Orthodox Evangelical and therefore, for me John 3:16 says something different than the way it is typically used by North American Evangelicals.

John 3:16, as it is a cornerstone verse, is easily taken out of context and left to stand on its own where it is indeed read wrongly and therefore it has become the flagship verse of a deviant form of Christianity that is propositional and contractual with respect to the grace free given us by the Trinity.  It uses an individual’s ability to make a purely rational decision about matters pertaining to Jesus to determine whether he or she goes to heaven or hell upon dying.  Propositional Christians say that a person is not saved until they have fulfilled the contractual condition of professing belief in Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour.  In propositional Christianity, human reason trumps grace.  It says “By reason through profession of belief in propositions about Jesus you will be saved” rather than, “By grace through faith you have been saved.”  Propositional Christianity ultimately turns faith into a work.

Faith in God is not something we can just decide to have.  It is not blind belief of religious propositions brought about by persuasion or even coercion.  Rather, faith is a gift from God, the by-product of God’s gracious work in history and in each of our lives.  It comes about from God’s directly acting upon us in the real, historical events of our lives.  The theologian, Karl Barth said, “Faith is what happens when the faithfulness of God encounters the fidelity of man.”  The Triune God of grace in his great love for us does something real in our lives that hits us right at the core of that part of us that is capable of trusting others and in that moment, true faith is born and it continues to grow.  Faith is therefore a relationship, not simply a decision to believe something.

Sometimes it is easier to say what you mean by saying first what you don’t mean.  So, this is what I’m saying I don’t mean.  We know people who say, “I believe in God because I should have died in that car wreck.”  Events like that can’t lead us to believe in God the Father of Jesus Christ by the work of the Holy Spirit.  They lead us to suppose that there is a god and from there we may surmise whatever we want about who or what that god is. 

Now what I am saying is faith, on the other hand, arises from something real that God has done in our lives by which he makes his "self" known to us as present and involved rather than distant and leaving us guessing.  God makes himself present with us as the Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit in all humility rather than saying “Believe in me I am Spirit” remains anonymous and in all humility points us to Jesus so that it is Jesus whom we meet and come to know in the Spirit.  Jesus also in all humility does not let the buck stop with him but rather points us to the Father saying “Come.  Know me as the Son of God by sharing in my relationship with my Father in the Spirit.  Know my Father as I know him.  You are his very loved child too.”  Thus, we come to know the steadfast love and faithfulness of God the Father as Jesus himself knows it and we desire to be faithful and to serve just as Jesus himself does. 

The how of how that happens is infinite.  Along with this knowing and confessing, a change happens in the way we understand ourselves.  We become aware that, “I am a new creation.  The old life is gone.  A new life has begun.  I do not make sense to myself apart from Jesus and therefore I have to follow him to figure out what is going on.  Something has radically changed about me.”  In the end, faith, as it is a gift created in us by the relationship building work of the Holy Spirit pointing us to Jesus, keeps us looking to Jesus and his purpose for us and striving to fulfill it because apart from that we just don’t know ourselves in a way we can really live with anymore.  It’s knowing I need to be different and Jesus holds the key to that transformation. 

Yet, I think most of us have been accustomed to hearing John 3:16 in a way that is propositional – believe in Jesus and you will have eternal life.  But, that reading is not the best reading of John 3:16.  The Greek it was written in doesn’t sound that way.  Furthermore, when you consider it’s meaning within the context of the conversation that Jesus is having with the Jewish elder Nicodemus, it is a statement of reality rather than a proposition for conversion that spells at the consequences if you refuse it.  Jesus was not saying to Nicodemus believe in the Son of God so that you can have eternal life.  He was rather simply stating that all who are in the present state of having faith and living faithfully in union with him in the Holy Spirit are presently not perishing, but are experiencing eternal life.  John 3:36, the last verse in this chapter, agrees.  It reads: "He who believes in the Son has eternal life; but he who does not obey the Son will not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him." 

Further, a lot hinges on how we define eternal life.   People have debated for the last few decades with Evangelicals who think it simply means life after death in heaven that goes on forever.  These folks simply say that eternal defines a quality of life to be participated in now.  This is closer to how John uses it, but we must set all that aside and accept the fact that Jesus himself defines what it is later in the Gospel when he is praying on the night he was arrested.  John 17:3 reads: “And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”  Eternal life is as I described in a moment ago; knowing God the Father as Jesus knows him because we are given the gift of participating in their relationship by the work of the Holy Spirit with and in us.  John 3:13 is not about how we get to Heaven when we die, it is Jesus explaining to Nicodemus what is happening to him now that he has the curiosity surrounding Jesus.  Nicodemus is being brought into eternal life by the work of the Holy Spirit who is drawing him to Jesus who will share his relationship with the Father with him.

Now, let’s take a look at Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus.  As I said earlier, Nicodemus was a Jewish elder, a member of the ruling council of Israel.  The conversation begins with Nicodemus coming to Jesus at night because he was afraid of being seen and somehow being identified with Jesus (v. 1).  That sends us looking to the last verse of our passage where Jesus says the light has come into the world but mankind loved the darkness more than the light and continued to do evil.  Nicodemus’ fear of the power of the Jewish authorities was keeping him from the truth.  Nicodemus then states that he has come to Jesus to acknowledge that the Council does indeed recognize that Jesus is a great teacher from God because no one could do the miracles that Jesus has done without being from God (v.2).  Then, recognizing their short-sightedness, Jesus instructs him that no one can see nor enter the Kingdom of God unless born again, unless they are born of the Holy Spirit; which means God has awakened faith in Jesus Christ in that person (vv. 3-7).  Furthermore, God by the work of the Spirit is as indiscriminate and unpredictable in whom he awakens faith as the wind blowing where it will blow (v. 8).

Jesus then gets personal with Nicodemus and confronts him about his blindness: “You are Israel’s teacher and you do not understand these things? (vv. 9-10)”  Then he starts to speak in the collective “we” in order to include his followers: “I tell you the truth, we speak of what we know, and we testify to what we have seen, but still ‘you people’ do not accept our testimony (vv. 11-12).”  By “you people” Jesus means the rulers of Israel who are blinded by power and can’t see who he really is.  If they were truly “of faith” they would see he is the Son of God, but being “not of faith” and rather “of power” they see him as only a teacher. 

Skipping ahead a bit, when Jesus says in verses 19-21 that light has come into the world but men love the darkness because of their evil deeds, he is using a generalized statement to speak prophetically and specifically into Nicodemus’ own life asking the question why it is that Nicodemus himself has come to him in the darkness.  Nicodemus can then only realize that he is using the cover of darkness to protect himself from those who love darkness because they do evil.  Yet, Nicodemus’ coming to Jesus is in a small way his coming to the truth, his coming into the light, his coming to faith.  Something then changed with Nicodemus for we know that after Jesus died, Nicodemus along with a man named Joseph of Arimathea got permission to take Jesus down from the cross and bury him.  In this conversation the Holy Spirit brought Nicodemus to faith with respect to Jesus and did so even though Nicodemus didn’t understand all of the theological stuff surrounding Jesus.

So, what should you carry away from all of this rambling?  Firstly, if you find that you have faith that in, through, and as Jesus Christ God has saved you, freed you, transformed you from an old life by means of drawing you to himself and given you a new live that centres on being Jesus’ disciple, then know this, not only will you live after you die you are presently partaking of eternal life, life in its highest quality.  Unfortunately, in this world that cannot see the light because it loves the darkness, faithfulness or believing, which is participation in eternal life, ends up being the way of the cross in which we must renounce claim to ourselves and devote ourselves to Jesus and a way of life that is for him and others and not for ourselves so that people might know the love of God.  Believing is living according to the Holy Spirit, indeed a wind-driven life, going where the Spirit leads us to do the work of Christ.  Secondly, eternal life is a life of devotion, of letting ourselves be open to hearing God speak to us in prayer, praise, and the study of Scripture both by ourselves and with other Christians.  Finally, it is discovering our God-given gifts for ministry in the church and utilizing them for the building up of the church.  So then, faith is not so much about belief or beliefs.  Rather, it is about believing, being in relationship God the Father in, with, and through Jesus the Son by the relation building work of the Holy Spirit.   Amen.