Last Sunday we left the people of Israel at Mount Sinai where they had received the commandments of God. They spent about a year at this holy mountain. (They arrived at Sinai in Exodus 19:1; they did not break camp until Numbers 10:11.) In our text for today, they are on the move again through the trackless wilderness. Their wilderness wanderings were the best and the worst of times for these chosen ones of God. On the one hand it was the time when God and the people were on close and intimate terms. God delivered them from Egypt. Looking back on this decisive moment in their history, the people of God made this memorable confession:

And you shall make response before the Lord your God, "A wandering Aramean was my father; and he went down into Egypt and sojourned there, few in number; and there he became a nation, great, mighty, and populous. And the Egyptians treated us harshly, and afflicted us, and laid upon us hard bondage. Then we cried to the Lord the God of our fathers, and the Lord heard our voice, and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression; and the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great terror, with signs and wonders...." (Deuteronomy 26:5-8)

So the chosen ones experienced God’s great care and attention, through the Exodus from Egypt to the holy mountain of Sinai where they received guidance for obedience and service. God did not supply all their wants, but God saw to all their physical and spiritual needs - at a time when they were helpless and had nowhere to turn.

But it was also the worst of times. Wilderness wandering, whining, and complaining went together. But what is really surprising in all this grumbling is the disgusting regularity with which the Israelites wanted to return to the security of making bricks out of straw under the orders of the oppressive government of Egypt. It seems that the security of slavery was more important than the freedom of the wilderness. (The Bible does not read like some romance story. It is uncomfortably and candidly honest!)

So in our story today, "they were on the road again," avoiding the enemy territory of Edom, grumbling and impatient as usual. They were wearing out and so was their leader, Moses. Moses was probably wondering why he ever left the flesh pots of Egypt or the quiet, tranquil life of a shepherd herding his father-in-law’s sheep. Again and again Moses had learned that it is a lot easier to deal with woolly sheep than woolly people. They accused him of inept leadership when they ran short of water. He continued to get it when they ran short of food. He was a leader who was also caught in the middle. If he wasn’t busy convincing his people that God had really called him, he was busy arguing with God that the people were worth calling.

Once again Moses heard the familiar lament, "Why did you bring us out of Egypt to die in this desert, where there is no food or water? We can’t stand any more of this miserable food." Their attitude reminds me a bit of my student days at college and our consistent complaining about the miserable, tasteless, starchy food we were being served in the cafeteria. But nobody took our complaining too seriously!

The children of Israel were not so fortunate. God heard and God acted and now we have the strange story of the snakes. "Then the Lord sent poisonous snakes among the people and many Israelites were bitten and died." This Old Testament story is a difficult one for our modern, scientific ears. God’s people were certainly behaving in an obnoxious fashion, but the punishment seems a bit severe. Does God really turn rattlesnakes loose among people? Can one be healed simply by looking at the bronze or copper image of a snake that is mounted on a pole? That sounds like magical hocus-pocus, a voodoo kind of healing that believers in God are supposed to avoid. Well, we can make the technical point that God sent the snakes, but it was the people who stepped on them! It also seems clear that it was God and not the snakes that caused the healing.

Perhaps it might be of additional help to learn that snakes have a rather interesting, if ambiguous religious history. The snake was cursed by God to forever crawl in the dust for its role in the sin of Adam and Eve. Here in our story the snake is elevated on a pole for healing purposes. We know that even today, the image of the serpent is the healing symbol for our medical profession. We still have snake cults among some religious people in Appalachia who handle the poisonous reptiles as a sign of their strong faith in God.

There is some evidence that there was a snake cult operating among the people of Israel. It was probably the "physical healing" dimension of their faith. The Bible tells us of this kind of snake worship in the temple of Jerusalem during the reign of King Hezekiah (2 Kings 18:4). Apparently, it was getting out of hand, because the good king had the image destroyed.

Archeologists have uncovered bronze images of snakes in an abandoned copper mine that could have been the location of this particular crisis, but this is a highly speculative conclusion.

We are dealing here with a lot of tangled history that will probably never be completely unraveled. But there is considerable evidence that the appearance of snakes in this wilderness crisis was something more than just a coincidence, and something more than voodoo magic at the hands of an unseeing and uncaring God.

Now you have probably heard more about snakes than you wanted to. But down through history to the present time, snakes continue to exert both their frightening and fascinating power. In our gospel reading for today, we have the surprising connection between the snake on the pole and the Son of God on the cross. If nothing else, John in his gospel makes clear the primary point, and that is that God provided the means of healing after the people had repented.

That is what happened in our Old Testament story. Once the people of God discovered how awful it was to live with snakes, they came to their senses again and confessed to Moses, "We have sinned for we have spoken against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord, that he take away the serpents from us." Living with snakes proved to be no picnic! It prompted an attitudinal change. It doesn’t always work that way. Sometimes increased suffering produces even greater bitterness and alienation. Here, however, it called forth the spirit of repentance and confession.

It is important to note that the prayers of the Israelites were not answered in the way they requested. The snakes were not removed. Instead the image of a snake was created out of bronze, lifted upon a pole and all who were bitten and then looked upon this image would survive. But of all creatures of God that could have been lifted up - a snake! A snake is lifted up to be the sign of healing, of salvation! That is very strange to us. It strikes us as just a bit more than unusual. Lift high the snake! To hear it said that way is offensive to our ears. It sounds crude and awful. A teenager would describe it as "gross."

But in his gospel, John takes this "gross" incident and tells us, "And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so much the Son of man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life" (John 3:14-15).

Undoubtedly this connection between the Old and New Testaments is the most important insight in our biblical readings for this Sunday. In the Old Testament, the snake is lifted up. In the New Testament, Christ is lifted up.

Lift high the cross! There is something gross about that too. It’s just that we have put so much gold plating around it and hung it around so many necks as decoration that it no longer looks or sounds offensive. I suspect this is one of the reasons the empty cross has replaced the crucifix in so many of our churches. We don’t want to see or even be reminded of the suffering and dying Christ who was nailed to it. But it was a lowly Jewish carpenter who was executed on such a cross as a common criminal. Yes, the chief symbol of our church today, the cross, was the electric chair of the first century.

So the great missionary Paul saw the cross as a "scandal to Jews and folly to the Gentiles" because it was hard for them to accept a suffering redeemer, a wounded healer. They and we are more comfortable with a God of power and majesty, but what we have is a carpenter’s son from the little town of Nazareth - one who came humble and meek and whose life ended high upon the cursed tree.

Yes, the story in front of us this morning is strange to our ears, but strange or not, our story continues to reveal a God who is faithfully consistent. In the forty years of wandering in the wilderness, through all the moaning and complaining of the called ones, God remained faithful to the agreement (promise) that was made with them.

For the children of Israel the wilderness was that time between God’s deliverance from Egypt and their entry into the promised land. In our life, the wilderness is that time between the dying and rising of Christ and when Christ comes again. So we are now on our wilderness journey. We live in the in-between-time. In our wilderness trip, we too have our "snakes" with which to contend - snakes that poison our lives. We also do our share of groaning and complaining. Yes, we live in our wilderness too, only the geography is different.

So lift high the cross! Look upon this cross and see there the sign of our healing, the sign of our salvation. Among other things, the cross is the great symbol of God’s continuing faithfulness to us. This God who refused to give up on the Israelites of old, will not give up on the baptized ones of the present.

Yes, lift high the cross! Let it remind us that our God knows that living can be hard and our suffering can be great. Our God in Christ has experienced wilderness living. God has appreciation and understanding of our feeble attempts to live and love in a wilderness full of snakes.

So lift high the cross! The uplifted cross proclaims to us that God’s love for us is not based upon our successes, our social standing, our bank account, our prestige - not even on our grade averages at school. The cross is and remains the symbol of God’s great and unconditional love for us.

Lift high the cross! See there your Redeemer and know "that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life."

Lift high the cross. Amen.