Sermon delivered on the Holy Cross Day, the 14th September 2008 by Fr Nicholas JG Sykes in the congregation of St. Alban's Church of England, George Town, Cayman Islands in the service of the Holy Eucharist.

Scriptures: Numbers 21: 4-9     Philippians 2: 6-11     S. John 3: 13-17

Numbers 21: 8 "The Lord said to Moses, `Make a fiery serpent, and set it on a pole; and every one who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live.'"

REASSURANCE AFTER BEING CAST OUT

I have been interested in the abundant evidence that is coming in, albeit discarded by many schools of science, for very marked catastrophes being involved in the creation from earliest times of man’s consciousness. I belong to the minority school of scientific opinion that asserts that the fear engendered by these catastrophes, working its way through the generations of man’s racial memory, influences our souls and affects our behaviour still. We should not forget either that on an individual level, all mothering involves the trauma of the separation of the child from the womb. That safe place of the womb, the only thing that the child has experienced, now turns itself against him, so to speak, and casts him out as surely as Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden. Possibly the trauma of birth or removal from the womb is never quite forgotten and stamps its mark on the mind of the child, and the child of course becomes the father of the man. Mothering such a being involves providing not just physical milk, but reassurance for the soul. On the edges of human society have always been infants who have little or no experience of that reassurance. It is sobering to consider that in recent times the pressure exerted on normal mothering processes has become sufficiently severe that what was once considered to be on the edge of societies threatens to work its way in towards becoming a central reality. If the family and the home and a degree of leisure, stability and concord within them are seen to be essential to the normal reassurance of a growing infant, we must begin to wonder what sort of humanity will survive an age in which these things seem to be greatly constrained or denied.

THE RESCUING GRACE

Our God is a rescuing God, however, and our lessons today remind us that even unimaginable sorts of trauma are fully matched by the rescuing grace that God will provide. This is something that believing people can hold on to when we consider the negatives in our daily diet, such as family instability, war, the serious storms with which we have become familiar, and the overturning of traditional ethics. The fearsome experiences of the Israelites in their wilderness wanderings are one of many Old Testament examples or images of those forces of life that stand against humanity, and what we heard of these fearsome experiences from our Old Testament Lesson today is picked up in the Gospel. The token of God's grace in the Old Testament passage, the serpent of bronze lifted upon a pole, is seen to foreshadow the lifting up of the Son of Man upon the Cross, that whoever believes in Him may have eternal life. Also, taking a fresh look at that Old Testament passage in Numbers 21: 4-9 can be interesting and perhaps instructive. It may be that the nature of the fiery serpents that were sent among the people hurting them was different from the usual interpretation of venomous desert snakes. The Hebrew for these creatures is actually "seraphim". That could suggest that these lethal entities might have been atmospheric rather than terrestrial, electrical phenomena perhaps a little bit like the plasma discharges of ball lightning. Although it is speculative, one could suppose that the effect of a serpent of bronze set up on a pole might be something like the effect of a lightning conductor, that is mounted to neutralise the electrical potential of the space around it. Those who placed themselves near enough to it would be kept safe from the electrical effects occurring all around them.

RAISED BY GRACE FROM THE TRAUMA AND PROSPECT OF DISASTER

If Moses' serpent of bronze acted like a lightning conductor giving those who kept near it a region of safety, that may help to make this biblical image, which is applied to the Son of Man in St. John's Gospel, more accessible to the modern mind. We can think of the function of a lightning conductor and see that the lifting up of the Son of Man upon the Cross does indeed, analogously to the lightning conductor, give us who keep near to it a region of safety. If we have come to be conscious of our world as a dangerous place, we might not again despise that place of safety. The relatively safe heavens and earth that we all have known may but be considered to be a phase occurring between catastrophes, some of which man cannot help but recall and recount in his own ancient stories. The theologian accounts for man's discords and divisions as aspects of his chronic fallenness, the Freudian psychologist looks for their causes in the traumas of infancy, and the Catastrophist discerns in man's traumatised consciousness evidence for a violent scenario of mankind's survival of his very creation. The modern mind in general is more inclined to configure the prospect of disaster ahead than ever before. For the Christian mind, order on the one hand and disaster on the other are not only physical, but also ethical in nature. We perish if we are captured by sin: in St. Paul's language we died through the trespasses and sins in which we once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience. But God, by lavishing upon us the riches of His grace, made us alive together with Christ, and raised us up with Him and made us sit with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. In the light of this we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, and no longer are we to revert to the tendencies and practices of our old fallen and traumatised nature. The cost of this great work of our redemption was outlined in our second Lesson, in which St. Paul describes the One who was in the form of God taking the form of a servant, and becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. "Therefore God has highly exalted Him and bestowed on Him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow."

PLACES OF SAFETY IN A DANGEROUS ENVIRONMENT

So yes, the Cross and Resurrection of Christ is our lightning conductor and more. Not only are we His baptised children refreshed, reassured and kept safe by Him through all the perils, physical and moral, of our present age, but we are made to possess a share in His exaltation, in that we are raised by a Fatherly hand to be with Him, and made to sit with Him in the heavenly places. And in the process, we too are to be fashioned into little lightning conductors for the benefit of those around us, standing in full view, as it were, of the lifted up Son of Man. Like the place of safety that He has provided, we also are to become little places of safety for others in the dangerous environment around us. That is what a father as well as a mother is particularly called to be for their own children, and all of us who minister in any way in the name of Christ, who was lifted up upon the Cross, are called and equipped by Him to be His little places of safety in those times and places of physical, social and moral danger to which we and any of our neighbours are exposed. May we all minister God’s redemptive safety to our neighbours, and by doing so declare His concern and love for them.