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St
Alban’s (Grand Cayman) & St Mary’s (Cayman Brac) |
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Sermon
delivered on the Fourth Sunday in Lent, the 22nd
March 2009 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
Ephesians 2: 1-10
John 3: 14-21 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.'" THE
CHURCH NOURISHES HER CHILDREN Today,
the Fourth Sunday in Lent, near the middle of Lent, became
associated in course of time with themes of refreshment, a sort of
lightening up of the Lenten fast before the discipline of the home
stretch to Holy Week and Easter, and also with the theme of
Mothering. The most basic of all mothering activities is the
refreshment of her infant, and so the themes of mothering and
refreshment are strongly connected. Certainly, our Mother the Church
refreshes us her children with the pure milk of the Word and the
sacraments. As the mothers here will know, even the breast-feeding
of babies is not without its complications. Sometimes there are
considerable difficulties, and by analogy we can understand that we
too as the Church's children can give our Mother the Church a great
deal of trouble in her efforts to nourish us with the refreshment
that she is impelled by her divine character to provide to us. REASSURANCE
AFTER BEING CAST OUT We
should not forget either, that 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. Perhaps 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 alienated soul. On the
edges of
human society have always been infants who have little or no
experience of that mothering and 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. The recent “octomom”
excitement should cause us to ponder what deeper issues for the
human soul arise from the increasing acceptance of alternative
fertilization techniques. If the family of mother and father and the
home and a degree of leisure, stability and concord within them are
seen to be essential to the normal mothering and reassurance of a
growing infant, we must begin to wonder what sort of humanity will
survive an age in which increasingly these things seem to be greatly
constrained or even altogether 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 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 look at that Old
Testament passage in Numbers 21: 4-9 from the viewpoint of the
recent “Electric Universe” physical model can be interesting and
perhaps instructive. It may be that the fiery serpents that were
sent among the people hurting them was not actually venomous desert
snakes. The Hebrew for these creatures is "seraphim" -
which could suggest that these lethal entities might have been
atmospheric rather than terrestrial, electrical phenomena of a ball
lightning type. Although it is speculative, one could suppose that
the effect of a metal serpent 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. The English Standard
Version points out that the metal might actually have been copper,
rather than bronze – the AV, by the way, renders it as
“brass”. Copper is the best of electrical conductors, and also
has a reddish hue, reminding us perhaps of the bloodied sacrificial
victim. RAISED
BY GRACE FROM THE TRAUMA AND PROSPECT OF DISASTER If
Moses' serpent of bronze or copper 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 and look to it a region of safety. If we
have come to recognise that our world is 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 dangerous times, 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
in our second lesson today 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. 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, mothered
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 spiritual
and physical environment around us. That is what a mother is
particularly called to be for her 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 spiritual, physical, social and
moral danger to which we and any of our neighbours are exposed.
QUESTIONS 1.
List some of the dangers that challenge our sense of security.
For some of these, match them with what you feel to be particularly
appropriate biblical imagery or themes of rescue.
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