The following sermon was delivered by the Rev. Dr. Jennifer Copeland on Sunday, March 10, 2024, at Duke University Chapel. View the recording.
Put a serpent on a pole, stare at it, and be healed.
Believe in the Son of Man, about to be executed by the authorities, and have eternal life.
Interesting prescriptions for a long and healthy life. We’re used to hearing things like stop eating red meat, exercise more, or quit smoking. Not easy to do, mind you, but practical.
These scripture lessons for this third week of Lent are an antidote to death. But they’re so foreign to us that we don’t know whether to be more confused by Moses’ serpent on a stick or the almost always misused John 3:16—“everyone who believes in him”—with a mighty narrow definition of belief. It might be easier to quit smoking.
I would suggest each of these antidotes to death from scripture today are exactly what people needed at the time the antidote was offered. If we are bitten by serpents in the wilderness—laying aside for the moment that our own grumbling and impatience may have contributed to this hazard—but if we are bitten by serpents in the wilderness, we need a snake bite kit. “Make a poisonous serpent and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live” (v. 8). Snakebite kit, ancient near east style. Whatever works. Scripture reports that it worked.
Scripture has other stories like this one where human behavior creates death-dealing conditions, often negated when someone intervenes or when people recognize their behavior and change their ways. Scripture regularly attributes the antidote to death to God. God comes through with lifesaving measures, even when God’s people have been warned ahead of time of the danger. God still comes through.
So, what about now? What is killing us these days and what do we need as an antidote? Our dangers may not be as literal as a snake bite, but things are killing us, draining our lives away. Drip by drip, all the things we confront every day, seemingly surmountable in their singular presentation but soul-crushing in their compounded accumulation.
They are mostly first-world problems for most of us, to be sure. But they are our problems, and they are killing us. Something as seemingly mundane as:
- A flat tire when we’re already late for work.
- A sick child on the day scheduled for our annual review.
- A burned casserole when the in-laws are coming for dinner.
They all sound trivial when we list them out like that, but there’s a mountain of individual pressure behind every instance when life presents a setback. The flat tire may come at the end of what is already a hectic morning caused by all the things that make our mornings hectic. And the morning might be following an evening or an entire weekend of preparing all the things we need to have on our desk at work today—the work for which we will now be late. It doesn’t take a terminal medical diagnosis to feel our lives draining away.
We have other matters, bigger maybe, like paying for college or attending to elderly parents. I used to listen to people talk about their elderly parents, and I’m going to tell you, I had no idea… People can’t tell you enough to get you ready for what it’s like.
And what about the obstacles faced by those who endure food insecurity—one in six children in North Carolina by the way—or the housing shortage—homelessness increased in Durham by over 300% in the last few years. And Apple’s not even here yet.
I could spend the rest of the morning throwing out examples of death-inducing data. It is Lent, a good time to face death. We started this forty-day journey by hearing the words, “to dust you shall return.” Staring death in the face might be the first step toward asking good questions about life.
For starters, we should admit that no one gets out of life alive. So, physical death is not the real problem. There are some physical deaths that are problematic: starving children, gun violence, maternal mortality, to name a few. I don’t mean to say dying doesn’t matter. I only mean to remind us that fourscore and seven years is not a deadly problem. There is plenty of dying going on every day that doesn’t end in the morgue.
In John’s gospel, we meet Nicodemus. Nicodemus is concerned about such weighty matters as rebirth and salvation, also known as life and death. Nicodemus understands death; he wants an antidote. He asks Jesus for the truth. This question comes at the end of an evening of conversation. Have you noticed how nighttime talks are always more soul-searching? That’s why college students stay up late at night to search their souls. Few existential questions have been answered over breakfast. Jesus and Nicodemus are staying up late to talk about an antidote to death.
Jesus reminds Nicodemus of a familiar old story. A story Nicodemus knows: the exodus from Egypt, the wilderness wandering, the eventual crossing of the Jordan. Most people know the gist of the story, like the words to an old song we can remember when we hear them even if we can’t sing a karaoke solo.
Remember how Moses lifted up the serpent, Jesus prompts. And it all comes back to us, the final complaint from the wilderness wandering. Jesus doesn’t need to tell the whole story. He alludes to the serpent, and Nicodemus knows the rest. A series of complaints that culminate by accusing, not just Moses, but also God, of leading them to death. “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness?” A question that annoyed God enough for God to allow deadly serpents into the camp. And Nicodemus remembers, God also provided the antidote for those deadly serpent bites.
What’s my antidote, Nicodemus wonders? What do I stare at in order to live? And there is Jesus, right in front of him. The antidote. “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” It’s a complicated response made more complicated by our increasingly myopic understanding of belief. Jesus goes on to talk with Nicodemus about what some people do in spite of what they say they believe, making it clear that truth claims are not necessarily trustworthy information.
It’s not always easy to tell the difference between what is true and what sounds true. Nicodemus seems to be struggling with that nuance. “How can this be,” he asks a couple of different times. Jesus lays it out for him in terms of light and darkness. “. . . the light has come into the world . . . people who do evil hate the light . . . those who do what is true come to the light . . .” (vv. 19-21). And what is that light? “For God so loved the world” (v. 16).
We measure truth claims against God’s love for the world. Does the claim reflect that love the way a mirror reflects light? Or is it swallowed by the darkness because there is no love to reflect. Jesus didn’t answer that question for Nicodemus. He just told him what to look for. Look for the reflection of God’s love for the world. That’s the antidote to death. That’s how we know what we’re hearing is true.
I’m going to come very close to the political line for just a minute, but remember Jesus wasn’t crucified for praying too much. He was crucified for walking all over the political line.
The election rhetoric is really ramping up now following our primary this past week. The usual suspects won the big tickets moving them forward to November. Some of my friends won further down the ballot and that makes me happy. I have a competitive spirit and elections have some of that competitive edge about them. We join campaigns and work the phones, we knock on doors and hand out flyers. We all get together on election night to watch the results come on the screen as the polls close, much like I watch every Duke basketball game, men and women—noting the score as the clock winds down. Personally, I like a landslide victory in basketball and elections. No need for an exciting close game. Just win. By a lot.
But as much as I love to beat Carolina—still waiting for that this year—elections are far more than a game, even the most competitive game we can imagine. As those who do the electing, our job as voters is to know the difference between what is true and what sounds.
I used to think all the people we elect want what’s best for our country, our state, our town; but just have different ideas about how to get there. And maybe that used to be the case, although I’ve studied enough history to think not. I was raised in South Carolina. Up until I was in my mid-thirties, I thought the Civil War was about state’s rights. When I moved to North Carolina I had never heard of Wilmington on fire. Turns out, neither had any of my friends raised in Wilmington. Black or white. But we all took history classes in high school. And then we grew up and voted for people who reflected what we had learned. What should be taught in high school is part of the election rhetoric today. Should we teach history that’s true or history that sounds like it’s true?
I’ve come to understand human beings don’t just have different ideas about how to reach the end; we have different ideas about what the end should be. And it’s killing us. Churches divide; families stop talking; children beat up each other in the bathroom. These are our serpents and they bite us every day.
