And the Lord said to Moses, “Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.”

When my friend and seminary classmate and now president of New Brunswick Seminary, Gregg Mast, was here for our Ash Wednesday service to begin this season of Lent, he spoke of two kinds of scriptures.

One he called the velvet passages, the ones that feel good when they rub on our souls: “Behold I bring you good news of great joy, for unto you a child is born”; “Come unto me all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest”; “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want” – smooth and comforting words.

Then there were the sandpaper passages, the ones the rub harshly upon our souls: “I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me”; “if we say we have no sin we deceive only ourselves and the truth is not in us”; “sell all that you have, give the money to the poor and follow me”; “how many times must I forgive? Seven? ‘No, 7 times 70.” Words that can irritate us and make us comfortable. And we grow by our exposure to both types of verses.

There are times when we are down and discouraged and broken and the velvet verses comfort us; and there are times when we are all full of ourselves, proud and arrogant, sure that we can tell God and everyone else what to do and the sandpaper verses humble us, and remind us of the sacredness of sacrifice and pain.

But I want to go Gregg one better today and suggest that there is a third category, beyond the velvet and the sandpaper. Today we are dealing with verses that I used to call “head-scratching verses” because I would read them and want to ask “what the heck is going on here?”

God is sending poisonous snakes among the people to bite them because they are complaining? How exactly does that fit with a loving God?

And more significantly, what does that say to me when I start my complaints to God?

Then there is the cure – you make a statue of what is ailing you and you put it up on a pole and then look at it and you will be healed. This could be, if we are to take this literally, the end of the health care crisis in our nation, and the start of a major boom in the profits of statue making companies.

And then, because those of you have struggled through the OT understand that there are a lot of head-scratching verses in the OT that the Christian tradition has chosen to overlook or reinterpret, but then Jesus himself, at the moment when he is most clear with a velvet verse “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son”, in that same conversation he refers to the snake statue situation, making it impossible for us to just dismiss it as an OT aberration.

If Jesus took a story seriously, then so must I.

But I don’t scratch my head as much as I used to about scripture, I have learned to come to those passages that baffle me with awe and a willingness to live with mystery, a willingness to hear what God has to say to me and us even when I can’t understand the logistics.

And today, as we continue through our Lenten examination of what God does, we realize that the central truth of these stories is that God heals.

And of all the things that God does, healing is the one – even more than forgiving – that I want to approach with awe and wonder, knowing that there is so much that I don’t know or don’t understand.

God heals, of this I am sure.

But I know that I am not the only one who has prayed, with passion, with tears, for the healing of people only to find myself standing at their newly dug grave with tears in my eyes and an emptiness in my soul.

Yet God heals, of this I am sure.

But I know that, in this room right now there are many of you who have prayed for healing and yet still suffer. They had that study in the paper this week that attempted and failed to pin down the power of prayer through scientific examination, as if God’s healing miracles were reproducible in a laboratory.

Yet God heals, of this I am sure.

And I know that I am not the only one who has prayed, deeply and continually, for the healing of relationships, only to find stubborn walls of pride and prejudice and apathy keeping people apart, shattering marriages, withering friendships.

Yet God heals, of this I am sure.

So how do I reconcile this certain faith of mine with the sad realities of the cemetery and the broken relationships that were meant to be holy sources of comfort? And beyond the struggles within my own soul, how do I, who have officiated at so many funerals, say to you: pray for God’s healing and you will receive it?

Well let me take what I can from the story and leave the rest for mystery.

First of all, there is the reality that the sin of the people was this: they complained.

Play that one around in your heart for a while.

They complained about God and about Moses and even about the quality of the food that they received.

How much of your time and my time is eaten up by complaining? I don’t think that the target of the complaints is important, it is the action of complaining that brings poison into the community, into our relationships, into our souls.

Listen to yourself, listen to how you sound to others, listen to how you sound to God.

How do you speak about your parents or your children or your spouse?

How do you speak about your kids’ teachers and principals, your town, county, state and federal leaders?

How do you speak of your boss, your employees, your co-workers?

How do you speak of the stranger in the other car on the highway or the person who can’t count who is on the express line ahead of you with 2 extra items?

How do you speak of those whose faith or nationality is different than yours?

How do you speak about life, this great gift that God has given you, this abundant and eternal existence that Christ has bought for you?

Do you complain?

For most people I know, the answer is yes, to some extent, on some level, yes we complain too much.

And doesn’t that create a poisonous atmosphere?

I can’t explain the logistics of the snake story, but I can be sure that when I am caught up in my complaining, I am creating a breeding ground for the dark things of life, I am killing the Holy Spirit’s gifts of love and joy within me and within those around me.

So I come to the story knowing that I and we need to be healed of our complaining and God heals, of this I am sure. Then there is the way that he heals.

It starts with the clear identification of the source of the poison.

How much healthier are we when we know what is wrong with us?

Certainly that is true physically, isn’t it?

We put the ice on the injury that we have, not the one that someone else had or the one that used to have; we take the medicine for what has been diagnosed, not for what we think we might have or wish we only had.

But it is even truer in our spiritual healing.

When we confess, St. Paul tells us, we are forgiven, but that means confessing: owning up to our bigotries and our envies and our selfishness and our lack of faith.

Once those things are out there, once they have been identified, we can find healing by looking at them. Isn’t that the benefit of visiting slave quarters in the south, or the empty concentration camps of Germany? Isn’t that why we hang the cross on the wall? We are visual creatures, in the same way the sight of our lit steeple can stir our hearts when we come home after being away too long, so the sight of poverty and pollution and hatred can cause us to change our ways and be healed. Which brings us to the words of Christ as he took hold of the story of the snakes and – not worrying about explaining it – held it up as a metaphor of his own life, his own death.

He invites you and me, sin-sick as we are, to be healed by looking to him.

And we can be, especially now in these sacred days as Lent draws to a close and we focus in on Jerusalem and the cross and the empty grave.

What is it, in your soul, that needs to be healed?

What is it, in our church life, that needs to be healed?

What is it, in our nation, that needs to be healed?

What has bitten us? What has poisoned us? What complaints or betrayals or failures have been defining our lives? What ever it is, whoever you have been, there is that man on his cross who is inviting you, urging you, to look at him, to study him, to be healed. Look at him in these holy weeks and you will be healed: everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.

God heals, of this I am sure.

Now I am tempted to end things here with this great offer of healing of our spiritual illnesses, years ago I would have done that. But I know that I can’t and don’t want to separate God’s healing from the physical world and from our illnesses.

Most of the people on our prayer lists are people in need of physical healing.

So what can we say about that?

Why is it that our prayers seem to go unanswered?

Why is it that our loved ones grow weaker and die, despite our best prayer efforts?

Let me suggest, just suggest, that which has sustained my faith as I have buried so many people whom I have loved so deeply.

You see, for me, there has been the ever-growing realization that this world is not all of life, it is precious and it is holy and it is the gift that God has given us for now, the place where he has called us to his service, but when that service is done I know that I will sit in a finer place, greeted by my parents, reunited with my loved ones from here and the other chapters of my life, embarrassed by the recalling of things that I have done or not done along the way, surprised by some people whom I might not have anticipated seeing, people whom God saw differently.

And I will be healed.

Permanently, eternally healed, beyond the grip of age and weakness and disease and sorrow.

I know, absolutely and unshakably, that God’s healing hands have answered my prayers for the healing of people I have loved in life, at times by restoring their health here and now, and at times by taking those people out of my life, for a time. And so I miss them, for now.

But every time I look up at that cross, every time I see our steeple in the distance, my sorrowing, cynical, beaten down soul is healed, for I remember and I celebrate that fact, the absolute fact, that God has responded to every prayer for healing that I have ever prayed.

And when I remember that, as I look up, I come alive again myself.

So pray for God’s healing for yourself and for others, here and now, and there and then.

Cherish the gift of abundant life now and eternal life then.

Confess the ways in which we have brought the poison down upon ourselves and others.

Look up - physically, spiritually, and emotionally – look up and you will be healed, because God heals us, of this I am sure.

And the Lord said to Moses, “Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.”