Lent 4 B - Mar 18, 2012 - Br. Robert Sevensky

St. Paul’s Cathedral, Burlington, VT
Br. Robert Sevensky, OHC
Lent 4 B – Sunday, March 18, 2012

Numbers 21:4-9
Ephesians 2:1-10
John 3:14-21

The Cross lifted up by Archangel Michael

weathervane at the top of the belltower at Holy Cross Monastery

I understand that your theme this Lent here at St. Paul’s Cathedral is the desert or wilderness.  It is certainly a theme of central importance in Scriptures as well as in monastic history and spirituality.  The desert continues to be an image of purification and transformation

It is also easy to romanticize this image.  I have heard people speak of “desert experiences” or of profound solitude or even of the “dark night of the soul” as if they were things lightly to be desired, something generally pleasant and not deeply disturbing, indeed terrifying.

Last week the Archbishop of Canterbury speaking at the ancient Benedictine foundation at Montecassino in Italy addressed this, saying in part:  “…in solitude, we are led to recognize the strength and resilience of our selfishness, and the need to let God dissolve the fantasies with which we protect ourselves.  In the desert there is no one to impress or persuade; there it is necessary to confront our own emptiness or be consumed by it.”   He went on to remind us that such solitude is safely experienced and is fruitful only if it is framed by a common or shared life, one in which we learn and practice “the basic habits of selflessness through mutual service.”   The stripping away by the desert is never for its own sake; it is for the sake of a more radical service in and at the heart of God's body, God's world.

This is not easy to appreciate, even in the monastic tradition.  We find in St. Benedict’s Rule for Monasteries repeated warnings against murmuring, which seems to be the besetting sin of monks.  Murmuratio, a kind of low level constant complaining, is treated with great severity by St. Benedict in a rule otherwise known for its moderation and discretion. He understands how murmuring undermines a community and harms it at every level, not least by harming those who become habituated to such patterns of behavior.  It's a problem not limited to monasteries, as you well know.  One has only to be in some parishes or workplaces or families to see and feel its effects.

And it's a very old problem.  Today’s first reading from the Book of Numbers represents only the latest in a string of complaints from the very people whom Moses is leading out of bondage into freedom:  “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness?  For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food (manna).”

God is frankly disgusted with the Israelites and sends fiery serpents that kill many.  Who can blame him?

But the people come to their senses and repent and ask Moses to intercede with God to remove the serpents.  What God does rather is instruct Moses to make a serpent of bronze similar to those that were killing the people, put it on a pole, and “whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.”

This is a very rich image, one inviting reflection and action.

I think of one of the brothers at my monastery who was for many years a hospital chaplain and a trainer of chaplains.  He used to tell his students that the principal pastoral task of the chaplain is to enter into the dragon's lair and name the dragon.  Whatever fear, anxiety, threat, wound or hurt the patient may be experiencing, the first work of the chaplain is to help the patient name it.

But this brother also tells how moved he was to discover in Annie Dillard's book Teaching a Stone to Talk something even more profound than naming:

In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters down, if you drop with them farther over the world’s rim, you find what our sciences can not locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned.

Our wounds, our demons, our monsters, our fiery serpents can kill us, but they can also cure us.  And for that to happen they must be named, they must be ridden, they must be looked at in faith, as in today's lesson from the Hebrew Scriptures.

Anyone who has been in therapy or recovery or who has survived adolescence knows this.

Jesus knew it as well.  In today's Gospel Jesus expresses his understanding that, like that bronze serpent in the wilderness, he too must be lifted up and gazed upon.  And he knew that, as for the Israelites of old, that gazing will be the source of life — indeed eternal life — for those who follow him.  This same Jesus who was for many — and let's admit it, so often is for us — a source of consternation and a sign of contradiction and a stumbling block — this Jesus on the cross is also our ultimate healing and blessing.

Over the portal of our monastery in West Park, NY, is a large marble plaque with the words: Crux est Mundi Medicina.  (“The cross is the medicine of the world.”)  It's been there since 1904, though the phrase itself is from a 13th century hymn by St. Bonaventure.

Crux est porta paradisi
In qua sancti sunt confisi,
Qui vicerurnt omnia.
Crux est mundi medicina,
Per quam bonitas divina
Facit mirabilia.

In case your Latin is a bit rusty, let me translate:

The cross is the door of paradise
In which the saints put their hope,
And triumphed over everything.
The cross is the medicine of the world
Through which the divine goodness
Performed miracles.  

The great miracle, of course, is that God so loved the world...and did something about it, gave his only Son.

If we are to love God, love life, we too must do something.  And that is, we must look, we must gaze, we must stare, with eyes wide open.   We must look at the cross, that symbol of the worst that humanity can offer and see there the greatest act of self-giving love, of hope and of human-divine solidarity.  And in the light and power of that cross, we must look with eyes wide open at the demons and serpents and monsters of our own time, whether personal, familial, social, economic, or political.  We must name them and perhaps even ride them until with them and each other we come into the light and peace of that kingdom promised us in Jesus Christ.

There is in the Order of Service for Noonday in The Book of Common Prayer this wonderful collect:

Blessed Savior, you hung upon the cross, stretching out your loving arms:  Grant that all the peoples of the earth may look to you and be saved; for your tender mercies sake.

May we have the grace and the courage to look at the cross and find there eternal life not only for ourselves but for all humankind, indeed for our whole creation.  May we look up and live.