Fourth Sunday in Lent - March 15, 2026

33:06 Show us your sacred path. Open our minds as we listen for your word. In your truth, grant us freedom. In your will, fill us with peace. In all things, order our steps. This we pray in the name of Jesus Christ, our rock and our redeemer. Amen. Today is the fourth Sunday in the season of Lent. This Lent, Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church is studying the names of God as recorded in scripture and as used for centuries by Christian communities in their public worship and in their private prayers.

34:03 This Lent we're puzzling over, marveling at, and reverently making use of God's evocative names. Last week, we considered a name that Moses used for God, the rock. We paid attention to an origin story in which a rock provided people in the wilderness with fresh water. We leaned in, and when Moses started preaching about God, the rock, we watched other parts of our tradition, like King David in the Psalms, pick up and use this poetic name. And eventually, we listened as the Apostle Paul told the people of Corinth that Jesus was the rock. God's names, we observed, have such interesting lives.

35:03 As we approach Holy Week, our focus is now shifting from names for God to names that Scripture has for Jesus. The Good Book makes use of a wide variety of names for Jesus, almost 200, To immerse themselves in that rich tapestry, medieval monastic communities developed the devotional practice of singing the names of Jesus. Beginning in the 10th century, Gregorian chants would rehearse in Latin, of course, the names and titles that scripture gives to Jesus. And today's prelude, played by Patrick, the Alma Chorus Domini, is one of the musical settings that is still used for these reverential naming hymns. Translated into English, the Alma Chorus Domini sounds something like this.

36:09 Alpha and Omega we name him At once both the head and the ending Fountain and source of all good Our advocate and mediator He is the heifer, the lamb, sheep, ram, the worm Serpent and lion mouth and word of God, light, sun, glory, splendor, and image, blossom, bread, vine, door, rock, mountain, and stone of the corner. And the list goes on. Chanting Christ's titles as a prayer, letting these evocative names drift through the doorways of their souls.

37:08 The monks and those who worshipped with them marveled at the many faces of our Lord. The chant served as something of a Sunday school lesson too, a catechism teaching new believers about Christ. In this capacity, there was learning and perhaps a few moments of surprise. Wait, did they just sing ram, worm, serpent? Serpent? Who would dare compare Jesus to a viper? Where did they get this strange name for Christ? Today, we're going to tackle these questions. And we're going to start once again with Moses. As we pick up the thread, the people of Israel have fled slavery in Egypt and are traveling through the wilderness. In today's passage, they protest, they complain that God and Moses have led them on an unbearably grueling journey.

38:16 Let us listen now for God's word as it echoes to us from Numbers chapter 21, beginning with the fourth verse. From Mount Hor, they set out by the way to the Red Sea to go around the land of Edom. But the people became discouraged on the way. The people spoke against God and against Moses. Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there's no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food. Then the Lord sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people so that many Israelites died. The people came to Moses and said, We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you.

39:14 Pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us. So Moses prayed for the people. 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. So Moses made a serpent of bronze and put it upon a pole. And whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.

39:50 Our second passage today is a familiar one. Although we're usually focused on verse 16 of John 3. And in doing this, we may have missed the fact that Jesus makes a curious reference to the bronze serpent from Numbers 21 as a preamble to this famous text. Let us listen again for God's word as it comes to us from the Gospel of John, chapter 3, beginning with the 14th verse. Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. For 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.

40:57 Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. this is the word of God for you the people of God thanks be to God Today, we celebrate our newly installed associate pastor, Chris Palmer. Later in the service, we will pray God's blessing on Reverend Palmer's ministry. For now, let me simply say this from the heart. It is a joy to have this talented, spiritually grounded, musically gifted pastor as a leader for your young adult ministry and for this whole congregation at Fifth Avenue Presbyterian. Chris, we're so excited that you and Catherine and little Alistair are part of this community of faith.

42:00 Now, if you haven't had a chance to get to know Chris yet, I encourage you to send him an email, give him a call, take him out for a cup of coffee, because Chris is a fascinating fellow. He plays multiple musical instruments. He can produce a legit Scottish accent on demand. He's a die-hard Eagles fan, and he has maybe an Achilles heel or two as well. This past week I learned that, like Indiana Jones, Reverend Palmer harbors a serious dislike for one of God's good creatures. Chris is not a big fan of snakes. Now I promise I did not know this when choosing the text for today's sermon.

42:57 Earlier, we observed that medieval monks included snakes in the devotional chant listing the precious names for Jesus. And we asked who could possibly call Jesus a viper? Well, good pastor, I'm sorry to report that the answer is it is Jesus himself who embraces this unusual name. In the Gospel of John, Jesus basically says, I'm like the serpent, the one in the wilderness, the one that Moses lifted up on a stick. Why does Jesus claim this unsettling image for himself? Let's see if we can ease Reverend Palmer's mind a bit.

43:56 Let's start today with our story from the book of Numbers. Chapter 21 in Numbers begins like so many Hebrew people in the wilderness stories. It's framed by hope, by the promise of a better future. The people have escaped slavery in Egypt, they've left captivity behind, they are free, they're moving through the wilderness, the desert, journeying toward the promised land. It's a new day. And yet the people's optimism doesn't last. What happened? What happened to the elation that came with leaving Pharaoh in the dust? Well, according to Numbers, the sweet taste of freedom was scrubbed away by arid desert winds. The wilderness turned out to be a tough place.

44:55 There were tribal enemies. There were days without water. There was hardly any food. and what meager provisions the people could scrape together tasted awful. They began to complain. They complained against Moses. They complained against God. We thought you were saving us from Egypt, and instead you sentenced us to misery. This Exodus thing is hard, harder than we ever imagined it would be. Our lips are cracked. Our stomachs are empty. We detest this place with righteous anger. God's chosen people rail against their situation. You and your God have brought us out here to die. Now, to be clear, what makes today's text sort of odd is not the fact that the people were complaining. The saga of the Exodus from Egypt contains numerous accounts in which people, cranky, irritated, downcast, broken-hearted people stuff heaven's suggestion box with complaints.

46:06 Most of the time the text tells us that God listens to these gripes, gripes about hardship, about downturns in the economy, about poor health, about miserable food, and yes, about incompetent religious leadership. How's the temperature in the sanctuary today? Y'all good? Well, we've heard it.

46:32 In the wilderness stories, God typically addresses the people's grievances as legitimate concerns. In a similar scene from the book of Exodus, God says to Moses, I've heard the complaining of the Israelites. Say to them, at twilight, you shall eat meat. And in the morning you shall have your fill of bread, and then you shall know that I am the Lord your God. More often than not, God answers the complaints of the people with compassion. And that's what makes today's story sort of odd. Instead of the usual, I've heard my children's cries and I will provide for them, God goes, well, God goes sort of berserk.

47:27 My wife, Amy, is a steady soul. A typical evening at the Black Johnston household involves loud, assertive people and loud, assertive animals swirling around each other in the kitchen. And at the center of it all is a source of quiet calm, an island of sanity, my even-keeled spouse. Occasionally, however, and I do mean occasionally, we get a glimpse of something different. Every once in a while our demands on Amy's gracious patience reach the tipping point. We've been too brash, too ungrateful, too obnoxious for too long, and in these moments her eyes blaze and she casts a look around the room that signals do not mess with me. We all know it's absolutely obvious that we've pushed the envelope too far.

48:29 Is that what's happening in today's text? Does God reach a tipping point? Has God responded out of loving kindness time after time after time until finally God can't take it anymore. And instead of a compassionate reply, how can I help you? Lightning darts across the divine brow and God chastises the people by unleashing a passel of snakes. And not just any old snakes. The Hebrew word that describes snakes here is seraph. These are seraph snakes. Many Bibles translate seraph as poisonous, and that seems to make sense because after all they're biting people and making them die. But honestly, Numbers is after something wilder still, and to get that picture in our minds we might recall another word very much like seraph. I'm thinking here of the cherubim and the seraphim, words that we use to describe the angelic hosts. Strictly speaking, the word seraph means fiery winged thing. Angels were seraphim, flaming fiery things from the realm of heaven.

49:57 divine beings sent by God. But in this case, instead of dispatching angels, God sends snakes, fiery, winged, mutant snakes with an appetite for human flesh and a bite that brings death. It's a surreal scene, a nightmare for some. And it's not over. horrified by the invasion of flying snakes the people turn to Moses and wave a white flag truce okay we get it we've been behaving poorly we've sinned please ask God to take the snakes away Moses prays and God responds God says to the prophet grab your hammer and tongs and fashion a flying, flaming seraph out of bronze, fix it to a tall pole, and stick it in the ground in the middle of the camp.

50:59 Anyone who is bitten shall look on it and live. So Moses shapes a serpent out of bronze and hoists it into the air. It's a wild scene. This week we were looking at this painting on the cover of your bulletin, and somebody says, oh, what a stormy sky. Look at those flashes of lightning. I said, those aren't flashes of lightning. Those are snakes coming down. They're flying down from heaven. Who needs K-pop demon hunters when you got the book of numbers? Numbers 21 is unsettling. And not simply because it contains flying, flaming snakes. The actions of God in this passage may strike us as worrisome. Where's the grace in this story?

52:01 I mean, the people apologize. So why doesn't God banish these feathered vipers with a wave of the divine hand? Instead, the Holy One pivots and asks Moses to hot glue a bronze snake to a tall stick. Why? How can gazing at the very thing that was trying to kill us save us? this past fall the bible study i lead here at church spent a few sessions reading the short stories of southern roman catholic christian writer flannery o'connor o'connor often wrote about moments when god's grace would break into people's lives Although for O'Connor, grace is not a warm and fluffy thing. A plate of pancakes, breakfast in bed.

52:59 No, for O'Connor, grace is a shock. It's a thump on the skull. It's a reorienting jolt that shakes people to their core. Grace is God's ball-peen hammer banging away at the tartar on our souls, liberating people from arrogance and cruelty and all manner of spiritual decay. I bet O'Connor loved the story of Moses and the flaming snakes. She would have thought the point of it all was patently clear. God needs to kill us, at least part of us. in order to save us. That sounds pretty harsh, preacher.

53:49 Is it true? Is there something inside of us that needs to die before we will risk loving God and loving neighbor before we can be what we were created to be? A few years ago, I had the opportunity to chat with author Tim Tyson. Tim wrote the acclaimed memoir, Blood Done Signed My Name, an account of the race riots that occurred in Oxford, North Carolina in 1970. The author's father, the Reverend Vernon Tyson, was the Methodist pastor in Oxford during that time. One of the stories in the book talks about Reverend Tyson's early ministry in Oxford. It discusses how in 1964, Reverend Tyson, a white man, invited Samuel Proctor, the renowned African-American minister and president of North Carolina A&T College, to preach at his church. This was a big deal. No black clergy person had ever stood in the pulpit of that all-white church before.

55:06 When news of the invitation spread, Tyson began to receive threats. One caller threatened to blow up the house where he and his wife and three children lived. Things got pretty scary. So on the eve of Proctor's visit, the church's administrative board called it an emergency meeting. At the meeting, church member after church member demanded that Reverend Tyson withdraw his invitation to Proctor. It was a tense moment, and that's when Miss Amy Womble, an elementary school teacher, a retired elementary school teacher, had taught most of the men and women in that congregation their ABCs stood up to speak. Miss Womble looked around the room and said I've been reading about a case up near Chapel Hill where a teenage boy went around a curve too fast and was killed in a car crash he was down there by the side of the road and they were just waiting for the ambulance to come and pick him up there wasn't any sign of life then an airman stopped who was home on furlough when he saw the boy and got down there and opened his mouth he saw that the man's tongue was stuck in the back of his throat and he ran his finger back there and pulled out the tongue and then he gave him mouth to mouth resuscitation and by the time the ambulance arrived he had revived and had a big dinner up there in Chapel Hill for this airman celebrating his saving this boy's life. Now what I haven't told you is that the boy who was saved was a white boy and the airman was a black man. Miss Womble went on. Now which one of you fathers would say to that airman don't you run your black fingers down my child's white throat?

57:08 don't you put your mouth on my boy's mouth and after that the church voted 25 to 14 to stand with Tyson and Dr. Proctor's visit came off without a hitch. I'm telling you that part of the story because I want you to focus on the next part of the story. Later that evening one of the people most opposed to the visit of Dr. Proctor. A man by the name of Grayson Byron came by the parsonage. Byron was a bachelor who worked at a local mill. He was a tough guy, but on this particular night, he could not stop weeping. He was just crying. He said, Pastor, I want to tell you something happened to me tonight. When Miss Amy was talking, something came over me that ain't never happened to me before. A love came up in my heart. I want to tell you I love you. I love Dr.

58:12 Proctor. I love everyone. The next day people in town accused Tyson, the Methodist minister, of serving wine at this emergency administrative meeting. What else could explain all the people who left it crying and professing love for their neighbor? What they didn't know, what they couldn't have imagined, was that this strange behavior came not from alcohol, but from watching a local school teacher lift a snake on a stick in the middle of their camp. My friends, we are living through a terribly fractious time for our country and for our planet.

59:06 Is it possible that there is guidance for the living of these days to be found in the sung council of medieval monks and the storytelling of elementary school teachers? Are we willing, amid the chaos of this moment, to picture Jesus as a serpent, a shocking manifestation of God's grace, a creature who slithers into camp, snapping at our selfish ways? And when this chastising viper is raised high on a stick or a pole or a cross, take your pick, will we testify like Moses, like Jesus?

1:00:04 Will we say, this, this is how healing begins. It starts when hard hearts gaze upward and confess. You know what? We really do need to be saved. We need to be saved from ourselves. Saved from small-minded and mean-spirited thinking. Saved from the malice and greed that flow through human veins. Isn't that the message, the bronze viper? Surely it's the message Jesus speaks in John 3. God's not finished snapping at our heels trying to save us. God loves this world. So loves this messed up world that God has sent God's beloved son. A source of fierce grace.

1:00:58 A model for life lived under the light of eternity. are always and ever snake on a stick. friends I invite you to stand as you're able and to add your voices to today's prayer for the day which can be found printed in your bulletins or on your screen El Olam, steadfast God. El Shaddai, mighty God. We pray to you. As we travel the path of Lent, give us courage, give us strength. Encourage us in this life to lift our eyes. Inspire us in these days to gaze on the sight of your beloved Son.