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Welcome to Danny's Thoughts (Danny's Thoughts Archive) Reflection for March 09' Look Up! Look Up!
Yet the closer one comes, the taller Liberty seems as she lifts her lamp beside the golden door, a sign of hope. From her base on Ellis Island, she stands foundation to top of flame, 305 feet tall. Standing at the bottom and looking up, Lady Liberty dwarfs everything and all that she symbolizes soars above the distant and small horizon. There is a reason why our churches and cathedrals are built with spires and steeples and towers pointing to the sky… they are vivid symbols of our human desire to reach skyward toward heaven, toward God! They are a reminder to all who pass by on the streets below, proclaiming, “Look up! Look to God!” As you drive toward Tolletts Chapel United Methodist from about a ¾ of a mile away you can see the steeple from our roof top. I have stared at that steeple and cross at different times throughout the last few years. I have wondered about how many people have seen it from a far and how many times god has been thought of during those times. So I thought I would go and look at that steeple and cross and when you are standing directly below it, staring straight up, all you can see is up! I thought that the Old Testament above is a story is the rather bizarre story about looking up… the unusual story about Moses and the bronze serpent. The men and women of this second generation began also to doubt and complain. They said things like, "Let us go back to Egypt. At least there we were fed, had homes where we could live in one place." They said also, "Who of us has seen God? To which of us has he spoken? Who among us can say he or she believes all the tales our fathers and mothers left us? Who?" And the wrath of Yahweh lashed out against them again. This time, the story says, Yahweh sent snakes into the camps to kill his renegade people. There were droves of snakes moving through the camp of the Children's children…snakes in the tents, snakes in the breadbaskets and the cooking pots, snakes in the bedrolls and snakes in the cribs. Then Moses, falling on his knees, petitioned God's mercy on the Children. God told Moses …to take a consecrated brass vessel at the door of the Tent of Meeting and hammer it quickly into the image of the serpents that were attacking the Children's children. Moses did and he wound the brass snake around the crosspiece of his staff and then he ran through the camp, holding the staff aloft and calling out to the people in the throes of their agony, "Look up! Look up and be saved! Look up! Look up and be saved!" And the Bible says that those who believed Moses, those who stopped looking down at the snakes, who stopped trying to pull them off of themselves and their children, but looked up instead at the brass snake…those men and women did not die, but they were saved. This does not mean that they were not bitten, but simply that those who looked up and not down did not die of their wounds. Eighteen months later, it was these men and women who saw the Jordan part before them and who walked across its dry bed to claim the land of milk and honey promised them by God. It's a good story, in fact, a very impressive story. And what the story recognizes is that all of us are going to be bitten—painfully bitten—in this life. When we look up … we are saved… This story could be a parable about human nature… we get bogged down with regrets, with fears, with worries, with all the pressing issues of our day-to-day living… and all the pain and suffering of life… when all the time God has a promised land for us! We can wander for a generation in the wilderness, hungry, homeless, lost… and God is waiting for us to come home… God won't save us from our own actions and the consequences of them… the snakes are going to bite us… but God gives us a way to survive and even thrive… all we have to do is look up! Look up and be saved! We all know John 3:16 by heart. “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. More often than not, if you ask someone to quote the Bible, that's what they will say… But the gospel passage actually begins two verses before that well-known summation of the Christian faith… Nicodemus has come to Jesus in the dead of night to see if Jesus is all that the people have been saying he is. Nicodemus, a Pharisee and leader of the Jews, seems to want to believe that Jesus is something special… the two men have a conversation about God's spirit, and the wind blowing where it will, and being born again… Nicodemus grumbles, doubts, scoffs at what he hears, but Jesus says to Nicodemus: … 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.?? It wasn't until later, after the crucifixion and the resurrection, that the Christian community began to understand this story in its fullness in light of Calvary, but even now, in the darkness of this night in Jerusalem, we are hearing the truth that in order to be saved, we must look up… look up to be saved… What is tormenting you? What are the snakes that are biting you? What are the poisons that are killing you? What are you afraid of? What are you running from? Like the Children's children wandering in their dessert, like Nicodemus, the curious seeker after truth, can we hear the word of God for us today? “Look up! Look up to God and be saved!” So many things claim to give us the answers to life's questions… so many things we turn to in order to find security, happiness, meaning, and purpose… so many theories and theologies, so many symbols and psychologies… to where may we turn… where is hope… where is our help…? Too often we look around for solutions to all that inflict us. Too often we look out... and not up. Too often our focus is on the ground, on the smaller things in life, and we dwell on the biting snakes and all that torments us… but faith proclaims, “Look up! Look up and be saved!” Friends, I am not so bold as to say that the church always has all of the answers to all of life's problems… but I am so bold as to say that the church points the way to the one who does… we point the way every time we say to the one in pain, the one who is sorrowful, the one who is bitten and broken by life, “Look up! Look up and be saved!”
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