Preached to the Congregational Church in Exeter, U. C. C., on the fourth Sunday in Lent, March 30, 2003, by Michael L. C. Henderson, pastor.

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

We were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else.

                      –Ephesians 2:3

     I've preached on these readings before, but you can imagine how that particular phrase leapt out at me this time as never before. Current events do make you wonder if all the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve are indeed, by nature, children of wrath.

     I'm always determined to interpret God's word to the actual situations in which we live. That's our job as preachers, especially in the Congregational tradition, in the United Church of Christ. But I'm at something of a loss to do that in the circumstances of this war.

     I could stand up here and claim that this war is unwise in global strategic terms, or that it is contrary to American tradition and principles, or that it inflicts unacceptable harm on people who have done no harm. As a citizen, a neighbor and a friend I have said such things, but you've already heard it all from both sides, and it is not the function of this pulpit.

     A preacher of the Gospel should be able to bring any human situation, including this war, under the peculiar gaze of Jesus Christ, with the help of Scripture and the Holy Spirit, and show you how it looks in that light. However, I despair. I fear that the more clearly you understand Christ's perspective, the more thoroughly you will be persuaded that it is irrelevant, unwise, and irresponsible, and must not be heeded. The clash between Christ's way and the world's way really is that stark.

     The media say there is a great disconnect in most American churches between the clergy, who overwhelmingly oppose this war, and their parishioners, 62% of whom support it. Can anything I say bridge that gap?

     Such is my lack of confidence that I am going to do something cowardly, and tell a story as told by someone else about other people in another time, praying only that it may somehow be helpful. This is Frederick Buechner, Presbyterian preacher, novelist, essayist, and one-time school minister at the Academy. He watched the Ken Burns series on the Civil War on TV, and he's talking about the segment on the fiftieth anniversary commemoration, in 1913, of the battle of Gettysburg:

The old men came back one summer day, Confederate and Union veterans both, to commemorate the occasion, and there were many ancient movies of them as they moved around jerkily through the grainy, lightstruck film, eating, listening to speeches, talking over old times and swapping stories. The most moving part of it to me was the reenactment of Pickett's Charge. There were no pictures of it as far as I can remember, but the sound track described it in the words of somebody who had actually been there at the time it was reenacted. The old Union soldiers took their places among the rocks on Seminary Ridge, the old Confederate soldiers took theirs on the farmland below, and after a while the Confederates started to move forward across the broad, flat field where half a century earlier so many of them had died. "We could see not rifles and bayonets," the eyewitness account said, "but canes and crutches" as they made their slow advance toward the ridge with the more able-bodied ones helping the disabled ones to maintain their place in the ranks. As the Confederate troops got near the Union line, they broke into one long, defiant rebel yell, and then something remarkable took place. "A moan, a sigh, a gigantic gasp of disbelief rose from the men on Seminary Ridge" is the way the eyewitness described it. Then at that point, unable to restrain themselves, the Yankees burst from behind the stone wall and flung themselves upon their former enemies. Only this time, unlike fifty years earlier, they did not do battle with them. Instead they threw their arms around them. Some in blue uniforms and some in grey, the old men embraced one another and wept.

     If only the old men had seen in 1863 what, for a moment, they glimpsed in 1913. Half a century later, they saw that the great battle had been a great madness. The men who were advancing toward them across the field of Gettysburg were not enemies. They were human beings like themselves, with the same dreams, needs, hopes, the same wives and children waiting for them to come home, if they were lucky enough to come home at all. What they saw was that, beneath all the fear and hostility and misunderstanding that divide human beings in this broken world, all humankind is one. What they saw was that we were, all of us, created not to do battle with each other but to love each other, and it was not just a truth they saw. For a few moments, it was a truth they lived. It was a truth they became.

You and I live in a broken world - a world shattered by wars, famine, political upheaval. We are citizens of a nation that in all its history has perhaps never been so dramatically confronted as it is now by its brokenness, a nation whose leaders more often than not seem to believe in absolutely nothing but their own political survival and are willing to sacrifice everything, including the national good, to ensure it, a nation whose city streets are littered by the bodies of the homeless and a fifth of whose children go to bed hungry at night if they are lucky enough to have beds, a nation that continues to spend billions on defense against the enemy without, when it becomes more apparent every day that all the real enemies are within - poverty, illiteracy, the despair that breeds crime and addiction. As for the church of Christ, no one knows better than the church itself all the ways it, too, is broken, just as no one knows better than you and I know it the brokenness of our own individual lives, both within ourselves and in our relationships with each other. In other words, it is easy enough to see the world as a horror show, but that is not the way the old men on the ridge saw it when they suddenly recognized that the advancing men were not enemies but brothers . . . . For all its horrors, the world is not ultimately a horror show because, as Jesus tell us, the world has the kingdom buried in it like a treasure buried in a field, like leaven working in dough, like a seed germinating in the earth, like whatever it was in the heart of the Prodigal Son that finally brought him home. The question is, How is it possible for us not just to glimpse that buried kingdom but to unbury and become it?. How is it possible in a broken world to become whole? Is wholeness something that we reach by taking pains, taking thought? Is it something that is given to us by grace alone? Is wholeness a human possibility at all?

     I don't know the answer to his question. I know that if wholeness is a possibility, it's only because all things are possible for God.

     God's possibilities are not human possibilities unless we bet our lives on them, which is a risky bet by any odds that we can reckon. The Israelites, having been delivered from slavery, found themselves in the wilderness and hated it, complained even about the manna, the bread from heaven that God gave them to eat there. We detest this miserable food! It wasn't really the food they hated, it was being so totally, radically dependent on God's mercy and providence as they were in that wilderness. No safety net but God: we hate that too, and if God's going to send poisonous serpents among us to punish us for that, it will only reinforce our insecurity and make us even more eager to defend ourselves. And practically all violence is self-defense to the perpetrator of it.

     God instructs Moses to hammer out a serpent from bronze and set it up before the people. They face the thing that bites them, and that heals them - it's a vaccination. But what is the thing that bites us: Is it someone else's venom, and not our own? Are we not children of wrath too?

     If we are children of wrath, still by God's grace, Paul says, we are changed. We are reborn, "created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life." God's purpose in Christ is not to condemn but to love human beings and give them life, good life, purposeful life, peaceful life.

     That is God's will and God's gift. We can take it to heart or not. There's no point complaining about the radical riskiness of it - the Crucifixion is no surprise to God and it should not be to us either. It is the thing that bites us and terrifies us.

     If we decline to take the risk of that Cross, we can do so proudly, dismissing Christ's way as a fool's dream, or we can do it sorrowfully, lamenting our lack of faith. Either way, we are not condemned, nor are we off the hook. The Cross is still there, still waiting for us to look up and see it. It's not going to go away.

     Amen