Will you pray with me?  Lord, may the words of my lips and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight.  Amen.

So let me just ask you right up front: can you believe what we just heard?  Or perhaps I should ask do you believe it?  In our story from Numbers today, the people misbehave, and God sends hordes of poisonous snakes among them as a punishment, and they die and die until finally they repent and God relents and helps them to survive the plague God has brought upon them.  So what I want to ask is, do you believe that God acts that way?  That God sends natural disasters to punish the rebellious?  Do you believe that God makes bad things happen to good people?  Christians and Jews throughout the ages have believed it.  Thomas Prince, a minister of this Old South Church in the 18th century, once preached that a recent natural disaster was God’s punishment for the increasing use of lightning rods on buildings, which, he argued, were preventing God from smiting evildoers with lightning.  He believed it.  Many still believe it today.  So my question is, do you?

Well, I want to say to you that I do not believe that.  I want to say to you that I think that it is on the face of it plain that in our first story today, God sends a natural disaster to destroy the rebellious, and I want to say to you that, though it is there and clear in our sacred scriptures, and though millions of Christians and Jews before me have believed itI don’t buy it.

I don’t buy that God sent poisonous serpents among the Israelites because my experience of God is not that God destroys those who misbehave.  My experience is that God is a god who invites us to closeness with God, and who mourns when we separate ourselves by our own freely-chosen actions, not a god who lashes out to drive us back into relationship.  My experience is that God is a god that does not create natural disasters and the pain and fear and death they engender, but rather makes Godself known in the strength and love of the human response.  Whatever the authors of this story believed and whatever their intentions, and with all due respect to all the saints that have understood God this way, I do not believe in a god that smites even the most sinful with snakes or hurricanes or sickness or infirmity.  I’m willing to bet that many of you don’t, either.

So the question I, and any of you who share my reservations about this story, must answer is, now what?  Shall we discard it, excise it from the book?  Shall we denounce it?  Shall we simply ignore it?  And how do we account for this change in belief?  Well, my hope and belief is that we, you and I and any who sense the dawning of a new truth in any day, might discover that the depths and truths of such a text were not exhausted with the kind of readings dear Thomas Prince would have done.  I believe that our God, and our bible, and we are deep enough and rich enough that when one meaning in our texts or our lives dies, there is still more meaning to discover.

In 1620, the Pilgrims prepared to set sail for what would be to them a new world.  As they stood on the docks, ready to board, their pastor John Robinson, unable to go with them, preached a sermon.  Those gathered there had faced mockery, derision, and suspicion for the sake of the new and radical faith to which they had sensed God calling them.  They were about to embark on a dangerous and unpredictable journey across a vast ocean there was no certainty they could navigate or survive.  Should they reach the other side, they would be faced with the incredible task of creating a new life for themselves in what was to them a wilderness full of unpredictability and fear, largely cut off from all they knew.  And their pastor gave them these words to guide them to their new life: (if you know them, you can say them with me) “Remember that there is yet more light and truth to break forth form God’s holy word.”

Remember that there is yet more light and truth to break forth from God’s holy word.  He knew that, though his people would face situations, and dangers, and joys in their new lives undreamed of in the old, God would never leave God’s people alone and trapped with nothing more than ancient words on musty pages to guide them.  He knew the truth that, if the people would but listen, God would send God’s Holy Spirit to whisper new insights, new visions, new readings of old stories for a new people in a new day.  So the best gift he could think of to give them as they set out into their new life was a reminder that God was still on speaking terms with them.

It’s a truth that the Jesus of our Gospel reading today knew.  You see, Jesus knew the story of Moses and the serpents we heard today.  He knew that once upon a time there stood in the first Temple in Jerusalem a bronze serpent on a pole.  The people worshiped before that bronze serpent; it was a center of their religious life.  And the story they told to explain the statue’s provenance and the reason for its presence in the Temple was the one we heard today of God’s saving act in the desert.  So important was the bronze serpent and the story of its origins that many long years after both the it and the first Temple had been destroyed, they were still remembered, still told.  The author of John tells us that Jesus knew the story so well that he felt free to reimagine it in the light of a new revelation: “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness,” he says, “so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”  As Jesus told it, it was no longer a story of the origins of Temple objects; as Jesus told it, it was a foreshadowing of his own life and the role he would play in ours.

What he did was to take that old, timeworn story whose original function was long past— a story which was, in fact, in danger of degenerating into nothing more than a story about God’s punishing whiners—he took that old story and breathed new life into it, gave it new meaning for a new day, made of it new truth of God’s action in his time and place.

Jesus takes the ancient faith of his people, and makes it his own.  In so doing, he frees us from interpretations of the past that no longer have the power to give life, and he calls us to new understanding and challenges us to listen for new ways of reading and telling the old, old stories.  In so doing, he allows us to be free of old ways of believing that no longer give light or truth, and challenges us to listen to God’s voice to make the faith ours in our day.

So, how do we hear that voice?  How do we know what to keep and what to change in our tradition and belief?  How do we not lose that which is still vital, and how avoid new ways that are not?  We listen first for God’s voice alone, in personal experiences of God and the world, and then we humbly come together with our sisters and brothers, for we are none of us alone enough to be sure the voices we hear and the visions we see are those of God, and need the revelations and perspectives of those around us to correct and guide our own.  At the very first national gathering of our denomination, the United Church of Christ, in 1957, one of the opening speakers had this to say: “And as, in the spirit of prayer, they check their plans and proposals freely with one another, the people of God have historic ground and precedent for believing that in the free interplay of mind with mind God has the best opportunity men (sic) can give Him (sic) to have His (sic) own mind be more fully known.” ¹  Listening for God’s voice together as the church is, in fact, the very reason the church exists.

It is the task that the UCC has been about since its inception at that first General Synod.  In John 17:20 and 21, Jesus prays this prayer: “I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one”.  For most of Christian history, this prayer has been interpreted as a call to uniformity, to likeness one with another, sometimes as a call to create a monolithic body, dictating worship, and belief, and practice for all its believers.  The “oneness” Jesus prayed for was understood to mean “sameness”: “of one mind”, “of one practice”, “of one belief”.  Those who strayed from that oneness were understood to be sinners and named heretics.

But in the first half of the twentieth century, the leadership of two rather dissimilar church bodies, the Congregational Christian Churches and the Evangelical and Reformed Church, decided to take Jesus’ prayer seriously in a new way.  What if, they wondered, what if we decided to become one body despite our differences?  What if we decided to join together as the body of Christ even though we don’t all believe the same things?  What if we decided to make a new church of ourselves, even though we organize ourselves differently and worship differently and even though our traditions come from different parts of the world?  What if we took the Lordship of Christ seriously enough to come together to live out his mission even despite ourselves, took his prayer for unity too seriously to get caught up on the details of our differences?  What if we determined to put Christ’s mission in the world first?  What if we believed that when we come together in Christ’s name, our differences in fact might become the very way we hear God speaking?

If ever there was “there is yet more light and truth” thinking, this was it, and they knew it was, because it made a lot of people mad.  For there are those in the world that are most uncomfortable with a fluid faith.  There are those who believe that God has spoken, that the truth is set like old and crumbling concrete.  Jesus found that out, didn’t he?  So have heretics throughout the centuries.  So did Martin Luther.  So did the Pilgrims in their way—who, by the way, must have listened to their pastor’s parting words, as they were among the predecessors to the bodies that later joined.

So there were a great many that resisted the merger, as there always are, and perhaps always should be, when a new word from God is proclaimed.  But the power of the new vision that God had put before the people was great indeed, as was the call they felt in Christ.  The merger, they said, would announce spiritually “…to the world that the Church of Christ is a unitive and not a divisive or static body;
practically it [might permit] the church to preach the necessity for unitedness among the nations…without the reproach that she is unwilling to move in that direction herself….” and so that “strategically the uniting of similar traditions of faith, liberty, and fellowship [might] multiply their power in the service of Christ, since in union there is strength.”²   To announce spiritually “…to the world that the Church of Christ is a unitive and not a divisive or static body.  It was too powerful, too right, to not be allowed to shine.  And so on June 25th, 1957, light and truth broke forth in a new way in these United States, and the United Church of Christ was born, to be lifted up for the peoples, a symbol of hope and unity in the wilderness of division and strife.

So, my sisters and brothers, the good news of this day is this: God is alive.  God partnered with our ancestors to hand down to us this, the stories of our faith, and then did not choose to trap Godself in it.  God partnered with our ancestors to hand down to us this place, the location of our faith, and then did not choose to trap Godself in it.  And God partnered with our ancestors to hand down to us the United Church of Christ and the church universal, and then did not choose to trap Godself even there.  And if God is not trapped by that which the Bible and the church have been, then, friends, neither are we.

There is still more that God has to say to us.  Still more dreams for God to whisper in our sleeping ears.  Still more visions for God to give to waking hearts.  There is still more that the United Church of Christ might become, still more that Old South Church might become, still more that you and I might become.

For as surely as there is yet more light and truth to break forth from God’s holy word, God’s people, God’s church, my friends, we are more than equal to the task of lifting it up, that the people might see it, and be saved.  Amen.

1.   Address by Rev. James E. Wagner, Tuesday, 25 June, 1957, Uniting General Synod of the United Church of Christ, Cleveland, Ohio.  In The Living Theological Heritage of the United Church of Christ, vol. 6: Growing Toward Unity, ed. Hilke, Elsabeth Slaughter.  Cleveland: the Pilgrim Press, 2001.

 2. “A Primer of Union: Questions and Answers Regarding the Proposed Union Between the Congregational Christian and the Evangelical and Reformed Churches”, pamphlet published by the congregational Christian Churches and by the Evangelical and Reformed Church, 1947.  In The Living Theological Heritage of the United Church of Christ, vol. 6: Growing Toward Unity, ed. Hilke, Elsabeth Slaughter.  Cleveland: the Pilgrim Press, 2001.