Church –
This past Sunday in our sermon, we looked at Numbers 21 and John 3. These two passages are complicated, but in dialogue with one another. As we heard on Sunday, Jesus is reframing God’s judgment by comparing His work on the cross to the serpent lifted by Moses in the wilderness.
There is a LOT going on in those two passages and there is a LOT going on in the cross of Christ. The good news that we heard on Sunday is far from exhaustive, but I hope it provided us with a new way to wrestle with the passages.
After the sermon, as we continued moving through the liturgy, one of the songs we sang gave me more to reflect on. Paul Zach’s Restore Us Again has a line that goes like this: “We longed for Egypt in the wilderness, a kingdom made of dust.”
After having just preached about how Christ embodied all of our violence and was lifted up to free us of the logic of violence by showing us what it wrought — God, in the flesh, crucified — I couldn’t shake this lyric.
As we walk through the wilderness of life, not yet in the promised land, have we projected a theology of violence onto God? Have we craved the logic of Egypt — the logic of violence and oppression — while walking through the unknown and in-between spaces?
Certainty can be so alluring that we are tempted to trade wandering for slavery.
And yet, Christ is revealing to us that any kingdom that runs on violence, retribution, and oppression is a kingdom made out of dust.
Friends, may you receive your wandering in life as freedom unto faith and not as a curse, and the may God of mercy guide you and grant you peace in the midst of uncertainty. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Peace,
Spencer+
