Maybe you’ve had an experience like this. Sometimes when I meet strangers in other states, like Florida, New Jersey or Alaska, they ask where I’m from. When I answer, "I’m from West Virginia," a person will ask, "Oh, isn’t that where you handle snakes in your churches?"

When I was teaching at Morris Harvey College, I liked to send students out on field trips to visit different kinds of churches. Once I scheduled a field trip to a snake-handling church in Jolo, West Virginia, and word reached Dr. Marshall Buckalew, College President, who called me in to ask if this was wise. I explained how I liked students to study all kinds of worship experiences and write critical reports. He smiled and advised me to be careful on this visit to be sure to sit next to a door or a window. As it turned out, I missed this trip and my students kidded me about being afraid of rattlesnakes.

Jesus compares himself to a serpent. "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." Jesus does not often talk about himself as a snake, but if he does in today’s scripture lesson, just maybe handling this serpent in our church is exactly what Jesus wants us to do.

Today’s Gospel lesson continues Jesus’ dialogue with Nicodemus, who wants to hold on tightly to his old habits, when Jesus asks Nicodemus to welcome rebirth, new spiritual birth from above. Enter the Kingdom of God, Jesus invites, through new birth of water and the Spirit. We welcome this new birth when we baptize, making new disciples, as Jesus instructs us to do. God promises to send new life into us through the Holy Spirit, so we leave behind, move away from our old, natural selves and forward into God’s new Kingdom, growing up and learning to become Jesus’ disciples, children of our heavenly father.

Jesus invites us to share lifting up the Son of Man, Jesus’ favorite messianic title. God sends Jesus into this world, out of God’s love, and God lifts up Jesus on the cross and Jesus invites us to take up our cross, to share in this good news of salvation. But why does Jesus say we must do this just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness?

Jesus of course knows his Jewish scriptures and points us to our Old Testament lesson to help us understand our need for God’s love. The people of Israel were on their transforming pilgrimage, moving from slavery in Egypt, toward the promised- land, much as you and I are on our Lenten pilgrimage, moving through our wilderness of 40 days toward Easter and Pentecost.

Wilderness days are tough. We are called to self-examination, prayerful repentance, discipline, study, preparation, in order to welcome Holy Week and Easter. Israel is tempted to look back to Egypt. Impatient with the food God gives in the desert. The food they ate in slavery looks so good by comparison. Just so are we tempted to look back, because we are called into freedom and freedom includes risks and responsibility. Easier, safer, to look back than to risk moving ahead, being born anew of the Spirit from above. Israel grumbles, blames Moses. God sends judgment: poisonous serpents to bite and kill. Israel cries out and God tells Moses to make a bronze serpent, raise it up on a pole, and all who are bitten may look upward and live.

God’s judgment and God’s salvation both come in the form of a serpent. In our Gospel lesson, God’s judgment and God’s saving grace both come in the Son of Man who must be lifted up on his cross, at once God’s judgment upon all sin and evil and God’s gracious love that forgives the sins of the whole world. God lifts up his only begotten Son upon that old rugged cross, and Jesus’ question is this: will we do our part to lift him up as well, and we can do this if and only if we take up our cross and follow; if and only if we loose our life in order to find our life.

John 3:16 is such a cliché, on bumper stickers and posters in ballparks, this love of God we must lift up looses its bite, pun intended. Instead of seeing the cross as God’s love given in a form originally shameful, despised and scorned, we have glamorized the cross into a symbol just like Easter bonnets, Easter eggs and bunny-rabbits, so Jesus’ cross looses all its original horror as God’s judgment on all sin and evil in the execution of a common criminal by Roman soldiers.

Mel Gibson has tried to re-capture this horror and shame in his movie The Passion. Isaiah the prophet says, "He has no form nor comeliness, no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men; we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised and we esteemed him not." Isaiah sees the awful horror in the violence and shame of the cross.

If Jesus were executed in the twentieth century, he would be summarily shot by a firing squad, or be subject to capital punishment in a state like Texas or California and we would have to replace the cross on church steeples with an electric chair and we would all wear little gold electric chairs on a gold chain around our neck. Would we lift up this Son of Man if he were sentenced to die as a common criminal today? We’d probably be just as repelled by the electric chair, as we would be revolted at the prospect of handling snakes in our worship service.

Yet Isaiah continues, "He was wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all." When Jesus invites us to take up our cross, he invites us to take up our electric chair, our serpent, turned off as we may be. Lift up this crucified Son of Man to welcome God’s judgment upon us all.

And as we study John 3:16, let us deal with this further truth. John 3:16 does not say God loves me or my soul. It does not say God loves us Presbyterians. It does not say God loves Christians. It does not even say God loves human beings. What this text says is God loves the world. The word in the Greek text is cosmos, meaning as in our study of cosmology, the entire created universe.

And it does not say God sends Jesus because any of us humans or any of this creation is lovable or deserves to be saved in any way on our own merits. It says God sends Jesus because this judgment and this saving grace wells up from deep down in God’s own being. God sends out saving judgment and grace because of who God is and because God desires to give of God’s very own self all God has within and all God can do, as much as it takes from God to save this creation from darkness and evil.

Rather than look inside myself to ponder God’s love and my salvation, I should look out to behold the cosmos God loves so much and wonder why and how God’s great love is working to bring about God’s new creation, God’s new heaven and earth.

And here I discover a curious and wonderful lesson. In Jesus’ time they saw only a three- storied cosmos. Earth here in the middle, heaven above, and all that was under the earth. Today after the discoveries of modern science, when I gaze at a twinkling little star, I need to ponder how the light I see has been traveling for billions of years before it reaches my eye and any one of the millions of stars I see above me belong to billions of galaxies, a universe too vast for me ever to observe or to comprehend with my human intellect.

The Apostle Paul says, " We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains…subjected to futility…in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain freedom…and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies." We need to think more than we normally do of God sending Christ so that the whole cosmos might be saved through him.

And now, explore with me how these texts speak to us in this transition time for our congregation. Israel’s temptation was to look back and long for past safety. God saves by calling them to look forward, to lift up the promise of a new homeland, even at the risk of 40 years spent traveling in the wilderness. Jesus in his wilderness temptation lets go of his past. "We shall not live by bread alone, but by every word from the mouth of God."

These 40 days in our transition time of Lent call us to let go of our past and lift up the future God is calling us to affirm. Let go past safety and security and welcome the risk of lifting up the opportunity and responsibility God is sending us as we welcome our new pastor and his family, this one who comes to us as our spiritual mentor. Let us not yield to the temptation to look backward. Let us let go of our past. Let us lift up the cross, our very own cross as we open ourselves to the risks and promises the future holds for this congregation.

Not long after I came on board, our Deacons were strategizing about how to minister to inactive members. I heard this warning: "Oh, but look how some folks have not come to church since Dr. Benny Benfield was here." I remarked, "And I know many who didn’t come to church while he was here." We need to let go of our attachments to or our detachments from whomever or whatever holds us tightly to the past and lift up our new pastor and the future for serving Christ in this congregation as our great Lord God is calling us to do. Let go and lift up.

Let go of George Vick and Benny Benfield and Tony Tucker. Let go of Dean Thompson and Doug Heidt and Mark Lampley and Dick Neely and Bob Newman. Let go and look forward and look upward and lift up Bill McCoy and trust God’s Spirit is ready to do a new and different, more faithful and saving work among us in the years ahead. Let go, and lift up.

Bob Orders tells me our new pastor brings a new and exciting combination of leadership gifts we have not seen before in this pulpit, experience and leadership in youth ministry, music ministry, spiritual counseling, sermons to help you get through the week, and if half of Bill’s reputation is true, our new pastor is surely "the real McCoy."

We believe our great Lord God has already lifted Jesus up in judgment and salvation, one and the same for us. Now our lifted up Christ says it’s our turn. Our time to lift up our cross and welcome the moving and working of Christ’s Spirit among us as we let go our past and lift up our future God is surely sending upon us. Will we take this risk, you and I? Let us let go and lift up the cross of Christ Jesus, our Lord.

And to God alone be all praise, honor and glory, now and forever more. Amen.