Sermon: Look and Live

Texts: Numbers 21:4-9; John 3:14-21

Date: March 26, 2006

Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, EagleHarbor Congregational Church

            Eewwww, snakes!

            We were comparing notes in Bible Study this week on our attitude toward snakes and I think the word “eewwww” is a fair summary of how the class feels.  We wondered if there is some universal snake-revulsion built into human genes.  Mat Chamberlain wins the prize for biggest shudder.  She remembered being somewhere a few years back with a snake handler and while she didn’t flee from the room (a sign of progress from her childhood terror), she kept herself well at the back of the crowd.

            A plague of poisonous snakes definitely ranks way up there as our idea of a nightmare.  Did God really send poisonous snakes among the Israelites, as the story in Numbers says?  That’s what it says—“The Lord sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died.”  This seems like overkill to the casual reader.  All they did was complain about the food.

            Well, to be fair, it was the food God had provided that they were complaining about.  They had gotten way over their gratitude for God’s provision of manna in the wilderness.  Gratitude must have gone out the window months or even years before, to hear them complain about the manna: “We detest this miserable food!”  I guess I could see God being irritated by these ingrates…but still, snakes?  It sounds too much like a parent who’s fed up with a sniveling kid shouting, “I’ll give you something to cry about, you brat!” 

            One source containing the commentary of ancient rabbis says the snakes are “ironic retribution.”  The rabbis pointed out that since the beginning of time, snakes have had only the dust to eat and yet they never complain about the food.  Therefore, the divine voice in that particular Midrash says, “Let the serpent which does not murmur concerning its food come and rule over the people who murmur concerning their food.”

            “Murmur” is a polite way of saying “complain.”  The book of Numbers, appropriately titled “In the Wilderness” in the Hebrew Bible, might as well have the subtitle, “Murmur, murmur, murmur.”  The NRSV’s introduction to Numbers says, “These narratives portray a people who found that, in the strange providence of God, the journey from promise to fulfillment led round about by way of the wilderness…The narratives do not idealize the wilderness period.  Again and again the people complained sensing the contrast between the relative security of slavery in Egypt and the precarious insecurity of freedom in the wilderness.”  

This week’s story follows the typical pattern of wilderness stories.  The people are initially jubilant about being saved from slavery in Egypt, but when the going gets tough, their trust in God ebbs away.  They complain.  Sometimes they get punished for complaining, as in this story, and sometimes God simply answers their complaints with provisions of food and water.  They go along OK for a while before times get hard again, and they complain again.  They just have a hard time maintaining their trust in God no matter how many times they see evidence that God will provide for their needs.  Our Seasons of the Spirit curriculum says that where the text says, “the people became impatient on the way,” the word “impatient” could be literally translated, “short of soul.”  Being short of soul is what sets off another round of grumbling.  Their souls don’t stretch all the way to total trust in God.

I can see why God wants them to learn to be long on soul rather than leaving them short of soul.  I’m still not sure that snakes are good for what ails ‘em--although I have to admit, they do seem to do the trick.  The Seasons of the Spirit adult curriculum does ask this interesting question about the snakes: “Which of these best describes for you the role of the serpents in the story: agent of punishment, source of healing, agent of self-discovery/self-realization, representation of human fear?”  What do you think? 

It seems to me that they might be all of the above.  They can’t be just an agent of punishment, because God doesn’t remove them after the people repent (again).  Interesting.  Rather than removing the snakes, God has Moses make a model snake out of bronze, lifted high up on a pole, which heals the people who look at it after they’ve been bitten.  It’s truly a weird and wonderful tale. 

The very thing the people are so afraid of becomes the means of healing them.  But they have to look at it in order to live.  Once bitten, a person would probably rather not ever see another snake, even a picture of a snake or a sculpture of a snake.  But the healing in this story comes only through looking at the bronze serpent.  Intriguing.

Rabbi Arthur Waskow has a blog linked to textweek.com that helped me see the serpent as a representation of human fear.  Poisonous snakes are real—there are real dangers in the world.  I’m sure there were real snakes in the wilderness through which the Israelites traveled.  While I personally doubt that God rounded up an extraordinary snake plague to punish the people, I find it easy to believe that they would have gone through some particularly snakey territory on their journey.  There are times in our lives when there are more troubles than others, times when we face more dangers than usual.  Since they came to a realization of guilt through the snake plague, and they were radical monotheists, they interpreted the snakes as an unpleasant teaching tool God was using.

At any rate, there are real dangers, and times when we face more dangers than other, calmer times.  In addition to real dangers, we have fear of dangers.  Fear.  Fears.  Sometimes whole plagues of fears that poison our outlook on life—that is, sometimes we face more fears than in other, calmer times.  Rabbi Waskow suggests that there is a need to call forth from ourselves these fears which are even more “serpenty” in essence than the deadly living snakes.  Are you with me?  The fear of danger can be even more immobilizing than the danger itself.  And you’ve got to get that fear, that super-serpent, out where you can take a long look at it if you want to live.  In Rabbi Waskow’s words,

“And what do you do with these super-serpents? Look hard into their faces. Stare hard at death, the face of fear, and you will be freed to life.

Stare hard at death -- and blink. Shut your eyes tight. Stare, and stop staring.

Stare these dangers in the face before we blink. Look -- and do not be addicted to the looking. Without looking, no gift of life. But to be mesmerized by the looking is also to reject the gift of life.”

            What I glean from Rabbi Waskow’s words is that we need to be able to examine what we fear, but not become obsessed by that examination.  “Stare, and then blink.”  First, look into the snakey face of our fears.  We do need to be conscious of our fears, as much as possible, because unconscious, unnamed fears can control us even without our being aware of it.  Vague, free-floating clouds of anxiety can subtly shrink our inner lives, causing us to focus on the petty or the trivial, manically seeking constant entertainment to ward off any quiet moments when anxiety might overwhelm us.

Naming and looking at our fear thwarts its power over us.  I experienced this recently when talking to a counselor about how I can be a good parent in a new phase of our daughters’ lives.   She helped me get a grip on the content of my fear about coming up short as a parent, helping me look at what I understood as bad and good parenting.  The fear of failure didn’t magically disappear, but it was cut down to size, no longer casting such a big shadow.  If we look at the story from Numbers metaphorically or poetically, perhaps this is why the bronze snake on a pole became the agent of healing.  The object of fear didn’t just evaporate—that doesn’t often happen in real life.  But looking at it becomes a means of healing, so that it no longer has so much power over the wandering people.

Rabbi Waskow reminds us in his writing that looking away is also essential.  “Look, but do not be addicted to looking.” We humans certainly have the potential to go overboard on examining our fears.  Naming the most poisonous of our fears does no good at all if we then perversely adopt them as pets, shaping our whole inner lives around them.  “To be mesmerized by looking is also to reject the gift of life.”  Counteracting this human tendency to become mesmerized by our fear may be the reason the bronze snake ended up on a pole.  Use your poetic imagination and think about it.  If God had told Moses to make the bronze snake and then just throw it on the ground among the living snakes, its power to heal would have been severely compromised.  You’d be trying to focus on the object of healing when eeekk! Along comes the object of your fear, slithering through the dust toward you, reviving your terror.

That bronze snake has got to be lifted up against the backdrop of the wild blue yonder.  It’s got to be lifted up, silhouetted against the vast reaches of the sky, putting whatever we are afraid of in the context of eternity.  It’s got to be placed where we can look at our fear, and then look beyond it to evidence of the Creator who is causing the sun to rise and set, calling forth the four winds, making the rain fall, and choreographing the stars’ dance.               

            Even the Mother of all fears, the fear of death, can be tamed in the context of eternity.  Jesus in the gospel of John recalls the story of the bronze serpent in the wilderness and compares his being lifted up for the believer to see to that healing moment for the Israelites.  Being “lifted up” here doesn’t mean simply becoming well-known or something like that.  In the original language, the verb which is the equivalent to “be lifted up” has the special meaning of “be crucified.”  Jesus is being lifted up as a suffering and dying servant on the cross. 

            As we look at Jesus being lifted up on the cross, we are forced to confront our own fears about death, confront our fears about our vulnerability to suffering.  But we look at Jesus from the vantage point of the resurrection.  We look at a suffering and dying Christ against the starry backdrop of eternity.  Even death is a temporary state, a transition into another phase of life.  The promise Christ makes is that those who believe will not perish but have eternal life.  Even the poisonous fear of death has no ultimate power over God’s people.   

            There is great freedom in the ability to focus beyond the image of death—so powerfully present in the image of Christ on the cross--to the backdrop of eternity.  There is immense potential for a healing of our inner turmoil as we who share in Christ’s baptism grasp what it means to share in Christ’s resurrection.  Eternal life begins not when our bodies die but when we look at Christ lifted up and begin to experience the death of our fears.

            We remember that in the story of our ancestors in faith, the people did not get a shortcut out of the wilderness.  God never did remove those pesky snakes.  We will not be getting a free pass out of our wilderness, either.  The dangers our generation faces are very real.  We will have our days when we are “short of soul”—having a hard time trusting in God’s providence, just as the ancient Israelites did.  We will have our times when it seems like we’re up to our ankles in adders, and it will be scary. 

But we need not be dominated and immobilized by fear.  We have been given the gift of seeing all that frightens us against the backdrop of the vast reaches of eternity.  We see that God is still seeking to heal us, to lead us, to nourish us on our journey.  We see that God is still seeking to lead the human family to the promised land, and that we have a role to play in that unfolding story.  We see that even death does not thwart God’s will toward abundant and eternal life.  Against the backdrop of this mysterious and creative love, we may freely look at all that frightens us and live.  Live the abundant and free life to which we are called, short on fear and long on soul, bathed in the light of Christ.  Let us turn toward the light, just as we are, seeking healing, courage, and faith.

The New Oxford Annotated Bible  Bruce Metzger and Roland E. Murphy, ed.  New York: Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 163 OT

Waskow, Arthur http://www.shalomctr.org/node/275