Re/pent: Numbers 21:4-9
Fourth Sunday in Lent
4 Then they traveled
from Mount Hor on the road toward the Sea of Suf in order to go around the land
of Edom; but the people’s tempers grew short because of the detour. 5 The
people spoke against God and against Moshe: “Why did you bring us up
out of Egypt? To die in the desert? There’s no real food, there’s no water, and
we’re sick of this miserable stuff we’re eating!”
6 In
response, Adonai sent poisonous snakes among the people; they bit the
people, and many of Isra’el’s people died. 7 The people came to Moshe and said, “We sinned by
speaking against Adonai and against you. Pray
to Adonai that he rid us of these snakes.” Moshe prayed for the
people, 8 and Adonai answered Moshe: “Make a poisonous snake and put it on a pole. When anyone who has
been bitten sees it, he will live.” 9 Moshe made a
bronze snake and put it on the pole; if a snake had bitten someone, then, when
he looked toward the bronze snake, he stayed alive. (CJB)
Chemotherapy is no picnic.
Cancer itself
is not a good time—I have lost friends and teachers to it and I have watched
grandparents and aunts survive it. But I’ve
been reading the updates of a friend of mine from divinity school who was
diagnosed with leukemia in February and watching her deal with this disease
with which so many of us have some experience.
Her descriptions of chemo, and those of others I have known who go
through it, sound miserable. Chemotherapy
alters the body on a cellular level, which sometimes means that healthy cells
get caught in the mix but always means that the body is containing a
battlefield that takes a great deal of energy.
At one point, my friend described her experience, writing, “The nausea,
loss of appetite, and fatigue have left me asleep for hours on end. I have some
numbness and tingling in my fingers, which they say will hopefully fade with
time. But it all seems a bit like one vicious cycle of no appetite which makes
you tired, then leaves you nauseated from having meds on an empty stomach and
so on and so forth.”[1]
The cure is
worse than the disease, some say, and while I don’t necessarily agree with that
I can certainly see how it might feel true.
To have to suffer while being healed seems perhaps counterintuitive, but
heal people do. When I was reading this
passage of a bronze snake on a stick that healed without preventing snakebite
outright, I immediately thought of chemo.
The idea that wellness is no picnic is, it would seem, not a new
idea.
“We’re going
to die in the desert!” Let’s set the
stage for today’s story from the book of Numbers, one of the five books known
as the Pentateuch that set up the identity of the nation of Israel. This tale comes from the 21st
chapter, meaning we’ve had 20 earlier chapters to listen to the Israelites
complain.
After
generations of slavery in Egypt, the people cried out to God for
deliverance—and, after escalating plagues that culminated in the death of
Egyptian children, God delivered them.
Then the Israelites got stymied by crossing the Red Sea, which God
parted for them. They entered the desert
and went toward the Promised Land to which God directed them. They balked at the people there, the first
real fight with the God Who had promised protection, and God said that they
would wander until the unfaithful generation had died out.
An entire generation learned they
could not go to the Promised Land but would fade in the desert. It makes it
slightly understandable that people would be edgy.
So they wandered. They cried out for food and water and God
provided manna and quail and water from rocks and over and over again the
people said we need this and God said okay, here is a workable version,
you may have to stay in the desert but I will still take care of you.
And then they get into an altercation
with the people of Edom and have to go around the land rather than through it,
a detour that seems to be enough for some people. “There’s no real food, there’s no water, and
we’re sick of this miserable stuff we’ve been eating!” they cry to Moses. “Fix it!’
We who have been in the pandemic for
a full year now may have some sympathy for the Israelites who are tired of the
way things are. When there is stress
enough, even a detour is too much. But,
as often happens when we are stressed and hurting, the complaints get
misdirected. Henry T.C. Sun points out
that the complaint here is not just throwing God’s gift in God’s face, but it’s
the latest in a long line of Israel’s demands for more, for better. “[I]f we extend the textual unit back to
include verses 1-3, the complaint of the children of Israel gets put into
sharper relief. Why? Because in that section, God hears the voice of the
Hebrews (verse 3a) and gives the indigenous Canaanites into their hands, so
that the Hebrews utterly destroy them (verse 3b). God gives the Hebrews their
first military victory in the Promised Land, and their response is to complain
about God’s provisions for them.”[2]
So we have ingratitude. Well, that’s frustrating, but God has heard
ingratitude before. A sternly worded reprimand
is surely coming.
“In response,
Adonai sent poisonous snakes.”
The cure seems
rather worse than the original complaint, here, since manna is awful but
poisonous snakes are deadly. This story
is not one that we tell that often, especially in Christian circles, because it
is not a great view of God. This God
hears people who are tired and grouchy and uncertain, people who are watching
an entire generation die off between slavery and settled freedom, people who
would love a sandwich instead of more quail, and God’s response is death by
snake. Death by supernatural snake, no
less. We who have been told over and
over again about the God of love may be tempted to say that this must be God
1.0 before we got the upgrade of mercy; surely this is Petty God Who went
through some equivalent of menopause with Jesus and mellowed out.
But it’s
not. This is the same God as the One Who
sent Jesus, as the One Who sent the Advocate on Pentecost, as the One Who loved
the world so much that He sent His only begotten Son into the world not to
condemn the world but to save it.[3] It’s that God.
Who, when
angry, is capable of sending snakes. “And
many of Isra’el’s people died.”
“Repent: to feel or express sincere regret or remorse
about one’s wrongdoing or sin.”[4] In this series of “re/lent” that has focused
on the way “re” words turn one back, this is a sneaky false cognate. The “re” in “repent” is not a separate
prefix; “pent” is indeed a word that means “confined” or “repressed,”[5] but “repent” is not “return
to confinement” or “re-confine.” It
comes from Old French repentir, where “re” adds linguistic force. To repent, in English, is to regret fully,
with all of one’s self.
“The people
came to Moshe and said, ‘We sinned by speaking against Adonai and against you.
Pray to Adonai that he rid us of these snakes.’” The people realize they have gone too far and
repent, but God never does. In fact, God
doesn’t even cure everyone so that we can all continue on our merry way; God
tells Moses to create a bronze snake on a pole to which people can look after
they’ve been bitten. After they’ve
been bitten, which means people are still being bitten after having repented.
This is a hard
text, Church, which is why it’s important that we take it and wrestle with
it. Scripture is not an iTunes user
agreement—we have to read this, we who claim faith, to recognize that
there are pieces we do not like and may not want in our holy text. We have to read this to recognize that those
pieces aren’t going anywhere just because they are uncomfortable to us. It is a whole area of theology to talk about
whether or not God is even capable of repentance because that implies that God
is capable of wrongdoing and that’s a different sermon for a different day, but
for this sermon on this day we sit in the space of acknowledging that we might
be able to understand the Israelites here but it is a lot harder to understand
God.
Professor Cameron Howard points out
that part of this is because our expectations have shifted. “The Hebrews who wandered through the
wilderness did not experience God as a safe and comfortable companion. In the
great showdown with Pharaoh in Exodus 1-14, God sends ten vicious plagues to
show the superiority of the God of Israel over Egypt’s gods, including Pharaoh,
who made his own claims to divinity. On the way out of Egypt, God appears as a
pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of cloud by night, a sight that incites
panic in the Egyptians (Exodus 13:21, 14:24). At Sinai, God thunders on the
mountain in fire and smoke, terrifying the Israelites (Exodus 19:18, 20:18-1).
These are not the images of God that call us to snuggle up in God’s everlasting
arms, ‘safe and secure from all alarms,’ as the old hymn goes.”[6] God sent snakes among the people who sniped
at the gifts of the Holy, who broke their part of the covenant that they would
be God’s people and God would be their God, caring for them from Egypt
to Canaan.
We carry a great
deal of desire to control God and not only give God some unchangeable pronouns
but put God in a box we can close when we want.
The idea that the Divine is wild, is angry, is loving, is all-powerful and
all-merciful, could fix everything in the world but doesn’t—that’s a hard
pill to swallow, honestly. I would be a
stone cold liar if I stood in this pulpit and told you I have never informed
God that He needs to get Her act together, that She must have abandoned His
creation when we have a global COVID death toll of 2.6 million people;[7] when we have 26 million
people in the US who are uninsured,[8] often because of cost;
when my friend has leukemia and has to endure chemotherapy that leaves her unable
to eat properly or stay awake for more than a few hours at a time.
And yet. With a text like this that may seem utterly
unfair, unmerciful, we are invited to step back and reexamine how we think the
story ought to go.
“The narrative
specifies that God sends the snakes, but never does either God or the narrator
call the snakes a punishment,” continues Professor Howard; “the people
themselves draw that conclusion. I
wonder if the Israelites might have fallen into the old post hoc ergo
propter hoc fallacy: ‘after this, therefore because of this.’ Maybe
God did not send the snakes because of their quarreling after all. Crying out
to God in complaint is not usually condemned in Scripture; there is a whole
genre of psalms that centers on complaint or lament!” But in this tale, “God does not give the
people what they ask for. They want Moses to get God to ‘take away the serpents
from us’ (Numbers 21:7). But the serpents do not go away, nor do they stop
biting. Instead, God instructs Moses on how to heal the people who are bitten;
they are still bitten, but they live. Deliverance does not come in the way that
they expect.”[9]
The really
unfortunate thing about repentance, about faith, about being in relationship
with a God Who doesn’t wait for our permission or our approval, is that what
happens next may not align with what we want.
We do not get to tell God what kind of food to send, or how to lead the journey
in the wilderness, or what healing should look like. I do not get to tell God that my friend doesn’t
deserve to go through chemo—whatever “deserve” looks like in that context,
anyway—and I do not get to say there should not be snakes in my world.
Because oh,
Church, there are a great many snakes.
There is poison in our world, in the literal senses of cancer and COVID
and addictions, but also in the metaphorical fangs of bigotry and resentment
and manipulation. We stand in the
shifting, slithering spaces and say this is not how it was supposed to go
and God says you have never had any idea about how it was supposed to go. Look up and be healed.
When Moses
created the bronze snake on a pole that did not stop the snakes but healed
people from them, it was an invitation to return to the faith the Israelites
had left. Have faith that the God Who
promised to be a God of healing will keep His word; have faith that even though
the chemo is absolutely awful, the science is doing what it does. My friend finally got to go home this weekend
and rest after her chemo round; she doesn’t know if the healing was fully
effective yet, but she got to sleep in her own bed and that was enough in this
singular moment.
This is not the last time the
Israelites pushed back on God, nor should it be. This faith thing is a relationship and we who
must read the iTunes agreement are allowed and encouraged to question, to push,
to wonder, to hold accountable the God Who calls us to serve in covenant of
care. But if and when we get caught up
in the snakes and the boringness of manna and say it should not be like this,
then we repent, we fully change ourselves to recognize that we do not by any
means have the whole picture. We have
only the promise that God loves, loves fully and deeply and mercifully and
truly, and it is ours to have faith enough to look up, and be healed.
May we have the hearts to push back
when God seems to have abandoned the covenant of care, the minds to remember
that we are not God and cannot do God’s job, and the souls that rest in the
push-pull of faith with the God Who made us, loves us, and welcomes us into
healing. Amen.
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