Sermon: Facing what we fear
We just wanted God to fix everything. We wanted the journey with all its trials and tests to be over and finally just get to the promised land.
God had fixed
whatever needed to be fixed so many times before. In Egypt labouring under the pharoah’s
domination, God sent Moses to set us free.
Up against the Red Sea with the Egyptian army right behind us, God
parted the waters. When the water on the
other side was bitter, God showed us how to make it sweet. When we ran out of food, God gave us manna. Thirsty, God gave water from a rock. Without meat, God provided quails – so many we
got sick trying to eat all that God gave us. Afraid of the strength and ferocity of the
Amalikites and Canaanites we had to go up against, God gave us victory.
And now we just
wanted God to fix it again – once and for all.
The journey had been long enough, with trials enough for us to learn to trust
in, and follow God. So we gathered up all
our complaints and yearnings, and brought them as an omnibus lament to Moses
and to God:
Why
have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the
wilderness?
For there is no food and no
water, and we detest this miserable food.”
At that point we
wanted God to be Mike Holmes, Martha Stewart and Miss Manners all rolled into
one – a divine trinity of the good, well-ordered world – a God who would make
the world all safe and sound, pleasing and comfortable for all – or at least
for us, and to rule in such a way that only good things would happen to good
people and there would be good reason for everything.
It seemed the
logical extension of what we’d come to trust about God as problem-solver and as
the saviour of our life. But to our shock
and dismay, what God gave us in reply was snakes – poisonous snakes that when
they bit us, made us start to die.
At first we
thought it must be punishment for our sin of presumption in asking to be free
of the wilderness and of the need still to be journeying and learning. So we recanted and repented of our
request. We said we’d learned our lesson,
so now could you please take the snakes away.
God heard
us. But God didn’t take the snakes
away. Instead, God told Moses to craft a
bronze snake – and if you heard the words for it spoken in Hebrew, in our
mother tongue, you’d know that it was meant to be something like a super-snake,
a snake that reveals and represents all the snakiness and poisonousness of all
the snakes on the ground combined – the very essence of poisonous snakiness at
the heart of them all. And when he was
finished making it, Moses was told by God to put this super-snake up on a pole
as an image for us to look at – to gaze upon, and that in the looking and
gazing would heal us of our snake bites and help us live.
Unless maybe God
couldn’t. Unless maybe the snakes
weren’t a punishment at all, but a revelation – a visual and visceral revealing
on the ground around our feet, of the sin and snakiness that lives within us –
that is always there, that God is aware of, and that now by the grace (?) of
God we could see, and feel the effects of, for ourselves. Because is there not a slippery something
within us – within each of us in our lives and relationships, and within all of
us as a species, that is not always good?
Sometimes it
really is sin we commit, and hurt we inflict – intentionally or not, on others,
on other forms of life, on the life of Earth itself – and we don’t like to look
at it. And sometimes it’s other kinds of
hurt we carry inside us – fears and anxieties, addictions and brokenness, ways
we beat ourselves up and feel beat up by others – feelings of inadequacy and
anxiety that are like toxin in our psyche and poison our lives from the inside
– and that we try so hard to find ways of escaping or hiding.
Or maybe it was
also the sin and brokenness of the world – of Earth and life on it, that came
to life in those snakes – all the evil, tragedy, sorrow and pain that is there
so much of the time, that we wish wasn’t but is, that often afflicts the lives
of others but also bites us, and takes away all the joy of living – sometimes
takes away living itself.
When we saw the
snakes and that God was not taking them away, we began to realize a few things we
had not yet to that point – that God is not Mike Holmes, Martha Stewart and
Miss Manners all rolled into one; that the world God has made is not just good
and well-ordered in the way we might want – safe and sound, pleasing and
comfortable, with only good things happening to good people and sufficient
reason for everything that happens; and that the way of God and God’s people often
involves being willing to see the sorrows and pains of this life more clearly
than others want to, and taking them on rather than just looking for ways to make
them go away.
One other thing
the snakes made us think of – I know I have to say this – was pharaoh and the
kind of power he used to wield in our lives and still wields in the lives of
many. I’m sure you’ve seen pharaoh’s
head-dress – at least pictures of it.
It’s a crown the pharaoh wears with the head of a fearsome, venomous snake on it arching up and looking
out from his forehead -- a pretty clear sign of who you need to
bow down and acquiesce to, if you wanted to be blessed rather than
oppressed by the power of the day. The
snake is the sign of anyone and any people who take the world into their own
hands and bend it to their benefit and well-being at the expense of others
and of Earth itself.
And the way they do it – the way we saw pharaoh and so many
others do it, is by fear – the fear they know we all are susceptible to. Sometimes it’s simple fear of the pharaoh and
the power he has at his disposal that’s enough to keep people in line. But it’s also fear of life and of the world
that pharaohs of any kind are able to manufacture and then manipulate to their advantage
by convincing people that they are the answer to what they fear – that they
will make the snakes go away for them.
For all those years we were in Egypt we saw the pharaoh
convincing the people of Egypt he was the one in touch with the gods who could
protect them from anything bad. Which is
why it was such a blow when Moses – our leader – God’s leader, stood up to him,
and through Moses God sent the plagues as a clear revelation that there was
something more than pharaoh to
be feared, and someone other than pharaoh to listen to and follow.
And I think
that’s what our journey is about, and always will be. About learning to trust God not just as our
problem-solver, but also as the One who calls us to look closely at the things we
are afraid of, the things that hurt us and others, that poison our life and the
life of the world.
I don’t
know. Does God ever promise to make the
dark go away in this life? Does God
promise to protect us from its bite? Or is
the promise instead that the dark will never completely overcome the light God
gives? And calls us to be?
You know, in a
world that’s such an unending amalgam of light and dark, of good and evil, of both
comforting manna and distressing snakes on the ground all around us, I wonder
what it’s like to be God – always not able just to make all the bad go away,
and having instead to show us what it means to live creatively, hopefully and
compassionately in the face of whatever we fear and whatever hurts us.
Living with a God like this – and growing into a spirituality like this
is not easy. It certainly goes against
the grain of probably every human culture and society – both yours and
mine. But I wonder if it’s exactly what every
culture and society really needs.
No comments:
Post a Comment