DATE: March 18, 2012
SCRIPTURE:
Numbers 21: 4-9; Psalm 107: 1-3, 17-22
BY: Rev. Cynthia E. Robinson
Lord Jesus Christ,
Take our hands and work with them;
take our lips and speak through them;
take our minds and think with them;
take our hearts and set them on fire
with love for you and all your people;
for your name’s sake.Amen.
When I moved from Ohio to Connecticut some 13 years ago, I was struck by the customary greeting of this area: “Hi, how are you?” Really, I thought. You want to know how I am? But by the time I would finish this thought process and managed to eke out a “Fine, how are you?” the person was already five yards closer to their destination.
So when I say to folks, “Hi, how are you” I hope for rather than expect an answer. Like the FedEx guy who came to my house with an envelope for my husband. As I opened the door and signed the electronic pad, I asked him, “How’s it going?” He replied, “I’m hanging in there.” I said, “I guess that’s what we’re all doing these days.” He shot back, “Yeah, it’s about all you can do in this freakin’ world.”
In his voice of complaint I could hear the longing: longing for better days ahead, for a time perhaps in the past when things didn’t seem so complicated, longing for change right now, this minute. And these days, there is much to complain about. The Occupy Wall Street movement and the Tea Party Republicans are just two examples of action groups organized around common complaints.
The atmosphere of complaint in this nation has turned vicious and intolerant. As we listen to the news and to commentators and the political rhetoric, we wonder how we got here. There seems to be an underlying crankiness and an even-deeper discontent with the way things are. All around us we can perceive a tug of war between the past and the future, leaving the needs of the present like the cries of an ignored child.
Our deep longing, our rising complaint reveals our desire for rescue, for someone, anyone to take us out of our painful circumstances and set us down gently in that bright land of plenty, health, and wholeness.
I am a poor wayfaring stranger
Traveling through this land of woe
But there’s no sickness, toil or danger
In that bright land to which I go.
The Israelites wandering in the desert logically thought that their rescue from Egypt would be better than their life of slavery. But appearances can be deceiving. “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness?” We can hear it in their voices: they would almost rather go back to Egypt, back to the Pharaoh/dictator who ruled their existence than trust this Moses, an Egyptian-raised, Hebraic stuttering sheep-herder, who looked both ways before he killed an Egyptian, and ended up on Pharaoh’s Ten Most Wanted list. And yet Moses was also the designated mouthpiece of God.
This rescue doesn’t seem to be going very well. It’s hardly a magic carpet ride through the desert: there is no food, no water, and the miserable food—the manna from God—goes bad if they try to hoard it. The people have been complaining continually, and then it gets worse. Poisonous, or a more accurate translation— fiery, serpents are sent amongst them; they bite the people and some of them die. Their complaint bites them back.
Now hold on—God sends snakes to bite people just because they don’t like his food? Sounds a bit ludicrous to me. My kids sometimes complain about what I cook for dinner but snake bites? Jesus said “Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for bread, will give a stone? Or if the child asks for a fish, will give a snake? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” (Matthew 7: 9-11) God gives good things, not snakes, right?
In the notes of this Bible passage, the word for fiery serpent is seraph, as in the seraphim, celestial beings in the court of heaven. In early Judaism these were six-winged flying snakes. By all appearances they were demonic creatures, but they also sang the praises of heaven. Literally, seraph means ‘burning one’. These were the angels who touched the prophet Isaiah’s lips with burning coals in order to purify his speech. Those who looked upon the seraphim directly would be reduced to ashes due to their intense brightness and heat.
God sent these fiery serpents to remind these poor wayfaring Israelites that what they longed for was not what fills the stomach but what satisfies the soul—an intimate connection to the divine. Sometimes what we long for the most, we also avoid the most. We long for closeness with God but we also fear that intense brightness and heat that can cut through our despair. Like Dante, many of us only seem able to find heaven by traveling straight through hell.
I know dark clouds will hover o’er me
I know my pathway’s rough and steep
But golden fields lay just before me
Where weary eyes no more shall weep.
So what’s the cure for complaint, the cure for our wandering route through sickness, toil and danger, the wilderness of life, the cure for sin? God has Moses construct a serpent made of bronze, to resemble those fiery ones, and set it on a pole, that those who have been bitten will look upon it and live. They will look upon the instrument of death and they will be healed.
Worship is a cure for the sickness of sin. And we have our own pole to look upon, the brazen cross of death and resurrection that we might remember the cauterizing heat of Jesus, how he came to bring not peace but a sword; remember his intense brightness, making blind those who claim to see and freeing those who live in darkness.
Worship, like complaint, is another language of longing. In worship we give voice to our desire for wholeness, our longing for healing, our hunger for justice and peace. We listen to the old, old salvation story told again and again as we meander our way through our own wilderness. God’s rescue, even that one offered to us in Jesus Christ, does not lift us out of our painful circumstances but gives us a way through them. That brazen cross looms not only over our individual lives but over every person, every community who dares to love.
But as you know, worship does not take place solely within the walls of a church. Worship can be anything that pulls the focus off of us and onto God and our neighbor. We worship when we serve others, when we give our offering, when we teach Sunday school, when food is given to the hungry, when we study the Bible together and pray for each other, when we visit someone, when we wait with a friend for test results to come back, when a “Thank you, God” escapes our lips.
In these moments the old, old salvation story is told through our story and through the story of this congregation, that story of not of rescue but of a way through. We remember, in the words of the psalmist, God’s steadfast love and God’s wonderful works to humankind, even to us, offering thanks and singing songs of joy. We remember that God seeks not to gratify our immediate wishes but to satisfy the longing of our hearts.
I want to wear a crown of glory
When I get home to that bright land
I want to shout the salvation story
In concert with that angel band.
Ultimately what we, and those Israelites, long for is home, that promised land where all God’s children are beloved and live in peace, where weary eyes no more shall weep. Death and resurrection are not the only absolutes of the Christian life. They point to the highest truth which is love. And love is our home; God is our home. We long for those many rooms, those many mansions Jesus prepares for us, those places of acceptance, trust, forgiveness, mercy, healing, compassion, justice and peace; that place which is right here, right now.
Our perception of time tells us that we are always living in an in-between time, between what was and what will be, but it is a time that will never come again. And like the Israelites it seems we must take the long route through the desert to find our way to that promised bright land.
You are still living through a time of transition, a time perhaps when you wish for what was known in the past, when you desire the resolution of your future, when you might be longing for anything but the present unknown. You’ve been wrestling some, struggling, and yes, I would bet there’s been some complaining too. Whenever we go through a time of uncertainty, little things that bother us seem like big things and big things seem overwhelming. And that’s okay. Maybe it’s been feeling like you are wandering through the desert, but at least in this church, there’s no complaining about the food!
The desert has a purpose. In the desert God made a community, one that would listen to God, no matter who God spoke through. Everyone leaves—everyone, one way or another. Moses was an interim minister himself: he never got to the promised land—he only saw it from a distance. Jesus, too, was a transition man, between this world and the next. But God’s love is steadfast.
What we need to remember whenever we are in a transition is that we’re all longing for the same thing, and our complaining, our worship, and all of us gathered together will remind us of that. We’re all longing for home.
I’m going home to see my Savior
I’m going home no more to roam
I am just going over Jordan
I am just going over home.