Lent 4 B יהוה
In August of 2021, I sent an email to Britt, just before she and Bryon took a flight to DC, on the way to Atlanta, Birmingham, Selma, and Memphis. I’d seen a rough itinerary, and when I saw that they planned to drive from Memphis to New Orleans, I send the email. If you want to get from Memphis to New Orleans by car, in anything like a timely fashion, you take I-55, through Mississippi: Senatobia, Grenada, Ridgeland, Jackson, Brookhaven, and McComb, into Louisiana, through Hammond to La Place, the terminus.
It so happens that I grew up twenty-eight miles west of McComb, near Liberty where my parents built a hunting camp. My father had bought a piece of land in the late ‘40’s, in the pine belt running from East Texas to Georgia, because his father had started a sawmill in Amite County, whose parents had immigrated from southern Sweden, which is heavy with timber. Amite County men in the 19th and early 20th century worked as loggers or hauled pulpwood, and along the way they killed every living creature they encountered, decimating the native wildlife. My father got in touch with the Virginia Game and Fish Commission and bought two pair of wild turkey to restock the wildlife. He turned the birds loose, waited a few years, and then invited a few friends in the spring to hunt turkeys, away from the telephone, out in the middle of nowhere.
In the beginning there was nothing at the camp but a pit, where pork or beef cooked overnight. At some point my mother got tired of not having a bathroom or a place to sleep since you have to get up at 4:00 to be in the woods before the sun rises. You have to sit beside the biggest tree you can find in the dark, maybe with a branch stuck into the ground to hide your face, and you cannot move. Wild turkeys are cautious, able to see and hear much better than you. They walk in silence. You hope that the sound you make on your turkey caller, the sound of the hen, will attract the male and provide your dinner.
The local dentist loved coming to the camp, being in the woods, the solitude and silence of it, listening to the world wake up. Nobody will walk by. His son Skip grew up coming to the camp, and when he moved to the city, he never turned into a city slicker, but always knew his way around the woods. One morning in the pitch-black dark, he picked out a tree, sat down, put his shotgun on the right, and put his turkey caller on the left. Skip sat in the dark until he heard a turkey gobble and decided to use his caller. He moved his neck ever so slowly, just a little to the left to pick up his caller, and when he did, when he looked down, he saw that his caller was on top of a coiled-up rattlesnake. You can only imagine. This story got my attention. This is the reason for the email to Britt. I had arranged for her and Bryon to get off I-55 in McComb, drive to Liberty, and stay at the camp. I told her: watch where you step, do not walk into the woods, and do not move the small boat sitting beside the lake. There would be cottonmouth moccasins underneath, another path to an early demise.
You may be picking up on the fact that I am terrified of rattlesnakes and moccasins and copperheads, and one reason I like living here is that there are no poisonous snakes west of the Cascades, and I can wander into the Grand Forest on Bainbridge and sit underneath giant Fir trees and not worry about being bitten by a snake.
All of which brings me to the book of Numbers, fourth book in the Old Testament, not your typical Bible hotspot. Now we’re here with serpents in the wilderness and being bitten, people dying, in an exodus from slavery. We are present in the company of Moses: “So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it on a pole, and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.” What an amazing story. Where did that come from?
If you are in a conservative theological arena, your answer would be Moses. You’d say that Moses wrote Numbers and Deuteronomy. That does present some difficulties, however, since Deuteronomy talks about Moses’s death. If you are in a different arena, your answer would be – nobody knows. Maybe Numbers is based on an earlier text, maybe on oral tradition.
In any case, people grumble a lot, not having water, complaining about miserable food, about their tribulations. Even Moses’s sister, Miriam, has leprosy after complaining about her brother. There are a lot of plagues, like the serpents, and there’s a lot of room here for a few miracles, for these snake-bit people.
Earlier in my life I had a dream of walking into a familiar courtyard like the ones in Mexico or Spain, and I was seized with panic at the presence of a huge yellow snake, twenty times the normal size, wrapped around the central fountain. It was a long time before I learned that the snake, especially in dreams, is often the presence of transformation, and I had a chance last month to encourage a friend who was under duress to stay with her snake dream, not dismiss it or run away, but welcome it, with its restorative power, life-giving power. Transformation might be now, or on the horizon, or the potential.
I’ve been re-reading Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead about three generations of a family in a small town in Iowa. The narrator, a pastor, writes a letter to his eight-year-old son, to be read later in his life, and he wants to talk about the creative spirit, the Deity:“Creating a proof from your experience is like building a ladder to the moon.It seems that it should be possible,until you stop to consider the nature of the problem.”
That is the problem for John. writing for a new generation, half a century after Jesus. He wants a different kind of language. He has access to Mark, Luke, and Matthew, but that’s not what he’s looking for, facts on a storyline. In Hebrew tradition, for Moses and today, the name is four letters, the tetragrammaton, four letters too sacred to say out loud. When that appears, it’s read as Adoni or Elohim. I’ve grown tired of people throwing around the word g-o-d.
If you research this, you’ll run headlong into Thomas Aquinas, 1265, pages and pages on ontology, on existence, on being, or the seven words of Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury in 1092: “That beyond which nothing can be imagined.” But John goes way back, to the book of Numbers: “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, Jesus must be lifted up.” There are layers of meaning here: not only lifted up above the ground, nailed on slabs of wood and left to die. It’s being elevated, raised up above, an uplifting. The Son of Man: it’s the first of three times that phrase appears in John, each one a reference to being lifted up – an exaltation.
In what has become the hotspot in scripture, printed on t-shirts, and two million online searches every month, John frames his theology in the very next verse after Moses and the serpent, and I want to reframe it, to say it in a different way: “Adoni, Elohim, the author of all life, sends the Word, Jesus, onto the earth, so that people can live with, and in the presence of, the sacred.” Scholars say that the word “eternal” is not about time as we know it. Eternal means embedded in the sacred. Jesus embodies sanctity, and we live with the sacred through the portal he opens.
Near the end of Gilead, Robinson writes: “This is only a glimpse of an embracing, incomprehensible reality.” Skip lived to the tell the story. I don’t know if killed the snake, but I know it got his attention. It changed his life. It was Coleridge who wrote that Christianity is a life, not a doctrine, not a theory or speculation, but a life; not a philosophy of life, but a life and a living process. In this life, look to the Word, the author of all life, to be healed.
