Venom Comes From More Than Snakes

By The Very Rev. Sherry Crompton

March 22, 2009

Read: Numbers 21:4-9 and John 3:14-21

In this morning’s passage from Numbers we hear about snakes; serpents. Poisonous snakes. Yuck. A recent Harris poll on “What We Are Afraid Of?” discovered that 36 percent of all adults in the United States list snakes as their number one fear.

I, for one, am not fond of snakes. In a recent visit to the Inn at Freedom Village, I entered the front doors and there in front of me was a young man sitting at the desk with a very large snake wrapped around his neck. Almost like a necklace or a boa. He explained it was indeed his pet and he is a boa constrictor…who greeted me by lifting up his up his little face and stuck his tongue out at me when I expressed some curiosity. I am still not fond of snakes. Pets or not pets.

Snakes, or serpents, remind us of the story in the Book of Genesis about Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, in paradise, and the temptation of the serpent. We tend to associate snakes with evil intent and I wonder if that may have a little something to do with the large percentage of people who fear snakes.

The story in Numbers is an odd one. The people are once again grumbling and complaining – which isn’t a new thing for the group – but this time what is different is that they speak out against God . Complaining about their leaders, Moses and Aaron, is one thing. Complaining about God is something else altogether.

The Lord sends poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died. When they realized their sinful ways, they went to Moses once again for intercession. Please pray for the Lord to take away the serpents.

The Lord’s response was not to take away the serpents; but rather to have Moses create a bronze image of the poisonous serpent and put it on a pole. Anyone who was bitten was to look at the serpent of bronze and they would live. They would be healed.

Now, think about that. The very thing that you are most afraid of – a poisonous serpent biting you and killing you – is what you need to look up to for healing. We need to look at what we fear the most, in order to receive life. Hmnnn. Another thought: poisonous venon and anti-venom come from the same place.

The first sentence in our gospel reading from John today is: “Jesus said, “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”

Ellen Edwards Kennedy, a writer and born-again Christian, wrote the following — whether about herself or about a character in one of her books I do not know:

“When I became a Christian, I began to look at a particular young woman with scorn. I felt little but contempt for her as I thought of her quick temper, her selfishness, her spiteful gossiping, and the way she took her loving family for granted. Any time she was mentioned, I could think of very little good to say. But one day as I was leafing through an old picture album filled with photos of her, Jesus spoke to my spirit and told me, “I have always loved her, despite her sins, and I have forgiven her. I want you to forgive and love her too.”

As I gazed at the young face in the pictures, my heart was filled with compassion for the girl. Along the way in searching for life’s meaning, she had made many mistakes. God gave me a gentle love for her and the ability to forgive her. That moment of healing, when I decided to forgive and love her, also gave me a new strength and a new freedom to love others as never before…because the woman in the pictures was me.”

Lent is a time of honest self-examination, of correcting course, of forgiving self and others. Lent is a time to take what we are afraid of, those parts of ourselves that we are afraid to look at, or to let others see, and lift them up into the light. Transformation can occur when we look at, or acknowledge, what is causing our fear, our anger, our bitterness, our frustration, our negativity, our hatred. We can be healed, transformed, given new life when we walk in the light.

Thomas Hall tells of a startling interview between a Time correspondent and a sniper during a recent skirmish. The sniper had worked in his profession for years. Before the outbreak he was a javelin thrower-an aspiring Olympic competitor. During the war he got used to killing. He had claimed to have cut down 325 people who had tried to cross what became known as Sniper Alley to get food and water. The sniper said he didn’t begin to hate until his mother was jailed and beaten by the other side. Now he hates. But probably the most telling part of the interview was when he described his visit to see his mother recently. He said, “I have no feelings for what I do. When she hugged me, I felt nothing.” That hate over time has turned this young Olympic hopeful into a killing machine. Venomous bites can be lethal.

Only a few Jewish families live in Billings, Montana, but for some, one was thought too many. A few people began their own hate campaign. They donned those ridiculous KKK hoods and marched out and around the Jewish homes shouting expletives and abuse. Understandably, peace-loving people in the community became frightened. Doors quickly closed and curtains shut out the blatant racism, as if their silence would make the problem go away.

But one faith community in town glanced around long enough to send a message to the beleaguered victims. They hung little menorahs in their sanctuary windows as a sign of love and support. Crosses and menorahs together in the windows.

The circle of rage and hate against these families, and now against their supporters, grew larger. Within a week the faith community itself was pelted with rocks and paint and its doors were smashed by these angry people. The poison of hatred and racism will kill God’s love inside a person and its venom can paralyze a person’s ability to love and be loved. Resentment and bitterness against others is ultimately against God. And with the resentment and bitterness comes the snakes. And with their venom comes death.

So now, a thousand years after the story about hatred and poisonous snakes we see a man standing in the darkness talking. And he says, “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” That’s not the story they were used to hearing.

Jesus doesn’t talk about hatred, racism, or other poisons. I guess by this time, the fact that we’ve all been bitten by poisonous snakes is obvious. So Jesus moves to the antidote. “When I am lifted up on that pole-just like when Moses erected the snake in the wilderness-people will recover and experience fullness of life.”

John doesn’t tell us the rest of the story right here. But we know it. When Christ was lifted up on that old cross, God allowed God’s very being to be bitten for us. God took the bites of all the poisonous serpents that slither through our society. All the serpents of hatred, bigotry, racism, sexism, and unforgiveness. He took the hit for us all. So that in the suffering of God there is healing for our hatreds, healing for our self-destructive poisons, healing for our lives.

In the midst of this poison, in the whirl of hatred, healing came to the faith community I just spoke of. CBS picked up the story and our nation, for a brief moment in time, heard about a little congregation and Jewish families who joined together to fight hatred and racism. Donations and money for repairs came from all over America to that little congregation and Jewish neighbors.

In the end, it was love, not hate that won the day. They were able to move from the poison to the remedy: God’s love. For in that split second we saw the form of a figure stretched spread-eagle on a cross, and the message read,

“I love you,”
-God