Martin Rinkert was called as a pastor in the small town of Eilenberg, Germany in 1618, just as the Thirty Years’ War was beginning. Without going into details about the Thirty Years’ War, it’s probably enough to know that during those thirty years the population of Germany fell from 16 million to 6 million. Pastor Martin’s little town happened to be a walled city, which meant that it became a crowded refuge for all manner of people running away from the bloody chaos of that time. Even while Pastor Martin struggled to provide for his own family, his household took in a constant stream of refugees and victims. To the horrors of war were added the horrors of famine and disease. It was said in those times that people would fight in the streets over a dead cat or a crow, so scarce food had become. In 1637 there was a terrible plague. Pastor Martin was the only pastor in Eilenberg not to die of the plague that year, and so he carried the burden for the entire town. He conducted over 4,000 funerals that year, as many as fifty in a single day, including one day the funeral for his wife.
We probably wouldn’t know Pastor Martin’s story today, if it weren’t for the fact that during the suffering of that dark time he wrote a hymn still sung today that you may know. The first verse goes like this:
Now thank we all our God,
with heart and hands and voices,
Who wondrous things has done,
in Whom this world rejoices;
Who from our mothers’ arms
has blessed us on our way
With countless gifts of love,
and still is ours today.
I wonder how many of us would find it in our hearts to write a hymn like that after what Pastor Martin had been through. After such great loss and sorrow—now thank we all our God! After such deep suffering and grief all around for years on end, with no prospect of relief, to look around you and sing from your heart: God has blessed us on our way with countless gifts of love, and still is ours today.
I hope I could do that, but if I’m honest with you, I don’t know if I could. The suffering and deprivation of our own time of plague and violence has left many people feeling angry, whether angry at God or angry at one another. In itself and up to a point, that isn’t wrong. The psalms are full of anger at God, and as we saw last Sunday even Jesus got angry sometimes.
But it seems like the anger in the people of Israel’s hearts, during the suffering and deprivation they went through for forty years in the wilderness, had soured into something worse than anger. Their hearts had turned bitter, full of impatience, ingratitude, and unfair complaints against God and Moses. As the King James has it, the people had taken to murmuring. Constantly murmuring, complaint after complaint, always it was something.
If we’d read the whole story straight through from the day that God set his people free from bondage to Pharoah in Egypt, we would know by now that this had become a pattern. Always murmuring, complaining. Moses, why did God bring us out here to starve? Why did God bring us out here to die of thirst? It was better back when we had the fleshpots of Egypt. Sure, we were slaves, but at least we had something to eat. Ok, God said, I’ll give you food and water, I didn’t bring you out of Egypt to die in the desert. God literally rained down food from heaven, manna and wild birds, and in a land where there was no water he made water stream out from a dry rock.
So by this point in the story, the Israelites know full well that God didn’t lead them into the desert to starve to death. He’d been providing for their every need. If you look again at what they say in their complaint against God and Moses, you can see that they actually know this. “There is no food and no water,” they say—“and… we detest this miserable food.” In the very same breath that they said they had no food, they admitted to God that they actually did have food, but they just didn’t like it. They wanted a more varied menu of miraculous providential provision.
It’s easy to see from our vantage point how impatient and unreasonable the Israelites were being, but I wonder if you and I are more like Israelites in the wilderness than we might like to admit. Our one year in the wilderness has been far less than forty, but we may well be getting weary and impatient. Our years of political struggle have been far less bloody than the horror of the Thirty Years’ War, but we may well be letting the rancor, blame, division and violence all around seep into our hearts too. Have we ever let ourselves enter into a spirit of complaint? Of bitterness? Of ingratitude for the many blessings God has given us? Of impatience with how long God has let us dwell out here in the wilderness?
What happens next to the Israelites is one of the strangest stories in the Bible, but one that’s worth dwelling with for a while as a type or image of the cross of Christ, as we heard Jesus himself tell us in John’s Gospel. “Then,” we’re told, “the Lord sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died.” It’s only this that finally wakes them up and changes their hearts. “We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you,” the Israelites tell Moses: “pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.”
What a strange story! Why on earth did God send poisonous snakes? I have to confess, I do not very much like snakes, and the notion of God sending them my way is not one that I like very much. What’s going on here?
I think we have to put this story in the context of what we’ve looking at these past few weeks: at how it’s very often only the wilderness times of our lives, the dark valley times of suffering and upheaval, that finally shake us up out of our slumber, wake us up to the life that really is life, and show us that what we’ve been living for isn’t worth it. Again and again in the Bible, this is a pattern we see. God gives us the chance to learn the easy way or the hard way, but all too often we’re stubborn enough that only the hard way will reach us.
Psalm 78 puts it this way, as part of a long poetic retelling of the wilderness wanderings of the Israelites: “He rained down manna upon them to eat and gave them grain from heaven. So mortals ate the bread of angels; he provided for them food enough… they ate and were well filled, for he gave them what they craved. But they did not stop their craving, though the food was still in their mouths. So God’s anger mounted against them; he slew their strongest men and laid low the youth of Israel. Whenever he slew him, they would seek him, and repent, and diligently search for God.”
Whenever he slew them, they would seek him! Hard as this saying is, it seems that this is part of why God’s providence, his loving care for us through all the changes and chances of this life, allows us to live in a world in which sin has gotten everything out of joint. Adam and Eve didn’t have to worry about poisonous snakes in the garden of Eden! Nor did they have to worry about famine, disease, or war. Only after they believed the lies of the serpent and sought to be like God were they cast out east of Eden into the world we live in now, a world red in tooth and claw in the valley of the shadow of death.
Why did God cast Adam and Eve out of Eden, into a fallen world full of evils like war, famine, and plague? Why does God allow plague and pestilence, death and disease? It’s important to remember that very often, disease and disability are things that just happen to people, not because their own sin had anything to do with it. “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” the disciples asked Jesus. Jesus replied, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.”
In a general and deeper sense, however, disease and death are part of the curse of the Fall, part of what it means to live in a world within which things aren’t the way they’re supposed to be. C. S. Lewis thought that sin had you might say jammed up the works of creation itself, so that nothing anymore works down here quite the way the good Creator had intended. St. Paul says clearly that death is the last enemy to be defeated.
Death and disease, including snake-bites that can kill you, were not part of God’s good design. But God nevertheless uses them in his providence to chasten us for our sin, to make us aware that every breath we have comes from God, to turn us back to complete dependence on Him. Remember the tower of Babel? People had gotten so confident in their own strength that they decided to build a tower that reached all the way to heaven. That is, they thought they could build a stairway to heaven by their own strength and climb it themselves. But we can’t do that. You and I aren’t gods. When God confused their language and scattered them to the four winds, it was actually a mercy. No longer could they imagine that they could build a tower to heaven and climb up by their own strength. No, if they were to ascend to heaven it would have to be by God descending to where we are, and lifting us up to where he is.
We can only do that, brothers and sisters, when we acknowledge our complete dependence on him. We can only do that when we repent of our sins, whatever they may be, and entrust ourselves completely to God’s mercy. We can only do that when we lay down our towers and our sins and our defenses and trust ourselves utterly to God, with every breath that God gives to us.
What better way to bring us to this place than by sickness and the awareness of death? What better way to teach us that we can’t build our own towers to heaven, that all flesh is grass, that we are fragile and frail, that every moment of our lives are a gift from God? Hear me, it isn’t that disease and death and snake-bites are good in themselves. It’s rather that God uses them to wake us up to the death that matters even more—spiritual death, the death of sin, the death of separation from God. It would seem that God allows this world to be a place where life is perched precariously over the valley of the shadow of death, in part because only if it is will we turn away from the kinds of lives that lead us only to a living death, trapped in the loneliness of lives built only for ourselves, and turn instead to lives full of love for God and neighbor that last forever, going ever onward and upward into the joy of life in the kingdom of God.
Back to our story from Numbers: after the Israelites repent and turn to the Lord for deliverance, then the Lord said to Moses, “Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.” And whenever someone was bitten by a snake after that, they looked up to the snake lifted up on the pole, and were saved.
Brothers and sisters, as strange as this story may sound, it’s a story for us. It’s a story for us because whether we know it or not, all of us are snake-bit. We’re bitten by the sins of ingratitude, impatience, a spirit of complaint, pride, self-focus, envy, bitterness, or whatever it is that’s sunk its fangs into you. That’s what’s keeping us from the promised land. That’s what’s keeping us wandering around out here in the wilderness, far from home. If the snake bites are what it takes to get us to lift up our eyes and our hearts and see up there on the pole an image of what our lives have become, well then, better a snake bite than dying out here in the wilderness. When we look, we see that it’s actually Jesus lifted up, taking on himself everything that that lying serpent in the garden has wrapped around our hearts and all of the venom the serpent has pumped into our veins. Jesus took all of that onto himself, so that we wouldn’t die out here in the wilderness. He died out here instead, snake-bit by the venomous brood of vipers we’ve become. But when we look up onto the cross, what we see there isn’t just an image of what we’ve done, but much more deeply, it’s an image of what God did. The love and mercy in the heart of Christ is the antivenom strong enough to heal all the damage that all of us vipers and the great serpent have done. The cross is an image now of love immeasurable and life everlasting. Now thank we all our God, lift up your hearts, look on him, and live. Amen.
The Rev. Dr. Jordan Hylden is associate rector at the Episcopal Church of the Ascension, Lafayette, Louisiana, where he also serves as a chaplain at Ascension Episcopal School.
The Rev. Jordan Hylden, ThD is Associate Rector for Christian Education at St. Martin's, Houston. Previously, he served churches in Louisiana, South Carolina, and Dallas, and as Canon Theologian for the diocese of Dallas. He has served as a General Convention deputy and on TEC's Task Force for Communion Across Difference. His doctoral work focused on democracy and authority in Catholic social thought. He and his wife, the Rev. Emily Hylden, make their home in Houston with their three boys Charles, Donnie, and Jacob.
