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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. Okay, so one thing here is clear. When God packs the picnic, complaining about the food may not be such a good idea.

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Beginning this past September, a number of members at the church I now serve took on the challenge of a program entitled Journey Through the Scriptures, a systematic and rigorous approach to reading through the entire Bible in a year. And every once in a while now, I hear people in the hallways of the church talking about this spiritual discipline. They often say that their reading is making them think more deeply about their faith. Sometimes they speak of slogging through the more tedious portions of our holy book.

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It's hard, someone said to me, to stay awake while reading those genealogies in Genesis, and I agreed. And then there are those who, with raised eyebrows, have spoken to me about the unsettling stories that they've come across. Last month, one elder said to me, Scott, Grimm's Fairy Tales has nothing on the Book of Numbers. She's right.

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The story of Moses and the snake on the stick may have locked up first prize in Scripture for sheer scary weirdness. Admittedly, the story starts out in a pretty straightforward way. This chapter from Numbers begins like so many other Hebrew people in the wilderness stories. Its first steps are taken in a hopeful cadence.

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The people have escaped from the slavery of Egypt. They've left their captivity behind. They are free. They are moving through the wilderness, the desert, on the final leg of their journey toward the promised land.

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The future seems full of possibility. But as we all know, that optimism doesn't last. What happened? What happened to all the elation that came with leaving Pharaoh in the dust?

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Well, according to the numbers, that elation is drained away, but sucked out of them by the wind of the desert. The wilderness turns out to be a pretty tough place, a place with tribal enemies, a place that tests loyalties, a place that steadily exhausts the people. There were days without water. There was hardly any food.

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And what meager provisions they were able to scrape up tasted awful. And so the people begin to complain. They complain against Moses. They complain against God.

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We thought you were saving us from Egypt, and instead, you have sentenced us to misery. This Exodus thing is hard, harder than we ever imagined it would be. Our lips are cracked, our stomachs are empty. We detest this place.

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The people grumbled with righteous anger boosting their voices. God's chosen railed against their situation. You and your God, they said to Moses, have brought us out here to die. Now, to be clear, we all know that what makes this story odd is not the fact that the people were complaining.

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The saga of the exodus from Egypt is replete with stories of protest. People complaining about God, murmuring against incompetent leaders, wondering why they ever allowed themselves to be talked into the uncomfortable and dangerous circumstances that they find themselves. In fact, the Bible is full of people, when you think about it, cranky, irritated, downcast, broken-hearted people, eager to stuff heaven's suggestion box with complaints. And the text tells us that God seems to encourage these complaints, or at least it says that God listens.

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listens to the gripes about the hardships of life, about downturns in health, about miserable food, and yes, about incompetent clergy. In fact, God both listens and frequently responds to these grievances. In a very similar scene in the book of Exodus, God says to Moses, I have heard the complaining of the Israelites.

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Say to them, at twilight you shall eat meat, and in the morning you shall have your fill of bread, and then you shall know that I am the Lord your God. More often than not in Scripture, God answers the complaints of the people with compassion. That's why tonight's story is so strange, because instead of the usual, I have heard my children's cries and I will provide for them, God goes, Well, kind of berserk. My wife Amy is an introvert living in a house full of extroverts.

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Her husband is an extrovert, her children are both shaping up to be extroverts, and I'm fairly certain that both of our cats qualify as extroverts. A typical evening in the Black Johnston apartment involves a number of loud, assertive people and animals swirling around each other in the kitchen, and at the center of it all is a source of quiet calm, an island of sanity, my even-keeled spouse. Occasionally, and I do mean occasionally, we get a glimpse of something different.

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Every once in a while, our demands upon her patience and her graciousness reach the tipping point. We've been too brash, too ungrateful, too obnoxious for too long, and at such moments, her eyes blaze with a look that signals, Don't mess with me, and while her volume doesn't increase, we know it is absolutely clear that we have pushed too far. Is that what's going on in this text? Does God reach a tipping point with the complaints of the Hebrew people?

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Has God responded out of loving kindness time after time until finally God can't take it anymore? So instead of a characteristically gracious response, instead of the usual compassionate answer, lightning darts along the divine brow and God sends a passel of snakes to chastity. dies to people. people.

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And not just any old snakes. The Hebrew word that describes the snakes here is seraph. These are seraph snakes. Many English Bibles translate seraph into our English as poisonous.

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And it makes sense. They're poisonous vipers. They're biting people and they're dying. But honestly, poisonous isn't even close to what Numbers has in mind.

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To get the right picture in our heads, we might want to recall another word very much like seraph. I'm thinking here of the cherubim and the seraphim, the words that we use to describe the angelic hosts. Strictly speaking, the word seraph means fiery, winged thing. So yes, the angels were seraphim.

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flaming, flying things from the realm of heaven, divine beings sent by God. Except in this case, instead of dispatching angels, God sends snakes, fiery, winged, mutant snakes with an appetite for human flesh and a bite that brings death. It's a surreal scene And it's not over.

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Horrified at this invasion, the people turn to Moses, Uncle, uncle, we get it. We've gone too far. We've sinned. Please plead with God to take the snakes away.

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And so Moses prays, and God responds, Okay, here's what I want you to do. You go, fashion a flaming flying seraph snake out of bronze and put it on top of a tall pole and put that pole in the middle of the camp so that everyone who is bitten has to look at it if they want to live. It makes for a fascinating picture. The moment when Moses hoists that bronze serpent up into the air has got to be one of the most spectacular scenes in all of Scripture.

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And it is odd. So very odd. I find the whole account disturbing. Not just the flying flaming snakes.

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It's the actions of God in here that are so worrisome. This is, after all, a story that ends with salvation. But don't you find it upsetting to think that God would require people to go through some silly ritual to escape certain doom? I mean, where's the grace?

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They said they were sorry. Why not banish the serpents with a wave of the divine hand? Why did God insist that Moses put a bronze snake on a stick? How can gazing at the very thing that would kill us save us?

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time here at Austin Seminary, one of my favorite classes to teach was entitled Religious Themes in Contemporary Literature, and I know a lot of the students that I've seen in the past two days took that class with me, and my favorite author in that class was Flannery O'Connor. O'Connor was famous for telling stories about moments when God's grace would break into people's lives. Except for O'Connor, grace was not a warm, fluffy thing, a plate full of pancakes served in bed. It was a shock.

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It was a thump on the skull. It was a reorienting moment that would shake the rust and decay out of people's souls in order to set them free. I hope O'Connor knew the story of the flaming snakes. she would have thought that the point of it all was patently clear God needs to kill us at least part of us in order to save us now can that possibly be true is there something inside of each of us that needs to die before we can truly embrace the love of God before we can really be what we were created to be

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One of the best books that I've read in the last couple of years is entitled Blood Doesn't Sign My Name. It's an account of the race riots that occurred in Oxford, North Carolina in 1970. The author's father, the Reverend Vernon Tyson, was the Methodist minister in Oxford at that time. One of the stories in this book tells about how, in 1964, Reverend Tyson, a white man, invited Samuel Proctor, the renowned African-American minister and president of North Carolina A&T College, to preach at his church.

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Now, no black clergy person had ever preached in that all-white church before. When news of the invitation spread, Tyson started receiving threats. One caller with a gruff voice even threatened to blow up his house with his wife and three children inside. Things got pretty scary.

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And so the church's administrative board called an emergency meeting on the eve of Proctor's visit. At that meeting, church member after church member demanded that Tyson withdraw his invitation to Proctor. It was a tense and nasty scene. And then...

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Amy Womble, an elementary school teacher who had taught most of those men and women their ABCs, stood up. She looked around the room and said, I've been reading about this case up near Chapel Hill, where a teenage boy went around a curve too fast and was killed in a car crash. He was down there by the side of the road, and they were waiting for an ambulance to come and pick him up and take him to the funeral home. There wasn't any sign of life.

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But then an airman stopped who was home on furlough. He saw the boy and got down and opened his mouth, and he saw that the man's tongue was stuck back in his throat, and he ran his finger back there and hooked the tongue and pulled it out, and then he gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and by the time the ambulance arrived, the man was sitting up, revived. They had a big dinner up there in Chapel Hill for this airman celebrating his saving of the boy's life. Now, what I haven't told you, Miss Amy Womble said, was that the boy who was saved was a white boy and that the airman was a black man.

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She said, Now, which one of you fathers out there who's been standing up here would go and say to that airman, Don't you dare run your black fingers down my white boy's throat. Don't you put your mouth on my boy's mouth. After that, the church voted 25 to 14 to stand with Tyson, and Proctor's visit came off without a hitch.

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Now, later that evening, one of the people most opposed to the visit of Dr. Proctor, a man by the name of Grayson Bryan, came by the parsonage. Brian was a bachelor who worked in the local mill. He was a tough guy with a gruff voice, but he could not stop crying.

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He said, I want to tell you, preacher, something happened to me here tonight. When Miss Amy was talking, something happened to me that has never happened before. And he said, a love came up in my heart. I want to tell you, I love you.

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I love Dr. Proctor. I love everybody. The next day, the people in town accused Tyson, the Methodist minister, of serving wine at his emergency administrative meeting.

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What else could explain all the people who left the Methodist church crying and professing love for their neighbor? What they didn't know, what they couldn't have imagined, was that this strange behavior came not from alcohol, but from watching a local school teacher plant a snake on a stick in the middle of their camp. Aren't there parts of us that need to die before we can be saved?

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Aren't there things in each of us, hatreds, prejudices, bitterness, that we need to release before we can embrace a bold love of God and neighbor? Maybe we should all turn our eyes to the serpent raised up by Moses in the wilderness. Maybe there we will see not a berserk deity, but God's fierce grace, a grace that is fiery in character and shocking in appearance. Maybe given our hard, hard hearts, that is our only hope for salvation, a snake on a stick.

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Hear now this reading from the Gospel of John the third chapter beginning with the 14th verse and 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 this is the word of the Lord be to God