MURMURING MAY BE HARMFUL TO YOUR HEALTH March 18, 2012, The Fourth Sunday in Lent Numbers 21:4-9 Douglas T. King, The Brick Presbyterian Church in the City of New York Sometimes, at the completion of the scripture reading in worship that is particularly challenging to our sensibilities as we respond to the reader s announcement, The Word of the Lord with Thanks be to God it comes out more like a question. Thanks be to God? Today is one of those Sundays. I cannot argue with you, if you said, Thanks be to God with some serious questioning in your tone. Now let me get this straight, you might be thinking. God sends poisonous serpents to bite and kill God s people for nothing more than a little complaining about their conditions in the wilderness. And can you really blame them? The Israelites are not quite on a pleasant camping trip as they are fighting for their survival in the harsh extremes of weather and terrain. On a humid day in July I can be found complaining about the weather as I make my commute across Park Avenue to go to work. I am not sure where exactly to find the good news in this story of God s short fuse and our own tendency to complain. I guess there is some comfort in the fact that Moses intervenes on the people s behalf and God allows him to fashion a poisonous serpent made of bronze that, when being gazed upon, will save people s lives. Although to our modern ears, this sounds more like two-bit hocus pocus than the way God Almighty chooses to work in the world. This story is arcane, distasteful and even primal in the fears it brings back of a stereotypical vengeful God of the Old Testament. And snakes no less! Of all the creatures that cover the earth, none is more despised than the snake. Perhaps our loathing of this creature originates from that story in the Garden of Eden and our - 1 -
first encounter with the serpent. Barbara Brown Taylor writes that A recent Harris poll on What are we afraid of discovered that 36 percent of all adults in the United States list snakes as their number one fear. Ophidiophobia is the clinical word for this fear, which affects 49 percent of women and 22 percent of men. (Taylor, p. 101) Recently Four South, the classroom right next door to the suite of ministers offices, has adopted a class pet, a big snake named Dude. Let s just say the arrival of Dude the snake into the building was met with much more animated conversation than might have occurred if Dude had been a hamster. I am not very afraid of snakes but I will tell you that if I am out for a hike in the woods and I am complaining about the mosquitoes and a snake comes slithering across my path, suddenly I am not too worried about the mosquitoes any more. So what is the magic bullet to help us understand this text? At what angle do we consider it, what prism do we view it through that will allow us to continue to understand as the loving God we have come to know and trust? Well it beats me, and I am not alone. Biblical scholars quite often disagree, but on this text there is consensus: It is disturbing. There is simply no way around it. And yet despite its difficulties I still believe there is something to be learned from this text of the snakes. From a literary point of view, this text is the last in a long line of murmuring stories ; stories that describe the tendency of the people to murmur, or complain against God. Throughout the story of the exodus the people wander through the desert and while they wander, they complain. It s too hot, they are thirsty, hungry, sick, tired. The majority of the people s complaints against God are directed to Moses since he is the leader of the people. However in our text for this morning, the people complain directly to God as well and God s answer is swift and catastrophic. God becomes the exasperated mother on a 16-hour road trip to Disneyworld. The kids are complaining in the back seat: Are we there yet? I m hungry, I m thirsty, I have to go to the bathroom, When will we be there?!?! Pulling off to the side of the road, she turns around and says: One more complaint and I will turn this car around and go home. - 2 -
Rarely do parents follow through with such threats, but when it comes to the Hebrews and their whining in the desert, God sticks to God s word. Except in this case it is not a cancelled vacation but an attack upon God s very children. As much as this text makes us queasy because of the violent God it depicts, I think what makes us more uneasy is the fact that we all know we are more than capable of murmuring to God. Without much effort I can work up a fairly robust set of complaints I would like God to rectify if it would not be too much trouble. We are blessed with employment, but grumble about the demands it puts upon us. We are blessed with loved ones but grouse about the ways they annoy us on a daily basis. What I find particularly interesting about the Hebrews murmurs to God, something that can also be true of our own complaints, is that they aren t really complaining of lack, but rather that what they have been given is not up to their standards. Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest the miserable food. It reminds me of the ancient borscht belt joke with which Woody Allen opens the movie Annie Hall, There s an old joke - um two elderly women are at a Catskill mountains resort, and one of em says, Boy, the food at this place is really terrible. The other one says, Yeah, I know; and such small portions. We are difficult to please, aren t we? A sentence later, the Hebrews complaint of no food at all, is shifted to admitting that, yes, there is food but it is not to their liking. The food in question that they find so detestable is the manna God has miraculously provided to them to sustain them in the midst of the wilderness. Talk about being ungrateful. I hear this text and I think about how many blessings in my life, how many gifts I have received from God I have murmured over because they were not quite exactly meeting my personal preferences. How many times I felt that I was entitled to - 3 -
more than I had. How many times I have gone to God in prayer to say why not more, why not better, and why not right now? In our consumer culture we have the gift of unlimited choice, an entire economy committed to catering to our most minute personal preferences. What color ipad cover would you like? Green or blue? Hard or soft cover? Would you like something with a design? We have sixty of those to choose from. The gift of unlimited choice becomes dangerous. Suddenly, it is seducing us, whispering in our ear like that first snake murmured to Eve: it could be a little better. You have everything you could ever need right at your fingertips, except this. How quickly we can fall into believing that our entire lives should be catered to by everyone and everything that surrounds us. We begin to expect our spouses to be perfectly matched to all of our personal preferences, the work we do to be personally fulfilling every day, and our friends to always meet our every expectation. And if they do not, we wonder if we can call customer service to get an exchange. If we could only get something that will provide us with a little more satisfaction. Oftentimes, God becomes the operator on the other end of that help-line and our prayers become little more than a laundry list of complaints. We whine and we whine about what is not quite right or as we hoped it would be in our lives. It can become a droning drumbeat of minor dissatisfactions that color our lives every day and shape our relationship with the divine in significant ways. God begins to become nothing more than a means to an end for us. Now I do not think we run the risk of God turning Dude the snake upstairs into a poisonous serpent who is let loose among us to strike us dead for all of our complaining. But I do think we are deadening ourselves with it all. The constant murmur of complaints under our breath sucks all the air out of our gratitude toward God and our enjoyment of life. No longer can we find the energy to be thankful for all that we do have, the multitude of blessings we have received. The murmurs numb us to the many joys that life does offer us each day. The complaints transform our relationship with God from one characterized by thanksgiving to a relationship characterized by the bitterness of unmet expectations. - 4 -
Instead of being grateful to have a place to live, we murmur about how much better our lives would be if we just had that fourth bedroom. Instead of being grateful for having a job, we murmur about that promotion we should have gotten. Instead of being grateful we have healthy children going to good schools, we murmur that they are not in our first choice of schools. Murmuring is insidious. It can seep into every last nook and cranny of our lives, leaving us judging all that surrounds us and believing we are entitled to more. Sure this manna is a miracle keeping us fed and alive in the wilderness but don t we deserve better? We deserve a bigger miracle God. Maybe we even deserve a bigger and better God than you. Murmuring destroys our ability to enjoy our lives and to be in right relationship with our God. I am always struck by how a scare will put things into perspective for many of us. When we learn that the suspicious smudge on our x-ray is not dangerous we are suddenly grateful for all we have. For a few days or weeks, every moment surrounded by our loved ones is more precious, the air we breathe is a little sweeter. We are grateful for every single day of good health. We recognize the miracle of our very existence. And then those feelings can begin to wane and we find ourselves murmuring about who left the cap off of the toothpaste and complaining to God about how many more blessings we believe we deserve. We murmur to God that maybe we deserve a little bigger miracle than the one we have already received. Now, I am not suggesting that God sent a bunch of poisonous snakes to scare the Israelites into being more grateful for the blessings and miracles they had received. I cannot explain or justify this terrifying passage in any way. But I do think it can serve to remind us of how just how dangerous our murmured complaints can be to us. The days in the season of Lent are beginning to dwindle. But it is not too late to try on a new spiritual discipline in the time we have left. Let us set aside the constant murmuring hum of personal complaints each of us carries. And when they do creep into our conversations both aloud and within our heads, let us be - 5 -
reminded of how deadening they can be to the gift of gratitude, and our relationship with the divine. Thanks be to God. Amen. Feasting on the Word, Year B, Volume 2, Barbara Brown Taylor. Westminster John Knox Press. 2008. pg 99-103 - 6 -