A Reflection for IV Lent All Saints’, Southern Shores, NC March 11,
2018 Thomas E. Wilson, Rector
Snake Eyes
Today we have a couple stories with snake imagery,
and as I keep telling you, the Bible is not interested in facts but in a deeper
truth and uses symbols to tell stories. Let’s take a look at snakes - and I can
see that many of you don’t want to really have a look at snakes. Is it because they
are reptiles and have cold blood? Is it because they are possible disrupters to
business as usual? Is it because they have scales rather than skin? It is
because they are a symbol of change with the shedding of their skins and we
rather like not having change? Is it because they swallow things whole and we
are afraid of being of being reabsorbed into something greater than ourselves?
Is it because they are close to the ground and we walk upright, away from the
ground of our being? Is it because they have a bad image in the Bible tempting
us to sin? Or is it just irrational? Think of the terms we use: “real snake in
the grass, slimy, cold-blooded, slither, forked tongue.”
When my daughter was a teenager, she had a snake
which I could never warm up to, but I would have to feed Sammy the Snake when
she went off to a Christian mission trip down in Panama or an Episcopal Youth
Convention in Wyoming. I think I probably told you the story about when we were
trying to sell the house and Sammy got out and found his way upstairs to the
bathroom light fixture to get warm. Luckily when she went off to college, Sammy
found a new home.
Snakes were part of the healing of people
who would come to the Temples of the God of Healing, Asclepius, where they
would sleep and face their dreams while non-venomous snakes slithered on the
floor. Snakes also had a reputation as tempters to brokenness as in the story
of the Garden of Eden where the snake tempts Eve to be like God and know good
and evil. Lamia was a Greek legend about a snake-like monster who tempted men
to forget themselves.
Keats wrote a Poem, Lamia, about a man who was magically enchanted by a beautiful snake
who took the form of a woman. He wrote it in his love letters to Fanny Brawne
whom he would praise for her beauty, but he lived in fear of losing his freedom
as a poet. He would die before they were married. She is in his sonnet “Bright Star would I were as steadfast as
thou art”. The last two lines of the
sonnet are:
Still, still to hear her
tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to
death.
In symbolic language the snake is often a symbol of
the wisdom of the unconscious because it is a creature who lives underground
away from sight. In the story from Numbers for today, the Hebrew children are
grumbling, blaming Moses for taking them off the easy road into the wilderness.
They make Moses the scapegoat for all their frustration, saying that if it
wasn’t for him, they would have a good life. They had been in Egypt in
captivity, and while they said they wanted to be free, freedom had a lot of
problems. They wanted freedom without responsibilities, sort of like a teenager
who wants to blame their parents for all of their problems. Listen to one of
their comments: “For there is no food and no water, and we detest this
miserable food.”
So which is it? Is there no food or is it that they
are tired of the gift of the manna which gets them through one day at a time in
the wilderness and they want to have more than they need? They are getting
tired of depending on God and want to be in charge as their own little Gods.
The unconscious thought that keeps coming up time
and time again for them is that they want to take short cuts to the Promised Land
or avoid it all together: “Why do we
have to trust this God of Moses? Can’t we just build a golden calf to worship?
Can’t we just go back to Egypt and maybe work out a better arrangement with our
slave owners?”
The pattern is like the symbol of a snake biting its
own tail, in a constant circle, trapped over and over again to repeat the same
behavior. They are denying that this is happening because they will not stop
complaining long enough to pay attention to their unconscious. But the snake of
the unconscious desire to return to the safety of a destructive past is not
content to just keep them from growing in their faith, but in this story,
snakes will bite them outwardly as well. They complain that the outward and
physical snakes are their problem rather than going deeper to find the real
snake.
Moses hears a solution from God to make a symbol of
the snake and lift it up so that the people face the deeper snake and come to
grips with the problem that is not out
there, but in here, inside each
one of them. Only when we honestly face ourselves are we able to make the
changes necessary for real change. The fact that the journey of the Exodus is
to take forty years is a reminder that facing the snakes inside is a lifelong
commitment to bring unconscious compulsive behavior to light so we can deal
with it.
John’s Gospel passage for today has Jesus revisit the symbol of the snake
in the wilderness when 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. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so
that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”
Eternal life is not that you will (future tense) live forever, but that
we are (present tense) living in the Eternal, participating in God knowing us
intimately and seeing us as God’s children, and sharing that vision as God’s
beloved. To be God’s beloved brings us Freedom and it carries responsibilities
to grow fully into the image of God’s love.
Jesus is saying he came so that we would have to face who we are. He
would be lifted up as a scapegoat on the cross so that we might see the
repetitive, cold- blooded, compulsive pattern of our lives when we try to be
our own little Gods. He is lifted up so that we might see ourselves trapped in
a circle of violence which we love, which we say with our lips that we do not
want, but which we keep making sure that continues because it take too much
energy and commitment to change. But when we see who we are, both sides of who
we are, then this is the beginning of learning how to receive forgiveness and
how to give it to others and to ourselves in the light of God’s love. No longer
will we unconsciously project all of the things that we don’t want to face -
our shadows - onto another person, but we will be able to face our unconscious,
our shadows, our snakes, our cold-blooded grounding and follow the Risen Christ
into a full life.
The
writer of the Ephesians lesson has traditionally been
seen as Paul or one of his disciples writing in Paul’s name. You remember the
story of Paul who was going to Damascus because he had projected all of his
problems on the Christians. And while on the road he is thrown off his high
horse and is forced to come face to face with his own blindness in truly seeing
God and himself. When he was healed, scripture says, that it was like scales
that fell from his eyes so he could see anew. No longer would have to see life
through the scales of snake eyes, but with the eyes of the Risen Christ. The
passage for today underscores the message:
“All of us once lived
among them in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of flesh and
senses, and we were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else. But God,
who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we
were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.”
Snake Eyes
S-ay; don’t like that s-nake in the
grass
the way he pass-es judgment so
eas-ily
grabbing more than his s-hare
greedily,
having fantas-ies s-educing every
lass.
Why is he with me every breath
taken,
always in my thoughts, at me
his-sing
dares, taunting my danger of
miss-ing
and every move I make seem mistaken?
I come to see that man is a true
mirror
of all those things I wish not to
claim,
but
repudiate, absolve myself’s blame
and
move to be seen as to Saint nearer.
But
I am who I am as is the snake man
together
we're both loved in God’s plan.
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