Sunday, September 14, 2025
First Congregational Church of Cheshire
© the Rev. Dr. James Campbell
Numbers 21:4-9
From Mount Hor they set out by the way to the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom, but the people became discouraged on the way. The people spoke against God and against Moses, “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 this miserable food. ”Then the Lord sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died. The people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed for the people. And 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.” So Moses made a serpent of bronze and put it upon a pole, and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.
I once read a story in the New York Times about a woman on the Upper West Side of Manhattan who kept finding snake skins in her studio apartment. But the odd thing was, she did not own a snake. And the animal control people, despite several valiant attempts, could never find a snake. In the end, she was forced to simply live with the mystery of it all, largely because she had a cheap, rent-stabilized apartment in a good neighborhood.
I once had one of those apartments too. But I could not have lived with snake skins, no matter how cheap my rent was. Because I have a fear of snakes. I wish I didn’t, but I do. It goes way back and seems somehow visceral. And so, I find today’s Scripture lesson to be especially horrifying.
Last week we heard about the children of Israel at the very end of their forty years of wilderness wanderings. But today’s story is from the very beginning of those wilderness wanderings, when life in the desert was new and daily challenges abounded.
And you know how people are when times get tough. They are impatient and demanding and full of expectations that someone, somewhere ought to be able to fix it all. And so, these people began to grumble against Moses, saying: “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt just to die here in the desert? For there is no food and no water... and we are hungry and thirsty.”
Now, frankly, that seems like a legitimate complaint to me. But according to this story, their impatience made God angry. And so, as punishment, God sent a plague of poisonous snakes to slither into their midst, into their beds, under their pots and pans. And these vipers bit the people. And the venom was strong. And folks died. And terror reigned.
Of course, these serpents made them sorry for what they said. And they apologized to Moses and asked him to pray for them, that the Lord would relent and save them from this terror. And Moses did.
And in response, God told Moses to fashion a bronze snake - an image of their fear - and to put it on a pole. Then God told Moses that he should tell the people that whenever they were bitten, they should look up at this bronze serpent and, in the looking, they would be healed.
Now I would be content to just ignore this snake tale. But Jesus himself makes a reference to it in the third chapter of John’s Gospel. Just before saying: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son…”, Jesus said: “For just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up.” That was, of course, a reference to the way Jesus would be executed on a Roman cross.
So, I guess we have to take this story seriously. And if we do, then that brings us to a most uncomfortable question: what was God’s part in all of this? I mean, seriously, what do you make of a God who supposedly sent poisonous snakes to bite people as punishment? Is God’s anger and vengeance the main takeaway from the tale? Or is there another more important lesson to learn here?
You might be interested to know that most biblical scholars believe that this encounter with the snakes actually happened. But they discard the notion that God sent the snakes. Perhaps, they say, the people had inadvertently disrupted a natural path for the snakes; or blocked their food or water source. But however the snakes got there, the point is that the human suffering was real. And so, the people, trying to understand why such an awful thing had happened to them, attempted to put it into the context of their theology.
And that’s what we still do. We humans have a psychological need to frame our suffering within a context that we can understand. And if we are people of faith, then we ask: what did God have to do with this?
Unfortunately, we very often draw the same conclusions that the Children of Israel did. We say that God is punishing us or trying to teach is a lesson. But this view of God as One who causes human suffering has made ardent atheists out of some of the nicest people. They just can’t believe in such a cruel and capricious and vindictive God. And frankly, neither can I.
But there is another faithful way to look at this story. And that is to begin with the assumption that suffering is just part of what it means to be human. We suffer. And God comes into the picture in the belief that even suffering can be redeemed; that something good can come from something bad. Isn’t that, after all, the story of Easter? Jesus was lifted up on a cross. The suffering was real. The death of Jesus was real. But it was not the end of the story.
Which brings me back to that bronze snake – the very symbol of their suffering. Why did God want Moses to make it to begin with? Could it be that our redemption begins, not by ignoring our pain or avoiding the questions our suffering provokes, but by daring to look at it; to really look at it so that we can find another way forward?
In 1980, a California woman named Gayle received a phone call telling her that her 19-year-old daughter, Catherine, had been brutally murdered. And her world fell apart. Not only was Gayle deeply grieved and angered by her daughter’s senseless murder, but she said she felt no comfort from her family. She needed to protect her fragile, elderly mother from the intensity of her grief. And her husband, dealing with the pain the only way he could, just didn’t want to talk about it.
And so, Gayle entered an eight-year period of darkness and a passionate lust for revenge. But during this time, Gayle also started to take her mother to church. And in the church library, there was a book about a Holocaust survivor who had found the strength to forgive the guards who killed every member of his family. And when she read that, she said a seed was planted in her heart. And eventually, she began to wonder: if this man could forgive, maybe I can too. Maybe. But months went by, and she did nothing.
One day, while driving home from church, she said that she heard a voice tell her: You must forgive him and you must let him know that you do. In other words, Gayle needed to take a good, long look at the source of her pain, in order to make room for redemption.
And thus began a series of letters and finally visits, during which Gayle and the murderer, a man named Douglas Mickey, began a road to reconciliation and finally friendship. But none of that would have been possible unless Gayle dared to really see the object of her pain, and then to allow the light in.
This week, we were reminded again of the senseless gun violence that plagues our land like venomous serpents. On the same day that Mr. Kirk was murdered, three America school children were also shot. And to date in 2025, there have been 357 victims of mass shootings in America. And all of our talk of thoughts and prayers has not gotten rid of the snakes. The only thing that will is a long, hard, unvarnished look at the very thing that terrifies us. And I wonder what might happen if we, as a nation, refused to look away from this horror until we, together, found a way through the wilderness?
Life is painful. It just is. And I am not here to tell you what you need to do with your pain. That’s between you and God. But I am here to tell you that pain is not the ultimate point. Redemption is. We just have to look long enough to really see.
First Congregational Church of Cheshire
© the Rev. Dr. James Campbell
Numbers 21:4-9
From Mount Hor they set out by the way to the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom, but the people became discouraged on the way. The people spoke against God and against Moses, “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 this miserable food. ”Then the Lord sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died. The people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed for the people. And 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.” So Moses made a serpent of bronze and put it upon a pole, and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.
I once read a story in the New York Times about a woman on the Upper West Side of Manhattan who kept finding snake skins in her studio apartment. But the odd thing was, she did not own a snake. And the animal control people, despite several valiant attempts, could never find a snake. In the end, she was forced to simply live with the mystery of it all, largely because she had a cheap, rent-stabilized apartment in a good neighborhood.
I once had one of those apartments too. But I could not have lived with snake skins, no matter how cheap my rent was. Because I have a fear of snakes. I wish I didn’t, but I do. It goes way back and seems somehow visceral. And so, I find today’s Scripture lesson to be especially horrifying.
Last week we heard about the children of Israel at the very end of their forty years of wilderness wanderings. But today’s story is from the very beginning of those wilderness wanderings, when life in the desert was new and daily challenges abounded.
And you know how people are when times get tough. They are impatient and demanding and full of expectations that someone, somewhere ought to be able to fix it all. And so, these people began to grumble against Moses, saying: “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt just to die here in the desert? For there is no food and no water... and we are hungry and thirsty.”
Now, frankly, that seems like a legitimate complaint to me. But according to this story, their impatience made God angry. And so, as punishment, God sent a plague of poisonous snakes to slither into their midst, into their beds, under their pots and pans. And these vipers bit the people. And the venom was strong. And folks died. And terror reigned.
Of course, these serpents made them sorry for what they said. And they apologized to Moses and asked him to pray for them, that the Lord would relent and save them from this terror. And Moses did.
And in response, God told Moses to fashion a bronze snake - an image of their fear - and to put it on a pole. Then God told Moses that he should tell the people that whenever they were bitten, they should look up at this bronze serpent and, in the looking, they would be healed.
Now I would be content to just ignore this snake tale. But Jesus himself makes a reference to it in the third chapter of John’s Gospel. Just before saying: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son…”, Jesus said: “For just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up.” That was, of course, a reference to the way Jesus would be executed on a Roman cross.
So, I guess we have to take this story seriously. And if we do, then that brings us to a most uncomfortable question: what was God’s part in all of this? I mean, seriously, what do you make of a God who supposedly sent poisonous snakes to bite people as punishment? Is God’s anger and vengeance the main takeaway from the tale? Or is there another more important lesson to learn here?
You might be interested to know that most biblical scholars believe that this encounter with the snakes actually happened. But they discard the notion that God sent the snakes. Perhaps, they say, the people had inadvertently disrupted a natural path for the snakes; or blocked their food or water source. But however the snakes got there, the point is that the human suffering was real. And so, the people, trying to understand why such an awful thing had happened to them, attempted to put it into the context of their theology.
And that’s what we still do. We humans have a psychological need to frame our suffering within a context that we can understand. And if we are people of faith, then we ask: what did God have to do with this?
Unfortunately, we very often draw the same conclusions that the Children of Israel did. We say that God is punishing us or trying to teach is a lesson. But this view of God as One who causes human suffering has made ardent atheists out of some of the nicest people. They just can’t believe in such a cruel and capricious and vindictive God. And frankly, neither can I.
But there is another faithful way to look at this story. And that is to begin with the assumption that suffering is just part of what it means to be human. We suffer. And God comes into the picture in the belief that even suffering can be redeemed; that something good can come from something bad. Isn’t that, after all, the story of Easter? Jesus was lifted up on a cross. The suffering was real. The death of Jesus was real. But it was not the end of the story.
Which brings me back to that bronze snake – the very symbol of their suffering. Why did God want Moses to make it to begin with? Could it be that our redemption begins, not by ignoring our pain or avoiding the questions our suffering provokes, but by daring to look at it; to really look at it so that we can find another way forward?
In 1980, a California woman named Gayle received a phone call telling her that her 19-year-old daughter, Catherine, had been brutally murdered. And her world fell apart. Not only was Gayle deeply grieved and angered by her daughter’s senseless murder, but she said she felt no comfort from her family. She needed to protect her fragile, elderly mother from the intensity of her grief. And her husband, dealing with the pain the only way he could, just didn’t want to talk about it.
And so, Gayle entered an eight-year period of darkness and a passionate lust for revenge. But during this time, Gayle also started to take her mother to church. And in the church library, there was a book about a Holocaust survivor who had found the strength to forgive the guards who killed every member of his family. And when she read that, she said a seed was planted in her heart. And eventually, she began to wonder: if this man could forgive, maybe I can too. Maybe. But months went by, and she did nothing.
One day, while driving home from church, she said that she heard a voice tell her: You must forgive him and you must let him know that you do. In other words, Gayle needed to take a good, long look at the source of her pain, in order to make room for redemption.
And thus began a series of letters and finally visits, during which Gayle and the murderer, a man named Douglas Mickey, began a road to reconciliation and finally friendship. But none of that would have been possible unless Gayle dared to really see the object of her pain, and then to allow the light in.
This week, we were reminded again of the senseless gun violence that plagues our land like venomous serpents. On the same day that Mr. Kirk was murdered, three America school children were also shot. And to date in 2025, there have been 357 victims of mass shootings in America. And all of our talk of thoughts and prayers has not gotten rid of the snakes. The only thing that will is a long, hard, unvarnished look at the very thing that terrifies us. And I wonder what might happen if we, as a nation, refused to look away from this horror until we, together, found a way through the wilderness?
Life is painful. It just is. And I am not here to tell you what you need to do with your pain. That’s between you and God. But I am here to tell you that pain is not the ultimate point. Redemption is. We just have to look long enough to really see.
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