2 Chronicles 36:14-16
Psalm 137:1-6
Ephesians 2:4-10
John 3:14-21

Where the Heart Already Is

We know the historical story that Jesus is narrating to Nicodemus. The people Israel had departed from Egypt but had not yet arrived to the Land of Promise. If they were artists, we might say, "They were in their Middle Period." The years of hard labor and bondage were over. They had not yet arrived to the life of true vision and beatitude signified by a land of milk and honey. They were not suffering, really. They were sheltered. They were fed. They were safe. And they were living out the ideal that all humans yearn for and the purpose of life: friendship and intimacy with God. For all of that, they were ... what is that modern term? World-weary. They were, if they were teenagers of today, bored. They longed for diversion. They wanted more exciting food. They were restless for .... something to happen.

But something does not happen. Sensual diversion — whether it be gourmet food or a desert oasis — does not appear. And the people Israel begin to complain. They grumble. They show contempt for Moses who has led them to this place of solitude and intimacy with God. And they rebel even against God. We might say that all their thoughts have become "snakey thoughts": reptilian, venomous, quick to strike. And the sacred book we call Numbers captures this by reporting a land that is suddenly alive with venomous snakes. Venom has become their element, their nature, their world.

The mysterious information that God has done this, that God has flooded their land with snakes, is, of course, inseparable from the state of their hearts and minds. That is, they have become venomous and, therefore, find themselves wading through a world of venom. (And we must hold always in mind that the Sacred Scriptures are historically true and are spiritually true at the same time.) And I think of the Irish proverb, "Your feet will take you where your heart already is." Their snakey minds have morphed into a snakey world (to use the language of today).

Have you ever experienced this state of mind? To borrow Hamlet's words, "How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world." Or, moving beyond Shakespeare, may I quote wives who say to their husbands, "You're being negative!" What the good wife is saying, of course, is that there is another way to be. While there can be no denying the world's brokenness, and that we are apt to be disappointed with the direction of our culture, nonetheless, the triumph of Christian life is to order this world to light, not to darkness. We are invited to see the world as God sees it. However discouraging the local picture may be, there is always a much larger canvas, for our lives (and deaths) are not dictated by the world's terms, but we are always bounded by God. The world, finally, is not real, but transient, unsteady, and always slipping away. The only reality is God and Heaven, whose steady light never weakens or wavers.

During the eighteenth century, when great philosophers like David Hume and Thomas Reid (to name two of many) were raising troubling questions about the elusive character of what we call reality — questions, I hasten to add, that have only become more elusive since their time — Dr. Samuel Johnson replied in exasperation, "What is reality?! This is reality!" and kicked a rock ... no doubt injuring his toes. Without question, there is something in the human spirit that does see life's hardest knocks as somehow being more real than other species of experience. We even have a phrase for it: "life's hard realities." But pain is not more real than the absence of pain. Nor is death more real than life. Indeed, unredeemed death is the final and ultimate statement of ... meaninglessness, nothing, an empty void, and as cold as a grave.

Yet, the desire to take life's hardest realities firmly in hand, attempting to break through, like Ahab boldly coming to face-to-face with Moby Dick, and grasp life as it "really is," has been a hallmark of nineteenth- and twentieth-century culture. In particular, a group of philosophers and artists such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus decided to swim all the way to the bottom of this dark sea that they might touch life's "essence" (as they would see it). Their motto was "existence precedes essence," calling themselves Existentialists. They were existence specialists. I remember reading novels in college such as The Stranger, The Plague, and Nausea, which sought to capture the hypnosis of world-weariness or to confront the essential darkness or fatal sickness of the world. Yet, a hundred years later, we can say that all they succeeded in capturing was ... a certain outlook, a fiction, a mirage — that by attempting to embrace senseless suffering, all they captured was thin tissues of nothing, which slipped through their fingers and out of the hands of their own dark imaginations. There was no essence. There was no breakthrough. For ultimate meaning and substantial reality lie elsewhere — an elsewhere, I might add, that they ruled out of their philosophya and art from the beginning. And Nietsche famously wrote: "God is dead."

But let us return to the dark imaginations and snakey thoughts of the people Israel. They too decided to use their own impulses and the lens of their perceived needs as their personal maps ... until they became hopelessly lost. until they discovered that they could not navigate rightly with those maps, that those maps led nowhere. And as their minds began to turn in a healthier direction, slowly dawning into a new turn of mind: they saw that they had erred. And their hearts became tender and contrite. They were wrong to grumble against the self-sacrificing Moses. They realized that they had sinned against God. And just at this moment, they experienced an epiphany, a new way of looking at the world, even a new way of looking at snakes. For they looked up and were healed by the figure of a snake, a bronze serpent, held up on a pole by Moses. God had taken the very figure of their venom and now healed them by it.

Upon reflection, the snake is not merely the figure of poison and random death, but, in fact, a sign of new life. Consider its ability to shed its aged skin and appear in the brightly colored body of its youth. Consider its capacity to take on a deathlike appearance over long periods, during a cold night or through a cold season, and then spring into vigorous action when the sun again warmed the earth. It was this hidden meaning which Moses held aloft on the pole: the bronze serpent, an icon of healing, even of eternal life. Indeed, the twenty-first century continues to hold this pole aloft as medical institutions display a bronze serpent on a pole or cross, called the caduceus. Whatever heritage might be claimed for the caduceus, whether ancient Greek or ancient Hebrew (and these two cultures lived side by side in the Mediterranean), its mysterious form is plainly to be seen on the uniforms of registered nurses and on the brochures sent from medical insurance companies.

You see, it all depends upon how you look at things. Any one of us might feel downtrodden, fixing his mind always on "snakey" life, gazing always on the striking viper. On the other hand, we might seek Heaven's view, looking deeper ... or should I say, higher? It is this upward gaze, we learn in the Book of Numbers, which heals all of God's people from being "snakebit" (to borrow an Americanism), pointing them ahead toward a Land of Promise, where no tear is shed and where death will have no dominion.

Our own world today is not so very different from the "Middle Period" of the Israelites. Many of us do not languish in hard bondage; neither have we arrived to the Promised Land. It is tempting to ask, "How long, Lord? How long?" It is tempting for us to become hypnotized by the world around us, like the Existentialists, who rejected God. But believing that harshness equates to reality or that cynicism and irony could replace truth or to to decide, as Pontius Pilate did, that there is no truth — all of that is a mirage imagined by a snakebit heart.

Many before us have looked up and gazed upon the Son of man, held aloft on a pole like the Bronze Serpent, and then never permitted their gaze to look down again. We have met these people and have drawn near to their souls filled with light and healing. We have seen them even in this world's most daunting corners of death and suffering. We have beheld that unquenchable light, which decades of human darkness could not quench. Surrounded by every kind of travail and danger and discourgement, they have been, and continue to be, living fountains and springs of abundant life. To be in their midst is to see the Kingdom of Heaven. Look up, good Christian, look up, for the darkness is giving way, and the light and warmth of God begins to filter in to the cold desert wastes.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.