The Park Road Pulpit

The caduceus is the symbol of medicine. According to Greek Legend, Hermes, the messenger of the gods, once came across two fighting snakes. Throwing his staff on them, they are said to have twisted together and ceased their violence. These two snakes, intertwined around a raised staff, have come to symbolize the potential for healing and wholeness.[1]

It is a symbol filled with irony and contradiction, isn’t it? I learned some years ago to expect to be awakened in the night if Amy so much as caught a glimpse of a snake that day. (We don’t watch “The Crocodile Hunter” in our house!) My racing heart has just about stopped scaring me to death when it awakes me to the sensation of a terrified woman, running through the bed covers in the night. And, Amy is not alone -- the human animosity toward these legless creatures is very old. I’d say it goes back to the beginning!

This symbol of healing, also called a karukeion[2], from the Greek word for “herald,” is also possibly connected to the ancient practice of rooting out parasitic worms under the skin. The ancient practitioner would make an incision just below the worm, and would then wind the worm onto a stick as it began to make its way out of the incision. (All the adults in the room are gagging at this point, and all the boys in the room are going “cool”!)

It is appropriate that the medical profession has chosen such a potent yet paradoxical symbol to represent its healing work.

In today’s ancient story from the wilderness, we encounter another raised serpent, and all of the contradictions this brings. It is the continuous story of the children of Israel. Complaint. Divine punishment.[3] Appeal to Moses. Intercession to God. God’s new initiative of grace, deliverance, provision, restoration, freedom.

From broken Covenant, to renewed Promise… it is still the story of the children of God.

The man’s son died in a cholera epidemic in India. This father spoke with his friend, Dr. Leslie Weatherhead, then a Methodist pastor in Europe. As the father paced the floor, he spoke the words which so many have been told they must recite in their grief. “Well, padre, it is the will of God. That’s all there is to it. It is the will of God.”

Then the Lord sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died. (Numbers 21.6)

Dr. Weatherhead could not abide this man’s resignation to the inscrutable will of a distant god, and he knew his friend well enough, even in these moments of deep grief to challenge his assumption.[4]

“Supposing [John] someone crept up the steps onto the veranda tonight… and deliberately put a wad of cotton, soaked in cholera germ… over your little girl’s mouth (she was now his only child)… what would you think about that?

“My God,” [John] said, “what would I think about that? Nobody would do such a damnable thing. If he attempted it… I would kill him with as little compunction as I would a snake… What do you mean by suggesting such a thing?

“But, John” [Dr. Weatherhead] said quietly, “isn’t that just what you have accused God of doing when you said it was God’s will? Call your little boy’s death the result of mass ignorance, call it mass folly, call it mass sin, if you like, call it bad drains or communal carelessness, but don’t call it the will of God.” Surely we cannot identify as the will of God something for which a man would be locked up in jail, or put in a criminal lunatic asylum.[5]

In his bestseller, “Why Bad Things Happen to Good People,” Rabbi Harold Kushner says,

It is tempting to believe that bad things happen to people… because God is a righteous judge who gives them exactly what they deserve. By believing that, we keep the world orderly and understandable.[6]

But the world is neither orderly nor understandable. So it is with God. We cannot tidy up life’s brokenness. We cannot fix all that is shattered and all that is shattering around us. And we cannot protect God’s goodness, or God’s “godness” with trite theology and easy answers. I say this because suffering is no illusion. The Curse of this life, our suffering, is as real as reality gets. And to try to convince someone that the path of the tornado or the loss of the marriage is just part of a “bigger picture.” That the random drive-by shooting or the Holocaust is part of a “greater purpose.” That the violence of war or the death of an innocent child will be redeemed in the great “by and by” is to do great injustice to our humanity. Perhaps the greatest injustice. For such justifications imply that human pain is relative. Further, they, indict the innocent by suggesting to those who are broken by their grief, that if they are strong enough, or if they are blessed, then they will overcome.

I believe that such a theology of denial, robs life of the very presence of God, especially where God is needed the most.

Something is broken in this world – it may be in the covenant of creation itself, it may be in the covenants we make with one another and then trample on at our own peril, it may be in the covenants God initiates – that we simply will not accept. Something is broken in this world – it may be something in the very complexity of reality itself, but something is broken. The endless pain and suffering of our humanity demand that we not write this brokenness off as an illusion of relativity.[7]

Some years ago Amy spent five and a half weeks in India. (It was the longest 40 days of my life!) I will not tell her story, but my story is that she returned a changed person. For in the streets of India she had seen a brokenness never before experienced. Poverty and squalor, endless suffering and death on shameless display. In recalling her story to friends in an e-mail, she called India the most “God-forsaken place” she had ever seen.

The reply from Missouri was brief, and it shook me to the core. “Why would you imply,” Drew said, “that God is more to be found in the comfort of America’s wealth and affluence, than in “Mother Teresa’s home for the Dead and Dying Destitutes”?

In the wilderness, Moses raised a serpent for the people’s healing. It is an image of the same venomous creature that brought death. Curse and promise are blood-kin. And into our world, God raises another caduceus, a living karukeion – a herald, a good news, a living Word. The Christian Gospel preaches the daring Good News that God enters into the very curse of this life. He is of the same venomous brood as you and I.[8] Filled with earth through and through. And yet, in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, something entirely different has been seen.

From this pulpit we preach a consistently high anthropology. By that I mean that we take great insight in the words of the creation narrative, that you and I, and all of the children of the world, are created in the image of God.[10] There is no room for John Calvin’s doctrine of “total depravity” in our hope. You are the image of God. To you God has entrusted now the message of reconciliation.[11] God is calling you to be perfect, complete.[12] You hold within your hands the potential for healing and wholeness – for yourself, and for those around you.

But there lurks within this much-needed doctrine of a great, human confidence the shadow of our sin. (Promise and curse are blood-kin!) It is the sin of arrogance. It is the covenant, broken by earthly pride. It is the great confident fallacy of independence and progress. “I can do it myself.”

I learned the King James as a child. I believe the still-relevant Truth as an adult:

For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life (John 3.16).

I do not believe that God sent poisonous serpents to kill the children of Israel. I do not believe that God sends AID’s as divine retribution.[13] I do not believe that God sanctions holy wars.[14] I believe, as Jesus said, it is not the will of your father in heaven that one of these little ones should be lost.[15] I believe it is God’s will for Annika Rose Van Buren[16] to grow old and to die a natural death at the fulfillment of a life lived in fullness, in abundance.

So for Anna, and for us all, we see in Jesus Christ, a God who enters the curse with us. For us. And I believe this God is still dying with us, that whatever comes, we might know the Promise of life.

God who lifts infants to Your cheek in acts of parental intimacy, ^{(Hosea 11.4)}

That in our attempts to find fault and place blame (yet to keep ourselves innocent),

Perhaps we need to see You in the "answer" and not in the "problem" ^{(___ + ___ = ___)}

[1] http://www.medhelpnet.com/caduceus.html. The word potential is critical – a doctor friend in Birmingham reminds me that he still practices medicine.

[2] The word is also related to the word for preaching, “kerygma.”

[3] In this sermon I call into question the aspect of “divine punishment,” yet I believe that the cycle as a whole remains intact. I locate the “divine punishment” in the complexity of our reality (“Curse and promise are blood-kin,” see below) and not with any literal, ordained judgments of God.

[4] I believe that it is right, and necessary, to challenge many of the traditional assumptions about God’s work in the world, and “God’s will,” though a moment of crisis is generally not the time to attempt to teach theology.

[5] Leslie Weatherhead, The Will of God, pp.11-13.

[6] Kushner, p.9, emphasis added.

[7] I use the term “relativity” here, in place of “relative” (mentioned above) to place the issue in contemporary terms. This is an obvious allusion to the world of the modern sciences, due largely to the influence of Albert Einstein’s “Theory of Relativity.”

[8] Some people will doubtless take offense at the suggestion of Jesus as of our “venomous brood.” I use this phrase intentionally, not only for the allusion to the serpents of the first text, but also to highlight my point here. God comes among us. Humanity and Divinity are co-mingled. Let the tension, and the offense, remain, for in this complex reality is the source of the curse – as well as the spring from which we draw our healing. I think here of Ephesians 4.6, for God is “above all and through all and in all.”

[9] This is an intentional reference to my sermon, “For Us,” (March 25, 2001) from 2 Corinthians 5.16-21, “God made him who knew no sin to be sin for us…” In this sermon I call into question support for the traditional doctrine of “substitutionary atonement.”

[10] Genesis 1.26.

[11] 2 Corinthians 5.18.

[12] Matthew 5.48.

[13] This is an often-repeated claim by Christian Fundamentalists, in their condemnation of homosexual practice.

[14] This sermon comes one day after words from my meditation in a “Service of Silence and Prayer” (at the beginning of Operation “Iraqi Freedom”) were printed in the Charlotte Observer in contrast to two other local pastors. One of these pastors claimed God’s sanction for this war, a claim which I find ironic in light of both President’ Bush’s statement of “crusade” (following the attacks of September 11, 2001) and Saddam Hussein’s claim of “Jihad.”

[15] Matthew 18.14.

[16] At the first of today’s service, we celebrated a baby dedication with Anna and her parents.

[17] This prayer was written four years ago for members of a Sunday School class in Birmingham, Alabama, who were struggling with the suffering (and eventual death) of one of their members, to leukemia.