When the whale was finally free, she swam a little way from the boat and suddenly jumped for joy – a full breach out of the water. And for the next hour, the group watched as this young whale made full breaches, time after time, about 40 breaches while they watched. It was a dance of freedom and joy by a young creature of God.
That is a beautiful story of freedom – but freedom is sometimes a bit more complex for human beings. Here’s a very different story.
At 6:15 a.m. last Wednesday, Greg Smith, an executive director at Goldman Sachs in London, sent an email to his boss resigning from the company. What his boss didn’t know as he read that email over his morning tea was that 15 minutes later, at 6:30 a.m., a different resignation letter by Greg Smith would hit the website of the New York Times. It was the kind of resignation letter that is reminiscent of some fiery exits from other jobs in the past. It wasn’t quite as dramatic as the resignation of Steven Slater, the flight attendant who in 2010 cursed out a passenger over the intercom, grabbed a beer, deployed the inflatable slide, and slid to freedom.
But it was still dramatic. In an op-ed, Greg Smith began, “Today is my last day at Goldman Sachs.” He went on to skewer the firm’s business ethics, client service and culture, in a sort of shot heard round the world – and the business pages have not stopped talking about it since. Among the many serious questions this spectacular exit has raised, are some more personal questions about Greg Smith, including the question of whether any employer on Wall Street will ever hire him again. Employers don’t like to take a risk that a person who made a spectacular exit once, throwing bombshells back at the office he was leaving, might do it again. Which is an example of a way an unhealthy system protects itself: unhealthy systems will guard against taking their bad behavior public by providing safeguards, enlisting everyone involved, including competitors who share in the profits of the system, in making sure things like this don’t happen. The threat, “You’ll never work in this town again,” becomes a very real one in a system like that.
This is just one example of a very serious human truth: if you are trapped in an unhealthy system – an abusive relationship, an bad work environment, an addiction, a personal set of poor habits – it is really hard to set yourself free.
Which brings us to our Old Testament reading today: a very weird story of snakes. And we may ask ourselves, why in the world did the lectionary people decide to include this weird story in our Lent readings? The other weeks in Lent have brought us stories of major covenants: Noah, Abraham, Moses. But this week – snakes? I’m with Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark – Why does it have to be snakes? I hate snakes!
The easy answer is, this story is referred to in the gospel, so our Old Testament lesson is selected to give us the background for the gospel reading. The more complicated answer is, this story, in a very real way, tells us something very important about the development of our Biblical tradition and how that tradition speaks of freedom in new ways to new ages and new people.
When you look at this story of the snakes, you can see layers of theological development, new ways of looking at the world and God’s relationship to us. At the most basic level, we have the story of a people, wandering in the desert after being freed from slavery in Egypt, encountering a snakepit and many getting bitten. The people ask Moses, their leader, for help, and Moses creates a symbol of God’s presence, a snake on a pole, to reassure them. People look at this symbol and are healed – perhaps of snakebite, perhaps of fear; at any rate, this symbol allows them to continue their wilderness journey.
So that’s the first level of theological development here: fearful former slaves run into danger and need a tangible sign of God’s protection. The second level of development is this: people begin to ask why the snakes were there. They can’t think of another explanation than that God must have sent them, and they attribute the snakes to God’s punishment for their complaining. Unfortunately, this makes God look temperamental and arbitrary – having a temper tantrum, sending snakes, then instead of removing the snakes, sending this snake on a pole. And it also raises other questions: do we have God to blame for all our misfortunes? Does God send tornadoes, does God send cancer, does God send automobile accidents? If so, God has a lot of ‘splaining to do. And I don’t believe that God operates this way.
Bible editors help us address this question with the third level of development in this story, by setting it in a particular context. The people of Israel begin to understand this event as part of a larger movement from slavery to freedom. Look at what’s going on in this story – the people of Israel are wandering in the desert, not sure where they’re going or when they will get there, and they start to yearn for the old familiar days of slavery. In their slave days, they were oppressed, they were beaten, their children were murdered, and they had nothing of their own. But at least things were settled and predictable. It takes courage to be free.
Human beings sometimes find predictable slavery easier to bear than frightening freedom, with decisions that have to be made, dangers that must be met, limitless possibilities, promises for the future – and we constantly have to fight our temptation to run back into our familiar, comfortable lives as slaves. In slavery, the suffering is known and expected; in freedom, you run across dangers you don’t know how to deal with – like, symbolically, snakes.
Greg Smith declared his independence from Goldman Sachs – now he faces the “snakes” of unemployment. An abused wife leaves her husband; now she is going to have to deal with the job market and the legal system and a custody battle and her own guilt and love for the man she left behind.
Freedom is hard: and what the people of Israel came to understand is that on the hard journey to freedom, the only way they would get there was to rely on God. Not just in the initial act of leading them across the Red Sea, but every single step of the way, from Egypt to the Promised Land. Because every step of way, their temptation was to fall back into slavery once more. Finally arriving at a place of freedom was an amazing act of courage.
Which is a truth that every one of us can look around and understand today. I mentioned last week that the Ten Commandments are not limits to our freedom: they are God’s way of life that save us from our own temptation to fall back into slavery – slavery to our possessions, to our passions, to our work, to false gods. We are always tempted into comfortable slavery instead f frightening freedom.
Just ask any member of Alcoholics Anonymous – people become slaves to alcohol, they are owned by alcohol, and they can’t just decide to be free. It takes reliance on a higher power to free them from that slavery – it takes God. They have to take a journey through a wilderness of healing, and every single day of that journey, they will be tempted to fall back into slavery. To be freed, they have to keep sight of that higher power before them.
Comfortable slavery is sometimes much easier than exhausting freedom. Now, one caveat: personal covenants we make, like marriage, can sometimes feel binding and limiting. In a marriage that is not abusive, the path to freedom lies through that covenant, not around it. God works through that marriage to teach us the way to love another human being. But in many other areas of life, there are many things that try to enslave us – unhealthy ways of life, bad work environments, our possessions and our debts that hold us in bondage, unhealthy systems we are trapped in. To get to a place of freedom, you have to have strength, you have to have courage, you have to have other people supporting you, and most of all, you have to have God. Because we humans can’t free ourselves on our own.
Which brings us back to our gospel for today. Right before the most famous passage in the New Testament, John 3:16, we hear a reference to this story about snakes, as Jesus speaks about being “lifted up” like Moses’ bronze serpent. When the Jesus we see in John’s gospel talks about being “lifted up,” he means being lifted up on the cross. John is telling us that looking at Jesus lifted up on the cross provides healing like Moses’ bronze serpent did. And what kind of healing does he provide? This kind:
"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.” Jesus on the cross provides healing of body, mind, and spirit. The word that Jesus uses for “believe” here is not the same kind of “believe” that you would use if you said, “I believe in evolution” – that is, you have looked at the scientific evidence and decided that it makes logical sense. This is the kind of belief that you would use if you say, “I believe in peace.” It’s not a question of whether peace is factual, it’s a question of whether you put your trust in it, work for it – whether you live according to that belief.
Jesus tells us that for us, looking at Jesus lifted up on the cross is how we are healed, because in him God frees us from slavery to sin and death, and leads us to freedom and life – and we can put our trust in him. The healing happens for us because on the cross, what we see is this: God’s love for us, so strong that Jesus gave his life for the sake of that love; and God’s utter involvement in our own struggles for freedom.
When we were slaves to sin and death, God entered our slavery, took our sin and death upon himself, and led us out of slavery into freedom. And Freedom is not an easy task: but day by day, we can put our trust in Jesus to give us strength, to give us courage, to help set us free from all the things that enslave us – so that we may not perish, but have everlasting life. And then, knowing that we are free, we can, like a young and beautiful humpback whale, a beloved creature of God, dance in joy and celebration.
No comments:
Post a Comment