In the Disciples of Christ in Community course last Wednesday night, we discussed understanding scripture and the authority of scripture. There’s a lot to say about that, more than I can say here, but I pointed out that we Episcopalians don’t believe that the Bible is factually accurate in all respects. It’s full of internal contradictions and sometimes presents a different version of events than what we know is true from irrefutable historical evidence. It also contains many different views of God and strains of theology that simply can’t be reconciled. Is God loving and forgiving or violent and vengeful? God appears both ways, and God can’t be both ways.

So, why do we say, “The Word of the Lord” when we read the Bible? If it’s not all literally true, what good is it? I believe that Holy Scripture is inspired by God, but not because it was whispered into someone’s ear who dutifully wrote it down. The Bible is a collection of books and stories compiled by people, and it has lots and lots of human fingerprints, and contradictions, and errors, all over it. But, thanks be to God, God seems to be willing to work with fallible human beings, and through this collection of thousands of years of reflections on God and humanity, the Holy Spirit strives to engage us in a continuous conversation about the most important things, the true things. The Bible doesn’t always get its facts right, but it always invites us into a holy conversation about the most holy truths.

Don’t underestimate the power of a holy conversation; the word “conversation” is related to the word “convert.” They both come from the Latin root meaning “turn around.” Conversation, especially holy conversation, can be powerful. But conversation, of course, requires that we choose to converse.

This morning, right off the bat we are presented with a choice as to whether to converse or flee. The Children of Israel have followed Moses and fled slavery in Egypt. Now they are wandering for forty years in the desert. They’re getting close to the end. The original generation, those who followed Moses out of Egypt, are almost all dead. We hear this morning from the second generation. Surely they had heard the stories of how their parents complained and tested God, and how it had not gone well for them. But now they get close to the Promised Land and are blocked by the Edomites, so to their great disappointment they have to head once again into the desert. And the people became “impatient on the way.” They speak 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.”

I love that! It’s such a classic temper-tantrum: “There’s no food, and we detest this miserable food!” (The food, of course, was manna, the gift from God that saved their lives.) When somebody is saying things like, “There’s no food, and besides I hate the food,” you can’t talk to them. And God doesn’t try. And that presents us with our choice.

Because what God does seems pretty terrible. He sends snakes, lots and lots of snakes, snakes in your shoes in the morning, snakes in your pots when you try to cook, snakes under the bed, snakes under the covers, snakes between you and the bathroom in the dark of night, snakes dropping on your bed as you sleep — or at least, try to sleep. (I can’t help but think of the scene in Raiders of the Lost Arc when Harrison Ford falls into a room full of snakes. “I hate snakes,” he says.)

I’m not phobic about snakes, but I wouldn’t like that.

And furthermore, these are poisonous snakes. They bite, and they kill. Lots of people die.

Well, now (as you can imagine) the people change their tune pretty quick. Wouldn’t you? So now they’re all, “We’ve sinned; we’re sorry; make it stop!” And Moses prays, and God says, “Make a bronze serpent and put it on a pole, and whenever anyone who is bitten looks at it, they will be healed.”

If you react to this story the way I do, you know the choice before us. My initial reaction is, “God is terrible in this story; I’m either going to ignore it, or assume it was a mistake, or write it off by assuming that they came across a really snakey place and they falsely attributed that to God. In any event, I’m not dealing with it.” That reaction is saying, “I’m not going to converse. This is threatening, and I’m not going to talk about it, even with the Holy Spirit.”

I don’t have all the answers about this story (I’m not sure that’s the point), but it’s an important story, and I want to ask a few questions to encourage you to stay in the holy conversation, to risk being turned.

So let me tell you just two of the images and questions I have when I converse about this story. You may have more. First, these are people who were delivered from slavery and saved from starvation and thirst by God’s gifts of water and manna, and now they are whining. One thing the Bible seems clear about is that God really doesn’t like whining. And in the holy conversation, I am asked, “How often do you complain, whine, about the gifts God has given you? How often do you murmur that they should have been different, or easier, or better?”

The second question comes from that powerful part of the story that deals with looking up and looking down. In a place with snakes all over the ground, I know where I’m looking! But Moses must have run through the camp of dying and frightened people shouting, “Look up! Look up at the tip of this pole! Look at the thing you fear! It will heal you!”

If we understand the snakes to be the things in our lives that scare us and make us miserable, could it be that we sometimes give them power by paying so much attention to them? Our lives so easily become focused on our problems, on the next step, on our feet. We become “People of the Snakes,” “People of fear.” And we never deal with the real issue, only the fear it breeds. We can so easily go through life looking down.

And God says, “Put the thing you fear on a pole, and look up.” That takes trust, to look up from your feet when you’re afraid of snakes. And so the second question the story asks me is this: “Will you trust enough to look up from trying to avoid your snakes and confront the very thing that scares you?”

Before Jesus delivers one of his most famous lines, John 3:16: “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,” he says this: “And 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.” This is one of the very few times that Jesus explicitly draws on a story from his people’s history to make a point about himself.

And then he goes on to say, God doesn’t come to condemn. (Now, there’s a message that seems to have gotten lost!). God doesn’t condemn people, Jesus says. People condemn themselves. “And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness.” This is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness.

Since Jesus has invited it, I will leave you to the questions that arose from our conversation about the snakes as applied to what Jesus says.

When we see Jesus lifted up on the cross, how often do we complain about that gift God has given us? How often do we say, or secretly think, “It’s not enough, or not adequate, or it should have been easier?” How often do we whine about the light?

And, “Will you trust enough to look up, up to the raised cross, up from trying to avoid your snakes and confront the very thing that scares you, up from the darkness to the light?”

During this Lenten season, as I leave you to, I hope, not only ponder but wrestle with these questions (and others of your own devising), I’ll leave you with one more image. I saw Martha Spring Wednesday night after she and Mike had returned from a trip to Boston. She was exuberant about Trinity Church. “The architecture,” she said, “is designed to sweep your eye upward.”

That’s true there. That’s true here. The reason our churches are built that way is that our faith is built that way. As you wrestle with the holy conversation our scripture engages us in, don’t forget to look up. It turns out that the symbol of death you will find there, a snake, a cross, is the key to life.