[Propertalk] serpent on a pole

[Ann Fontaine]

The Serpent on a Pole
For all of its beauty and joy, this world is founded on pain and loss.  
Darwin is not a challenge to Christian belief because he shows how  
species arise over time (rather than being created at one fixed point)  
but because he makes it impossible to imagine a time before death and  
pain entered the world. They have been the constant companions of  
creation, in all their nastiest forms. Even creationists cannot  
believe that Adam brought death into the world.

Whatever the theological problems this raises, the solution does not  
include running away. The Israelites in the desert tried that, and  
died. The cure they were offered was staring at the very thing they  
feared. They were to stare hard at the serpent death which terrified  
them so, according to Rabbi Arthur Waskow and Rabbi Phyllis Berman in  
Red Cow, Red Blood, Red Dye: Staring Death & Life in the Face.  http://www.shalomctr.org/node/275

For Christians this becomes even more poignant. For us it is Christ  
who becomes the serpent on a pole. Looking at him, we see what  
horrifies us; agonising suffering and bloody death. It is easy, with  
practise, to become complacent about it, seeing new life springing  
from this agony. We do not serve our God well by doing so.

The serpent in the wilderness was offered to allow the people of God  
to face their terrors. They looked into the pit of the image of death.  
Christ offers us the image of our worst imaginings, and of all the  
suffering of nature. Every meadow pipit pushed out by the baby cuckoo,  
every caterpillar split open by the parasitic wasp who has eaten  
though it, each is summoned up in the image of the creator of them  
dragging out a slow death from suffocation. Lifted up so, he draws all  
to him.

Somewhere in this, I feel, lies something of a solution. It is far  
from an intellectually satisfying solution. Yet it is played out again  
and again. Suffering can demean and destroy, and yet on occasion  
individuals can transcend themselves through it. These last months  
have seen the suffering of the Cameron family and of Jade Goody. The  
circumstances are totally different, yet, yet… The extraordinarily  
moving exchange in the Commons between two bereaved fathers, both  
knowing the constant anxiety of having a child with a life-limiting  
disease was a moment of reality in the too-often artificial rhetoric  
of that cold institution. Jade Goody’s decision not to hide her slow  
descent to death has opened up conversations about facing death over  
the whole country.

I am not speaking of the general need to address urgent problems, true  
as it is that we must. There are many issues on which we are out of  
time, and running faster will not serve us. Unpleasant truths about  
the thoughts of those who are our co-religionists. Painful  
realisations about the financial state of many of our congregations.  
Nasty facts about the age structure of those congregations, and just  
why they are so structured. Not to mention the now fast-ticking bomb  
of ecological disaster.

All this is true and urgent, but it is only a weak reflection of the  
story of the bronze serpent and the man on the cross. That promise is  
about facing the terror of pain and death in the word, and being  
blessed in the facing of it. That story underlies all the other  
terrors we need to deal with, and if we do not face it, we cannot face  
them. We need to turn and face that serpent because only by looking  
steadily on its face can we hope to gain healing for our other ills.






Ann Fontaine
Wyoming GC2009 c3

http://seashellseller.blogspot.com

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