Sermon by Pastor Mike Buttonnn

Means to Ends
Text:  Numbers 21: 4-9; John 9: 1-7

NRS Numbers 21
4From Mount Hor they set out by the way to the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom; but the people became impatient on the way. 5The people spoke 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." 6Then the LORD sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died. 7The people came to Moses and said, "We have sinned by speaking against the LORD and against you; pray to the LORD to take away the serpents from us." So Moses prayed for the people. 8And the LORD said to Moses, "Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live." 9So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.

NRS John 9
1As he walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. 2His disciples asked him, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" 3Jesus answered, "Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God's works might be revealed in him. 4We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work. 5As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world." 6When he had said this, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man's eyes, 7saying to him, "Go, wash in the pool of Siloam" (which means Sent). Then he went and washed and came back able to see.

God’s grace to you and all yours, for the sake of Jesus!  Amen. 

Let’s be honest.  The Bible has its share of strange, startling, and, yes, even weird stories.  Among the Bible’s strangest and possibly weirdest stories are the narratives that deal with healing.  Today’s lessons are two cases in point.  In the Old Testament reading from Numbers, God orders Moses to make a serpent of bronze and set it upon a pole in order to heal wayward Israel of snake bites.  In the New Testament lesson from John, Jesus uses his saliva and dirt to make a mud that he places upon a blind man’s eyes, after which he orders the man to wash in the pool of Siloam, where his vision is restored.  These are the kinds of stories that make some people want to believe that the Bible is nothing but a book of mumbo-jumbo and dangerous superstitions. 

But before examining what bronze serpents and mud pies have to do with healing, let’s first ask the obvious:  “What’s God doing sending poisonous, in some translations, fiery snakes to bite and kill his own people?”  The Bible explains that Israel was speaking against God and his servant Moses, complaining that they had been brought into a place where they would die for lack of decent food and water.  Sending snakes to kill people might be one way to handle complaints, but it hardly seems worthy of a God “gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.”  [Although: I do remember one really long car trip when I was sorely tempted to threaten the two litter whiners in my back seat with fiery serpents. But I digress.]  You have to remember that what’s happening here is more than just a little murmuring in the ranks.  Given Israel’s very precarious situation, the grumblings of a few had the definite potential to become the mutiny of the many.  In the no-man’s land between Egypt and Canaan, there’s no doubt that were Israel to overturn God’s leadership in God’s appointed servant Moses, then the whole nation would be lost.  From our own historical experience we know that in times of war and national emergency, justice often has to take a harsher form than it would in times of peace and prosperity.  It could be argued that God had to drop the hammer, or God’s whole gracious deliverance of Israel from bondage would have been for naught. 

Even more difficult to understand, though, is the assumption in both of these stories that God can and sometimes does send illness.  The overwhelming witness of both Old and New Testaments is that God, the LORD, is a God of healing.  When, earlier in the book of Exodus, Israel was dying of thirst in the desert and the only water they could find were the bitter springs of Marah, even though Israel complained against Moses, God sweetened that water and declared:  “I am the Lord who heals you” (Exodus 15:26).  But to keep Israel from total self-destruction, there’s no question that God sent the plague of snakes.  When, in the lesson from John, Jesus and his disciples come upon the man born blind, the disciples automatically assume that God must have something to do with the man’s loss of sight, asking, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus says that neither the man nor his parents sinned, but still he insists that the blind man’s affliction has a divine purpose: “that God’s works might be revealed in him.”  None of us (!) ever (!) has the right or the authority to declare that another person’s illness or injury is God’s judgment on him or her.  But as we struggle with our own frailties and infirmities we cannot, as people of faith, ever dismiss the possibility that God can be as much at work in our illness as in our health. 

So what about the bronze serpent and the mud pies?  That’s weird, right? 

Well, I can tell you this:  if your physician ever comes after you with snake charms and a water pistol, you have my permission to seek a second opinion.  For us, snakes and spit would be some very weird medicine, but we have to remember:  what would have been weird for those Israelites and that blind man would be Moses handing out doses of anti-venom serum or Jesus attempting laser eye surgery.

Both Old and New Testaments spring from pre-scientific cultures dominated by magical worldviews.    With virtually no understanding of internal medicine, physicians in the ancient world might (!) be competent to administer some primitive first aid, but little else.  There was no germ theory of disease, and while there was a common practice of trying to keep wounds clean, those same wounds were typically treated with infection bearing instruments and packed with contaminated bandages.  Aside from some herbal medicines that could as easily kill you as heal you, there were no antibiotics, no anti-inflammatory drugs, no pain-killers. 

God’s prescription of a bronze serpent actually draws upon an ancient principle of folk medicine, that like heals like.  For example, it was widely believed that if a fruit or vegetable looked like an internal organ, it must be good for the treatment of that organ.  So a person with a brain injury would be given (what?) cauliflower, again on the assumption that like heals like.  (Didn’t your mom tell you to eat your cauliflower because it’s brain food!)  Not surprisingly, then, when snakes afflict Israel, God prescribes a bronze snake.  The association of the snake with healing was widespread throughout the ancient world.  The Greek god for healing was represented by the rod of Asclepius, a snake upon a pole, similar to the caduceus symbol of two snakes entwined around a rod often used to represent medical practice today. 

Folk medicine is likewise at work in Jesus’ healing of the man born blind.  It was widely assumed that bodily fluids contained some of the life force of the person from whom they issued.  In the seventh chapter of Mark’s gospel Jesus takes saliva from his mouth and touches it to the tongue of a deaf man to restore his speech.  In Mark 8 Jesus again applies his saliva to the eyes of the blind man at Bethsaida to give him back his sight.  In tonight’s reading from John 9 Jesus combines his saliva with the dust of the earth in a way that recalls God’s creation of Adam in Genesis 2, in this case making a new creation to replace the fallen one of the man’s blindness. 

The point is not that we should roll back the advances of science and get back to the good old days of all “natural” medicine.  The point is that God uses the means, methods, and understandings available to bring about healing.  Are all means, methods, and understandings equal?  Of course not.  But we believe in an incarnating God who reaches people in, with, and through the cultures in which those people are historically embedded.  In a pre-scientific culture with a magical worldview God uses magical techniques that the people would recognize and accept.  But unlike magic, in neither of these stories is God being manipulated or otherwise coerced into healing through spells or incantations.  The Bible is a book of testaments to God’s healing will, not a manual for getting God to do what we want. 

Admittedly, many of the Bible’s healing stories strike us as primitive, or if you will, weird, but we forget that only a five or six generations back most surgeons divided their practice between cutting on people and cutting people’s hair.  That’s why barber poles are traditionally striped in red and white.  The most commonly prescribed medical procedure in mid-19th century America was blood-letting, in which the barber-surgeon drained blood from a patient until he or she became faint.  The practice was based on the ancient theory of humours, in which disease was thought to be brought on by an imbalance in the four humours – blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile – which were believed to correspond to the four elements of Greek cosmology, air, water, earth, and fire.  It sounds crazy to us, but when Abraham Lincoln became dangerously depressed on the death of his beloved Ann Rutledge, his doctor prescribed a rigorous course of what?  That’s right, bloodletting, accompanied by mercury compounds that almost killed him and for a while made him crazier than he already was.  

I sincerely hope and pray that a hundred years from now our great-great grandchildren will be looking back on some of our modern medicine as unbelievably primitive and totally weird.  But for them as for us as for ancient Israel, the same God of mercy and compassion will be the healer working in, with, and through whatever means are at the Lord’s disposal. 

In the Name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.