Facing our Fears

"Facing Our Fears"

Numbers 21:4-9
March 22, 2009

From 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. The 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.”
Then the LORD sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people,
so that many Israelites died. The 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. And 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.” So 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.

Last summer I shared with you that I have a fear of public speaking, a fear of doing
what I am doing now, ironically enough, and that even though in the past 10 years I’ve
had to get in front of people every week, I still get the butterflies in my stomach. Now,
the good news for me is that the amount of butterflies in my stomach has changed—
instead of a swarm of them, it’s simply a few persistence ones that kick up right before I
get up and speak. Some people never have that kind of phobia, that kind of fear—they’
ve always been comfortable speaking in front of people, but other people, often for
mysterious reasons, are like me, people who can never quite shake the fear associated
with event, or a certain animal, or a certain height or depth, or being enclosed, or
exposed. It really is surprising the amount of phobias that actually exist out there, how
many different things there are to be fearful, that terrify people. I did a bit of research
and came up with a few phobias that you may not have heard about it, but you might
be able to guess from the name; Test time:

Arithmophobia - Fear of numbers.
Mertophobia - Fear or hatred of poetry.
Pharmacophobia - Fear of taking medicine.
Mechanophobia - Fear of machines.
Maniaphobia - Fear of insanity.
Ornithophobia - Fear of birds.
Papaphobia - Fear fo the Pope.
Theophobia - Fear of gods or religion.

One of the most common phobias out there is arachnophobia, which is an intense fear
of spiders, and I found an interesting cure for that fear on the internet—ah, the
wonders of the internet—but one I’ve heard about before. Essentially, what the cure
argues is that no one has a zero tolerance for something—we can all tolerate what we
fear to some degree, because, even for someone who is highly fearful of spiders
knowing that a nest of spiders is 10 miles away doesn’t really bother us, or seeing a
picture of one doesn’t really scare us—all of that just goes to show us that we can
actually live in a world with spiders. The steps laid out for the cure say that we need to
write that down, put it on paper, and then simply acknowledge that there is a degree of
comfort we can have with spiders, even if it is just being 10 miles away from us. And
then we just keep bringing the spiders in closer, so to speak, even if just in our minds—
perhaps you can tolerate spiders in a glass jar, or in a cage of some sort…just keep
getting them closer and closer to you, and the idea is that the more you become
comfortable with the idea that you are not completely fearful of what you thought you
could never stand, the more your mind adjusts to this idea, the more the fear, the
phobia will dissipate. It may take months and months to get there, but just thinking
about your fear, and stretching your limits in your brain, you can actually overcome that
fear. Writing it down, writing the steps down by which you get closer to that spider, it
helps give you perspective every time you look back at how far you’ve come, making
you stronger and more willing to face your demons and conquer your phobia.

So far, I haven’t used that cure, because I don’t have lot of major phobias, except the
one that I have to conquer every Sunday, which is to get up in front of you and speak,
but I think it might work. I’ve heard things like that before, and to some degree, you can
see the idea actually being used in our text from Scripture today. Moses puts up a pole
with an image of the very creature that God has sent to terrify the people—a snake
twirled upon a pole, much like the dramatic picture you see on the cover of your bulletin
today. The people have to look at the snake, the bronze snake, an image of what they
fear most, in order to be cured, a moment and an idea that just fascinates me. But it
goes back to the principle found in that cure I found on the internet—the way to cure
our fear of something is to look it right in the eyes, so to speak, if only in your mind, if
only in an image hanging on pole in the desert.

But before we flesh that out a bit, let’s get some context here for our Scripture. This
story is from the time when the people of Israel are still wandering in the desert, after
they have left Egypt, but have yet to arrive in the Promised Land—and remember, this
wandering would eventually last for forty years because of the very type of thing that is
happening right here—lots and lots of complaining and whining from the people. It’s
always interesting that we tend to idealize the past, even the bad past, if we happen to
be going through a difficult time in the present, and that is what has happened to the
Israelites—they had forgotten that they were once slaves, but oddly enough, have only
remembered that they had received three meals a day, even if it was only gruel. They
had complained about food—and God gave them manna. They complained about
water—and God broke open a rock, which gushed forth water. When they complained
about having no meat to eat, God sent them quail. When the water at Marah was
bitter, God showed Moses how to sweeten it. So, you get the pictures—a lot of
grumbling, a lot of bitterness in the midst of their newfound freedom, and now comes
one final moment of complaint, and it seems as if God has had enough, and so here
come the snakes, poisonous snakes who bite seems like fire, whose bite actually kills
the complainers. Now, I have to admit that I am not wild about the idea of God killing
people because of some whining—I suspect a lot of us would be in danger of losing our
lives if the sentence for whining was death—but you have to have some sympathy for
God here—sometimes you’ve just had enough, and you’re done, DONE with the
complainers and the whiners. And, of course, the story shows a more ambiguous
picture of God than we are really comfortable with, but, hey, if we, who are created in
God’s image, are sometimes an ambiguous lot, why would we expect God to have no
ambiguity within him—or her?

Nonetheless, here it is—not only does God provide the poison, God also provides the
antidote, and the cure is take the image of that very thing that is killing them, those
snakes that so many of us fear, and put it on a pole, so that if one should be bitten,
one can simply look upon the image of that very thing that is about to kill you, and be
cured, be healed of your disease. And what’s even more interesting is that Judaism is
very clear about having no graven images, of not trying to put the divine nto stone, and
yet, here it is: an image, an almost idol like image, is the vehicle by which the people will
be saved. In fact, we know that the people actually ended up taking that very snake
laced pole, and, that hundreds of years later, it would end up in the temple being
worshipped by the people, and a religion would be formed around it, only to have King
Hezekiah destroy it in one of the frequent attempts to get the nation back on track with
God (2 Kings 18:4). There is a long history of the snake intertwined on the pole—look
at the seal of the American Medical Association, the serpent as destroyer and healer,
death dealer, and life bringer. For some reason, as we evolved as humans, snakes
have played an important—and sometimes ambiguous—role in human history,
embodying our fears, and yet carrying within its sinews the possibility of healing as
well.

And so we have the serpent on the pole, gazed upon with desperation by the people, in
hopes of being healed of the serpent bites. The cure is to look into the eyes of the one
they fear is out to destroy them, the snake. It’s a powerful, powerful moment, because I
think it tells us what to do with our own fears, it gives us a clue about how to overcome
those demons within us, the uncertainties, the self-doubts, the moments or things we
think we cannot face. What we fear must be faced, it must be looked at, stared at,
gazed into—we’ve got to confront what we fear the most, to take the cure, drink the
antidote, if we want to be cured, be made whole. For those of us who have done some
therapy, we know that’s the case—you have to name your demons, and rummage
through them, before they can become powerless, because what we do not confront,
what we do not face, becomes more powerful than it really is. With our backs turned
away from our fears, we never know when they will bite us or attack us, but with our
face towards the serpent, or our fear of not having enough, or our fear of dying, or of
losing a spouse or partner, whatever, with our face towards our fear, we can see when
they will attack us, and we can see what they really are—simply stone and bronze,
simply an idol that has no real power other than the power we give it.

When we turn our backs to fears, when we don’t confront them, they become demonic,
they are what so often destroy our happiness, and even the happiness of those we
love.

John Henry Faulk tells the story of his early childhood, growing up with his cousin, Billy,
deep in East Texas. John Henry said that as nine-year-old make-believe Texas
Rangers, they were the scourge of all bandits, robbers and desperadoes when they
rode their trusty stick horses on the range between the kitchen door and the corn crib.

One day John Henry's mother sent them out to investigate a commotion in the
henhouse. They cautiously entered where all the chickens were squawking and
fluttering around and began to examine the nests. About half way through their
investigation, as they peered into a nest, a black snake raised its head about six inches
from their noses. John Henry remembers how all of their make-believe heroism fell
away as they made a new door in the side of the henhouse.

When John Henry's mother questioned them about the incident, she wondered how the
two bravest lawmen in East Texas could be afraid of a harmless black snake, adding,
“After all, everybody knows a black snake can't hurt nobody.” To which young Billy
replied, as he rubbed his bruised head and backside, “Yes, Ma'am, but they sure can
cause you to hurt yourself.”

Master story-teller Donald Shelby, who relates this narrative, goes on to say that Billy is
right and that is why fear itself is frightening. John Steinbeck saw it and wrote: 'A
person afraid is a dangerous animal.' And Robert Frost put it this way: 'The people I am
most afraid of are the people who are scared.' Why? Because fear causes us not only
to hurt ourselves, but to hurt each other in unwitting, senseless and often destructive
ways. (Homiletics Online)

And so the question is whether or not we are willing to confront what we fear, to name
it, to look into its eyes, and seek out the healing that can only come when we inch
closer to the very thing we think will destroy us. What we find out it—and, to be honest,
in my better moments, I’ve found out as well—is that the very thing we think will unravel
us doesn’t do so, it doesn’t kill us, it doesn’t destroy us. And it isn’t only about us
confronting that fear, that fear of being alone, that fear of not having enough money,
that fear of being too close to someone, that fear of death, that fear of intimacy—it’s
not just our journey that is made better in this life—but also we give away that healing
to our friends, our families, strangers even, who no longer have to be in relationship
with someone who life is controlled by fear. So, I say, stare it down, look into the eyes
of that very thing you fear most, and don’t flinch, don’t be tempted to look away,
because what will save us, emotionally, spiritually, even physically maybe, is our
willingness not to look away, our willingness to neutralize that very serpent, that very
demon that we had thought would kill us, by looking at what we fear, and inching closer
to it, and then finding out that what we thought might kill us, might destroy us, may be
the very thing that saves us, that one day make us truly whole. Amen.