When will we get back to normal?
I just want things to be normal again.
Have you heard that recently? Said it yourself? Gotten really, really used to that yearning for the way things used to be?
Moses knows all about that.
Ever since the moment the people of Israel got loose from Egypt and entered the wilderness, they’ve been demanding to get back to the way things used to be. Egypt wasn’t lonely, like this wilderness. It had melons and garlic. Lots of water and meat. It was better than this stupid wilderness where we have to journey long and work hard to get to the promised land.
I particularly like today’s complaint: “There’s no food and water, and we hate this miserable food [that we miraculously have!].”
Never mind that “how things used to be” was actually slavery and genocide. New is hard. The wilderness – the uncertainty and in-between-ness and loneliness – absolutely wears us out.
The parallel isn’t perfect – COVID certainly didn’t deliver any of us from oppression – but the exhausted yearning of the Israelites in the wilderness might feel familiar to many of us now.
We too complain against our leaders – and sometimes against God – because we’re just stuck. The vaccine rollout is uneven and lots of us aren’t even eligible yet. Schools are open; but it’s wrong. Schools are closed; and it’s wrong. The economic relief is the wrong size and shape and it’s great but it’s awful, too. Remote worship – like manna – is a miracle and a weary grief, both at the same time.
But we’re not going back to Egypt.
We’re not going back to normal – not the same normal we came from, anyway.
God isn’t ever going to put us back where we were. God has bigger plans for us than that.
When we are up to our eyeballs in uncertainty, when things just seem to get harder, it’s natural to want to go back to how it used to be, even if how it used to be wasn’t objectively all that good.
But God wants – God demands – our trust, and our commitment to moving forward, following God to the land of promise. God expects – commands – our whole-hearted commitment to being part of Jesus’ work of life triumphing over death, even when we’re so stuck we feel like we might as well be dead.
And to drop out of that trust, that commitment, is deadly.
Jesus talks about how those who do not believe – who do not commit themselves to Jesus’ promises and mission, who don’t love God’s truth above all – are “condemned already”.
It sounds harsh, doesn’t it?
The people of Israel drop out of their trust in God’s protection and care; drop out of God’s vision of a holy, vibrant people in a land of abundance and promise; and get bitten by deadly snakes.
Also harsh. Scary, in fact.
I can’t make these stories of God’s wrath or condemnation comfortable for you, because I’m not comfortable with them myself.
But I know that they’re being told to us – have been told to generations of God’s people for thousands of years – because the people who wrote them down wanted us to know what they had learned.
That they appreciated a God who would draw boundaries, who would insist on keeping us in the faith, keeping us on the road toward God’s promises, even at the cost of pain to us.
They trusted the God who shows us where we fall away, and provides the incentive to return to God’s path, instead of just letting us wander away until we lose ourselves, and lose our way home.
The people who told us these stories appreciated that God would actively and uncomfortably send snakes to change our minds when dropping back to our old comforts in a broken world seems like a better deal than committing to the work and hope of God’s dream of a holy and healed world for us.
Because whether we like it or not, God’s not going to put us back where we used to be. God has bigger plans for us than that.
And the snakes aren’t actually going to win.
God’s people in the wilderness responded to those snakes by remembering that God actually can and will protect them from death. They ask Moses to plead for God’s help, and God sets up this snake on a pole.
It’s one of the weirder miracles of the Bible. Instead of a direct healing, or the banishment of the snakes, when you get bitten, you look at this image of a snake, and you are healed. It’s a bit nonsensical as an anti-venom treatment, but it’s extremely effective as an anti-doubt treatment.
We don’t passively receive healing for the wounds caused by our lack of trust. We take an action – turning or journeying to contemplate the snake – to place ourselves in God’s hands. To actively, consciously affirm that we are putting our trust in God’s healing, protection, and care.
And then we live. Live more spiritually whole and strong, because the action of re-committing ourselves to God’s care heals the doubt that bites at us.
The healing God offers in Jesus is actually just as odd. The whole world can’t keep it together in God’s path of promise; evil is all over; it’s easy to give up on the commitment to a healed and holy world universally close to God.
Snakes aren’t enough anymore. So God innovates again, with incarnation.
God becoming vulnerable human flesh and dying – dying at the hands of an oppressive human system – that’s a really weird way to save the world.
And it’s another invitation to the kind of deliberate, risky trust that places us directly into God’s hands. With the same result: we live.
Not just live another day, but live abundantly, fully, eternally, joyfully closer to God.
Because God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.
Once we’re in God’s hands, God won’t ever put us back where we were, where we imagine we were comfortable. Because God is always working for universal salvation, and we’re not there yet.
Today, in our wilderness, those invitations to deliberate trust look a little different than the crucifix or the snake, of course. There’s a vaccine – lots of vaccines, actually – which were developed faster than ever before, and about which we still have much to learn. It’s a miracle for which we have to take actions of deliberate trust: roll up our sleeves; search diligently; or wait our turn. Some of those actions are easy for many of us; others are hard. All are actions of trust in God and in our community.
For many of us, it requires an act of deliberate trust to attend remote worship, depending on God to be present and nourish us in new and strange ways.
We have to actively trust in God and one another that our friendships, our essential relationships, will go on and even grow, while we are separated for another week, another month, another long, and difficult time. That act of trust is chosen when we show up – on the phone, by text, by card and letter, on the other side of a mask or glass or computer screen – in all the ways that feel wrong, not enough. Those are the actions by which we stay in the new wilderness, looking for God’s promises together in spite of the discomfort and uncertainty.
We have to actively choose to trust God and one another by planning for continued change, by making commitments to ways we won’t return to normal – like our audio-visual investment at Trinity that commits us to a future where our worship won’t be only in our building ever again.
Because God won’t ever put us back where we were, no matter how much we miss it.
God has different plans for us, and insists that we stay in the journey. God is committed to keeping us in the journey of promise and trust; of change and uncertainty and eternal, abundant life.
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