The phrase “to not air your dirty laundry” always struck me as a child when our laundry was regularly hung out on lines across the backyard as I questioned who would be taking a public inventory of my undergarments. The phrase is a strong cultural value of some that personal relationships and private concerns are best hidden from strangers — that self-disclosure can tarnish one’s reputation leading to painful embarrassment and when you have an issue with someone it is best often dealt with directly and not circulated among those who are unrelated to the issue. Unfortunately, the push to not air one’s dirty laundry too often leads some to bury manipulation and abuse, deep hidden shame, and holding secrets from those whose empathy and listening ear can be an invaluable help. Secrets turn to gossip and get spread with grains of truth and make messes.
As unbecoming as dirty laundry might for many be snakes. Who likes looking at snakes, honestly? And the first reading talks about putting the snake up on a pole. One podcast I listened to this past week urged not even reading the first lesson in worship because snakes are just “too creepy”. Yet that is what the reading about is putting the snakes out for open display. The reading asks of us: can we push God too far?” When the Israelites grumble and confess that they sinned, and ask Moses to pray for God to remove the snakes. Moses prays, and God instructs Moses to “make a fiery snake and set it on a pole so everyone who is bitten can look at it and live” (21:8). Moses makes a snake from bronze and puts it on a pole as instructed. Bizzare as it may sound, it works, and when people are a bit, they look at the image and live. Perhaps related today, the Rod of Asclepius is a rod with a snake on it as a symbol still of medicine today and often injections of a bit of a live virus act as a vaccine for the disease itself.
With the talk of dirty laundry and snakes, it is good for us to be slightly uncomfortable occasionally — to face our fears. Talking with a leader of a recovery group this past week was urging participation in Adult Children of Alcoholics meetings and sharing his experience in his therapy to be willing to share openly about childhood hurts and trauma. He said: “to hug that hurting inner child”, is what we all need. He was convinced carries some aspect of a hurting inner child from our unique childhoods which needs a good hug and some love to heal and realize we are not alone.
In a world of hurt and trauma, we often want to shut down rather than listen to more hurt. Unable to take on more, we lack empathy and the ability to relate to pains that take such hurt and sacrifice deep in our psyche and hearts; we put off defenses and walls within and around us.
Jesus tells Nicodemus in the Gospel lesson for today that in him, God seeks not to condemn our weaknesses and hurts but rather the seek and to save — to heal and to restore.
In the film Four Good Days, Molly, a heroin addict, is invited by a former teacher to speak to a middle school class about her struggles. After hearing her story, one student shyly berates her, saying, “I’m sorry, it’s just, that I would never let myself fall that far.” Molly’s response: “Do you know how many times I told myself that? That I’m not going to let myself steal to get high? That I’m not going to let myself lose custody of my children to get high” Recovering from a life of pain, whether that pain is days or generations long, is complex and ongoing. The grumbles and challenges of the exiles in the reading from Numbers depict Molly’s shame and her anger and dignity as they complain to God.
Today’s psalm is a depiction of the profound struggles of addicts. The affliction of drug dependency makes addicts in the words of the Psalm “[loathe] all manner of food” (Ps. 107:18) and drags them along “rebellious paths” (v. 17) as they draw nearer and nearer to “death’s door” (v. 18). Only “[crying] to the Lord“ (v. 19) saves them, whether their help comes directly from God or loved ones. How do we condemn or how might we love our self-destructive self and neighbor? When do we intervene or await God’s intervention?
Jesus discusses with Nicodemus in the Gospel those who do not want their deeds exposed or prefer keeping their dirty laundry in closed hampers one might say rather than deeds that shine brightly. Hidden wounds fester, buried grief’s attempts to be drowned in alcohol or work resurfaces. To heal, we all need to push through the hard truth of reality in brutal honesty and truth. And then we also discover that our hurts and pains are not unique but drawn into a shared familiar community of empathy, healing, and shared resilience.
Jesus compares himself to, of all things, the snake in the wilderness. Jesus becomes a human object of horror, an image of death-dealing, a source of derision — to become life for the world — the wounded healer. Jesus, God among us, meets the worst form of death at our hands, then returns to us with grace and forgiveness. For those who despair about the future of the planet, the worst may come, yet from the reality of our pain and derision God can do great work with our worst.
A bronze snake was raised high to counteract the poison of earthly snakes on the Israelites’ journey from slavery to freedom. Today the church commemorates both Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, renewers of society, who hold up a needed witness. Harriet Tubman, born into slavery, repeatedly walked the North American wilderness from south to north, guiding over 300 enslaved Black refugees from Confederate slavery toward the freedom holding up the trail sign of the Underground Railroad. Tubman wore a bandana as a sign that she was a woman and no longer a child and amidst her own trauma of slavery led many on the path to freedom. Sojourner Truth, whose birth name was Isabella, was freed after slavery was abolished and discerned a call to be a preacher. Taking the name Sojourner Truth, she set out on an evangelistic journey, where people found her testimony to be deeply moving. Tubman and Truth journeyed in the political, social, and spiritual wildernesses of a people that failed to uphold its promises to Black people and women.
Who would consider lifting the image of an electric chair or lethal injection of heinous criminals toward death as a sign of freedom? Yet, the symbol of freedom for our faith inan instrument of capital punishment, embarrassment, and undeserved pain in the cross. Paul writes to the church in Ephesus in the second lesson: “But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace, you have been saved… so that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.
