Sinners, Saints, and Snakes:
The Stories God Writes
Tonight, as we celebrate the life of Saint Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, I want to honor the Irish tradition of story telling. When I was in Ireland, an old priest took us on a tour of the countryside with endless stories to invite us into the life of the land. Tonight, I want to mimic this wise old man by telling the stories that invite you into the life of the eternal land – into the Kingdom of God.
Opening I: Sinner and Saint
Sinner and Saint. This seems a good topic in the season of lent. We fast in repentance and wait for the celebration of redemption. This is the time of the year that best holds us in that tension of Sinner and Saint. This is also the title of a story only God could write. Last year, I wrote a paper about Saint Patrick and that was my thesis. I still believe it true. Patrick describes himself in these words: “"I, Patrick, a sinner, least among men, most unlearned, least among the faithful, and despised in the eyes of many."1 And, still, Patrick is a saint.
I’m going to play a Derek Webb song for you called “Saint and Sinner.” The lyrics to the song are under your plate. Please listen and reflect. Before I tell you stories, find your story as a sinner and saint.
Lyrics:
If you want my glory you gotta take my sin
If you want my future you gotta take my skin
If you want my heart you gotta take my blood
If you want my bed you gotta take my lust
‘Cause I’m not a half a man
I’m not a half a man
Lord knows I love you now
But a saint and a sinner is what I am
If you want my spirit you gotta take my booze
If you want my mystery you gotta take my clues
If you want my child you gotta take my kin
If you want my money you gotta take my rent
And it doesn’t get better once you see the light
You wake to find that the fight has just begun
I used to be a damn mess but now I look just fine
‘Cause you dressed me up and we drank the finest wine
Prayer:
Let’s open our time with the prayer of a sinner and saint:
I arise today, through God's strength to pilot me:
God's might to uphold me, God's wisdom to guide me,
God's eye to look before me, God's ear to hear me,
God's word to speak for me, God's hand to guard me,
God's way to lie before me, God's shield to protect me,
God's host to secure me:
Christ to protect me today
Against poison, against burning, against drowning,
Against wounding, so that there may come abundance of reward.
Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ in me,
Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ on my right,
Christ on my left, Christ in breadth, Christ in length,
Christ in height, Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of every man who speaks of me,
Christ in every eye that sees me, Christ in every ear that hears me.
Opening II: Snakes
- Harry Potter II (Snake scene)
- Anaconda
- The Jungle Book (Snake Scene)
- Passion of the Christ (Snake scene)
Table Groups
I’m sure you’re thinking many things right now – probably many of them relate to the level of my sanity, but aside from that, I’d like you to explore what you’re feeling at your tables. You should have a list of questions at each table to discuss. Please take a few minutes to go through these:
- What are you feeling right now?
- What emotions or descriptive words to snakes raise?
- What symbolism do they hold?
- Do you have any traumatizing memories of snakes (previous to today)?
My memory of snakes
My experience of snakes is extreme fear. To say I was a timid child would be putting it lightly. Still, my fear of snakes was worse than my other fears. I remember one day setting out into my back yard only to find a Gardner Snake sitting on the path to our basketball court. I was paralyzed. I ran back into the house and, since my parents weren’t home, I called the neighbor to tell her I was trapped in my house because a snake tried to kill me. Another time, a neighbor boy grabbed a Gardner by the tail and whipped him in the air snapping his neck. This boy became a legendary strength in my mind. His name was Travis but now he was “Travis the great, slayer of snakes.”
There is yet another memory of snakes. In my neighbor’s yard, we found a snake. We decided that we would kill it. We dropped a rock on its head. Sound biblical? We were little Bible nerds in the making, and we were going to crush the serpent’s head. Anyway, we picked the rock up and the snake was still alive. So, we got a bigger rock and threw it harder. Still, he lived. At this point, my stomach was churning. In part, I was afraid that all the snakes in the world would now seek their revenge on me in mythical proportion. In part, though, it felt just wrong. Even thinking of it now brings tears of shame to my eyes. We were dedicated to the painful death of something God created. I left at this point, no longer able to partake in this torture. Eventually, my friends, the crusaders, achieved their righteous goal. None of us ever felt as good about it as we hoped. I was not Becky the Great, slayer of snakes. Travis was no longer great; he was the troublemaker next door. We were not heroes; we were murderers and little more.
Scripture and Snakes
It seems like there is this inborn fear of snakes. That is actually why we are here tonight. When I first heard a myth of Saint Patrick driving snakes out of Ireland, he quickly became my own patron saint. When I mentioned to a friend that tonight we would be looking at pictures of snakes, she threatened not to come and begged me to mention it no more. I don’t think this fear is cultural – or at least it is globally cultural.
What are some of the biblical images of snakes or serpents?
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- The Garden
- 2 Corinthians 11:3 – The Greeks actually believed that snakes crafted their poison be eating certain herbs.2 There was an intelligent intentionality to their poison.
- Matthew 7 and Luke 10 – the good Father will not give his child a snake when asked for fish.
- Leviathan, the sea monster is a serpent the Lord uses as punishment.
- Revelation 20 calls the serpent a dragon, the devil, Satan, who will be bound for 1,000 years.>
Another image of a serpent in scripture comes in Isaiah chapters 11 and 65 and in Micah 7. The serpent is no longer an object of fear. Children frolic over the asp’s hole and carnivorous snakes now eat dust. This craftily deadly creature is somehow included in redemption as it is made harmless. It makes you wonder what happens between the dawn of creation and the completion of re-creation.
Stories
1) Moses and Snakes
Let’s begin with the story of the fiery snakes in Numbers 21.
Then they set out from Mount Hor by the way of the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom; and the people became impatient because of the journey. The people spoke against God and 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 loathe this miserable food."
The LORD sent fiery serpents among the people and they bit the people, so that many people of Israel died. So the people came to Moses and said, "We have sinned, because we have spoken against the LORD and you; intercede with the LORD, that He may remove the serpents from us." And Moses interceded for the people.
Then the LORD said to Moses, "Make a fiery serpent, and set it on a standard; and it shall come about, that everyone who is bitten, when he looks at it, he will live."
And Moses made a bronze serpent and set it on the standard; and it came about, that if a serpent bit any man, when he looked to the bronze serpent, he lived.
In this portion of history, what are the Israelites best at? Wandering, sure. Complaining though. That is their forte. So, here we have them, forced to circumnavigate Edom and back to their complaining. I remember my mom teaching me this story as a child. The thesis and application: Don’t complain or snakes will get you. I don’t, though, think that the complaining of the Israelites is the main point of the story. It is the background. Much like in Garden State, when Andrew is dressed is that wretched shirt and stands in front of the matching curtains, it is possible to lose the story to the background, but let’s neither lose Andrew amidst the floral print sea nor the foreground of our story to the people’s complaining.
So, the people complain again. Sometimes, God hears the complaints of the people and responds with odd generosity, and my odd I mean the grace that is only comprehensible by our gracious God. In chapter 11, God responded to their complaints with food from Heaven, a highly extravagant grace. Here, though, God’s generosity comes through painful rebuke: God sends a scourge of serpents.
The videos that played as we began our discussion were there to traumatize you. I figure, if I’m preaching and I don’t believe in Hell fire and brim stone, I have to be inventive and find new ways to traumatize my audience. No, but I did want to traumatize you. Imagine what the Israelites experienced. You are already hungry and tired. You are wandering in the desert. You assume God has brought you to the desert to die. Now, a plague of snakes comes. All around you people are dying. You see them bit. The bites burn like fire, and so the snakes are named “fiery snakes.” They burn and writhe in pain. Then, they die. Will you be next? Will your family? Maybe you are already mourning someone in your family and every step outside of your tent is filled with fear of the snakes. Every time you climb into bed at night, you wonder who might be waiting to slowly poison you. Trauma.
And so, you, again, find yourself in a place of repentance. You gather your shame up in hand and meet Moses to beg his forgiveness and, through him, beg God’s forgiveness. With tears, trauma and frenzy you ask Moses, “Pray to Yahweh that he might take away this serpent from upon us.” You don’t ask for safety amidst the serpents. They are a tainted image to you and you wish them gone. Your heart clings to the hope that, as you have repented and your faithful leader Moses brings your repentance before Yahweh, the snake will leave.
They don’t. Instead, Moses makes a bronze, idol-like, snake, of the same breed as your tormentor, and places it upon a pole for you to fix your eyes upon. Moses instructs, as Yahweh proclaimed, “It will be that anyone who has been bitten and sees it will live.” The scourge of the snakes has not left, but salvation has come. And as the strangeness of this hits you like mesmerizing wave, you are bitten, pain pulses through your body as the burning scars you and you recalcitrant do as instructed; you gaze into the eyes of the bronze serpent as though they were the very eyes of God and find it strange a serpent saves you.
The thing that hit me as I was studying this passage was that, later in Israel’s life of worship, this same snake became an idol that Hezekiah destroyed.3 The Canaanites worshipped a snake god in a cult of healing as well.4 This just seems strange. Snakes are poisonous and deadly. Snakes are the original source of poison that led Adam and Eve to the apple. How, of all creatures, does a snake become a God of healing?
Let’s stop for a moment and, at your table, talk for a bit about what you are feeling and the strangeness of this mode of salvation.
2) Patrick and Snakes
With this story in hand, I’d like to jump way forward in history to roughly 400 AD and Saint Patrick. Has anyone heard the story of Saint Patrick? You all know that he is primarily a snake charmer right? You know that he came to a plagued people, and unlike the story above, drove the snakes out. Right? If you’re not familiar with the story, let me share with you.
Croagh Patrick is a mountain in the West of Ireland. I call in Pneumonia Mountain because I climbed it and got pneumonia. But, what Croagh Patrick means is Patrick’s Mountain. It is a holy site in Ireland. It is a pilgrimage site. You climb up this mountain whose path is covered with loose rock, making it more difficult, to arrive 2,000 feet above sea level at a wee chapel where homage is paid to Patrick in memory of his snake charming.
One day, as Patrick was trekking across Ireland as a servant and shepherd of God’s people, he set out to climb Reek, what later became Croagh Patrick, and, even later, became Pneumonia Mountain. Like any traveler attempting the hike up Pneumonia Mountain, Patrick grew tired and rested. As he returned to his climb, he was plagued, not only by a torturous path, but by the demon Corra. He fought the demon with his staff. Finally, he pitched his bell at her, sending her away. Corra darkened the bell and it turned to iron. Then she took flight as an exile. Patrick continued his journey with blackened bell in hand.
Reaching the peak, Patrick offered a blessing over Ireland. Like Moses at the Red Sea, he held his bell in the air and rang it. It echoed down from the mountain like a trumpet call as Patrick shouted from the peak, banishing snakes from Ireland. From every rock and every hole, every snake in Ireland was driven, like a lemming, into the mystical green Irish Sea. The snakes, like Corra, were exiles. They never returned to Ireland. Patrick remained on the mountain for 40 days as he prayed for the salvation of the people. Now, those who climb the mountain as a penitent pilgrimage are assured not to be included in eternal death.5 This is a story of utter triumph, of running out an enemy, of absence of adversity in the wake of a sounding bell and resounding cry. This is also a story of untruth. It is a myth. It is a story God did not write. God does not write these smooth ended stories. God redeems, and that is much more messy.
Let’s now turn to a story God did write, the truest story ever told.
3) Jesus and Snakes
Gospel Reading: John 3:13-21
No one has ascended into heaven, but He who descended from heaven: the Son of Man.
"As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up; so that whoever believes will in Him have eternal life. For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him. He who believes in Him is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.
“This is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil. For everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But he who practices the truth comes to the Light, so that his deeds may be manifested as having been wrought in God."
The thing I’d like you to notice is that Jesus is equated to the serpent. Part of this is the ways in which Jesus is the new Moses. Still, with all the dark imagery around serpents, it feels difficult to hear Jesus equated with a serpent. None-the-less, as we discovered before, of all animals, the serpent was a source of healing, so Christ is a source of healing. If you remember the words, the promise in Numbers is that those bitten who believe will not die. In John 3:16, those who believe will not perish – they will not die. But more comes: they will have eternal life. When John uses “eternal life,” he means the kingdom of God. What does this mean? The Kingdom of God. Eternal Life. What are these? They are certainly more than salvation from death. They are certainly not extrication from the world of snakes or banishment of demons. They are a life. They are calling. They are re-creation. They are, in effect, sainthood given to sinners.
The Essence of The Story of Sinner and Saints
Ephesians 2:1-10
And you were dead in your trespasses and sins, in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience. Among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.
But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.
For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them.
In this passage, we see that we were dead. We were all sinners, like any sinner. We walk in the course of this world, in disobedience, according to lust and desire. We were children of wrath. In short, we walked as the Israelites wandered. Complaining and unchanged. Again, this death is not the point. It is not the foreground. Remember Andrew from Garden State again. Remember him lost amidst the background and rescue him from disappearing into that floral fabric abyss. Do not lose the foreground of resurrection and redemption to the background of shame and death.
At the same time as we do not want to lose the foreground of grace to the background of sin, we need to hold sin. The complaining of the Israelites, though background, is not only null. The sin that puts Christ on the cross is not small. The way we lived, as sinners, does not disappear in light of grace. Like Derek Webb says in the song we listened to: “It doesn’t get better once you see the light. You wake to find that the fight has just begun. I used to be a damn mess but now I look fine, ‘cause you dressed me up and we drank the finest wine.” We live in a paradox. The sin of the sinner, though background to the foreground of grace, is still very present and very real. It is death.
Here is our story in a nutshell: We were dead, but God. The most beautiful words: But God. Through God’s grace, God has made us living. God has taken us, sinners, whose works are helpless to save us, and as a gift, has made us alive, saints, with Christ. This life, eternal life, is more than avoidance of death. It is calling. God has prepared works for us, a story for us, for God’s own glory. Our joy, our eternal life, now, is to participate as the kingdom brings redemption.
In Moses’ story, the snakes do not leave: the people are saved. In Patrick’s story, the demons do not leave: the people are saved. In our stories, our sin does not leave, the world’s sin does not leave: we are saved. What is more, we are saved in order to spread salvation. We are sinners, common and missing God’s mark, redeemed, called, set apart, made holy – we are saints.
The Real Patrick
Patrick is such a sinner called to sainthood. Now that we’ve heard the false story of Patrick, I invite you to the life of Patrick as a play. I’ll tell you the story in six acts and through it, you’ll see God as a masterful author who, indeed, writes the story of sinner and saint, dead turned living, lost turned called and finally calling. As Patrick himself said, “My final prayer that…none of you will ever say that in my ignorance I did anything for God. You must understand – because it is truth – that it was all the gift of God.”6
Let me set the stage through prologue - the already in motion story Patrick is born into. Without mentioning anything else of the background, we start where Patrick does: God. In his Confession, Patrick writes, “God himself is the beginning of all things, the very one who holds all things together, as we have been taught.”7 For a minute, close your eyes and meet Patrick’s starting point: only God. <30>
Stepping out of this universal yet intimate beginning, we encounter his family. Patrick’s grandfather was a priest,8 owning land both in the city and one the countryside. His father9 was a deacon, and an imperial tax collector. Patrick’s family foreshadows greatness – but not the type which Patrick’s journey leads him to.
As we set the stage and the curtain rises on our play, we are in a small Roman town on the Western Coast of Britain.10 The town is walled and safe. You hear a soft tune of innocence and luxury and Patrick prances onto the stage.
So begins act one of our play: Patrick’s childhood. He frolics away the years between the city and his grandfather’s country estate. He watches and taunts the slaves tending sheep. Here, the lights would dim and the dialogue become pointed and eerie as it foreshadows something different. (By the way, shepherds, at this time in Britain were not respected; they were in face, the lowest of the low. When Veggie tales, being the historical experts that they are, remade the story of Patrick substituting pigs for sheep, it did well to translate and emphasize how lowly this position was.) Amidst all of this, Patrick is baptized, trained in Christian faith, and well educated. Yet he has no use for the religion of his father and grandfather and is a self-proclaimed atheist from birth.
As Patrick turns 15, he commits some great sin – probably murder and likely the murder of one of those pitiful shepherding slaves. He stands on the stage, murder weapon in hand as through the dimming lights, you see Irish slavers sneaking up behind him and capturing him.
The lights rise on act two with Patrick closing up a one day trip from his past home to his new and future home: Ireland. Even in this dark hour, Patrick, the letter and story, sees that it is the work of God: “We deserved slavery,” he boldly states of himself and the thousands of other youth taken to slavery in Ireland, “for we had abandoned God and did not follow his ways…so God poured out his anger on us and scattered us among the hordes of barbarians who live at the edge of the world11.” The background of Patrick’s story is just like the background of the Israelite’s story and ours: we deserve death.
In the next several scenes of our play, Patrick is sold, sent to the lowliest position – not a cow herder not the prodigal son’s nightmare of pig tending – but a shepherd and slave-owner is made slave: a further step in foreshadow. Next we see the youth encountering the fear of wolves and marauders, the loneliness and chill of cold, dark, and misty Irish hills and everything that is not the privilege and safety his prologue afforded. In this place, the youth also encounters God. Prayer becomes his steady pastime and love his rapidly increasing response to God.
Like in a movie montage, quickly, six years have come and gone turning youth to man and the voice of God meets Patrick in such a state. The Author enters the story telling Patrick, first, “You have fasted well, soon you will be going home,”12 and later, “Behold, your ship is ready.”13 The humble man obeys and thus ends act two. In summation of this act, Thomas Cahill insightfully observes a spoiled youth turned humble man and states, “[Patrick] endured six years of this woeful isolation, and by the end of it he had grown from a careless boy into something he would surely never otherwise have become: a holy man.”14
Act three begins as Patrick journeys. He has come to the coast of Ireland15. High on his awaited arrival, Patrick asks for safe passage only meet hearty rejection. He turns back to the direction from which he came and begins to pray. Before Patrick reaches “amen,” the sailors call after him and offer not only safe passage but an odd – common at the time and place – sign of friendship: their nipples to suck.16 One imagines Patrick turning bright red as he politely refuses the gesture but accepts the sentiment. Act three trails on as Patrick journeys through dessert for 28 days before reaching home.
Here is where our intermission comes. As the lights come up and you go to the lobby for refreshments, you discuss how shocking it is that Patrick may be a murderer. You ask each other when the snakes come in. You marvel at the God who took this atheist to the ends of the earth in order to create a transforming encounter.
Take a minute and discuss the story so far at your tables <1>
Now the lights flicker and you return to your seat. The curtains rise on that same village we began with. The same joyous music is playing as Patrick enjoys a prodigal son like homecoming. However, his happy return is interrupted by a dream. Those to whom he was a slave, from whom he escaped, now come to him and hauntingly whisper in his sleeping ear, “We beg you, holy boy, come and walk among us.”17 Again they come to him, with letters. He reads the first one and cannot bear to read the rest. He will return as a slave to his slavers and as a savior to his captors, bearing that same Gospel that turned a murderous boy into a man of God.
In act five, Patrick returns to Ireland. He weathers peril at the hands of kings, slavers, druids, and even the accusations of his fellow Christians. Amidst all this, he serves and interacts with the people and with their culture as a loving servant. In typical Catholic form, he never asks the people to disavow their gods, culture, or worldview but instructs them, instead, to see all these things in light of Christ. Again, the snakes do not leave, but the people are saved.
This brings freedom of more than one kind. Where once they feared their Gods, they now hate demons.
In the scenes of act five, we mainly see Patrick reaching out to the kings and rejoicing, as Irish princesses become nuns. This also afforded Patrick the great blessing and crescendo of fighting for the rights of slaves and ultimately for the end of slavery. Once a slave owner, then a salve, now a slave to Christ, Patrick’s fight for women and slaves fits perfectly into the epic and circular story God writes for him. And, the seed of an early foreshadowing, as Patrick watched shepherd slaves on his grandfather’s estate, then becomes one himself – this strain of the story come to resolution as Patrick’s influence ends the Irish slave trade and remains a shepherd of people until his death18. He is a sinner – a deadly snake – turned saint. Like I said, a story only God can write.
A Final Story: The Snake
As we come to the end of our stories, I want to remember the snake, the lowest and most despised creature. The one who strikes fear in our hearts. The one equated with Satan – who also, is somehow equated with healing, and eventually equated as a prefiguration of Jesus Christ. One day, we will not fear this snake. As John 3 tells us, we are brought into eternal life, into the Kingdom of God. Here, God writes the stories of sinners turned saints and of snakes who do not strike fear, but who represent redemption. We have become God’s story. As Patrick wrote of himself: ““I – who am myself a letter of Christ for the work of salvation to the end of the earth.”19 He also said, “My final prayer that…none of you will ever say that in my ignorance I did anything for God. You must understand – because it is truth – that it was all the gift of God.”20 Ephesians 2:10 tells us that we are “His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them.” So, before we close through a Psalm, take a moment in your groups to reflect and dream about the story, the letter, God is writing in and through you as all around you sinners become saints and snakes come to represent healing.
Close with the Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22
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Let us now praise the author who is writing this story.
Person 1: Oh give thanks to the LORD, for He is good, for His lovingkindness is everlasting. Let the redeemed of the LORD say so,
Person 2: Whom He has redeemed from the hand of the adversary and gathered from the lands, from the east and from the west, from the north and from the south.
Person 3: Fools, because of their rebellious way, and because of their iniquities, were afflicted. Their soul abhorred all kinds of food, and they drew near to the gates of death.
Person 4: Then they cried out to the LORD in their trouble; He saved them out of their distresses. He sent His word and healed them,
All: And delivered them from their destructions. Let them give thanks to the LORD for His lovingkindness, And for His wonders to the sons of men! Let them also offer sacrifices of thanksgiving, and tell of His works with joyful singing.
Benediction:
May Christ and His Saints stand between you and harm.
Mary and her Son.
Patrick with his staff.
Martin with his mantle.
Brigid with her veil.
Michael with his shield.
And God over all with His strong right hand.
