Jan 29, 2019
From the Pulpit: Fiery Flying Serpents
This is the second in a series of posts dealing with a book of sermons written by my father-in-law entitled From the Pulpit. I would like to focus on a sermon about the story of how Moses healed his people in the wilderness by having them look upon a staff with a brass serpent after they were bitten by fiery flying serpents.
Before I proceed any further, I want to make an important point about dragons (you know, because fiery flying serpents, right?). Dragons are to animals like infinity is to numbers. Not only are they serpents (which we are naturally afraid of), they breathe fire (and honestly, isn’t that the most primal of all super powers?) and they aren’t even tethered to the ground (the stuff of dreams). Anyway, dragons aren’t real, but they trump all the real animals. It’s not really fair, even. Invoking a dragon is like a kid calling out infinity! when competing to name the highest number.
“…because of the simpleness of the way…”
Ok, so the children of Israel were beset by serpents, and the Lord told Moses to put a brass serpent on a staff and hold it up for everyone to see. Those that looked, survived and those that didn’t…didn’t.
So why didn’t everyone look? Nephi says that “because of the simpleness of the way…there were many who perished.” What the hell does that mean? Sure, I get that sometimes people overlook simple solutions, but is that really some deep insight?
Yes, yes it is. At least I want to propose a candidate deep insight. I have been very interested lately in the challenges we face as a society due to the conflict between technological/economic progress and the fact that our brains are stuck in an evolutionary state where the foundation of our happiness is found in relationships.
So I want to compare the simple/complex dichotomy to the economics/relationship divide. Society has emerged from the dark ages by adopting a scientific mindset where we can break everything down to subatomic interactions and then build up powerful machines from first principles… and where everyone’s job is a tiny piece of a complex global economy.
Complex things are built out of a lot of little parts, but they are parts that we can identify and comprehend. We have faith that even if we don’t know how a computer works, there is someone one this planet who could break it down based on every component, and then someone else who could explain each of those components, and so on until we get all the way down to fundamental particles.
Simple things aren’t built out of individual parts that we can analyze and understand. They are either taken at face value, or not taken at all. But nothing is really simple. We just know that everything is really broken down into an infinite number of particles and sub-steps. So if it seems simple, it is really just mysterious. Back in the good old days (i.e., before the enlightenment), people could just accept simple things (like God and Family). But now we don’t trust them.
Accepting simple things at face value didn’t lead to the industrial revolution, the printing press, the periodic table, the cure for Polio, the internet, or anything else that modern people put their faith in. If it’s simple it just means we don’t understand it. If we don’t understand it, we don’t have power over it. So simple makes us afraid.
Now, obviously the explosion of science, technology, and the modern economy happened way after the Exodus, but maybe the story of the fiery serpents is really targeted at the modern age. Maybe it was just a shadow of things to come…that society would ultimately reject the simple so completely that we would start to die of toxic venom (e.g., anxiety and addiction).
In his sermon, Bob compares the brass serpent (i.e., the simple, miraculous thing that can save us from spiritual poison) to the practice of holding regular Family Home Evening. I don’t think he’s too far off, but despite my belief that science and rationality will ultimately lead to the downfall of society, I am still pretty much incapable of accepting something so simple. I need a theory. So here it is:
In order to find happiness in this world, we need to recognize that our brains evolved before money, science, or technology. We evolved in a world where the only way to achieve long term food security was by developing superior relationships and cooperation with our tribe. There was no such thing as a bank account, or even a food silo. Just about the only thing you could store up was loyalty.
The economy may have changed in the past thousand years or so, but our DNA hasn’t. And our DNA says that to be happy we must be secure in our tribe. So in the end, I agree that the Brass Serpent is the Family. To be saved we must avoid the temptation to look at economic success as the solution to all of our problems. Instead we must satisfy the deep, primitive need to be loved and respected by our small band of allies that will stick with us through feast and famine.
