A Serpent to Kill the Lizard Brain

The Rev. Brad Sullivan
March 14, 2021
4 Lent, B
Numbers 21:4-9
Ephesians 2:1-10

John 3:14-21

A Serpent to Kill the Lizard Brain

So, imagine you are in a desert, the wilderness, with a few hundred thousand of your closest family and friends, and you get to spend most of your day not hunting or growing crops, not worried about what you’re going to have to eat each day because food from Heaven comes down each morning and settles on the ground like dew.  You’ve worked on some housing and shelter, but otherwise, if you want to spend the day playing the lute or pipe and singing and dancing, you pretty much can because God has taken care of your needs.  

Then, you start to cry.  “We don’t like this food!  We’re gonna die!”  That’s what was going on with the people of Israel in our story from Numbers today.  “We don’t like this food (that you give us every day, God)!  We’re gonna die!”

I think of children on a long car ride, kinda hungry, pretty bored, rather uncomfortable.  They probably don’t actually think they are going to die of hunger, boredom, thirst, etc. if they were to think long and hard enough about how they’re really doing.  They might even admit that really, they’re just uncomfortable.  Listening to the anguished cries of those moderately hungry, bored, and uncomfortable children, however, it sounds like they are indeed in the last throws of starvation and death.  

To be fair, I’ve heard plenty of adults make similar anguished cries of, “This is terrible; we’re gonna die,” when really they were just uncomfortable or not overly happy with how things were going.  

So how did the people of Israel, and how do we go from the point of uncomfortable and bored to “We don’t like this food!  We’re going to die!”? 

Well, it has to do with the way our brains work.  There’s the thinking part, the frontal part of our brain, which realizes, “Yeah, no I guess I’m really not about to die; I just need a snack; I’m good.”  There’s also a lower part of our brain, which I call the lizard brain which has your basic fight or flight function.  Lizard Brain sees a threat or a perceived threat, and it starts getting us a little more anxious, a little more agitated.  It doesn’t know that the hunger we feel isn’t actually life threatening.  Lizard Brain just knows “hunger bad!”  As we go, if Lizard Brain starts to get really scared, it initiates lockdown, a fight or flight response to the real or perceived threat.  The thinking part of our brains is actually shut down, and we begin acting and even making decisions based on this lowest lizard part of our brain which simply says, “There’s a threat:  Eliminate or Run?”

We see this all the time with road rage, with people screaming at a cashier, with family members shouting at each other.  When people say something in the heat of an argument that they instantly regret and don’t really mean, or when they’re in an argument and start making stupid arguments that they later realize they don’t even believe, that’s when Lizard Brain has taken over.  

That’s the condition of our brains.  We really don’t like being uncomfortable, we’re not overly fond of anxiety, and we absolutely abhor uncertainty.  Our brains want resolutions to problems quickly; our brains want to collate information and get it tucked away in the appropriate place so our world makes sense and we feel safe. 

When situations or things register in our brains as uncomfortable or possibly threatening, Lizard Brain starts to raise its little lizard head.  For the children, uncomfortable in the car on the long drive, the lack of comfort brings Lizard Brain to the fore, the fight or flight response kicks in, and you get the anguished cries of children who have just had a snack and yet are starving…to death.  

So, we have the situation in Numbers in which the people of Israel were railing against God for bringing them out of Egypt just to die of hunger in the wilderness.  They were in the desert, they were nomadic, and they were really tired of the miserable food God kept giving them every day…they were dying of hunger because they were tired of the food.  Israel was not afraid of dying, even though they claimed they were.  Israel was on a long car ride:  uncomfortable, anxious, and full of uncertainty about the future:  three things which Lizard Brain abhors.  

As a response, God sent serpents among the people.  That seems a bit much as a response to complaining, and certainly not something I would recommend parents do on the car ride.  So, other than God being angry and wanting to hurt the people who had slandered him with lies about his mistreatment of them and them being near the point of death, what might be going on with this serpent attack?

I had this idea that what if the serpents were a little less literally poisoning and killing people and a little more poisoning the people as the serpent did in the garden of Eden?  With that idea in mind, I checked with my favorite Rabbi, and one of the coolest people I know, Annie Belford.  She pointed me to commentary by 11th century Rabbi Rashi who wrote about this passage from Numbers: 

God said, as it were: Let the serpent which was punished for slanderous statements come and exact punishment from those who utter slander. — Let the serpent to which all kinds of food have one taste (that of earth; cf. Genesis 3:14 and Yoma 75a) come and exact punishment from these ingrates to whom one thing (the manna) had the taste of many different dainties (see Rashi 11:8) (Midrash Tanchuma, Chukat 19).  

Like the serpent in Eden, the people of Israel in the wilderness were telling slanderous lies against God, that he was killing them, making them starve to death.  In fact, God had cared for them and sheltered them and kept them safe and well fed, but Lizard Brain was taking over in the people and so they made their anguished cry of, “We’re gonna die.”

Then, whether God sent serpents which actually killed them with literal venom, or if the serpents were killing them with more deceit and lies, God had Moses set up a bronze serpent for the people who were bitten to look upon and be healed.  

Now, this bronze serpent was not like Medusa in reverse.  It wasn’t magic, as though if it happened to cross into someone’s line of sight, suddenly they were all better.  It wasn’t an idol or a god to bring healing.  The bronze serpent worked as people looked upon it and realized, “That’s what I’ve become.  I’ve become as the father of lies, trusting my own anxiety and Lizard Brain rather that trusting in God who has freed us and kept us safe.”  They would look upon the bronze serpent with true repentance, let Lizard Brain quiet down for a few moments, and the serpent would kill the lizard.

That’s a big part of religion and religious practices, to help us silence Lizard Brain and return to trust in God and peace in our hearts.  See when we’re fully freaked out, thinking, “We don’t like this food; we’re going to die,” and Lizard Brain is in control, our thoughts and beliefs aren’t usually enough to bring us back to trust and peace because the thinking parts of our brains are shut down when Lizard Brain is in control.  

We need more than thoughts and belief when Lizard Brain takes over, we need actions, we need habits, we need a bronze serpent, so to speak, to kill the lizard.  Thus we have habits and practices of prayer and meditation, of scripture reading, of silence and breathing, of daily turning our lives and wills over to God, and daily taking stock to see how we did and where we might need to seek correction or reconciliation.  

Thats the idea of Lent.  That’s the idea of practicing daily habits of our religion, learning over and over to trust God and then, when Lizard Brain does take over, to use our well established practices as a bronze serpent to kill the lizard.

So parents, when your children make slanderous cries of how wicked you are for bringing about their immanent death after a few hours in the car with snacks and water ready at hand, I suggest again not releasing a box of serpents on your kids.  Rather, I suggest instilling in them or suggesting to them over time a habit of religious practices to help them return to God with trust and peace so they’ll have some bronze serpents with them on the long car rides.

For adults who also have times of Lizard Brain hijack, I recommend the same thing.  Develop habits over time of religious practices: prayer, meditation, breathing, walking, reading scripture, creating, noticing beauty.  Develop these habits so that they can serve as bronze serpents to kill the lizard when it rears its little lizard head, and then return to God with trust and peace.