Signs, and Their Interruptions

Rachel Hackenberg wrote a few weeks ago in the UCC Daily Devotion about the sign Moses didn't want. In Exodus 4:1-4 God tells him to throw down his staff, and it becomes a snake, and Moses does exactly what any of us would do — he recoils. She wrote of her own response had she been Moses, “Nope. No snake signs, thank you. I'll take the purring cat, the whisper in the trees, the open window.” Her point lands where it should: the question is never whether we can recognize a divine sign, but whether we'll accept its interruption.

I want to stay with the snake a moment longer, because there's a detail in the instruction that I can't stop turning over.

God doesn't only say “pick it up.” God says, "Reach out and seize the snake by its tail" (vs 4). By the tail. That is the wrong end. Anyone who has spent five minutes near a snake, or near anyone who handles them, knows you take it behind the head, where the mouth can't reach you. Grabbing it by the tail means it can still turn and bite. So the command isn't just "stop recoiling." It's "pick up the dangerous thing in the way that leaves you most exposed."  Yikes!

But here's what I think Moses was actually recoiling from. Not the reptile itself. (A snake is a bad afternoon; you can back away from a snake.) What Moses was refusing was everything that grabbing it committed him to. Take hold of that writhing thing and you've said yes to Pharaoh. Yes to the plagues. Yes to standing in a court that could kill you, and to forty years in a wilderness you never asked for. The comfortable signs he'd have preferred — the whispering wind or an open window — are comfortable precisely because they confirm without conscripting. They tell you you're on the right track. They don't hand you an assignment. What we refuse, when we refuse the snake’s tail, is rarely the danger itself. The danger is the shape our life takes once we've closed our hands around it.

I'm writing about this because we, as a congregation, have already reached out and grabbed a tail.

In June of 2024 we voted to become a Resurrecting Church. In doing so we named, out loud and on the record, that we were not going to manage a graceful decline — we were going to pick up the living thing and see what it did in our hands. The Justice & Resilience Collaborative is what that looks like now that our fingers are actually closed around it: 174 years of this church's welcome and stubbornness and showing-up, gathered into a body meant to help our neighbors face hard things without facing them alone.

But I want to be honest, in the way this piece is asking me to be honest: we could get bit.

This is not a safe undertaking. We took hold of it knowing it would cost us — money, capacity, the comfort of the familiar, the people it may unsettle. Grabbing the snake by the tail is not a metaphor for confidence. It's a metaphor for obedience that hasn't promised an outcome. Moses had no guarantee the thing wouldn't strike him. He had only the instruction, and his open, exposed hand.

But look at what the snake became.

It doesn't stay a snake. In the moment Moses obeys, it turns back into a staff — and not the ordinary shepherd's stick it was that morning. From here on Scripture calls it the staff of God, the staff "with which you shall perform the signs" (Exodus 4:17). It is the same staff Moses will lift at the edge of the water, when God says, "Stretch out your hand over the sea and divide it" (Exodus 14:16), and the Sea of Reeds opens, and the people walk out of slavery on dry ground.

Sit with that. The very thing he was terrified to grab is the thing that parts the sea. The danger he almost walked away from becomes the instrument of everyone's freedom. There was no other staff. The rod of deliverance and the snake on the ground were always the same object — and the only way to get the one was to close his hand around the other.

So this is the sign, and this is its interruption. Not a purring cat telling us we're fine as we are. But a thing on the ground that stops us in our tracks and asks whether we'll pick it up from the dangerous end, knowing it can turn on us. We already answered once, in 2024. We're answering it again now, every time we keep our hand closed around this work instead of setting it back down.

I still don't know that it won't bite. But I do know what Moses learned with the tail of that snake in his fist: the thing you're most afraid to hold is sometimes the exact thing God means to free people with.

Yeah, snakes can be scary. But with God's help, we can reach out our hands anyway.

Reaching out with you,

Pastor Robin