Scripture: Numbers 22:22-35
This is going to be a somewhat whimsical sermon, though I do mean for it to have a few serious ideas in it before I’m done. Whimsical first of all in the choice of subject matter, which in a way comes from General Synod, the national meeting of the UCC I just came back from, but not from any of the content of the synod itself. At General Synod there is a tradition of an unofficial publication that is handed out every day and that consists of just sort of odds and ends that may or may not relate directly to anything on the agenda. It offers, for instance, some information about the city we were meeting in, and because water was a recurring symbol and theme of the synod and especially the worship services, one day it offered some examples of how much water it takes to produce various things like a hamburger and just whatever strikes the fancy of the self-appointed people who take it upon themselves to do this. This little publication is called Balaam’s Courier, and for no better reason than that the publication reminded me of the Biblical story of Balaam, I decided to preach on that story today.
It’s a somewhat obscure story, known maybe to some people but certainly not in the way a story like David and Goliath is known to many people who aren’t very familiar with the Bible at all. So this sermon is whimsical in that sense, just sort of “why not preach on a rather obscure story from a book of the Bible that is also rather obscure, the book of Numbers. Maybe I’ll pick some other sort of “out-of-the-way” stories for preaching over the next few weeks; maybe not—I haven’t decided yet. It’s also whimsical in the sense that the story itself is somewhat whimsical, clearly meant to be treated with a light hand, not presented as though it were full of somber, profound, philosophical pronouncements. It’s a story that many consider to be a folk tale that found its way into the Bible. Why not just for fun take a look at it and see where it leads. So…Balaam.
But first some background. The story of Balaam is several pages longer than what we heard, and the whole story of Balaam needs to be placed in the context of the larger story of which it is a part. Numbers is one of the first five books of the Bible. It is part of the Torah, which for Jewish people I would say is a bit like the four gospels are for Christians. It is the most fundamental, you might even say the most sacred, of all the sacred writings. Not that the rest of what we call the Bible is not important, but the Torah and, for Christians, the gospels have a special status.
Four of the five books of the Torah are concerned with the Hebrews escape from slavery in Egypt and their subsequent forty year wandering through the desert wilderness on their way to the promised land. Numbers is the next to the last book in that sequence of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. I suspect if the question was asked: which Book of the Bible do you think would be most unpleasant to read, most boring or most objectionable or most irrelevant, many people, many non-Jews anyway, might choose Leviticus. Numbers might come in second. Like Leviticus it contains various instructions that God dictated to Moses to sort of elaborate on the ten commandments. Many of them are about things that don’t concern us anymore, or that clearly are relevant only to another time and culture. The book of Numbers gets its name from a census that God commanded Moses to take of the various tribes for purposes of determining who was available for fighting and for priestly service. It deals with how the people are to be governed, sort of by law type questions. It does not contain those pesky verses some people pull out in arguments over homosexuality, but it does have plenty that is frankly not riveting reading or in any apparent way relevant reading. But it does have some stories and through it all has a larger story to tell.
The larger story Numbers tells is essentially this. A couple of years into their sojourn in the wilderness the Hebrew people had gotten themselves into trouble with God. They were complaining about the tough life they were leading, some wishing they were back in Egypt, grumbling among themselves, doing crazy things like making golden calves, wanting to depose Moses as their leader. God decided this group of people was not really deserving of getting to the promised land. God would wait for the next generation to come along. They were the ones that would get to enter the promised land. But that required waiting forty years, for the old generation to die out and the next generation to come along.
When our story today picks up the forty years has passed, and the Hebrew people are poised on the edge of the promised land. There are lots of them. The number Numbers gives is about 600,000. Whether you trust the number or not, the point is that this was not a raggedy group of a few hundred people. This was a horde. They had to travel through a land called Moab in order to get to where they were going and the king of Moab wasn’t too happy about it. Hundreds of thousands of these people descending on his little country was not a happy sight. He was of course afraid of what they might do—murder, rape, plunder—who knows what, and there were obviously too many of the invaders to consider fighting them off.
So the King of Moab sent for a famous sorcerer to come and curse the Hebrews so that something would happen to make them go away or make them so weak that the Moabite army could handle them. The name of this sorcerer was Balaam. When the Moabite dignitaries approached Balaam with this proposition offering him appropriate gifts and rewards, he said let me think about it. Overnight he had a little conference with God, the God of the Hebrews, though Balaam was not Jewish, but then maybe he recognized the God of the Hebrews as being everybody’s God. In any case, God—Yahweh—told him not to do this. So Balaam went back and told the Moabites no. He had prayed about it and he didn’t really feel this was what God wanted him to do. The emissaries took the news back to the Moabite King, whose name was Balak, but Balak wouldn’t take no for an answer. He sweetened the pot, sent higher up dignitaries back to Balaam with an offer way beyond appropriate, an offer he couldn’t refuse. Balaam said, “let me think about it.” Another overnight conversation with God, who this time is reported to have said essentially, “if you really want to go, go ahead, but do only what I tell you to do.” So Balaam took the money and went with the Moabites back to their country with the intention of pronouncing a devastating curse on the Hebrew people.
This is all before the part of the story you heard this morning, but I have a sort of side comment on just this much of the story. Isn’t it interesting how the will of God can so easily be confused with the will of human beings? I don’t know how many times I have heard clergy type people say, for instance, that they have prayed about it and they sincerely feel that God is calling them to a different church, which just happens to be a church with a larger salary, or more members, or more prestige, or located in a seaside resort with a parsonage on the waterfront, or whatever. I’m not suggesting that people who say such a thing are being knowingly and intentionally hypocritical, but I am suggesting that when human beings try, even very sincerely, to hear the word and will of God particularly for them, they (we) are very susceptible to hearing most clearly what we want to hear. This is one of many reasons why we should be suspicious when anyone, including ourselves, especially including ourselves, thinks that they are in possession of the will of God.
In the story, God actually gets angry at Balaam for going with the Moabites right after God is quoted as having said that it’s ok for Balaam to go with the Moabites. Some people are disturbed by this, thinking that God is being inconsistent and arbitrary, one minute saying it’s ok for Balaam to go, the next minute saying it’s not, and getting angry at Balaam for acting like it was ok when it was God in the first place who said it was. I have a different interpretation. I think what God is quoted as saying is what Balaam heard, but that what Balaam heard is not what God intended to say. What we want God to say, what we wish God would say, what we are ready to hear God saying to us is not the same thing as what God is saying. Recognizing our almost infinite capacity to confuse our own self-interest or preconceptions or assumptions with the will of God is part of what it means to walk humbly with God.
And speaking of walking humbly with God, that seems to me to be a large part of what the rest of the story is about as well. Balaam’s mode of transportation we are told was his trusted donkey, who took him everywhere, so Balaam goes with the Moabites and sets out to accomplish his task, goes to find these Hebrews so he can curse them real good. As he goes, for a reason that is explained to us the readers but which is a mystery to Balaam, the donkey veers off into a pasture and begins to graze. Balaam figures the donkey has just sort of lost focus, yells at it, hits it upside the head to get its attention, and they continue their journey. A little later they’re passing along a part of the road where there are vineyard walls on both sides and the donkey again veers off to the side, causing Balaam’s leg and foot to be scraped painfully against the wall. This makes Balaam downright angry and he takes it out on the animal, whacks him pretty good, and gets him to go on. A third time an angel of the Lord appears, who the donkey has seen twice before and who has been the one causing what Balaam sees as the donkey’s strange behavior. This time the donkey just lies down in the road, refuses to go any farther. Balaam completely loses control, beats up on the donkey and threatens to kill it.
At which point the donkey speaks. “Balaam! Why are you hitting me and cussing me out. You’re going to curse the Hebrews and here you are cursing me too. Your friend! Haven’t I carried you all over God’s creation and been your faithful companion all these years? Am I in the habit of leading you astray or quitting on you for no reason?”—“No”—“Well then…”
Now sometimes people get hung up over the fact that there’s this story in the Bible with a talking donkey. Are we supposed to take this as a legitimate miracle? Evidence of how primitive the Bible is? A fairy tale? Or what? But the point of this story is not that the donkey talks. It is that the donkey sees, sees more than the human being in the story who is famous for his special powers. Balaam is all caught up in who he is and what he is doing. He thinks he has talked with God, knows God’s will, is embarked on this mission to do God’s will, a mission for which he is very well qualified and for which he is being very well paid. He has forgotten that maybe, just maybe, he isn’t so clear about God’s will after all, that he is supposed to keep on listening for and seeking God’s will, that thinking you’ve got it isn’t quite it. Furthermore, in the process of getting all caught up in his important work, Balaam has forgotten who his real friends are. In the story Balaam actually is less open to God and less insightful about the things of God than his donkey. It is not clear so much which one is the ass. Or to put it positively it is clear that both the donkey and the human are God’s creatures. The story to me is an encouragement for all of us to walk humbly with God.
It is also a story about cursing and blessing. I suppose you could look at this story in the larger context I was talking about earlier and say that the point of the story is that God will find a way to accomplish God’s purposes. In this case that purpose seems to be that the Hebrews should get to the promised land, as God promised they would, and so God sends an angel and enlists the help of a donkey to see to it that Balaam’s and Balak’s scheme to issue a devastating curse on the Hebrews that would destroy them or keep them from getting where they are going, to see that that scheme will fail.
I’m not so comfortable with that point of the story. I’m not so comfortable with the idea that God accomplishes God’s purposes by intervening in our lives in quite so active or direct a manner. I tend to think of God’s will being done, or I think of it more as God’s dreams for us coming true, I think of that happening through much more subtle and mysterious interactions between the human and the divine. For me this is not a story about how God may use different techniques but that one way or another God will get God’s way. It’s not a story about God pulling the strings behind the scenes.
And I am also not comfortable, definitely not comfortable, with the notion of the promised land being the promised land, that is the notion that the land of Palestine, which is where the Hebrew people were headed in this story and where it seems that God willed them to go, I am definitely not comfortable with the idea that the land of Palestine belongs, by divine command, to the Jewish people. Especially given the violent and sorrowful current history of Palestine and the competing claims to the land based on competing scriptures and claims to understand the will of God, especially in the light of all that, I cannot go with any point of the story that implies that it is God’s will for the Hebrews to enter, conquer, occupy, and own the land of Palestine and therefore we should cheer when the donkey lies down under Balaam because that is helping that grand scheme to be accomplished. I need to block out that larger picture if I am going to read the story of Balaam with a friendly eye.
But I do believe there is a smaller point here, or maybe not so small. Balaam was on his way to curse the Hebrews. The angel of the Lord was sent to prevent this act of cursing. The donkey saw this, understood this, and helped to prevent the cursing. And when Balaam cursed the donkey, the donkey called him on that too. The story continues past what we heard this morning. In spite of the angel and the donkey Balaam continues to carry on as though he will send his curse on the Hebrews. He does it three times but three times God prevents him and in the end Balaam ends up offering the Hebrews a blessing instead of the curse that was first intended.
The simple thought occurs to me that it is not God’s will for people to curse each other, whether the people being cursed are Hebrews on the way to the promised land or not. It is not God’s will for people to curse each other, no matter who it is. And so I close with not a whimsical but a wistful thought. The wistful thought is: Wouldn’t it be nice if everywhere and all the time people who set out to curse other people ended up offering them a blessing instead? Better, wouldn’t it be nice if that wistful thought were something more than a wistful thought, something more like an earnest prayer and a lived reality. Isn’t it our calling as people of faith to do our part, however we may be able, to turn curses to blessings beginning with whatever curses there may be within ourselves. And more than that, may our constant prayer be that all God’s people know what it is to be blessed. Amen.
Jim Bundy
July 19, 2009