“If you tell me Christian commitment is a kind of thing that has happened to you once and for all like some kind of spiritual plastic surgery, I say go to, go to, you're either pulling the wool over your own eyes or trying to pull it over mine. Every morning you should wake up in your bed and ask yourself: "Can I believe it all again today?" No, better still, don't ask it till after you've read The New York Times, till after you've studied that daily record of the world's brokenness and corruption, which should always stand side by side with your Bible. Then ask yourself if you can believe in the Gospel of Jesus Christ again for that particular day. If your answer's always Yes, then you probably don't know what believing means. At least five times out of ten the answer should be No because the No is as important as the Yes, maybe more so. The No is what proves you're human in case you should ever doubt it. And then if some morning the answer happens to be really Yes, it should be a Yes that's choked with confession and tears and. . . great laughter.” ― Frederick Buechner


Texts:

Psalm 35:1-10 

Numbers 22:22-28

1 Corinthians 7:32-40

If God could use an outsider to bless Israel, who is to say God could not also use an animal to reach that human?

The story of Balaam's donkey is peculiar.  It sounds like something from the place of fairy tale and myth.  As Balaam is going down the road on his donkey, the donkey sees an intimidating looking angel on their path   At first, the donkey turned the other direction.  The second time, the donkey tried to walk to the side, scraping Balaam's foot against the wall.  The third time, the donkey laid down in the middle of the road.  The fascinating part about this exchange is not that the donkey could see the angel but Balaam couldn't.  It isn't even that the donkey spoke: "What have I done to you, that you have struck me these three times?"  The fascinating part is that Balaam responds to his talking donkey, as if holding a normal conversation with a human: "Becuase you have made a fool of me!  I wish I had a sword right now in my hand!  I would kill you right now!"  

"Because you have made a fool of me..." How often do we hurt those around us because we believe they have made fools of us?  How often do we make fools of ourselves and look for someone else to blame?  Sometimes, we refuse to see the humor God has placed in us broken creatures.  We take so seriously our images and our egos that we forget we were made in joy.  We were made with missing parts, with rough edges, with beauty and mystery, and so often we are so busy trying to make it look like we are not missing any of our parts, like our rough edges have been chiseled to perfection, hiding the beauty and the mystery and the joy of having been made good, but not perfect.

If the RCL had asked my opinion (they didn't), I would pair this text with 1 Corinthians 4:7-10:

7 For who sees anything different in you? What do you have that you did not receive? And if you received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift? 8 Already you have all you want! Already you have become rich! Quite apart from us you have become kings! Indeed, I wish that you had become kings, so that we might be kings with you! 9 For I think that God has exhibited us apostles as last of all, as though sentenced to death, because we have become a spectacle to the world, to angels and to mortals. 10 We are fools for the sake of Christ, but you are wise in Christ. We are weak, but you are strong. You are held in honor, but we in disrepute.

The Corinthians know a thing or two about keeping up appearances, but they miss some of the crucial points of what it is to be community.  Of course, this is easy for me to say, nearly two millenia later, but how different are we from they?  "We are fools for the sake of Christ, but you are wise in Christ.  We are weak, but you are strong.  You are held in honor, but we in disrepute."  It is when our ego is shattered, when we realize we have nothing we can depend on that we realize how truly broken we are, that we cannot hide the rough edges or the missing parts.  We despair, thinking this is God's refusal to love us becuase we cannot imagine God working differently than we do.  Deep down, we imagine a God that judges us on our facades of righteousness and our exterior presentation of self.  Eventually, all of this is stripped away, laying bare our brokenness.  It seems God prefers to work through our rough edges and missing parts, transforming what we would hide about ourselves into gift.  Brokenness is where God does God's best work.  It is when we are hiding, afraid that we cannot face another day, that God comes, coaxes us out of our hiding places, and reminds us that our deservingness is not - and has never been - the grounds for our holiness.