Numbers 22:22-35
August 25, 2013
God’s anger was kindled because he was
going, and the angel of the Lord took his stand in the road as his adversary.
Now he was riding on the donkey, and his two servants were with him. The donkey
saw the angel of the Lord standing in the road, with a drawn sword in his hand;
so the donkey turned off the road, and went into the field; and Balaam struck
the donkey, to turn it back on to the road. Then the angel of the Lord stood in
a narrow path between the vineyards, with a wall on either side. When the
donkey saw the angel of the Lord, it scraped against the wall, and scraped
Balaam’s foot against the wall; so he struck it again. Then the angel of the
Lord went ahead, and stood in a narrow place, where there was no way to turn
either to the right or to the left. When the donkey saw the angel of the Lord,
it lay down under Balaam; and Balaam’s anger was kindled, and he struck the
donkey with his staff. Then the Lord opened the mouth of the donkey, and it
said to Balaam, ‘What have I done to you, that you have struck me these three
times?’ Balaam said to the donkey, ‘Because you have made a fool of me! I wish
I had a sword in my hand! I would kill you right now!’ But the donkey said to
Balaam, ‘Am I not your donkey, which you have ridden all your life to this day?
Have I been in the habit of treating you in this way?’ And he said, ‘No.’
Then the Lord opened the eyes of
Balaam, and he saw the angel of the Lord standing in the road, with his drawn
sword in his hand; and he bowed down, falling on his face. The angel of the
Lord said to him, ‘Why have you struck your donkey these three times? I have
come out as an adversary, because your way is perverse before me. The donkey
saw me, and turned away from me these three times. If it had not turned away
from me, surely I would by now have killed you and let it live.’ Then Balaam
said to the angel of the Lord, ‘I have sinned, for I did not know that you were
standing in the road to oppose me. Now therefore, if it is displeasing to you,
I will return home.’ The angel of the Lord said to Balaam, ‘Go with the men;
but speak only what I tell you to speak.’ So Balaam went on with the officials
of Balak.
I think this story about Baalam is really interesting,
and I think this for two reasons. The first reason demonstrates my immaturity,
but the second reason has to do with the fact that Balaam’s story demonstrates
how God often works in ways we neither expect nor appreciate.
Let’s start with the reason that has to do with my
immaturity. I’ve always found the Balaam story to be funny the way it was
translated in the older versions of the Bible. In newer versions of the Bible
it says that Balaam died his donkey to a tree and walked a ways to meet the
king, Balak. But in older versions, where donkeys were called “asses,” it says
that Balaam tied his ass to a tree and walked a mile. See, I told you I’m
immature.
Still, when I tap into my more spiritually mature
moments, I recognize that this story reveals a lot about our experiences of
God, and how God uses the supernatural to impact us. Our passage takes place
after Balaam has begged God to let him speak to King Balak about the Jews.
Neither one are Jewish, but Balaam is still considered to be God’s prophet. And
he feels the need to speak to Balak, but God forbids it. Balaam begs, and
finally God relents. Then, after further consideration, God decides that this
is not what Balaam should do, so he sends an angel to appear to Balaam’s donkey,
blocking the path with a flaming sword. Why not appear to Balaam, too? It
doesn’t say, but I have a theory: it has to do with the fact that at this point
Balaam is interested mainly in his own interests and plans, not God’s. Balaam
is closed off to God. But the donkey, being a creature of God, is still open to
God. The point is that whether we experience God or not often has more to do
with our own openness to God then with God’s availability to us.
This leads me to my own coincidental/providential
experience, which eventually led me to come to Calvin Church. I had something
of a Balaam experience the first time I drove through Zelienople. It wasn’t
quite the same. There were no donkeys or angels that I could see, nor any
beatings. But there were things going on in terms of where God wanted me to
eventually serve as pastor.
At the time I was in the midst of taking the year off to
write my Ph.D. dissertation. I also had just begun the process of interviewing
with churches for my return to ministry once my dissertation was completed. Diane
and I were living in the North Park in a house surrounded by fields, trees,
turkey, and deer. I was spending six to eight hours a day reading and writing.
I had recently finished writing the first three chapters of what became a
10-chapter, 400 page dissertation.
I had recently sent to my first and second supervising
professors (we call them “readers”) my introduction and Chapter 1. Like many
Ph.D. candidates writing their dissertations, I sent mine off, convinced (or
hoping) that my erudition, insight, and writing would amaze my professors. I
sent off a pristine package of pages, proud of my work and expecting the best. Several
weeks later I received back these same pages, covered in red ink. Everything
was torn apart. My sentence structure wasn’t good enough. My citations weren’t
done properly enough. My insights were criticized. My conclusions were
questioned. Almost all Ph.D. candidates have similar experience, and when we do
we go into a bit of a funk since our egos have been squashed. I was no
different. Receiving the first round of critiques from my first reader crushed
me. Then he delivered worse news: “Scott, your second reader, should be sending
his comments by the end of next week.” And when I received them, there was even
more red ink. I was left feeling depressed.
Diane, trying to talk me off the ledge, had an idea to
cheer me up. She suggested that we go to Sharon, Pennsylvania to try the wings
at Quaker Steak & Lube. You may not know this, but I am a big fan of
chicken wings. In fact, having spent a number of years playing in lacrosse
tournaments in the Buffalo, New York area, I became a bit of a wing snob. Back
then I could eat wings all the time. Unfortunately, since then I’ve also found
that you really can’t eat wings all the time because they’ll not only end up in
your belly, but bulging your belly. Anyway, she tempted me by telling me that
they had a reputation as having the best wings in the world. I wasn’t going to
let that challenge go untested.
We decided to drive there via route 19 to see the fall
foliage, which meant we had to pass through Zelienople. I was singing along to
whatever song was on the radio as we crested the hill to descend into Zelie.
Immediately I was intrigued. I had never seen the town before because I had
always passed by along I-79.
As we drove through Zelienople, I kept saying to Diane,
“Now this is the kind of place I’d like to live. Look at this!” Something deep was striking me about the
town. It felt almost like I was driving through home. We drove around the town,
looking, and as I passed by all the churches I commented on them, saying things
like, “Now that church would not be a good church to be a pastor of because
there is no room to grow. That church there has potential, but it is too close to
the surrounding buildings.” We took a right on 68, just to see what was there. As
we approached Calvin Church, I said, “Wow, that’s a church with potential. You
can see that it has room to grow, and if you just look at the sign out front,
you can tell it’s a church that isn’t stuck in the past” (you’d be surprised
what you can tell about a place by even the most inane things). I then wondered,
“What are the chances that they would be looking for a pastor?” I had asked
that question more in jest than seriously. It seemed unlikely that I would
consider Calvin Church because at the time I was working on starting a new
church in the North Hills of Pittsburgh.
We turned around, got back onto route 19, and I didn’t
think much about it again. Eventually we got to Sharon, had our wings (which
were good, but not as good as the ones from the place I consider to be the
pinnacle of wingdom: Mammoser's Tavern
in Hamburg, NY), and came back home via I-79.
8 months later I was contacted about an opening at Calvin
Presbyterian Church. It floored me. Was this the church I looked at? I had to
find out, so I sent in my forms to be considered for the position of pastor.
Still, it didn’t occur to me that I would actually come here. I was really just
hedging my bets. As I mentioned, I had been working on starting a new kind of
church in the North Hills area, and was working on it with Pittsburgh
Presbytery. At first, that experience had been positive, but recently it was
becoming more difficult. I was experiencing resistance from some of the other
churches who saw this new church idea as a threat to their churches.
The idea I had for a church was VERY different from new
churches being developed at the time. Those churches were built on contemporary
Christian praise music and small groups. I wanted to create a church grounded
in spiritual growth, where pushing people to grow deeper spiritually through
worship would be a focus. As to music, I had a novel idea. I had come to the
realization that in life virtually no one listened to only one kind of music.
When most people get in their cars, they listen to some sort of combination of
pop, classic rock, country, r&b, classical, jazz, talk, and news. They move
around the dial, looking for songs they like more than just genres that they
like. Almost no one listened to just one form of music (in a poll this past
Sunday morning, on how many just listened to classical, only 4 out of 200 in
attendance raised their hands), so why only offer one kind of music in worship.
Most people listen to a variety. So let’s offer music of every kind. I also
wanted worship that integrated prayer, silence, praise, weekly communion,
preaching in a conversational way, and a number of other ideas culled from
different Christian traditions. No one had a name for this kind of worship. I
discovered ten years later that a new name had since emerged, which is
“emergent.” I was trying to start a church much like the Hot Metal Community
Church on Pittsburgh’s Southside, but in the suburbs.
While developing my ideas for that church, I also
interviewed with other, more established churches. I had turned down offers
from some because I felt more called to start this new church. In the midst of
all this, the search committee from Calvin Church contacted me to interview me.
Could they come and hear me preach? Since I wasn’t serving in a church, the
best I could do was to have them come and see me teach a class at Southminster
Presbyterian Church in Mt. Lebanon. The committee decided to drive down on a
night of driving rains and high winds. The committee not only watched me teach,
but afterwards decided to pull chairs in a circle and interview me. When
members of Southminster suggested that the classroom was being shut down, and
people were going to other events, the committee said, “That’s okay, we’ll
straighten up and turn the lights off.”
We then had a 45-minute, laughter-filled interview. Once again, I was
starting to become intrigued by Zelienople.
Several months later, the committee invited me to be the
next pastor. I turned them down, saying I was committed to seeing if I could
start a new church. They wouldn’t let me turn them down. They said, “What if we
just agree that you decide in December, after the presbytery decides whether or
not to go forward. If they do, we’ll keep looking. If they don’t, you come
here.” Again, an amazing response. It really seemed like God was all through my
contacts with Zelienople and Calvin Church.
In December of 1995 we took the new church idea before
Pittsburgh Presbytery. Some pastors walked out of the meeting early, protesting
the idea and stating that money shouldn’t go into this church, but should go
only to inner city churches. The evangelicals complained that the idea wasn’t
evangelical enough, with one pastor stating that only contemporary churches can
work in the suburbs. Others complained that it wasn’t liberal enough. It was an
awful experience, made worse by the fact that I wasn’t allowed to defend myself,
or the church idea, because of procedural rules. Then, some of the pastors made
false charges about my motivation for proposing the idea, with one pastor
standing up and saying to the whole assembly, “Graham’s only proposing this
because he can’t find a church anywhere else willing to take him!” By this
point, I had actually turned down several offers from other churches, was
holding onto an offer from Calvin Church and another that had just come in from
Columbus, Ohio, and was in the interview process with three others in Maryland
and Philadelphia. I understand why he said it, though. Three pastors of the
North Hills had met with me two months before over lunch, and had said point
blank to me, “We’re worried you are going to take our members, so we’re going
to do whatever we can to make sure you don’t get this thing off the ground.” They
had told this pastor that I was only doing this out of desperation. One of the
three apologized to me three weeks after their lunch with me. He did speak on
behalf of the new church idea at that presbytery meeting. Still, the meeting
had become so toxic that the members decided to table the vote for the February
meeting. I walked away knowing that this new church idea really wasn’t God’s
will for me.
I’m not sure whether the new church idea originally was
God’s idea or my own, but the negativity and toxicity that had begun to
surround it had become much like an angel appearing before the donkey and Balaam.
Perhaps I was seeing for the first time what God really wanted. I walked away
from that meeting, got home and cried for 10 minutes, called up the chair of
the Calvin Presbyterian Church search committee, and told her that I was coming
to Calvin Church. What had begun almost a year earlier with a trip to get
chicken wings turned into a clear sense of God’s calling to come to Zelienople.
From these coincidences, these God-incidence providences,
I’ve learned a number of lessons, but I want to share two.
The first lesson is that just because we don’t sense God, that doesn’t mean God’s not doing
anything. We generally depend upon our seeing and hearing when deciding
whether or not God is doing anything in our lives, or in life in general. If we
can’t see or hear tangible evidence of God working, we tend to think with some
certainty that God either isn’t doing anything, or that God doesn’t exist.
I’ve discovered, through my experiences, that God is often
doing many things beyond our grasp. Sometimes we catch glimpses, such as my
driving through Zelienople, but because we don’t think it’s significant at the
time we don’t attach it to God. In those cases, the most insignificant seeming
things can eventually become the most. At other times we catch no glimpses, but
time passes and we look back, discovering that God had been doing things all
along, bringing events together, and making things happen in areas we never
knew. For example, at the same time I was driving through Zelienople, Calvin
Church was just hiring an interim pastor and getting ready to create a search
committee. Just because I didn’t know that didn’t mean that God wasn’t doing
anything.
A second lesson I learned is that we have to learn to become spiritually sensitive,
recognizing any moment or any experience as being potentially filled with God. I’ve
learned that our inability to see or sense God often has to do with our own lack
of sensitivity. We have to learn to become open to God, asking “what do you
want,” rather than “God, do what I want.”
The big question is, how do you get to be that open? For
Christians there’s a simple formula: Way
follows Will. If your will is in the right place, where you really put your
will in a place where you want to discover God, the way will become clear. Often
we confuse this, thinking that will must follow way. In other words, if God
shows us the way, we will will it to be so. But in the Christian life, way follows will. This is a common
message throughout Scripture. When we will what God wills, the way to discover
God’s will becomes apparent because God reveals it to us. God leads us to learn
how to pray, how to read Scripture, how to worship, how to live. The point is
that we have to put our will in the right place, and if we do, God will help us
to find the way.
So, in summary, God is doing something in your life right
now. The question is, are you ready to discover it?
Amen.
