Strange Tales, Week 2
A Guide of Sorts
Each week picks up where Sunday left off. A sermon can only hold so much, so these six mornings go back into the passage and sit with the parts we ran past. Read the short passage first, in your own Bible if you have one handy. Then read the reflection. Then pray, in these words or your own. Six days, Monday through Saturday, and then we are back together.
One thread runs under all of it. We are people who like to name things before we understand them, and skip the parts we cannot name at all. This whole series is leaning how to practice the opposite. So, every morning the hope is to keep asking, one way or another, the same two questions...
What am I trying to name before morning?
Where is God in the part of the story I usually skip?
Strange Tales, Week 2:
Monday:
"God said to Balaam, 'You shall not go with them; you shall not curse the people, for they are blessed.'… That night God came to Balaam and said, 'Get up and go with them.'"
- Numbers 22:12, 20
Before there is a talking donkey, there is a God who seems to change the instructions. Do not go. Then, go. And then, once Balaam goes, we are told God is angry that he went. If you have ever wanted the Bible to hand you clean, consistent directions, this passage is going to frustrate you on purpose.
Here is what I think Balaam missed before he ever saddled the donkey. He treated the instructions like a formula: say the right thing, run the ritual, and out comes permission. Feed the machine correctly and the light turns green. But God is not a machine that pays out once you finally work the mechanism right. There is no lever, no combination, no version of the request that guarantees the answer you were hoping for.
That is not because God is withholding. It is because God is a companion on the road, not a vending machine at the end of it. A companion adjusts. A companion says wait, and then says go, and then walks alongside you while you get it wrong along the way. A machine could never do that. A machine only ever gives you back what you put in.
Where is God in the part I usually skip? This morning, right here, in the murky middle, in the discomfort of a God who will not be reduced to a formula.
Where are you treating your relationship with God like a machine, running the same request through again and again, instead of walking with a companion who might answer differently than last time?
A Prayer for Today
God, I keep looking for the lever that guarantees the outcome I want. Teach me you are not a machine to be worked, but a companion to be walked with. Amen.
Tuesday:
"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… Balaam struck the donkey."
- Numbers 22:23
Here is the joke at the center of the story, and it is a sharp one. Balaam is a seer. A professional. Kings pay him good money because he is supposed to perceive what ordinary people cannot. Seeing is not a hobby for him. It is his entire résumé. And he cannot see the angel standing in the middle of the road with a drawn sword.
The donkey sees it. The animal with no status, no title, no reputation, no fee, sees the holy thing first. And Balaam, the one whose whole career rests on his eyes, is blind.
I want to sit in how uncomfortable that is, because I am usually Balaam in this story. I am the one with the credentials and the confidence, sure I can see clearly, striking at the very thing trying to save me. The people we have quietly decided do not count. The voice with no authority behind it. The kid, the newcomer, the one nobody thinks to ask. Scripture keeps insisting that these are exactly the ones who tend to see the angel first.
It is worth asking, honestly, whose sight you have already discounted. Not because they are wise or credentialed, but because sometimes the ones closest to the ground see the sword in the road before the rest of us do.
Whose voice have we, as a church, decided we do not need to listen to, and what might they be seeing that the rest of us can't?
A Prayer for Today
God, forgive me for the people I have stopped listening to. Open my ears to the ones with no title who may be seeing you more clearly than I am. Amen.
Wednesday:
"Balaam's anger was kindled, and he struck the donkey with his staff… 'Because you have made a fool of me!'"
- Numbers 22:27-29
The donkey saves Balaam's life three times. She presses into a wall and crushes his foot to avoid the sword. She lies down in the road. And each time, for the trouble of saving him, she gets beaten. Three times.
Notice what she does not do. She never throws him. She never bucks him off the road and forces him to safety against his will. The only thing in her power is her own body, into the field, into the wall, down onto the ground, and she leaves the rest to him. She saves him by putting herself between him and the sword, at her own cost, every single time, and she never once takes the choice away from him. That is worth sitting with if you believe, as I do, that God does not save us by overriding us. God saves us by standing in the gap, again and again, at God's own cost, and waiting to see if we will finally stop swinging.
I have beaten a few donkeys in my life. People who told me a hard truth. People who slowed me down. People who would not just get out of my way, and I was so sure they were the problem that I could not see they were the rescue.
Who has been trying to protect you that you have been treating like an obstacle?
A Prayer for Today
God, show me the stick in my own hand. Show me who I have been striking when I should have been thanking. And loosen my grip. Amen.
Thursday:
"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?'"
- Numbers 22:28
A donkey opens its mouth and speaks human words, and Balaam's response is to argue with it. He does not fall over. He does not gasp. He does not register, even for a second, that a miracle is happening. He is so consumed by his anger that a talking animal barely rates.
Notice that the donkey does not defend herself with an argument. She does not list what she saved him from or narrate the danger he never saw. She just asks the plain, honest question: have I ever done this to you before? No spin. No interpretation. Just the flat truth of the years they have already spent together. Some of the truest things anyone ever says to us are exactly that plain, and we miss them anyway, because we are too busy being right to notice we are being loved.
What am I trying to name before morning? Sometimes what I am really doing is naming everything as a threat, because I am too angry to name it as a gift.
What grace might be right in front of you that your anger is keeping you from seeing?
A Prayer for Today
God, when I am angry I go blind to you. Cool me down enough to notice the mercy I am about to strike. Amen.
Friday:
"Then the LORD opened Balaam's eyes, and he saw the angel of the LORD standing in the road… and he bowed down, falling on his face."
- Numbers 22:31
Notice who does the opening. Balaam does not finally squint hard enough and make out the angel on his own. He does not achieve sight through effort or expertise. The Lord opens his eyes. Seeing, in this story, is a gift he receives, not a skill he masters.
And once his eyes are open, look at what the story does next. The line between the angel and the donkey goes soft. She had turned away in the exact places the angel says she saved him. She did with her body, for three days, what the angel had apparently been doing the whole time, standing in the gap, refusing to let him ride onto the blade. I do not think that blurring is an accident. I think it is an invitation to ask whether the presence underneath Balaam this entire time, the one he kept beating, was ever separate from the presence he was finally allowed to see.
If that is true, then God was not missing from this road until Balaam's eyes opened. God was the one he had been sitting on, and hitting, the whole time. The miracle is not that God finally showed up. The miracle is that Balaam finally noticed who had been carrying him.
I take strange comfort in this. It means I do not have to earn my clarity, and it means the God who saves me is not hovering somewhere out ahead, directing things from a safe distance. God is close enough to be struck. God is close enough to be mistaken for an obstacle. And God stays anyway, leaning toward my life, waiting for my eyes to open.
Where is God in the part I skip? Sometimes I am the part I skip. Sometimes I am the one who cannot see, and the mercy is that God was never far enough away to miss.
What would it mean to stop looking for God somewhere out ahead of your trouble, and start noticing the presence that has been carrying you underneath it the whole time?
A Prayer for Today
God, open my eyes. Not because I have worked hard enough to deserve it, but because I cannot do it myself. And when you do, let me see that you were never as far away as I thought. Amen.
Saturday:
"Balaam answered… 'Must I not take care to say what the LORD puts into my mouth?'"
- Numbers 22:38
Balaam came all this way to curse. It is the job he was hired for, the reason the king's money is in his bag. And when he finally opens his mouth over Israel, blessing comes out. Three times he tries, and three times he can only say what God gives him to say.
There is a pattern worth naming on your way out of this week. A donkey's mouth gets opened, and it turns out she had been saying true things with her body for three days, just not out loud. A prophet's eyes get opened, and it turns out God had been present the whole road, just not yet visible. And now a prophet's mouth gets opened, and it turns out the blessing was already there, ready, before he ever tried to curse. Nothing in this chapter is new information. It was all already true. It just finally became audible.
That is worth remembering the next time you assume God has gone quiet on you. God does not usually go from absent to present. More often, God goes from present to audible, waiting on us to stop swinging the stick long enough to hear it.
Tomorrow we meet a grieving prophet, a crowd of mockers, and two bears, in one of the verses most of us wish were not in the Bible at all. We are going to refuse to skip it. But this morning, sit with a man on a donkey who set out to curse and could only bless, and ask what that might have to do with you.
What would change in this town if we became a people whose mouths could only bless the ones we came prepared to write off?
A Prayer for Today
God, get hold of my seeing so completely that it changes my speaking. Turn the curses I have ready into blessings I did not plan. Amen.