BLESS THE BEASTS AND THE CHILDREN dohn'M, Buchanan

Numbers 22 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
May 15, 1983 Columbus, Ohic

The setting we need to create is sc old, perhaps 3500 years, it is impossible totally
to reconstruct. But with the help of archeology, history, and a few maps, some clarity
emerges. The year was 1500 BC, The semitic tribe called. Hebrews was on the march:
from a generation of captivity in Egypt, through decades of meandering in the dry wilderness
of the Sinai pennisula, to the land of Palestine, inhabited by people called Cannanite who
lived in city states with names like Moab, Jericho. The Hebrew tribes were devastatingly
successful: motivated by an intense religious certainty that the land was theirs, hardened
by the discipline of the desert, the armies of the children of Israel seemed invincible,
Their reputation preceded them: the kings of the Cannanite city states lived in mortal
terror of the day when the horizon clouded with dust from the advancing Israelite army.

It was on just such a day that Balak, King of Moab, looked out across the plains on
the far side of the Jordan River, near the city of Jericho and saw it. They had come over~
night. Having defeated the neighboring Ammorites, they were camped, preparing obviously,
to advance on the next objective ~ Moab, Balak's private domain. So Balak gathered his
court and uttered one of the more graphic observations in the Bible: "This horde will now
lick up all that is round about us, as the ox licks up the grass of the field."

Obviously emergency measures were in order. The strategy was to bring in reinforce-
ments, divine if possible. Balak sent a delegation to a mysterious but highly regarded
shaman by the name of Balaam, to hire him to lay a ctw'se on the Israelite horde. Balaam
refuses the offer, the delegation returns to Balak with the reply, Balak renews the invita-
tion, ups the ante, sends a second delegation to Balaam, this time with an offer he cannot
turn down, In the meantime God is having a cunning conversation with Balaam in his
dreams. The text today begins on the morning when Balaam sets out with the Moabite
delegation, heading North, for a meeting with Balak to discuss the matter further.

One further word: every time I heard this story as a youngster I wanted to laugh: not
only at the language, but at the content. It has always seemed ta me a funny story, but
I kept my laughter to myself because it always seemed more appropriate to be grim about
the Bible. I know better now. I have learned that the people who first told it, howled
at ii. It was hilarious. It is a wonderful example of oriental folk-humor, That is not to
say that it is not a serious story, nor that it is not the vehicle of Ged's word to us - only
that it is funny, and that you don't have to endure the pain of internalizing a snicker or
chuckle if you feel one coming on,

Hear now the word of God: So Balaam rose in the morning, and saddled his ass, and
went with the princes of Moab. But God's anger was kindled because he went; and the
angel of the Lord took his stand in the way as his adversary. Now he was riding on the
ass, and his two servants were with him. And the ass saw the angel of the Lord standing
in the road, with a drawn sword in his hand; and the ass turned aside out of the road, and
went into the field; and Balaam struck the ass, to turn her into the road. Then the angel
of the Lord stood in a narraw path between the vineyards, with a wall on either side. And
when the ass saw the angel of the Lord, she pushed against the wall, and pressed Balaam's
foot against the wall; so he struck her 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 ass saw the angel of the Lord, she lay down under Balaam; and Balaam's
anger was kindled, and he struck the ass with his staff. Then the Lerd opened the mouth
of the ass, and she said to Balaam, “What have I done te you, that you have struck me
these three times?" and Balaam said te the ass, "Because you have made sport of me.

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whatever he writes. So 1 read anxiously what Sittler, i#-His—tete70’s,

world-cless—<thinker, had to say to new seminary graduates. He posed
the question of how Christianity gets transmitted from one person to
another, one generation to the next. Listen to how he put it - “As I
tried to discern the tangled history of my own coming to Christian
faith...My whole life has been haunted by the reality of Jesus...I find
that, despite al] the scholarship which has taken place between my seminary
days and this moment, there is no abatement in the power of this haunting
allure of the figure of Jesus." (Trinity Review, Fall 1982, p. 34)

Sittler told how he had been on a program with Krister Stendahl,
one of the leading New Testament scholars in the world, and how a layman
from Iowa had gotten up during the question and answer period and asked
very simply, "Professor Stendahl, how did you get ‘hooked’ on this stuff?"
Again, let's allow Sittler to tell it: "Now we all leaned back and
expected from Stendah] a fairly long-haired description of the nistorical,
conceptual, philosophical path by which many of, us came, and it was a
great moment when Stendah] said, ‘My family and I were not church people
at all and the only way I could rebel against the mores of my family
was to go to church! And when I got to church, within six months, I
fell in love with desus.'" (p. 33/34)

Even those intellectuals who perceive and discern and comprehend
so much more than the rest of us begin here, with the elemental simplicity
of the man. Or perhaps it is because they discern so much that they
can see the centrality of the man..."I fell in love with Jesus. +c

ig uestion is posed first in the..lesson for the dayy™ by Jesus
himself. you love me, Peter?" The®situation is 1 ‘¢ with dramatic
inten o> the night Jesus was arrested and subjected to the humilia-
n of a Feligious trial before Caiaphas, Peter had followed at a safe
distance into the courtyard of the high priest's residence. It was there,
warming himself at the fire, that Peter had been challenged. "You are
one of them!" a young woman had said. And Peter, startled, frightened,
had denied it. Three times it happened that night and each time Peter
denied knowing Jesus, punctuating his third denial with an obscenity.
It is one of the more poignantly human stories in the Gospel narrative,
and it concludes powerfully with the cock crowing and Jesus’ eyes meeting
Peter's and Peter weeping bitterly, devastated by his own humanness.

What occurred next, for Peter, is unclear. Jesus was crucified
on a Friday. If the disciples were around, most of them at least, kept
a discreet distance. On the first day of the week,, Easter Sunday, Peter
was one of the first to discover the empty tomb. And then there occurred
a series of mysterious resurrection appearances. Some time later Peter
and the others are fishing in the early morning when the risen Christ
appears on the shore. They eat breakfast together and tia@ensdnuctune

the stage is set for the conclusion of the
matter of Peter's denial.

=j~

And surely part of it is that the innocence, the uncluttered gaze of Balaam's beast
~ is something like that state of childlikeness which Jesus forever made important and

memorable, Surely part of this funny but surprisingly wise old story is that the child-like -

donkey sees what the high-priced religious practitioner cannot see, And that, I would
submit, is a very provocative topic.

As if on cue, having chosen this text a long time ago, the New York Times Magazine
editors were kind enough last Sunday to publish a major feature article, "The Loss of Child~
hood". The author, Marie Winn, contends on the basis of hundreds of interviews with fourth,
fifth, sixth, and seventh graders, that we have undergone fundamental and major change
in our society in the very definition of childhood. She discusses the ease with which young
ones are able to talk about sex, drugs and pornography. The greatest change, however,
is not the loss of innocence but in our basic attitudes toward children. "Where parents
once felt obliged to shelter their children from Hfe's vicissitudes, today great numbers
of them have come to operate according to a new belief: that children must be exposed
early to adult exprience in order to survive in an increasingly uncontrollable world. The
Age of Protection has ended. An Age of Preparation has set in. And children have suffered
a loss." (NYT Magazine, 5/8/83, p., 18) Marie Winn acknowledges that there is no turning
back to simpler times, that access to television alone guarantees a level of exposure to
and knowledgeability about adult sexuality, unheard of when today's adults were growing
vp. What is needed is the recovery of the freedom and privilege for children to be children,
to enjoy the luxury of uncomplicated innocence.

Bruno Bettleheim agrees. In The Uses of Enchantment, Bettleheim laments that in
education we teach reading skills without meaning and without the stimulation of imagina-
tion. Childhood is the time for the imagination to be exercised and developed in order
that the adult will later see better, more wholly, more accurately, Why is it that the
professional religionist couldn't see as clearly as the donkey? Why is it that you and I
often miss the angel standing in the road ~ if not because we have lost some capacity
to see angels?

It is not peculiar to our life style alone. C. S. Lewis, in his autobiography, writes about
his experience in an English public school {a private boarding school, in our parlance)... "Spiri-
tually speaking, the deadly thing was that school life was a life almost wholly dominated
by the social struggle; to get on, to arrive, or having reached the top, to remain there,
was the absorbing preoccupation...l1t would perhaps, not be too much to say that in some
boys’ lives everything was calculated to the great end of advancement. For this games
were played; for this clothes, friends, amusements, and vices were chosen,” (Surprised

by Joy, p. 168)

Those privileged te be dealing with small children, and the rest of us whase responsibility
it is to give support to the process, need to learm again the necessity, not of preparing
children to cope with hard realities, but of simply being chidlren. Because if they are
not children, there will be a great emptiness later, an incapacity, a poverty which, the
more one thinks about it, is basically spiritual or theological poverty.

“Unless you turn and become like children," Jesus said, “You will never enter the kingdom
of heaven." He did not say, “Unless you act childishly..." Immaturity is not the goal,
It is to become like children. It is a reminder that from its beginnings, in the nativity
story, Christianity depends on the humble, the meek, the unlikely, the weak, for its wisdom.
Shepherds recognize the baby out back while important, educated, powerful people swap
stories at the hotel bar. From the beginning...very modest people are important in the
Christian story, and one learns, after awhile, not to stop Hstening when children or fisher
men or outcasts speak, In the New Testament, more often than not, they say the words
worth hearing. From the beginning Christian faith celebrates the innocent, the sinall,
the meek,

awk

sie

Hans Kung somewhere quips that the list of great people who love
Jesus but want nothing to do with the church would be jong and distin-
guished indeed. And everyone on it has missed the point. You can't love

_\ w\ Jesus without feeding the sheep, and that gets you mixed up with other

ond

folk and before you know it you're in church. ay

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like Even as Jesus was pulling it out of him I believe Peter was

ng a hose instances when love becaine visible, tangible, physical:
when Jesus, moved by compassion had healed his own mother-in-law; when
he gently touched little children; and ate with unclean street people;
and in hot anger overturned tables and drove moneychangers from the temple;
and when in awful majesty at the end knelt in front of each of them and
washed their feet,

I ao (Een was—in-Tove with Jesus betause he had seen Jesus TTve

More than any of them I see in Peter my own attraction to the power
of that kind of love. The allure has always been a love which has inte-
grity and authenticity and strength about it. But there is a sense in
which that strength also repels. How else can we account for the prissy
Jesus of much ecclesiastical art? Robert Clyde Johnson's classic comment
was that the Jesus of modern Protestantism is inclined to be "velvety"
- that in modern hands the Jesus of the New Testament has a “soft streak"
in his personality when, in fact, there is a profound strength which
some found - and find - frightening.

Frederick Nitzsche, certainly no friend of the faith, saw this clearly
in Jesus. A character in one of his novels says about Jesus, "He had
to die: he looked with eyes that beheld everything - he beheld man's
depths and dregs, ali his hidden ignominy and ugliness.“ (Thus Spoke

Zarathustra, in Johnson, "The Meaning of Christ", p. 33)

The allure of Jesus is a strength of a love that can also repel.
After all, falling in love is very risky business. To be in love is
somehow to be more aliy&- and that can be frightening. To be in love
with one person is to love humanity more: it is to experience more,
sense more, care more and hurt more. If you do not want that, if you
do not want your life changed, it is better not to get close to Jesus.
The allure, finally, is that he defines our humanity better than anybody
else. Better than anyone he shows us what human life can be and therefore
what our own potential is.

Sittler confessed to the seminary graduates, "This grave man with
all the pathos and the magnificence of his life must not be betrayed.
I must not talk nonsense about this man, I must not make jokes about
him. I must not trivialize moralistically this awesome figure."