A Tale of Two Donkeys
Numbers 22:23-31; Matthew 21:1-11
A Sermon Delivered by Thomas J. Boone, Ph.D.
Central Presbyterian Church, Mobile, AL
Palm Sunday, March 16, 2008

Have you ever felt like you just don’t understanding what God’s doing in your life? Maybe you’ve been through a long period of financial trouble, and nothing seems to change even though you’ve been praying overtime for God to change the situation. Maybe you’ve been through a long period of trouble in marriage and even though you’ve been praying for God to make things better the problems don’t go away. Maybe you have a friend facing a protracted serious illness and even though it seems like a million prayers have gone up to God to heal her, it seems as if God’s not doing anything about it.

People seem to see God working plenty in the Bible. Look at Abraham and all the conversations they have: isn’t God clearly working there? Remember the time when angels came down the road on their way to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah and Abraham bargains with them? Or take Moses for example. It seemed like Moses and God had a physical interaction at times, God seemed that real. Then take David. If there was ever a case for someone seeing God work day to day in his life, surely it was David.

But wait, not so fast. There had to have been periods of time when David didn’t feel or see God working. How else do we explain verses like “You have seen, O Lord; do not be silent! O Lord...wake up!” (Psalm 35:22-23a); or “I waited patiently for the Lord” (Psalm 40:1); or “For God alone my soul waits in silence,” (Psalm 62:1). Then hear the words of the prophet Habakkuk who pleads with a silent God, “How long, O Lord, am I to cry for help, but you will not listen? Or cry to you ‘Violence!’ yet you will not save?” Evidently, people even in the Old Testament knew all too well the pain of God’s silence.

It’s not always easy to understand what God’s doing. Why does one Christian find a job quickly and another Christian go without for long periods? Is God more present or showing more favor to the person who finds the job? No, but neither can anyone say exactly why there’s a difference between the two when both are devoted to the same Lord. It’s not always easy to recognize that God is at work when circumstances appear to the contrary.

I’ve shared before that when I was in Chicago one of my jobs was as a Starbucks Barista. But, what I’ve not shared is the backdrop to that job. In my 5th year my stipend expired so I needed money: you know how it is with people in graduate school, they’ll do about anything if you pay them. I looked for work for about three months and couldn’t find anything. I had been praying, but it seemed like God wasn’t interested. Maybe you can relate. I’d been divorced by that time so I was thinking the natural thoughts most people think: is God punishing me? Have I disappointed God too much? During one long walk home, I reached bottom so I went humbly to my church and for the first time I asked my Pastor for help. He did help me, and he told me that God was going to use all this somehow. He assured me that God was working and hurting for me, even though He was doing something I couldn’t yet recognize.

Then he handed me a paper that had come through the church’s fax machine that very morning. It was a job opening for a part-time church secretary. Now, let me tell you something about this. Not only was this possibly an answer to a long period of prayer and waiting, but God had kept me from several other jobs until this one came along. I got the job because the Pastor was thrilled to have another Pastor be the church secretary. I had gone from an Associate Pastor of a large, “Who’s-Who” church in NJ to a Ph.D. candidate, to a church secretary. The irony wasn’t lost on me, but quite frankly I didn’t care.

But, it didn’t stop there. At the same time I started working at the church God brought another job to me. One of the women from my church was a manager at a Starbucks, and when she found out I was looking for part time work she asked me immediately. She had just lost a couple of employees and needed an older and reliable person. That was also the year of 9/11 and I became the pastor to many young people at Starbucks who had become disenchanted with the world and life on account of that fateful day.

So while I was complaining against God, doubting myself, and worrying about finances, God was all the while waiting for me to become humble enough not only to take a job as a church secretary when I had been a Pastor, but also to take a Barista job and apply all my pastoral skills into a situation where God needed me to reach hearts for Him. God was working to make me humble and open to His leading where He took me; I just wasn’t able to see it at the time.

I share that story with you because I want you to know that even Pastors have had to learn the lesson that no matter who we think we are, or how bad our circumstances appear to be, God is working. But, that doesn’t mean we’re always going to see it, and we may even be so blinded by our circumstances that we think He’s not even concerned any more. Our problem is that too often the boxes we use to understand God are too small.

This is the tale of two donkeys. In our readings from this week we had this great story in the Old Testament about a man and his talking donkey. It’s also the week we remember Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey. There’s a tale of two donkeys here, and it’s this: God’s at work, but it’s easy to miss. And sometimes God doesn’t want us to see Him; He wants us simply to have faith that He’s there, appearances to the contrary.

In Numbers, Balaam is a non-Israelite prophet in the service of a king who’s afraid of the Hebrews as they get closer to Canaan. They had chalked up a few victories, and word was out about this group of wandering nomads who were able to cross through the Nile and defeat the Egyptian army. So the king told Balaam to curse God’s people, thinking that a curse from a prophet would help. Balaam considers it, but then God visits him in a dream and says, “Don’t do it, because these are my people.” Balaam heard God, even though he wasn’t an Israelite, and he told his king that he couldn’t curse God’s people. Risky move, but rather than kill the prophet the king decided to attempt another persuasion; this time by sending important people who promised him fortune if he would only curse the Hebrews. Still Balaam refused, but then God told him later on to go ahead to meet the Hebrews, but only speak what he heard God saying.

Where the story gets a little odd is when the donkey that Balaam was riding talks to him. You see, along the way the donkey saw that the Lord was standing in the road and appeared to be trying to kill Balaam, so the donkey tried to save Balaam by veering off course. What makes the story humorous is that Balaam couldn’t see the Lord getting ready to kill him, so he became increasingly mad with his donkey while it was running into walls and scraping Balaam’s legs trying to get away from the Lord. Finally, after a few beatings by Balaam, the donkey looked up at Balaam and basically says, “Hey, what’s that for? I’m just trying to save your life.” At that moment the Lord reveals himself to Balaam who promptly falls flat on the ground and humbles himself.

It’s a hilarious story when you think about it in these terms, but the way the story’s told forces us to ask why the Lord was angry with Balaam? Wasn’t he doing God’s will? Well, that all depends on how you define doing God’s will. Was he “doing” what God said, yes. But, here’s the catch: his heart wasn’t right. Sure he was appearing to obey God, but in reality he was doing it to benefit himself. Notice what the text says in verse 32. “I have come out as an adversary, because your way is perverse to me.” He’s referring to verses 15-19 when the second delegation comes to Balaam and his response shows that he had money, power, and recognition in his heart, not serving the Lord. And because of that while Balaam had ears to hear God, his heart obstructed his view of what God was really doing. Sometimes we can be so blind to God that even a donkey will see what we don’t see, which is the point of this story.

The second donkey, the one we normally focus on in Palm Sunday, carried Jesus through Jerusalem. Now in this story the donkey was neither talking nor walking Jesus into walls. So what’s the connection? Just as Balaam wasn’t seeing what God was doing, the people who saw Jesus weren’t getting what God was doing. For years God’s people had been waiting for a Messiah, but when Jesus came strolling through Jerusalem on a donkey they had no clue what was really happening. They thought the Messiah would come as a national liberator, not a spiritual one. They wanted to be freed from Rome; they had no idea that God was operating on a much larger scale. They were measuring ounces, God was measuring kilotons. The Messiah came riding on a donkey, for everyone to see; people couldn’t fathom a God who’d come down from heaven to destroy death itself. So they missed what God was doing.

In these tales of two donkeys we perceive our tale whenever we fail to comprehend that God is working. Sometimes God blinds us, as he did with Balaam, and sometimes we’re too concerned with our own agenda, as was the case with the people of Jerusalem. Our boxes can be so small, can’t they? Sometimes stress binds us so we forget our freedom in the Lord. Sometimes bottom lines, timelines, and deadlines keep us from living life abundantly as Jesus wanted. How deceived we can be by illness, unemployment, bills, marital strife, and change that we become blind to the work that God’s doing right now.

In all of this, God’s not promising us that if we get our hearts right we’re always going to see God in every way. But, what He is promising us is the good news that as we take steps to bring our hearts in line with the Lord’s righteousness our faith will increase. We won’t always see the Lord at work in our lives, but we can trust that despite all appearances God is present with us. We can trust that God is our greatest cheerleader. We can have faith that He is with us in the storm doing exactly what we need for our greater holiness. And it works this way for us because this is the witness we bear to a world that cannot fathom the real God or perceive His goodness. In all things God is seasoning us for the greater work of His kingdom that flows to the world through us. Amen.