"The Lesson of the Talking Donkey" (sermon)

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday August 31, 2025
Scripture:  Numbers 22:20-35


I will apologize in advance, since this isn’t Holy Humour Sunday, but a sermon about a story about a talking donkey just begs to be opened with a joke or two.

A talking donkey walked into a bar. The bartender says “Hey.” The donkey replies, “Make it a double.”

A man was driving down the road and sees a sign:  Talking Donkey for Sale.  He is intrigued so pulls over and the farmer directs him towards the barn. He sees the donkey tied up outside and approaches and asks, “You really talk?” The donkey replies, “Yes.” Once he gets over his shock, the man asks, “What’s your story? Why are you for sale?”

The donkey replies, “Well, because I could talk, I wanted to use my skills for good, so I joined CSIS and became a spy. They figured that because nobody would suspect a donkey, I would be able to overhear important conversations between world leaders. I was one of their most valuable spies for 8 years, but then constantly jetting around the world got to me, and I wasn’t getting any younger, so I came home and got a job doing undercover security at the zoo. Again, who is going to suspect a donkey? But now I’m ready to retire, and this farmer doesn’t have any use for me so has put me for sale.”

The man goes to the farmer and says, “Sold! How much to I owe you?”

The farmer replies, “$10.”

The man asks, “Why so cheap?”

The farmer replies, “Because the donkey’s a liar – he never did any of those things he told you.”

I will also say that the temptation to make political jokes out of a talking donkey is there, but I’m not going to go in that direction today.

Instead, I want to look at the heart of the story.  What might this story be trying to tell us?  When we have our weekly bible study, one question that I sometimes ask the group, especially when it is a weirder story and we wonder why it was included in the bible, is, “If you had to preach on this story, what message would you pull out of it?”  I’m often amazed at what the group comes up with, because even in the weirdest stories, there are often at least a couple of different threads of good news that we can pull out of it.

This week, the good news thread that caught my attention in this story is not the fact that the donkey could talk, but the fact that the donkey was tuned in to notice God’s presence.

Balaam comes across as a stubborn man.  God tells him directly not to do anything other than what God tells him to do.  But Balaam thinks that he knows better, and even though God told him to only go if he was summoned, Balaam saddled his donkey and went anyways, without waiting to be summoned.  (And confession time – I have some sympathy with Balaam here.  It is hard for me to wait for something if I’m pretty sure that I know what the right course of action is.  It is hard for me to step back and let God be in control of the decisions.)

So Balaam sets out, God isn’t happy with him, and God sends a messenger, an angel, to block the road in front of him.  And here, don’t think about Halmark Card or Christmas pageant angels – think biblical angels with many eyes and many wings, and puffs of flame, and we’re told that the angel has a sword drawn to block the road.

But Balaam, with his single-minded focus, isn’t able to see the angel and is ready to keep on going.  But the donkey, on the other hand, sees the angel and turns away.  Balaam blames the poor donkey, and beats the donkey for turning off the path, then beats the donkey again when his foot scrapes against a wall on the detour, then beats the donkey a third time when the donkey lies down and refuses to go past the angel.

And finally, God gives the donkey the ability to speak, and the donkey cries out to Balaam, “Why are you beating me like this?”

In the end, Balaam is finally able to see the angel, and recognizes the error of his ways.  He is prepared to return home to await his summons, but God tells him, through the angel, that he can carry on, but only speak what God tells him to say.

The humour, to me, in this story is the reversal of roles.  Donkeys are usually known for their stubbornness; but in this story it is the donkey who is willing to change course while the human stubbornly tries to keep going through the roadblock.

In this story, it is the donkey who is attuned to notice God’s presence, in this case, God’s presence in the form of an angel or messenger; while the human remains ignorant.

We begin our worship services here with an opportunity to share our God sightings – times when we have been especially aware of God’s presence, or times when we have noticed God working in the world.  Sometimes I wish that I had chosen a different name for this part of the service, because God communicates to us using all of our senses, not just our eyesight.  We hear God.  We see God. We can smell and taste God.  We can feel God.  And then there are times when our sixth sense kicks in, and we are aware of God even though we can’t pin it down to any of our physical senses.

But all of this only works if we are tuned in to be aware that God might be there.  Multiple times, people have told me how much they appreciate this time of sharing our God sightings, because it makes them much more alert to noticing God’s presence throughout the week as they go about their day-to-day lives.

There are two pop culture references that jump into my mind when I think about this – one is a line from the U2 song, “Walk On” when they speak about a place that has to be believed to be seen.  And the other one is in Madeleine L’Engle’s book “Many Waters” which includes unicorns, but the thing about unicorns is that you can’t see them unless – or until – you believe in them.  You can ride the unicorns, but you have to keep on believing in them for them to continue to exist.

I could really mix up my metaphors here, and conclude that the moral of the story is to be like a talking donkey and believe in unicorns!

But truly, I think that maybe Balaam did learn something from his donkey.  I think that he learned to be open rather than stubborn.  And I expect that the next time God appears to him in the middle of the road, he will be able to see God’s presence because he will be expecting it.

So maybe one of the lessons from this story is to be like the talking donkey.  To be open to perceiving God’s presence through all of our senses.  To expect God to be present.  And to be open to wherever or whatever the encounter leads to.

And may it be so.  Amen.

 

 

I had to choose between a funny donkey picture

and a sweet donkey picture –

there doesn’t seem to be any in-between –

and went for a sweet picture.

Doesn’t this fella look like he is about to speak?

Used with permission.

"Here Be Dragons" (Sermon)

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday August 24, 2025
Scripture:  Revelation 12:1-17


And now we get to the dragons.  Or a dragon, since there is only one in this story.  This is maybe the most, “Wait?! What?! That’s in the Bible???” story that we are going to read all summer, and I’ve been looking forward to this week all summer.

I have loved fictional dragons ever since I read Anne McCaffrey’s Pern books when I was in high school.  The dragons in her world were majestic beasts, coloured gold or bronze or green or blue.  Each dragon would telepathically pair with a rider, and together, the rider and dragon would protect the planet by breathing fire that scorched the Thread, a lethal substance that fell from the sky like rain.  Her world also contained fire lizards, like mini-dragons, who were two small to be ridden and unable to fight the Thread, but who still had the ability to bond with humans.

I only read the first Game of Thrones book, but I loved Daenerys’s dragons that hatched at the end of it.  Then there is the dragon in The Paper Bag Princess, who is more comical than scary.  There is a dragon in Narnia, specifically in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Actually, there are two dragons, because when the old dragon dies, a greedy selfish child gets transformed into a dragon and needs to be un-dragoned by learning that relationships are more important than gold coins and jewels.

My list could go on.  There are dragons in Tolkien’s Middle Earth.  There are dragons in Harry Potter’s world.  And who doesn’t love Toothless from How to Train Your Dragon?!

And don’t forget the dragon on the Welsh Flag.  In fact, the screen name that I often use on the internet is Draig, which is the Welsh word for “Dragon.”

But the dragon in the story from Revelation that we read today doesn’t have any of the redeeming characteristics of most of these fictional dragons.  The dragon that we read about in Revelation is completely scary, wholly evil.

One of the keys to reading the Book of Revelation is to understand that it is allegory.  The author of this book isn’t predicting some future event; instead, the author is writing about what was going on in the right-now.  But it has always been dangerous to criticize those in power, and so to be safe, the author writes in code, writes in allegory where one thing is standing in for what is really going on.

This book was written in the very early years of the church, in a time before Christianity became adopted as the official religion of the Roman Empire; before, even, it was legal to be Christian.  Which, if you remember your history, led to all sorts of horrible things.  Christians being thrown to the lions, etc.

Our early Christian ancestors were committed to their faith though.  Despite all evidence to the contrary, they knew that Jesus had lived, died, and risen again, and they were convinced that Jesus was the Messiah, the anointed one, their saviour.  Neither death nor the threat of torture and death could sway them from following the Way of Jesus.

This is the world in which Revelation was written – a time when it was very dangerous to be a follower of Jesus, a time when the threats were very real and very violent, and a time when it might sometimes feel like the easier path would just to give up and worship the Emperor in Rome rather than worshipping God as made known in Jesus.

Enter the dragon, and a great cosmic battle.  On one side, we have a woman clothed with the sun, moon under her feet, and a crown of twelve stars on her head.  Fighting on her behalf, we have Michael, and the rest of the good angels in heaven.  In the other corner, we have the dragon, and the dragon also seems to have angels, or messengers of God, on his side.  In the course of the battle, the dragon gets thrown out of heaven, down to earth.

Like I said, Revelation is written as allegory, with people and things within the story representing something in real life.  So let’s explore these symbols a bit more.

Let’s start with the woman, clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and wearing a crown of twelve stars.  The woman is pregnant, and in labour when the dragon attacks her, and we’re told that the dragon wants to eat her baby as soon as it is born.  Typical dragon behaviour.  Her son is to rule the nations, and is taken away to be with God, while the woman is left to run away from the dragon, into the wilderness.

The son is a pretty easy symbol to pick apart, since it is almost certainly referring to Jesus.  A child who was born to rule the world, who was taken out of the world to be with God.

So who then is the mother?  The first answer that pops into my mind is the literal answer – Mary.  The mother who carried Jesus within her body, then birthed him into the world, and raised him into who he became.  Mary, who is sometimes call the Queen of Heaven, and who is sometimes called Theotokos, or God-Bearer.

But that answer doesn’t quite fit, because even though her son was taken from her too soon, she didn’t need to escape into the wilderness after his death, afraid for her own life.

The other option, the other place where Christ is birthed, is in the church.  The church is the Body of Christ.  Every time we baptize a new person, baby or adult, we are birthing a new part of the body of Christ.  Every time we grow together in our faith, we are nurturing the body of Christ.  In many ways, the church that stretches through time and across space is the Mother of Christ and is clothed with glory.  That isn’t to say that the church is perfect – we are still human and we still mess up – but we trust that the Holy Spirit is working in us, transforming us ever-so-slowly, into this glory.

And Jesus was snatched away from the church too early.  He only had a few years with his disciples, who were the foundation of the early church; and after Jesus’s death, even as the church grew exponentially, it was as if the church was thrust into the wilderness without the immediate presence of Jesus, and vulnerable to all sorts of dangers and persecution.

Which brings us to the dragon.  Taken alongside this other symbolism, the dragon is pretty easy to name as the Roman Empire.  The book of Revelation was probably written either during the reign of Emperor Nero, or in the years following his death.  And in case it has been a couple of years since you brushed up on your Ancient Roman History, some of Emperor Nero’s “accomplishments” include:  suppressing a rebellion of the Indigenous people of England.  Burning down the city of Rome so that he could build a new palace, and then blaming the Christian community for the fire.  Murdering anyone who opposed him, and possibly murdering his mother, and possibly murdering his wife.  Laying siege to the city of Jerusalem and destroying the temple. Crashing the economy by abolishing taxes.  Executing both Peter, Jesus’s disciple, and the Apostle Paul.  (Sometimes I wonder if some of our world leaders today aren’t styling themselves after Nero…)

Life under the Emperor Nero wasn’t easy for anyone, not even for those closest to him, and it was especially difficult for the early church who refused to worship the emperor, and who made an easy target because they refused to fight back, they chose to turn the other cheek instead, just as Jesus had taught.  And so Nero and the whole machinery of the Empire slide very easily into the image of a dragon trying to destroy the woman, the church, in our story.

And as much as I love literary dragons, I don’t love this dragon, and I don’t think that this is a story that is primarily about a dragon.  I think that this is a story about hope.  Because the dragon doesn’t win in this story.

The woman, the church, is given wings like an eagle (and here, the eagle’s wings are meant to make us think back to Isaiah, and God carrying the people to safety on the wings of an eagle, and not the eagle standards carried by the Roman Legions).  The woman is carried away to safety, and the dragon turns its rage towards the rest of the woman’s children, the children who remain faithful to God.

Which isn’t really a Happily Ever After sort of ending – more of a Happily For Now.  You have to read through to the end of the book of Revelation to get the Happily Ever After, and unlike any novel, the happy ending is truly forever and ever amen here.  The end of Revelation describes a world transformed into God’s peaceable kingdom, with no more tears, no more pain, no more wars or fighting.  And that dragon?  We’re told that God binds up the dragon with a strong chain, throws it into a bottomless pit, and seals the top.

And so to the original readers of Revelation, rather than a scary book, it is a book that is filled with hope.  It describes the suffering that they are experiencing – using coded language, of course, in case the manuscript falls into the wrong hands – it wouldn’t do for a story depicting the horrific evils of Bad King Nero to fall into the hands of Nero himself.  The book describes for them the suffering that they are experiencing, and reminds them that the suffering isn’t the end of the story.  Our fight against the dragon will eventually end, and if we can hold on long enough, the dragon will eventually be defeated, and God will dwell with us, and we will be God’s people, and God will wipe every tear from our eyes.  Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more. We won’t need the sun and the moon any more, for God will be our lantern and light; and there will be food and healing for all. (Revelation, chapter 21, in case you want to look it up!)

And even though this book was written for a specific group of people, undergoing specific persecutions, I think that this message is for all of us.

It can be discouraging to follow the news these days.  Wars seem to be starting at a higher rate than they are ending.  Children are starving in Gaza while much of the world looks the other way.  Trust is disintegrating, everywhere you look.  People and groups seem to be putting themselves in silos rather than looking for ways to work together.  Everyone for themself, no matter who gets trampled in the process.

And beyond the headlines, I know that many of us are dealing with dragons closer to home – the loss of a loved one, struggling with a challenging diagnosis, conflict within families or between friends.

But for all of us, the message of Revelation is that the dragon isn’t the end of the story.  No matter what dragons you might be facing at the moment, either in your personal life or on the global stage, know that in God’s story, dragons never win.  Hold on, don’t give up hope, and trust in the ending that is coming!

The message of Revelation is that the dragon isn’t the end of the story.  The worst time is never the last time.  Jesus’s story didn’t end with his crucifixion, and the dragons can never win.  We are part of God’s story, and the ending is worth waiting for.

And may it be so.  Amen.

 

 

A Dragon Skeleton I photographed last year

in Conwy, Wales

"Learning From the Long-Winded Preacher" (Sermon)

Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday August 3, 2025
Scripture:  Acts 20:7-12


When I took the Licensed Lay Worship Leader course, many years ago, and we started learning how to write sermons, one of the first things our instructors taught us was don’t try to preach more than one sermon per sermon.  Which sounds silly, but it’s true.  We were beginner preachers, and when you start diving into the richness of the bible, with most readings there are many, many directions that you can go with the reading.  As beginner preachers, the temptation was there to try and say all the things.  But this leads to a sermon that doesn’t have any focus, or too many foci.  “I want to say this about the story, but I also want to say that, and what if I go down this rabbit hole here, and that detail is interesting too.”

Only preach one sermon per sermon, they taught us.  You’ll always have next week to say the thing that you didn’t get to say this week; and don’t forget that if you are following the lectionary, the same reading is going to come around 3 years from now, and you can say that other thing about the story then.

On the opposite side to this advice, I can also tell you about the time that I sat through a 3-hour sermon.  Not a 3-hour church service, but a 3-hour sermon.  The preacher that day was all over the bible.  He would be following one train of thought which would make him think of a bible reading – he would call out a chapter and verse and then point at someone in the congregation, and they were expected to find the verse and read them out loud for everyone, and the preacher would then follow that train of thought for a while.

It was an overwhelming experience for me, as someone not used to this style of preaching.  It was like thoughts and stories and teachings were washing over me.  At the end of 3 hours, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you what the sermon was about, but 16 years later I still remember the feeling of being there in worship that day, and at least one of the points that the preacher was trying to make.

One other important point that I should make about this 3-hour sermon is the context.  I was in a Pentecostal house church in Tanzania.  They didn’t have a church building, and the pastor would travel around offering worship services wherever he found himself.  He showed up at the house where I was staying, as my hosts were members of his flock.  They then sent word to all of the neighbours who might be interested in attending, and once everyone had assembled, the worship service began in the living room.  (And for those of you who can’t imagine sitting there through a 3-hour sermon, don’t worry.  Because it was a house church, it was very relaxed – people were free to wander out and come back in again, and because we were all sitting on the floor, it was easy to shift and stretch and get more comfortable.)

So this was a case where the preacher was trying to say it all in one sermon, because who knows how long it would be before his next visit to this segment of his church.  He wanted to convey as much teaching, as much encouragement to them as he could – almost like filling them up in faith to keep them going until next time.

And when the sermon was done, when the prayers and the singing were over, our hosts brought out a meal and we broke bread together.

Which brings us to the Apostle Paul, and the bible story that _____ read for us this morning.  If you remember Paul’s story, he started out as a persecutor of the very early church, before he encountered the Risen Christ on the Road to Damascus and had a very dramatic conversion experience.  This led to his transformation from the primary persecutor of the church to the primary apostle of the church.  He undertook a series of missionary journeys all around the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas and his visit to Troas that we read about today was on his third and final journey.

Here, he is on the coast of what would be modern-day Türkiye, and he is only able to stay for a week in Troas.  He has never been to this city before, never met the fledgling church that has sprung up there, and history tells us that Paul never had a chance to visit them again.  So he only has a single week to spend with them, and he wants to maximize the time he has with them.

On the last night, Paul starts preaching.  And he keeps on preaching.  I could be funny and suggest that maybe Paul’s persecution of the church hadn’t ended with his conversion if he was going to preach such long sermons!

And then somewhere around midnight – three, four, five hours into the sermon, a young man who had been perched on the window sill to listen to the sermon dozes off.  And when he falls asleep, he loses his balance and falls out of the window, landing on the street three storeys below.

At least Paul pauses his preaching at this point, and he and the others rush down.  The young man died as a result of his fall, but Paul, following in the footsteps of Jesus, raises the young man back to life.  We’re told that the people were much comforted by this, but I suspect that there was also a fair amount of celebration as a result.

As for Paul, he and the rest of his congregation went back upstairs, had a bite to eat, and then Paul continued to preach for the rest of the night, right up until daybreak.

It’s a quirky little story.  When I was planning out worship for the summer, I was tempted to put this story next week when our Session members are going to be leading worship so that they could complain about long-winded preachers and make jokes at our expense, but I decided to tackle this story myself and poke fun at myself.

I would put Paul’s visit to Troas, and his marathon 8-hour sermon, into the Tanzanian House Church category of sermons, rather than the LLWL “Only preach one sermon per sermon” category.  This is the only time that he is going to be able to spend with them, and he wants to convey as much as he possibly can to them.  If he had only preached for 10-15 minutes, the church in Troas probably would have felt cheated out of time that they had with him, like they were missing out on the wisdom that Paul had to impart on them.

But in this short story, we get to see so much of how church can be.  Church is people who want to spend time together.  Church is learning about our faith from each other.  Church is breaking bread together.  Church is healing one another.  Church is serving each other.

The church of the era of this story was very different than what we think of church today.  There were no church buildings – churches would have met in the house of whoever had the most space to welcome everyone.  There were no seminaries, no professional clergy.  Even what we think of as the bible didn’t exist yet – they would have known the Hebrew Scriptures, what we call the Old Testament, as most of the early Christian communities arose out of the synagogues, but the very earliest parts of the New Testament, the letters that Paul himself was writing to the church in different places he visited, these were only just being written at the time of this story.

And yet church still happened anyways.  The people gathered and they would have told the stories that they knew about Jesus – “Do you remember the story about the time when Jesus walked on water?  It went this way, there was a storm on the Sea of Galilee and the disciples were in a boat when they saw someone walking across the water towards them.”  At each gathering, they would have shared bread and wine in a communion meal.  As new people joined the faith, baptisms would have been offered by the community.  And so when someone like Paul came to visit, someone with authority and expertise in the faith, it was an opportunity for the members of the community to go deeper.

In some ways, I wonder of the 21^st Century Church is moving back towards this model of church.  For 1700 years in between, Christianity was the norm in society.  Christianity governed the nations.  Christianity set the laws.  And yet in the past 50 years or so, we have been moving into a post-Christendom world where church-going is not a societal requirement, and those of us who are here are here because we want to be here.

And so I think that a story like the one that we read today can offer us some comfort. We don’t need to be in the centre of society to be faithful followers of Jesus.  All that a church needs is people who want to learn and grow in faith, people who want to share the bread and the cup and offer the water of baptism, people who want to embody Christ in the world, serving and healing the world.  It’s as simple as that.  (Though I rather suspect that we can leave the 8-hour sermons back with Paul.)

No matter what the church of the future might hold, the one thing that has been consistent in the church across the eras is the presence of the Holy Spirit.  It is the Holy Spirit who calls us, the Holy Spirit who equips us, the Holy Spirit who sends us into the world and accompanies us along the way.  The same Holy Spirit who inspired Paul’s words almost 2000 years ago is dancing in our midst today.  For we are the church.  We are God’s church.  And God will never leave us nor forsake us, no matter what shape or form the church might take.  Thanks be to God!

 

 

The conclusion of my Not-8-Hours-Long Sermon
(And not even 3-hours-Long)

But if I didn’t have next Sunday, and the Sunday after that,

and the Sunday after that, who knows how long

this sermon would have been…