My Odessey to The Ass

I shared the scripture portion in an earlier post (Num. 22). Now I am telling you what Balaam’s Ass means to me.

Now I am over sixty years old and I look back across my years: I see that I spent almost all of my life learning, living, and promoting the unique, twisted doctrines of my heritage.

I have repented heretofore. I owe a great debt to all the others I sought to bring to my version of “the faith.” I have tried to say that elsewhere in my own voice and name.

Here I seek to tell you about Balaam’s Ass.

In my Bible training I found the story arresting, but even my brilliant teacher did not really unpack it for me. He did have a saying that has done me well. “God has a lot of unusual tools in his tool chest.” Amen.

As I entered into my late twenties it dawned upon me that most of the theology books I consulted were written by incredibly spiritual people of faith who were outside of my heritage.

I also slowly and repeatedly noticed that people I taught were often preloaded with respect for God and scripture.

I continued my own education as a nontraditional student, finding teachers with real faith and real truth and astounding insights at numerous turns in the road.

The importance of truth regardless of who spoke it brought me back again and again to Balaam’s ass. Even Balaam.

At one point, I chose as a personal research topic a study of the miraculous and its connection with false prophets in the Old Testament.

I was amazed to learn that God allowed false prophets the ability to work wonders and to speak “prophetically” even while they promoted their personal error. This was haunting to me. I concluded that numerous false prophets might well have been true prophets for God at times in their lives. Like Balaam.

Then I continued to suppose my heritage still was following important doctrinal truths which I was open to question but unable to see any loop-holes within.

Then I was given the tools and light dawned. I was nearly forty when that happened. It was during my last ministry tenure, too. Cracks of light were coming at me from a variety of ways, but the answers were being hammered out largely alone and within my study. This was fragile and filled with trial, error and self-doubt.

It was years before others too were publishing what I had come to see even if it was a fuzzy puzzle for me.

Today I recognize my heritage was a denomination while I grew up taught to think it was nondenominational.

I was taught that we were a unity movement, and certainly there had been some historic moments when that is how we had seemed to behave. However, many of those previous events were combative debates and therefore illusions of unity efforts.

I was not taught peacemaking but holy war!

In fact, my heritage has splintered repeatedly (80 plus times) and seems not to have the tools for any repair or healing with the smallest exceptions. We were sectarian and no unity movement in point of fact. In fact those spun-off have been even more hard-bitten, bitter sects. Strangely one of the more unity-driven prophets from among came from one of these sub-groups rather than the mainline. In the mid-seventies one of our foremost leaders remarked in an assembly that our congregations “ought to take out full page ads apologizing for how we had behaved.” I eventually wanted to leave my church with its baggage.

Truth had always been much revered by my forebearers and rightly so. Strangely we seemed like ancient Israel to kill our own prophets that arose from among us.

As a young adult I tried to be a minister of the gospel and after several churches I decided that my church punished ministers for seeking to better learn and teach challenging truth.

Today that feeling has been replaced with a clearer understanding – yes it was true. Nevertheless, some ministers were able to dance the dance in that tension better than others. Some were somehow able to maintain their livelihood as ministers and grow and challenge and change the church somewhat all at the same time. Not me.

Over-time I learned that my truth was based in the wrong-headed assumptions. Our hermeneutics were crippled. My truth was twisted. I tended to under-value or even devalue the very personage of and our relationship with God, his Christ and the Spirit.

I came to be ashamed of myself and my heritage. I kept measuring other churches looking for a better place to go. There were many with parts of the truth, but very few that seemed healthy. Today I think postmodernity has forced a number to rethink and change at least somewhat. God is still using earthern vessels!

Now I see that the church is like my own dysfunctional natal family. It too has along with its baggage also given certain gifts to me.

I was able to return to school again and therein I began to face my shame and I found that I was a damaged soul too. One always becomes like the thing we worship! Idol worshippers become like their idols, even dead truth and twisted truth! Beware my friend, there are demons in the road and well as angels with swords drawn!

Now in retrospect I see that God was grinding stone against steel trying to hone and shape us both: the church and me.

Today I also see that I have been a false prophet. I see I was dead in my sins. I once gloried that I walked so well among my brethren whose dedication was less fiery and hot. I did not realize my self-righteousness until I lost my standing!

Now, I have been broken. I was rejected and humiliated by churches that I sought to serve. That was a shock. I felt betrayed by a pampered child who turned to drugs (to whom I surely passed-on my own damage). Finally my angelic wife ended our empty marriage (sorta like telling me to curse God and die); likewise in the end she seemed not to know me and certainly or to care for me – I was humiliated. It was some years before the emptiness in my life became clearer to me.

Accordingly, I have my own insights into a current story about the minister's wife (Mary Winkler) who killed her minister husband with a shotgun. Mostly overly money and deadly emptiness that prevailed). I suspect that their emptiness, idols and addiction was killing them all first!

I came to see myself has having been an idolater following a dead religion, a parody of Christianity. I can not now blame them for being empty and dead - I was, too. I had failed them.

So, whereas I once seemed to have a worthy resume and my family seemed a picture of high standards. So that I seemed to be a man of God with honor and faith that all proved illusory. I am a broken, defiled man – but now I cling to Jesus: for he is the way, the truth and the life.

As for Balaam’s Ass: now I see that God once guided wise men to Jesus using a star. That the ground cries out with the blood of righteous Abel. And the whole earth groans awaiting its day of salvation. So, too, once an ass tried to save the life of his misguided owner Balaam. Balaam was God’s target and he for a moment sought to do God’s bidding. Ultimately, Balaam was drawn back into his high-paying soothsaying lifestyle in spite of finding God’s voice. His class had always worked for the highest bidder. Scripture finally, in the end, labeled him a false prophet.

The nameless ass with its merest animal resume was a lone creature but was faithful to God’s calling. It was never heard from again. I choose to follow the ass class. I hope only to speak and perchance to disappear. Except to my master.