A Wise Ass

Trinity, Wisdom, and a Talking Donkey

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31

A few weeks ago, I taught a Monday School session on heresy. Technically, heresy is wrong belief. Practically, it is the losing side in theological battles as a religion becomes increasingly rigid, calcified, and in my opinion, dead.

Fortunately, though we still think of ourselves as part of the Christian religious trajectory, our United Church of Christ commitment to continuing testament and the right of Christian conscience means we don’t do creeds, and don’t label people as heretics because their understanding of unknowable mystery is different than our understanding of unknowable mystery.

This is a Sunday when heresy gets a lot of attention in traditional Christianity. The Sunday after Pentecost is, for churches that use the liturgical calendar, Trinity Sunday, and orthodoxy around the Trinity is particularly tricky. Preachers are sometimes advised not to preach at all, or, if there are seminarians handy, to throw them to the wolves. Better to let that wet-behind-the-ears newbie fail than to embarrass yourself as the parish rector.

We do not have seminarians, so you are stuck with me. Though I am only sort of going to preach on the Trinity.

While in Divinity School, I took a semester long course called “Trinitarianism and Anti-Trinitarianism” taught by the Rev. Dr. Sarah Coakley, a systematic theologian in the Anglican tradition who would leave the next year to serve as the Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. Like most of my classes, I was a guppie among sharks, outclassed by my peers in every way. But I did manage to learn a thing or two.

Okay. Maybe a thing, not two.

Early Christians were able to manage the God and Jesus thing. I mean, there were still heresies, people occasionally losing their heads, literally. But it was only when they tried to figure out the Holy Spirit that things got messy. It was like finishing a jigsaw puzzle, and having one piece left over.

That’s when they came up with the idea of the Trinity, describing God, called “The Father” in this context, Jesus aka “The Son,” and the Holy Spirit, as three divine persons sharing one nature. Definitely not three natures because that would somehow be polytheism, and not three modes of one person because that would be bad too for some reason I never completely understood.

Mostly I don’t care about these ancient arguments, heavily influenced by ancient Greek philosophy.

I understand why the ancients conceived of God as a person. I accept that people who encountered Jesus thought they had experienced God. I get that our experience of God today is in one another and in creation.

But as we studied the pre-cursors to Trinitarianism, I learned that the Holy Spirit, which also has to be eternal in classic theology, is foreshadowed in the Jewish tradition in an embodied “wisdom,” sometimes called “Sophia” after the Koine Greek word. And there is this whole body of work called “wisdom literature” in the ancient Near East, texts like the Book of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes in the Jewish canon, and the Book of Sirach in the additional materials known as the Apocrypha.

I’m not one-hundred percent on personified wisdom being the same as the Holy Spirit, but I am completely down with the fact that wisdom is depicted as a woman, because, as I mentioned last week, ninety-nine times out of one hundred, it is not a woman who says “hold my beer!” right before they scream “YOLO!”

Which gives me a flimsy excuse to tell a fun story found in the Torah. We could use a fun story these days, and there are not that many in the Jewish Bible, what with all the genocide and war.

The story is found in Numbers, which we barely read because it is full of numbers.

The Israelites are entering the Promised Land. Blah blah blah “genocide,” blah blah blah “unrealistic numbers.” They’ve already defeated two regional kings.

King Balak of Moab, which sits on the far side of the Dead Sea, is alarmed by the size of the Israelite invasion, and hires the powerful prophet Balaam, not an Israelite by the way, to curse the invaders.

Balaam doesn’t want the job, but finally relents, though he only promises to say whatever Yahweh tells him to say. This is one of those sneaky texts where Yahweh does not belong exclusively to the Jews.

Balaam mounts his donkey, and heads from his home along what is today the Turkish-Syrian border to the plains of Moab. Yahweh may have allowed Balaam to go, but God is still cranky about it, so an Angel of the Lord is sent to disrupt the journey.

First, the angel stands in the middle of the road. The donkey can see the angel with a sword. Balaam and his two attendants cannot. When the donkey turns off the road into a field, Balaam strikes it.

Next, the angel stands where the road passes between two vineyard walls. The donkey squeezes to the side of the road to avoid the angel, scraping Balaam against the wall. Once again, the prophet strikes the donkey.

Finally, the angel stands in a place that was so narrow, there was no way around. The donkey decides simply to lay down. Once again, Balaam strikes his donkey, throwing a tantrum unbecoming of a prophet.

Then, God gives the donkey the ability to speak, because why not? The donkey asks why he has been struck. “Because you made me look foolish,” Balaam says.

The donkey responds, “Have I not been a good donkey for years? Have I ever given you a reason to doubt me?”

Balaam answers “No,” and God opens his eyes, so that he can see the angry angel. With a sword. Angry angel plus sword.

For the record, King Balak of Moab never got what he wanted. Balaam never cursed the Israelites.

Besides being a fun story, because who doesn’t love a talking animal, there are bunches of possible morals to the story. I’m going to be true to my working class roots, and choose this one:

Maybe that difficult donkey knows something you don’t. So before you lash out, ask questions.

Arrogance and ignorance are not exactly new, but the Algorithm Age has amped up outrage by carefully feeding us what it thinks we want to hear. It drives us further apart with every click. Communication is reduced to text chat if you are lucky, and anonymous meme wars all too often.

Accountability and relationship were weak enough, even before the tech companies bowed to the racist and rapist in chief, promising to platform his vengeance and hatred.

Maybe that is why a space like this is so rare and so important. We come together, a bunch of freaks and geeks in all of the best possible ways.

We listen to stories that are not our stories, tell stories of the wounds we carry and the victories we have one, stories of love and of grief, stories that happened this morning on the way to church, and stories that maybe did or didn’t happen on the way to Moab and the Promised Land somewhere around 3200 years ago.

We listen to stories of a fugitive who led a revolution against a Pharaoh, of a prophet crossing borders, of a revolutionary executed but not defeated.

Maybe wisdom is a little less you and a little more us.

Because that donkey, you know… he knows.

And that Trinity thing? Three into one? Well, I never was good at math. So how about we focus on what we do know, blessings not curses, neighbors in desperate need, and the beauty and challenge of this day, which seems more than mysterious enough to me. Amen.