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Reading

Our reading this morning is a wonderful folk tale from an unlikely source, the 4th book of the Torah, dating from 13th c. B.C– Numbers 22:22-35

Balaam was a Moabite, a professional seer, or wise man, who sought to learn the will of the gods by observation and interpretation of signs, visions and dreams.  When the Hebrew people were on their way to the promised land from Egypt, they passed through his country of Moab.  Balak, the king of Moab, hired Balaam to pronounce a curse on this riff raff, this bunch of refugees.  Balaam sets out on his donkey to comply with his commission.  But God sends a messenger [an angel] to change Balaam’s plans. [as an aside, I’ve often wondered why people think angels are sweet guardians when the Bible is full of angels whose messages turn us around in very unexpected ways, who confront more than comfort.  Anyway, just be sure you want to hear messages that may turn your life around!  Balaam’s behavior and his politics were changed!]

An angel stands in the road and the wise seer, the “professional” at paying attention to the Holy, doesn’t notice – but his donkey does, and runs off into the field.  The poor thing is soundly beaten for his lifesaving efforts.  Again, the angel stands in the road, blocking a narrow passage.  The donkey pulls to side, crushing Balaam’s foot against the wall, and again the animal is beaten.  Next time, when the donkey sees the angel he just sits down.  He speaks to his master pointing out the messenger, and Balaam finally sees the angel and gets the message.  He goes to meet the Hebrew people, not to curse them but to bless them. 

Sermon

Sometimes, like Balaam, we are stopped in our tracks:

Whether it is through animals whose senses put us back in touch with our own senses, through little children who slow us down, through disasters we don’t expect or passing acquaintances, or stray thoughts, or headlines, or the light coming through the trees, God acts, sometimes in very ordinary ways, sometimes in very extraordinary ways to get our attention.

Sometimes when we are stopped in our tracks, its personal.  One friend heard this story and said, “I know who the donkey is in my life, its my brain tumor.”  Another friend had one of those dreaded Friday night phone calls: his teenager had crashed the family car.  Bob parked on the road and as he walked toward the Volkswagen van tipped over in a ditch, he saw the van as the donkey, stopping him in his tracks to think about his relationship to his son.

Sometimes when we are stopped in our tracks its collective:

“The War,” Ken Burns’ series this week, beginning before Pearl Harbor with the quiet towns and ordinary people whose lives were so drastically changed, describes so touchingly one crucial time in history.

September 11 was a more recent moment for us –in Marin, there was a feeble effort to bring clergy together, we needed to define the threat, address the fears and respond long term but we failed –  I thought back to 1968, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy.  Then, there was already a group who knew and trusted each other and were committed to common goals of justice and social change, the Southern Marin Action Committee, in which this fellowship played a key role.  Your Rev. Karel Botermans, with Father John O’Connor then head of Catholic Charities in Marin, Rev. Fran Geddes who was across the road at First Congregational and others heard the news of the rioting and decided that housing was an important way to address inequality in Marin, to respond to being stopped in their tracks with real change and visionary action.  Karel couldn’t attend one meeting and sent one of his laymen, Martin Mackey, and the rest is history.  Martin, with Becky Watkin, Inka Benton, Larry Livingston, the Parks and many others from this fellowship gave significant leadership to forming Ecumenical Association for Housing as an appropriate response to the violence and grief of 1968.  One participant, Richard Rosenberg, who represented Rodef Sholom, [he was later president of Bank of America] said, “ We didn’t want to be simply bystanders to the forces of change in the air.”  Since that band of faith leaders and friends, over 1000 homes have been acquired and rehabilitated or built in Marin County as a result of their beginning efforts:  Small, sustainable, quality homes all over Marin, deed restricted for affordability, designed for seniors, people with disabilities, working families.  I say, three cheers, and thanks to this congregation!

I think Marin has been stopped in its tracks again in the last year, stopped in its tracks by two seemingly small stop signs:

            1) the report that our ecological footprint in Marin is one of the highest in the world;

            2) that neighbors were organizing to oppose 4 1200 sq. foot architecturally designed homes to be built by Habitat for Humanity right by HWY 101 and Tiburon Blvd, next to a bus stop, available to families with incomes of around $50,000. 

Who we SAID we were was unmasked.  We THINK we are for sustainable communities, leaders in environmental protection, liberal and open people.  But we aren’t.  Who will be the donkey in the road to stop the continued creation of an unviable, unjust county? Who will be the donkey to see and spread a message of blessings not curses?  What now? 

I think we are called to create a new story, a new time of social action, by those who have a deeper, more inclusive vision of community, a broader picture of climate change that includes transportation and land use, life styles and interrelationships.  2/3rds of the jobs  being created in the north bay require no more than a high school education – we are a service economy.  We need to embrace that.  Commuting into those jobs has doubled from outside the Bay Area since 1990, it has gone up 131% from Solano County.  Our larger homes and wealthier property owners own more cars than the same number of residents 20 years ago. No wonder that more than 50% of the greenhouse gases in the Bay Area come from cars!  Those big homes also generate more low paying jobs.  And yet we vote down the train because we say it is Sonoma’s problem, even though its our work force that needs it; we oppose appropriate, smaller, more affordable infill housing that might mean that some of the 50% of the people who work at the hospital who live out of the county might live here, some of the health care workers with our growing number of elderly residents, some of the people who take care of our cars, our streets, our cultural assets, our children. 

Time to make the most important environmental protection steps we can take, to improve our public transit options and our affordable, infill opportunities! 

Time to say that we will not push our seniors and our work force off on to valuable agricultural land 60 miles away, with all the personal, community and environmental damage of long commutes.  We need the resource our seniors offer, they need to stay near family and friends and connections. 

Time for the faith community take the lead again, as happened in 1968. 

So what does Harry Potter have to do with our story?  With donkeys and cars and faith organizing in Marin?   First, who recognizes what needs to happen and makes it happen in the great stories?  In Harry Potter, it’s an odd band of young people, and the oddest ones help save the day in the end.  In Chronicles of Narnia, it’s the children, especially the youngest Lucy and her friend the beaver.  In Lord of the Rings it’s the hobbits, not the superheroes.  We don’t even need to seem powerful, we don’t need to mind being the donkey! 

Second, in the end, those with a positive vision, those who are FOR something and not just AGAINST something, will win.   Harry Potter was not just against the evil use of magic, he was for friendship, loyalty and a new kind inclusion and fairness. 

Third, Ask children what made Harry Potter so special and they will tell you, it was his mother’s love.  We go forward, not with antagonism but with love, for each other, all those in our extended community who serve us, with love for mother nature, the earth and her gifts for which we hold stewardship.  Those we call prophets have acted out of great love for their people, their community as well as for the One who called them.

And last, we go forward knowing that what we have shared here, in this place, is not irrelevant to the world to which we return.  We do not create friendship, love, vision without the Spirit that stopped us in our tracks, the Spirit that is pushing us, supporting us, lifting us up.  Dumbledore tells Harry toward the end of the whole series:  That which Voldemort does not value, he takes no trouble to comprehend.  Of house-elves and children’s tales, of love, loyalty and innocence, Voldemort knows and understands nothing.  Nothing.  That they all have a power beyond his own, a power beyond the reach of any magic, is a truth he has never grasped.”

We share a power beyond any magic, a hope that sets us free, to care, to act, to envision a just, inclusive and sustainable community.  So be it.