Out Our Way: Cranium vaporious critters

"There are none so blind as they who will not see."  - popular proverb based on Jeremiah 5:21 

Out our way, school has begun and the smart ones are ready to buckle down and learn. The not-so-smart ones are still goofing off, and the really dumb ones may never learn anything of importance at all. It's not so much a matter of IQ as of common sense.   

Years ago while living in Wyoming, a popular bumper sticker I saw quite regularly read, "Eat lamb. 50,000 coyotes can't be wrong!" It's not just the size of sheep and their relative gentle nature that makes them so vulnerable to predators - it's their lack of sense.  Everyone knows about having "horse sense," but have you ever met anyone who bragged about having "sheep sense." Horses can be trained. Why even some cows can learn. Over at the H. Earl Clack Memorial Museum is a picture of Long George Francis of Havre fame, riding a trained longhorn steer down 1st Street as part of the Festival Days parade. But sheep? I confess, I have never seen a sheep that could learn anything.

Sheep need a shepherd not just to keep predators away, but also to rescue them from their own foolishness.   That is why the shepherd's staff has a crook - to pull dumb lambs out of creeks they can't swim, out of holes they walked into, and away from rattlers and thorns and other nasty stuff they are too dumb to realize can hurt them.  

There may be a reason why Jesus referred to Himself as the Good Shepherd and we as His sheep. It seems a lot of us don't have much horse sense, but tend to take after the little woolies. We can be pretty dumb critters.

Go back to the very beginning and reread the Genesis story of Adam and Eve. As many of you know, the forbidden fruit was "the knowledge of good and evil."  What you may not know is that phrase, "knowledge of good and evil" was a commonly used euphemism in the Middle East for "knowing everything" - that is, to be omniscient ... that is, to be God.

As you will recall, that was the real temptation: to be able to replace God with self. Well, despite the "Father of all Lies" assurances to Adam and Eve that such was possible, they had to learn the hard way that it wasn't.   Rejecting God they discovered they had rejected love, peace, wholeness and ultimately life itself. Oh, not just "bios," the biblical word for existence, but also "Zoe," the word for the abundant life that lifts us above the earthworm and the amoeba. That consciousness of beauty, harmony, honor, dignity, etc.  

Look at those societies that encouraged sheep-like thinking in its people. The first thing they tried to do was get rid of the Shepherd - ban God from the culture. Have you ever seen pictures of a Soviet city back in the hey day of Communism? I recall being in West Berlin and then taking a tour of the "other side" of the Wall. East Berlin was the darkest, dreariest, dullest and most lifeless city I had ever seen. I saw tank traps, barbed wire, guard towers, and lots of guns ... most facing east. It was pretty obvious the "Worker's Paradise" wasn't building walls and laying concertina wire to keep us out but to keep their own people in. Not many folks were scaling the Wall from the west side!

Well, the Wall came down and life has returned to that part of Berlin, and to Leipzig, Warsaw, and even Moscow little by little. Interesting to discover that so had faith and the worship of God sometime before. So what are we to make of it? Is there a connection or is it, as some even still believe, mere coincidence?   

Even Goliath knows better than that.

(Dr. Bruington is pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Havre. Copies of the "Out Our Way" column and cartoon, as well as his weekly cartoon and children's message series "Bruin-Town Tales," can be viewed at the church website: http://www.havrepres.org. The book "Out Our Way: Theology Under Saddle" is also available at Amazon.com.)