Pup
Stories
Contents
“Pup” by David O. Bales
“God’s Weakness” by David O. Bales
Pup
by David O. Bales
Matthew 5:1-12
Because Pup had a thin face and a receding chin he always looked weak, especially so when he stood, as now, with his mouth open waiting for Yannai. The villagers noticed his habit of latching onto Yannai and nicknamed him “Pup,” because he followed like one.
A wheat merchant brushed him aside, ordering his slaves where to place their baskets. Other merchants brought dried fish, some had pottery, laying it out on a carpet, and one arranged tanned leather on the ground. Pup stepped out of their way and then pushed rocks around with his foot while he searched right and left for Yannai.
He was 11 and had come to live with his mother’s sister six years ago, but in this Galilean village he’d always be a stranger because people knew about his parents. His aunt didn’t say much about him to others, just that when his father tired of beating his wife he’d joined a handful of revolutionaries in Trachanitis, dying as they tried to rob a supply caravan bound for Rome’s legions. Pup’s only memory of his father was his furrowed forehead. His most vivid memory of his mother was her stare. No matter what she was doing, she seemed to look above or beyond it with unfocused eyes.
In the late morning his aunt finally agreed that he’d finished his chores, so he stood now on the edge of the market and waited. He didn’t know why he did this everyday, never asked himself why. It’s what he did each forenoon at the market, although hardly anyone spoke to him there or he to them. But he listened. His little free time from the women’s household chores was filled with listening. He heard about the caravan that just arrived by Lake Galilee, about a ship that was beached in a storm at Sidon, about how one merchant was hiding from the tax collector, and how an agitator against the Romans was now in chains rowing a trireme. Listening fit him like an old sandal. The more interested, the wider he opened his mouth.
He licked his lips that were dry from his open-mouthed breathing and strained to spot Yannai through the merchants bustling in the square. He stepped from one foot to the other as he almost had to dance to stay out of everyone’s way. Then Pup spied him. Yannai was on the other side of the square and departing the village. Pup rushed to catch up, bending low and elbowing through a tight group, dashing to Yannai. He ran to him and tugged his sleeve twice before Yannai turned around. Pup was always tugging on Yannai’s sleeve. Yannai had thick black eyebrows and he squinted as though irritated when he talked with Pup. He finally turned and spoke as though he didn’t remember that Pup followed him everyday. “Oh, hi.”
“What we doing today, Yannai?”
“We? I’m going to Cana to see a friend.” Then he turned as though he didn’t expect Pup to follow.
“I’ll go with you,” Pup said too eagerly.
With nothing more expressed, Yannai continued out of the village, Pup following. As they walked over the first low hill Pup said, “Heard about Jesus?”
Yannai answered over his shoulder, “Who hasn’t?”
“In the market everyone said he’s setting up to speak right over there,” he pointed down a trail to the right, where groups of travelers were heading. “Everybody says he’s talking outdoors now.”
Yannai spoke again over his shoulder, “We’re outdoors. Anybody can speak outdoors.”
Pup drew nearly beside him, “They say he’s been teaching in the synagogues, but now he’s going to do open-air speaking. Look,” he said and gestured toward groups who’d followed the two of them from the village and then turned off the trail, clearly aiming to attend Jesus’ outdoor event.
“Let’s go listen,” Pup said, shocking Yannai. He’d never made a suggestion of what they should do. Yannai turned almost toward Pup, “I’m going to Cana today,” and continued walking. Within a few steps he realized that Pup wasn’t following. He turned around in surprise, “What you doing?”
Pup was anxiously gazing toward clumps of people gathering on the trail towards Jesus.
“I want to hear Jesus. Word in the market is that people are flooding to see him from all over and we’re just a few minutes away. He talks about the Kingdom of Heaven. Maybe he’s the Messiah who’ll kick out the Romans.”
Yannai struck with one foot toward Cana, but held his body toward Pup like a question, “You coming?”
Pup looked uncertain, but he didn’t follow. Yannai’s eyebrows came down over his eyes as he said, “All right. We’ll give a few minutes, but I need to make it to Cana and back today.” And for the first time in three years Yannai walked a direction he hadn’t chosen while Pup followed close behind and babbled about what he’d heard of Jesus’ teaching and preaching and curing all kinds of illnesses. “Everybody was chattering about him in the market. A bunch of the merchants are packing up early to go hear him.”
Within an hour the two had spotted Jesus. He led a huge crowd up a slope, then stopped near the top to speak. Pup said, almost bouncing, “We got here at the beginning.” Yannai replied with a snort.
People shuffled closer after Jesus sat. In a clear voice that projected over the crowd, he began, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”
Pup leaned forward as he listened. Yannai tugged on his sleeve. “Come on. We’ve heard enough. Sound like a Messiah who’s going to free us? Such rot!” He turned to go but realized that Pup wasn’t following. He was listening intently to Jesus. His mouth was wide open.
Preaching point: Jesus draws people to him.
* * *
God’s Weakness
by David O. Bales
1 Corinthians 1:18-31
On the morning of January 8, 1919 the wind off Rio de Janeiro’s Guanabara Bay was particularly strong; but Rodrigo and Dimas didn’t realize it was out of the ordinary. The two soldiers had arrived by different trains three days before and neither had ever visited their nation’s capital before. They’d met in the chaos of the army’s staging area where veterans and recruits milled together, waiting to be formed into half of a new company. They believed they’d found one another by God’s leading, because they were devout Roman Catholics and each wondering if God wanted him to become a priest. Because they were veterans, they were able to finagle leave this morning to seek a church for worship.
As they wound through Rio’s crowds a woman threw her hand up to catch her hat as it was blowing away. Dimas pointed to a steeple a few blocks to their right, Rodrigo turned to his left. “Here,” he said, and started walking away quickly, against the direction of the crowd. Dimas looked after him but didn’t see sign of a church that way. Rodrigo, however, was approaching a news stand. Dimas caught up with him and saw he held a newspaper with a headline “ROOSEVELT BURIED.”
“I heard about it on the train,” Rodrigo said.
“The American president?”
“Yes, a very great man.”
Dimas jerked his head back, “Wasn’t he always interfering in South American nations?”
“Yes,” Rodrigo laughed, but those were Spanish speakers. Never Brazil. He was here on a scientific expedition—1913 into 1914. Got a river named after him. Didn’t you know?”
Dimas shook his head, “I’ve been stationed so deep in the jungle six years that the whole world could be speaking Portuguese by now and I’d never know. About the only news we received was new army manuals.”
Rodrigo folded his arms around the newspaper. He said quietly, “I was with him.”
Dimas almost expressed disbelief, but caught himself and changed his statement into a question of wonder, “You were with President Roosevelt?”
“He wasn’t president then. Had been out of office four years. His son Kermit was an engineer working in Brazil and the colonel, that’s how he wanted to be addressed, was on a speaking tour and seems he’d agreed to do something scientific or expedition-like in Brazil. Ended up being with Colonel Rondon.”
Everyone in Brazil’s army knew of Rondon’s surveys.
“If it weren’t for Colonel Roosevelt, I’d probably not be hunting for a church this morning.”
The two men turned back towards the church, Dimas listening and Rodrigo speaking almost reverently. “A few years before that, when Rondon had been extending telegraph lines into the jungle from the south, he lit upon a stream flowing north but no one knew where it went. It must have emptied into the Amazon, but probably a thousand miles of jungle lay between where Rondon discovered a northern flowing stream and where it emerged.
“So the government, this same government that can’t get its soldiers to the right place at the right time and sort them into companies, ends up sending Colonel Rondon, Colonel Roosevelt, his son Kermit, a naturalist, and a doctor upon the search for where that river went. There were more explorers with them at the start and I was one of the original 150 hands. We endured a long trek just to reach the stepping off point, over two months with pack mules and ox carts. The going was so rough we ate some of the oxen and I wonder to this day if there’s not still a trail for a few hundred miles of junk we tossed out to lessen the loads. Always going north, just to meet the river’s source, and there they split the expedition so that one group continued on a different river while 16 of us conveyed Roosevelt’s expedition down the unknown stream.”
Rodrigo raised his eyes to look above the packed street and spoke against the wind, “The two colonels didn’t know one another’s language, so they spoke together in French, which, obviously, neither was good at. Kermit needed to be there to translate between them. But the language wasn’t important. Didn’t take the Colonel long to communicate with us with gestures and we with him. And communicating became supremely important the farther we went. We found out that the fellow who put together the supplies was an idiot. Tons of what we didn’t need and not enough of what we did. Then, when we finally split from the other group and arrived to start north on the river, we had to navigate these heavy dugout canoes without enough room for all the baggage. Too late we found the vessels weren’t suited to the rapids we met again and again.”
The two men arrived in the crowd outside the church. Rodrigo stepped out of the breeze near the wall. He was going to finish his report before he entered. He stared at Dimas with a desperate look.
“We lost canoes. We lost men. We didn’t find much game for food, and almost no fish. Figure that out, on a river? People were getting sick, including the Colonel and Kermit. As I said, we didn’t have to know English or French to realize what was most important to the Colonel. After a few months his mission became not so much finding the river’s goal as keeping his son safe. Clear to everybody. The worse it got, the more he was concerned about saving Kermit. Week after week we splashed into catastrophes, nature whittling us down, as we had to drag those heavy canoes, cutting our way through the dense jungle in portage after portage around the cataracts. Even had to stop for days and hack out trees to make a new canoe. Finally we wrecked so many canoes we didn’t have enough space for everyone to board even in gentle currents. So half of us had to traipse the shore, hacking through the vicious jungle. We were near starvation, ill and injured workers having to ride aboard the canoes. The Colonel was incapacitated—bad heart, malaria, and his leg infected—when word from his tent came that he wanted us to go on without him. However, Kermit wouldn’t leave him.
“So, the Colonel’s rubbing shoulders with death, but the life he so dearly wants to rescue can only be saved by his weakly allowing his son to save him.”
Rodrigo clutched the newspaper to his breast. For a moment unable to continue, he shook his head to control of his emotions. He turned to the church door whispering, “The powerful weakness of love…. Seeing what the Colonel did and why he did it has come to signify for me Christ’s love. The Colonel saved his son through his suffering weakness. Year by year it means more to me.” He spoke wide-eyed to Dimas, “As God saved us through the weakness of the eternal Son.”
He crossed himself and stepped into the church. Dimas crossed himself and followed.
Preaching point: Redemptive weakness.
*****************************************
StoryShare, February 2, 2020 issue.
Copyright 2020 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
“Pup” by David O. Bales
“God’s Weakness” by David O. Bales
Pup
by David O. Bales
Matthew 5:1-12
Because Pup had a thin face and a receding chin he always looked weak, especially so when he stood, as now, with his mouth open waiting for Yannai. The villagers noticed his habit of latching onto Yannai and nicknamed him “Pup,” because he followed like one.
A wheat merchant brushed him aside, ordering his slaves where to place their baskets. Other merchants brought dried fish, some had pottery, laying it out on a carpet, and one arranged tanned leather on the ground. Pup stepped out of their way and then pushed rocks around with his foot while he searched right and left for Yannai.
He was 11 and had come to live with his mother’s sister six years ago, but in this Galilean village he’d always be a stranger because people knew about his parents. His aunt didn’t say much about him to others, just that when his father tired of beating his wife he’d joined a handful of revolutionaries in Trachanitis, dying as they tried to rob a supply caravan bound for Rome’s legions. Pup’s only memory of his father was his furrowed forehead. His most vivid memory of his mother was her stare. No matter what she was doing, she seemed to look above or beyond it with unfocused eyes.
In the late morning his aunt finally agreed that he’d finished his chores, so he stood now on the edge of the market and waited. He didn’t know why he did this everyday, never asked himself why. It’s what he did each forenoon at the market, although hardly anyone spoke to him there or he to them. But he listened. His little free time from the women’s household chores was filled with listening. He heard about the caravan that just arrived by Lake Galilee, about a ship that was beached in a storm at Sidon, about how one merchant was hiding from the tax collector, and how an agitator against the Romans was now in chains rowing a trireme. Listening fit him like an old sandal. The more interested, the wider he opened his mouth.
He licked his lips that were dry from his open-mouthed breathing and strained to spot Yannai through the merchants bustling in the square. He stepped from one foot to the other as he almost had to dance to stay out of everyone’s way. Then Pup spied him. Yannai was on the other side of the square and departing the village. Pup rushed to catch up, bending low and elbowing through a tight group, dashing to Yannai. He ran to him and tugged his sleeve twice before Yannai turned around. Pup was always tugging on Yannai’s sleeve. Yannai had thick black eyebrows and he squinted as though irritated when he talked with Pup. He finally turned and spoke as though he didn’t remember that Pup followed him everyday. “Oh, hi.”
“What we doing today, Yannai?”
“We? I’m going to Cana to see a friend.” Then he turned as though he didn’t expect Pup to follow.
“I’ll go with you,” Pup said too eagerly.
With nothing more expressed, Yannai continued out of the village, Pup following. As they walked over the first low hill Pup said, “Heard about Jesus?”
Yannai answered over his shoulder, “Who hasn’t?”
“In the market everyone said he’s setting up to speak right over there,” he pointed down a trail to the right, where groups of travelers were heading. “Everybody says he’s talking outdoors now.”
Yannai spoke again over his shoulder, “We’re outdoors. Anybody can speak outdoors.”
Pup drew nearly beside him, “They say he’s been teaching in the synagogues, but now he’s going to do open-air speaking. Look,” he said and gestured toward groups who’d followed the two of them from the village and then turned off the trail, clearly aiming to attend Jesus’ outdoor event.
“Let’s go listen,” Pup said, shocking Yannai. He’d never made a suggestion of what they should do. Yannai turned almost toward Pup, “I’m going to Cana today,” and continued walking. Within a few steps he realized that Pup wasn’t following. He turned around in surprise, “What you doing?”
Pup was anxiously gazing toward clumps of people gathering on the trail towards Jesus.
“I want to hear Jesus. Word in the market is that people are flooding to see him from all over and we’re just a few minutes away. He talks about the Kingdom of Heaven. Maybe he’s the Messiah who’ll kick out the Romans.”
Yannai struck with one foot toward Cana, but held his body toward Pup like a question, “You coming?”
Pup looked uncertain, but he didn’t follow. Yannai’s eyebrows came down over his eyes as he said, “All right. We’ll give a few minutes, but I need to make it to Cana and back today.” And for the first time in three years Yannai walked a direction he hadn’t chosen while Pup followed close behind and babbled about what he’d heard of Jesus’ teaching and preaching and curing all kinds of illnesses. “Everybody was chattering about him in the market. A bunch of the merchants are packing up early to go hear him.”
Within an hour the two had spotted Jesus. He led a huge crowd up a slope, then stopped near the top to speak. Pup said, almost bouncing, “We got here at the beginning.” Yannai replied with a snort.
People shuffled closer after Jesus sat. In a clear voice that projected over the crowd, he began, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”
Pup leaned forward as he listened. Yannai tugged on his sleeve. “Come on. We’ve heard enough. Sound like a Messiah who’s going to free us? Such rot!” He turned to go but realized that Pup wasn’t following. He was listening intently to Jesus. His mouth was wide open.
Preaching point: Jesus draws people to him.
* * *
God’s Weakness
by David O. Bales
1 Corinthians 1:18-31
On the morning of January 8, 1919 the wind off Rio de Janeiro’s Guanabara Bay was particularly strong; but Rodrigo and Dimas didn’t realize it was out of the ordinary. The two soldiers had arrived by different trains three days before and neither had ever visited their nation’s capital before. They’d met in the chaos of the army’s staging area where veterans and recruits milled together, waiting to be formed into half of a new company. They believed they’d found one another by God’s leading, because they were devout Roman Catholics and each wondering if God wanted him to become a priest. Because they were veterans, they were able to finagle leave this morning to seek a church for worship.
As they wound through Rio’s crowds a woman threw her hand up to catch her hat as it was blowing away. Dimas pointed to a steeple a few blocks to their right, Rodrigo turned to his left. “Here,” he said, and started walking away quickly, against the direction of the crowd. Dimas looked after him but didn’t see sign of a church that way. Rodrigo, however, was approaching a news stand. Dimas caught up with him and saw he held a newspaper with a headline “ROOSEVELT BURIED.”
“I heard about it on the train,” Rodrigo said.
“The American president?”
“Yes, a very great man.”
Dimas jerked his head back, “Wasn’t he always interfering in South American nations?”
“Yes,” Rodrigo laughed, but those were Spanish speakers. Never Brazil. He was here on a scientific expedition—1913 into 1914. Got a river named after him. Didn’t you know?”
Dimas shook his head, “I’ve been stationed so deep in the jungle six years that the whole world could be speaking Portuguese by now and I’d never know. About the only news we received was new army manuals.”
Rodrigo folded his arms around the newspaper. He said quietly, “I was with him.”
Dimas almost expressed disbelief, but caught himself and changed his statement into a question of wonder, “You were with President Roosevelt?”
“He wasn’t president then. Had been out of office four years. His son Kermit was an engineer working in Brazil and the colonel, that’s how he wanted to be addressed, was on a speaking tour and seems he’d agreed to do something scientific or expedition-like in Brazil. Ended up being with Colonel Rondon.”
Everyone in Brazil’s army knew of Rondon’s surveys.
“If it weren’t for Colonel Roosevelt, I’d probably not be hunting for a church this morning.”
The two men turned back towards the church, Dimas listening and Rodrigo speaking almost reverently. “A few years before that, when Rondon had been extending telegraph lines into the jungle from the south, he lit upon a stream flowing north but no one knew where it went. It must have emptied into the Amazon, but probably a thousand miles of jungle lay between where Rondon discovered a northern flowing stream and where it emerged.
“So the government, this same government that can’t get its soldiers to the right place at the right time and sort them into companies, ends up sending Colonel Rondon, Colonel Roosevelt, his son Kermit, a naturalist, and a doctor upon the search for where that river went. There were more explorers with them at the start and I was one of the original 150 hands. We endured a long trek just to reach the stepping off point, over two months with pack mules and ox carts. The going was so rough we ate some of the oxen and I wonder to this day if there’s not still a trail for a few hundred miles of junk we tossed out to lessen the loads. Always going north, just to meet the river’s source, and there they split the expedition so that one group continued on a different river while 16 of us conveyed Roosevelt’s expedition down the unknown stream.”
Rodrigo raised his eyes to look above the packed street and spoke against the wind, “The two colonels didn’t know one another’s language, so they spoke together in French, which, obviously, neither was good at. Kermit needed to be there to translate between them. But the language wasn’t important. Didn’t take the Colonel long to communicate with us with gestures and we with him. And communicating became supremely important the farther we went. We found out that the fellow who put together the supplies was an idiot. Tons of what we didn’t need and not enough of what we did. Then, when we finally split from the other group and arrived to start north on the river, we had to navigate these heavy dugout canoes without enough room for all the baggage. Too late we found the vessels weren’t suited to the rapids we met again and again.”
The two men arrived in the crowd outside the church. Rodrigo stepped out of the breeze near the wall. He was going to finish his report before he entered. He stared at Dimas with a desperate look.
“We lost canoes. We lost men. We didn’t find much game for food, and almost no fish. Figure that out, on a river? People were getting sick, including the Colonel and Kermit. As I said, we didn’t have to know English or French to realize what was most important to the Colonel. After a few months his mission became not so much finding the river’s goal as keeping his son safe. Clear to everybody. The worse it got, the more he was concerned about saving Kermit. Week after week we splashed into catastrophes, nature whittling us down, as we had to drag those heavy canoes, cutting our way through the dense jungle in portage after portage around the cataracts. Even had to stop for days and hack out trees to make a new canoe. Finally we wrecked so many canoes we didn’t have enough space for everyone to board even in gentle currents. So half of us had to traipse the shore, hacking through the vicious jungle. We were near starvation, ill and injured workers having to ride aboard the canoes. The Colonel was incapacitated—bad heart, malaria, and his leg infected—when word from his tent came that he wanted us to go on without him. However, Kermit wouldn’t leave him.
“So, the Colonel’s rubbing shoulders with death, but the life he so dearly wants to rescue can only be saved by his weakly allowing his son to save him.”
Rodrigo clutched the newspaper to his breast. For a moment unable to continue, he shook his head to control of his emotions. He turned to the church door whispering, “The powerful weakness of love…. Seeing what the Colonel did and why he did it has come to signify for me Christ’s love. The Colonel saved his son through his suffering weakness. Year by year it means more to me.” He spoke wide-eyed to Dimas, “As God saved us through the weakness of the eternal Son.”
He crossed himself and stepped into the church. Dimas crossed himself and followed.
Preaching point: Redemptive weakness.
*****************************************
StoryShare, February 2, 2020 issue.
Copyright 2020 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
