(Part 1)

JBTM 80
Sermon: A Lizard in the King’s Palace
Proverbs 20:24–28
Daniel I. Block, PhD
24
Four things on earth are small, yet they are extremely wise:
25
the ants are not a strong people, yet they store up their food in the summer;
26
hyraxes are not a mighty people, yet they make their homes in the cliffs;
27
locusts have no king, yet all of them march in ranks;
28
a lizard can be caught in your hands, yet it lives in kings’ palaces. (Prov 20:24–28, HCSB)
Introduction
Some things in life do not make sense, but this can be for many reasons. Sometimes the
senselessness arises because there is no apparent The Chicago Pizza Squirrel
connection between cause and effect. We have a saying for
this: “There is no rhyme or reason” to account for the
phenomenon. Sometimes things don’t make sense because
they are incongruent; an element in a picture does not
belong. You see, life is supposed to be regular, ordered,
predictable. If an element is inserted into the picture that
does not belong we are disturbed, puzzled, amused, or
stimulated. Just before I sat down to write this sermon,
what made the television news in Chicago was a pizza
squirrel. 1 Responding to a previous report of a rat in New
York that had carried off a slice of pizza, we saw images of
this squirrel up in the tree eating his loot. There is something
wrong with this picture: pizza is human food; pizza is not
eaten up in the tree in the middle of apartment blocks;
pizza is not actually healthy for humans or squirrels. How did this happen?
When I was an undergraduate I took an introductory course on Physical Geography.
Here I learned a new word: erratic. We often use this word of behavior that deviates from
the normal, or of people who are eccentric. In geology the word is used of a boulder or
rock that a glacier picks up and transports often hundreds of miles and deposits in an area
where it stands out from the native bedrock. It does not take a rocket scientist or even a
rock geologist to notice that there is something odd about this picture. And that is also the
2016.
¹http://chicago.eater.com/2016/3/25/11306378/meet-chicagos-pizza-squirrel. Accessed March 25,