Sound the Trumpets?
Joel 2:1-2, 12-17; Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21
March 6
Blow the trumpet! Sound the alarm! But please do so quietly and without drawing undue attention to one’s self.
At first blush that seems to be the mixed message from these distinct passages.
Joel is all hot and bothered, and wants everyone to know about it. “Assemble the aged; gather the children, even the infants. Call back the honeymooners. Get the priests. No one is too busy or important or otherwise engaged. Call a solemn assembly to attend to this message. Now!”
Jesus, on the other hand, says “do not sound a trumpet” but practice your faith quietly, praying in your closet, giving alms in secret, fasting but telling no one about it.
So which one is it? Trumpets or no trumpets? Vast public assemblies – worship – or quiet, contemplative, prayers?
I will begin this in confession: this meditation is a work in progress the reflects both my own wrestling with these two passages and also my deep conviction that lives of faith are marked by a deep commitment to struggling with ultimate questions rather than a conviction that we have been given ultimate answers. So, let’s struggle together.
A while back the child care center had a fire drill, which involves setting off the fire alarm, which, trust me, will get your attention no matter where in the building you happen to be. That’s a good thing: if you are a fire alarm, your job is to be heard above all else.
In case of emergency, you want loud alarms.
Joel, apparently, is speaking to an emergency.
I was walking through the building a couple of weeks ago knowing that the fire inspector was coming to check things out, and I noticed that one of our “Exit” signs was askew. If you are an “Exit” sign, your job is to be seen, and seen clearly, so I got a step stool and fixed it.
You want those signs on all the time, in case of emergency but not just in an emergency. You want them on before the emergency so you learn where the exits are.
Jesus seems to be speaking to a different moment in life than the one Joel addresses – not a five-alarm fire emergency, but also not a walk in the park on a spring day when God is in heaven and all is right with the world. I’d call it, for the moment, a season of looming crisis.
Emergency or crisis, then. There is a difference. Now, to be sure, it may be only a difference in perception – one prophet’s crisis being another prophet’s emergency. That simple truth underscores for us one necessity of faith: the practiced determination to read accurately the signs of the times.
Are we living in a looming crisis or is it an emergency?
There are, of course, all kinds of crises and all kinds of emergencies. For example, eating and exercise habits that see you gaining considerable weight constitute a crisis that calls for deliberate and long-term changes. If, however, you do not pay attention to the crisis, then the heart attack that results is an emergency that calls for 911.
For union officials in Wisconsin, for example, the campaign for election of a new governor was a crisis that probably put a few hundred, maybe a few thousand members out on the campaign trail. The subsequently elected governor’s announcement of his plan to strip the unions of their collective bargaining power was an emergency that put a hundred thousand bodies in the streets.
If, for example, you’re driving down the interstate and see a sign that says “395 to DC center lanes; 495 to Baltimore left lanes; 495 to Tysons right lanes: 2 miles” this is a crisis. If you find yourself in the far left lane needing to be in the far right lane and you can see the Jersey barriers – that is an emergency.
The decades long struggle for ordination rights for GLBT members of the Presbyterian church has been a crisis for the church. The vote in our Presbytery on April 30 constitutes an emergency for those of us with the power to vote, and, if present trends continue through this spring, sometime a few weeks after Easter something entirely new will emerge for our church – just to underscore that emergencies are not always negative.
Crisis time is the approach to the crossroads. Emergency time is when you realize you’re in the wrong lane for your turn. Crisis time is the season – however compressed or lengthy it may be – the season to decide. Emergency time is the moment to act.
Do we sound the trumpets now, or just polish up the instruments?
That question is, to be sure, one of the reasons that Karl Barth said that preaching should be done with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. Reading the signs of the times is a critical practice of our faith.
But by holding two disparate texts – indeed, two completely different kinds of texts – in tension, we must see that faith itself lives always in the uneasy tension between crisis and emergency.
Is there no down time? No ordinary time? No time with neither crisis nor emergency?
On the one hand, if we are honest, we know that the most accurate answer to that is probably “no.” On the other hand, and it remains crucial to hold on to this “other hand,” we are commanded to remember the Sabbath and to keep it holy. That is to say, we know that “wars and rumors of wars,” disease and death, and so on and so forth are constant in human experience – crises and emergencies will be with us always, but we also know that we have been given green pastures to lie down in, trusting that we do not have to carry the load of history on our own shoulders. Resting from the calling to shoulder some of the load some of the time is both good and right as well as faithful. It is also the subject of a different sermon.
We know that somewhere near to us always someone we care about is facing a moment of decision, a time of crisis – whether it is about a job or a relationship or school or an illness or an addiction or a housing situation or family changes, someone we love is in crisis. That same someone could well be facing an emergency soon.
That’s why we hold disparate texts together and read them alongside one another. Taken as a whole, the texts speak to the whole of our own lives, and while pieces of the text stand in tension with other pieces the same is true of our own lives: some parts just don’t always mesh smoothly with others and, yet, there is often deep richness in the rough places.
The invitation uttered through both the prophetic word of Joel and that of Jesus in Matthew is to a way of living through these disparate and sometimes difficult seasons of our lives.
We do not know the precise nature of the crisis to which Joel responded. Indeed, scholars differ by some five centuries in merely affixing a date to the text. There’s no way to name a specific, historical incident to which the author of Joel is responding.
However, as Rabi Abraham Joshua Heschel put it so eloquently, “In a stricken hour comes the word of the prophet.” Heschel goes on to insist that the prophets of Israel throughout “maintained that the primary way of serving God is through love, justice, and righteousness.”
The stricken hour comes when justice is perverted, righteousness no longer prevails, and love has been replaced by fear. Sound the trumpet, then! Assemble the people!
Jesus would have understood this reading of the prophets completely, and he, too, sounds the trumpet with his own voice at moments of emergency in his ministry. But in the text from Matthew, he is pointing out the crisis that will give rise to the emergency, and offering up a way of living that fundamentally alters the context itself. The prophets would have understood.
His invitation to a “prayer retreat” is not an invitation to escape the cares of the world by ignoring the sirens around us, ignoring the suffering around us. Nothing else in either the Sermon on the Mount, in which this passage is found, or the broader gospels suggests any such thing. Jesus never offers or recommends escapism, though he does honor the Sabbath.
But here he sees the crisis, the suffering, around him, and invites people to follow him on a way of life that responds to the crisis by living with the suffering rather than imagining that we can somehow live above it all.
The ones who practice their piety before others in order to be seen by them have, in effect, placed themselves on lofty thrones above the masses, above the sick and suffering, above the poor, the outcasts, above the rabble. Jesus calls his followers, instead, into the very midst of that rabble – indeed, he called his followers from the rabble, not to live above it but to live differently in the midst of it precisely in order to transform it by lives of love, justice and righteousness.
As I read these two texts together last week, Reinhold Niebuhr’s famous serenity prayer kept running through my mind. If you Google it, you find the most commonly recited version: Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference.
Interestingly, it turns out this is not exactly the way Niebuhr originally wrote it. Instead, in a slight but significant difference, he wrote, “Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I should; and the wisdom to know the difference.”
Do you hear the difference? The courage to change the things I should change does not respect the impossibility of some situations. It presents, instead, an ethical imperative to act regardless of whether or not we believe we can make a difference. It presents an ethical imperative to live constantly lives of love, justice and righteousness.
I believe we are called to act both in the midst of crises and in the midst of emergencies. The difference may be as grand as the distinction between acts of charity and acts of justice, or as insignificant as the differences in tactics and strategies. In the end, that really doesn’t matter, because they are all acts of faith.
You see, when Joel calls forth the trumpet blast and when Jesus invites us to quite prayer and fasting, in both cases we are being called to live differently in the world trusting that whether or not we can change things God can – in us and through us, God can and does calm the storms of looming crises and heal the wounds of emergencies.
Our calling, through all of those seasons, however we construe them, is simply to live faithfully in the moment that we have been given with lives known by their loving kindness, justice and righteousness. May we find the courage to live such lives. Amen.
March 6
Blow the trumpet! Sound the alarm! But please do so quietly and without drawing undue attention to one’s self.
At first blush that seems to be the mixed message from these distinct passages.
Joel is all hot and bothered, and wants everyone to know about it. “Assemble the aged; gather the children, even the infants. Call back the honeymooners. Get the priests. No one is too busy or important or otherwise engaged. Call a solemn assembly to attend to this message. Now!”
Jesus, on the other hand, says “do not sound a trumpet” but practice your faith quietly, praying in your closet, giving alms in secret, fasting but telling no one about it.
So which one is it? Trumpets or no trumpets? Vast public assemblies – worship – or quiet, contemplative, prayers?
I will begin this in confession: this meditation is a work in progress the reflects both my own wrestling with these two passages and also my deep conviction that lives of faith are marked by a deep commitment to struggling with ultimate questions rather than a conviction that we have been given ultimate answers. So, let’s struggle together.
A while back the child care center had a fire drill, which involves setting off the fire alarm, which, trust me, will get your attention no matter where in the building you happen to be. That’s a good thing: if you are a fire alarm, your job is to be heard above all else.
In case of emergency, you want loud alarms.
Joel, apparently, is speaking to an emergency.
I was walking through the building a couple of weeks ago knowing that the fire inspector was coming to check things out, and I noticed that one of our “Exit” signs was askew. If you are an “Exit” sign, your job is to be seen, and seen clearly, so I got a step stool and fixed it.
You want those signs on all the time, in case of emergency but not just in an emergency. You want them on before the emergency so you learn where the exits are.
Jesus seems to be speaking to a different moment in life than the one Joel addresses – not a five-alarm fire emergency, but also not a walk in the park on a spring day when God is in heaven and all is right with the world. I’d call it, for the moment, a season of looming crisis.
Emergency or crisis, then. There is a difference. Now, to be sure, it may be only a difference in perception – one prophet’s crisis being another prophet’s emergency. That simple truth underscores for us one necessity of faith: the practiced determination to read accurately the signs of the times.
Are we living in a looming crisis or is it an emergency?
There are, of course, all kinds of crises and all kinds of emergencies. For example, eating and exercise habits that see you gaining considerable weight constitute a crisis that calls for deliberate and long-term changes. If, however, you do not pay attention to the crisis, then the heart attack that results is an emergency that calls for 911.
For union officials in Wisconsin, for example, the campaign for election of a new governor was a crisis that probably put a few hundred, maybe a few thousand members out on the campaign trail. The subsequently elected governor’s announcement of his plan to strip the unions of their collective bargaining power was an emergency that put a hundred thousand bodies in the streets.
If, for example, you’re driving down the interstate and see a sign that says “395 to DC center lanes; 495 to Baltimore left lanes; 495 to Tysons right lanes: 2 miles” this is a crisis. If you find yourself in the far left lane needing to be in the far right lane and you can see the Jersey barriers – that is an emergency.
The decades long struggle for ordination rights for GLBT members of the Presbyterian church has been a crisis for the church. The vote in our Presbytery on April 30 constitutes an emergency for those of us with the power to vote, and, if present trends continue through this spring, sometime a few weeks after Easter something entirely new will emerge for our church – just to underscore that emergencies are not always negative.
Crisis time is the approach to the crossroads. Emergency time is when you realize you’re in the wrong lane for your turn. Crisis time is the season – however compressed or lengthy it may be – the season to decide. Emergency time is the moment to act.
Do we sound the trumpets now, or just polish up the instruments?
That question is, to be sure, one of the reasons that Karl Barth said that preaching should be done with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. Reading the signs of the times is a critical practice of our faith.
But by holding two disparate texts – indeed, two completely different kinds of texts – in tension, we must see that faith itself lives always in the uneasy tension between crisis and emergency.
Is there no down time? No ordinary time? No time with neither crisis nor emergency?
On the one hand, if we are honest, we know that the most accurate answer to that is probably “no.” On the other hand, and it remains crucial to hold on to this “other hand,” we are commanded to remember the Sabbath and to keep it holy. That is to say, we know that “wars and rumors of wars,” disease and death, and so on and so forth are constant in human experience – crises and emergencies will be with us always, but we also know that we have been given green pastures to lie down in, trusting that we do not have to carry the load of history on our own shoulders. Resting from the calling to shoulder some of the load some of the time is both good and right as well as faithful. It is also the subject of a different sermon.
We know that somewhere near to us always someone we care about is facing a moment of decision, a time of crisis – whether it is about a job or a relationship or school or an illness or an addiction or a housing situation or family changes, someone we love is in crisis. That same someone could well be facing an emergency soon.
That’s why we hold disparate texts together and read them alongside one another. Taken as a whole, the texts speak to the whole of our own lives, and while pieces of the text stand in tension with other pieces the same is true of our own lives: some parts just don’t always mesh smoothly with others and, yet, there is often deep richness in the rough places.
The invitation uttered through both the prophetic word of Joel and that of Jesus in Matthew is to a way of living through these disparate and sometimes difficult seasons of our lives.
We do not know the precise nature of the crisis to which Joel responded. Indeed, scholars differ by some five centuries in merely affixing a date to the text. There’s no way to name a specific, historical incident to which the author of Joel is responding.
However, as Rabi Abraham Joshua Heschel put it so eloquently, “In a stricken hour comes the word of the prophet.” Heschel goes on to insist that the prophets of Israel throughout “maintained that the primary way of serving God is through love, justice, and righteousness.”
The stricken hour comes when justice is perverted, righteousness no longer prevails, and love has been replaced by fear. Sound the trumpet, then! Assemble the people!
Jesus would have understood this reading of the prophets completely, and he, too, sounds the trumpet with his own voice at moments of emergency in his ministry. But in the text from Matthew, he is pointing out the crisis that will give rise to the emergency, and offering up a way of living that fundamentally alters the context itself. The prophets would have understood.
His invitation to a “prayer retreat” is not an invitation to escape the cares of the world by ignoring the sirens around us, ignoring the suffering around us. Nothing else in either the Sermon on the Mount, in which this passage is found, or the broader gospels suggests any such thing. Jesus never offers or recommends escapism, though he does honor the Sabbath.
But here he sees the crisis, the suffering, around him, and invites people to follow him on a way of life that responds to the crisis by living with the suffering rather than imagining that we can somehow live above it all.
The ones who practice their piety before others in order to be seen by them have, in effect, placed themselves on lofty thrones above the masses, above the sick and suffering, above the poor, the outcasts, above the rabble. Jesus calls his followers, instead, into the very midst of that rabble – indeed, he called his followers from the rabble, not to live above it but to live differently in the midst of it precisely in order to transform it by lives of love, justice and righteousness.
As I read these two texts together last week, Reinhold Niebuhr’s famous serenity prayer kept running through my mind. If you Google it, you find the most commonly recited version: Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference.
Interestingly, it turns out this is not exactly the way Niebuhr originally wrote it. Instead, in a slight but significant difference, he wrote, “Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I should; and the wisdom to know the difference.”
Do you hear the difference? The courage to change the things I should change does not respect the impossibility of some situations. It presents, instead, an ethical imperative to act regardless of whether or not we believe we can make a difference. It presents an ethical imperative to live constantly lives of love, justice and righteousness.
I believe we are called to act both in the midst of crises and in the midst of emergencies. The difference may be as grand as the distinction between acts of charity and acts of justice, or as insignificant as the differences in tactics and strategies. In the end, that really doesn’t matter, because they are all acts of faith.
You see, when Joel calls forth the trumpet blast and when Jesus invites us to quite prayer and fasting, in both cases we are being called to live differently in the world trusting that whether or not we can change things God can – in us and through us, God can and does calm the storms of looming crises and heal the wounds of emergencies.
Our calling, through all of those seasons, however we construe them, is simply to live faithfully in the moment that we have been given with lives known by their loving kindness, justice and righteousness. May we find the courage to live such lives. Amen.
posted by David Ensign at
9:38 AM
<< Home