Nov. 18, 2001
Text: Psalm 98
Miriam had long wondered about miracles. Her teachers read her stories from the Torah that were filled with the great miracles God had done for Israel. But she wondered whether miracles still occur.
Miriam knew something was seriously wrong with her brother Aaron who was born eight weeks earlier. His ritual circumcision--which all Jewish boys have when they are eight days old--had been delayed. Her dad had stopped traveling as much and was spending more time at home. Her parents took Aaron to many appointments with doctors. They never said Aaron would die, but the worry in their faces suggested they knew he might.Of course, Miriam had never really wanted a little brother or sister. Her father spent most of the time flying around the country going to meetings. He almost never was around for things at school. He even missed it when she sang a solo part in a school concert. Miriam loved doing things with her dad, but now he was spending almost all of his time with Aaron. Even her mother seemed completely focused on Aaron.
Miriam would never admit it, but she wasn't sure she wanted a miracle for her struggling baby brother. What she really wanted was to have her mother and father with her more and not share them with Aaron. She asked her grandmother Naomi if she had ever seen a miracle. Her grandmother responded, "I was nearly captured by Nazis when I was about your age and Christians hid me--that was a miracle." Her grandmother's eyes searched Miriam's distant eyes.At Hebrew school, her rabbi said, "The great miracles of Torah happened because God wanted to show the Israelites and the whole world the power of the God.” When she pressed the rabbi about her brother, he said with a sigh, "Aaron is a miracle too. It's just harder for us to see it." He gave her a big hug. "I know this is hard for you. But keep little Aaron in your prayers," he advised. But instead of seeing Aaron as a miracle or needing a miracle, she instead saw him as a mistake.
A few days before a school concert, her father announced that he had to start traveling again for his work. Miriam became very unhappy when she heard this. "My next concert is coming up in three days. You missed it last time. You promised!" she screamed. "How come you can stop traveling for Aaron but you can't for me? I hate my family, including Aaron. I hope he dies!" She stormed up to her bedroom.
Her mother and father came into her room a few minutes later and quietly closed the door. She felt terribly selfish for saying that Aaron should die. "I'm sorry," said her father. "We've been so concerned about Aaron that we have forgotten about you."
Miriam's mother hugged her gently and said "We love my precious. You know, sometimes I too wish that Aaron had not been born to us." Miriam was surprised to hear these words. She sat on her bed with her parents for a long time and fell asleep in her mother's arms.At dinner the next day, Miriam's dad announced that he was changing the way he worked. He would be at Miriam's concert. He was canceling almost all his travel. “We will have less money but the most important thing is that we will have more time together," her father said.
Miriam sang beautifully at the concert and she could see her proud parents in the second row. At home, Miriam spent more time with both Aaron and her parents. She often helped her mother or the nurse bathe Aaron. At night, at bedtime, Miriam began to pray for God to perform whatever miracle it would take to help Aaron.
A few weeks later, as her father tucked her in for the night, Miriam told him of her prayers for Aaron. "But I haven't seen any miracles," she said thinking of tiny Aaron.
"I don't know what miracles God has planned for Aaron," replied her father, "but I do know one miracle that God has already performed for us."
"What miracle was that?" Miriam asked her dad, puzzled.
"God taught me and your mom how precious the time we spend together is, loving each other as a family, being here for each other. Our time together is a wonderful gift from God. Just as splitting the Red Sea was a miracle, so Aaron is a miracle that revealed to me the gift of my family."
Miriam, who had wondered what happened to all the miracles, then realized how much better her life had become since Aaron arrived. "Yes," she thought aloud, "I think I have seen my first miracle."
The Call of the Shofar
We've quite a combination of lessons for this day. Disturbing talk about all that will go wrong in the Old Testament lesson and in much of our New Testament readings as well. Dark messages for a dark time, we might conclude. But Psalm 98 comes to our rescue. Verse 7 stands out--but we should take the Hebrew word shofar as "shofar" and not "horn." For Christians, it takes some effort to understand how important shofars are in Jewish tradition. If pressed for a similarly important item for Christians, it is not too much to compare a shofar with the chalice.
A Jewish shofar is made out of an animal horn. Any horn may be used for a shofar, except the horn of a cow or a bull because their horn would be a reminder of the Golden Calf--which the children of Israel had made in the desert, coming out of Egypt. Usually, and preferably, the shofar is made out of a ram's horn, in memory of the ram which was offered instead of Isaac.
In certain Arab countries the Jews were not allowed to sound the shofar, for it used to disconcert the Arabs who knew that the Jews believed that the Jewish Messiah would some day come with the sound of the shofar.
All this comes out of the Bible of course, specifically Genesis: "And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and behold a ram caught afterwards in the thicket by his horns." According to tradition, Abraham saw the ram caught in one thicket after another. Said the sage Rav Huna, “The ram caught again and again in the thick bushes showed Abraham that his children would be caught in one exile after another, but in the end they will be redeemed by the sound of the ram's horn.”
According to Jewish tradition, as well, the shofar has to be bent, to show that the righteous have to bend their hearts to the Heavenly Father.
Rabbi Rashi explains that there was a time when the Jews were forbidden to sound the shofar. Guards were posted to watch them until the service was concluded. The tradition then developed that the shofar would not be sounded until after the reading of the Torah; with the reading of the life-giving Torah, it was believed, also came forgiveness.
Of Stones and Meaning
We know all too well about stones. I read last week in the Wall Street Journal of the young men sent off to Afghanistan by the fiery preaching of the mullahs in Pakistan. Young men, 18 or 19, and sometimes boys even younger, take their hunting rifles off to defend Islam and God in Afghanistan, are given two days of minimal training, and are consumed in the fire of cluster bombs dropped by high-flying B-52s. Young men and boys have not been around long enough to understand about how rough rough stones can be. I know about B-52s; my father used to fly in them and I have been inside them and watched them take off many times. I know what they can do.
We know about stones that arrive anonymously in the mail which contain anthrax. We know about stones when one of our own will bomb a federal building and call the deaths of children “collateral damage.”
We also know about the stones we are grinding as we prepare to send our own young women and men off to war. Some of the them will accidentally kill non-combatants and some will lose their own lives--and our tears will feel like very rough stones. We know about the large stones of felled buildings and the air liner crash which killed 265 people on Monday. Five infants, on their way to see grandmas and grandpas, instead were consumed in a fiery crash. And we cried yet again.
We know about mayors who spend most of their day attending funerals and memorial services. Heroes make stones a bit smoother but at the end of the day, our loss is still there. And we grieve and wait for brutal new stones to arrive.
In the midst of what sometimes seems to be a sea of stones, where do we find Biblical shofars to call us to hope and faith? The Psalmist in our lesson calls us “with trumpets and the sound of the shofar" to "shout with joy before the King, the Lord!”
But aren’t the stones far larger than the trumpets and the sound of fiery crashes much louder than our shofar? Appearances to the contrary, the Psalmist is emphatic: the Lord shall come to judge the earth “in righteousness” and us “with equity.” Whatever happens, however large and jagged the stones, the Psalmist says, we can count on the faithfulness of God.
Remember Julian of Norwich: God allows us to fall that we might we lifted all the higher. Julian reminds us of the deepest paradox, the one that is most difficult for us to grasp: only as we are lifted out of suffering by a God who suffers do we find our calling.
Can we, like Miriam, discover miracles where we thought there were only disasters? If we see only stones, we surely won’t sense any divine activity and a diminishing cynicism likely will characterize our lives. But if we believe in shofars and welcome the nurture of God, the Psalmist has assured us that the singular echoes of the shofar will finally triumph over the sound of falling stones.
On that decision, I think the Psalmist would say, we hang the meaning of our lives.