The Calling is Loud, the Work is Quiet

          On the surface of things, there is a contradiction, or at least a tension, between the words of Joel and the words of Jesus.

          Blow some trumpets—don’t toot your horn.
          Call, assemble, bring even newlyweds out of their bed chambers, to pray in the streets—don’t do your prayin’ in public.
          Shout, Weep aloud to be seen—don’t look dismal…

          A tension too, every ash Wednesday—don’t disfigure your face, as we do so with Ashes…

          But Jesus and Joel are doing different things—Joel is calling his people to repentance… Jesus is watching works of religion done wrong.

           So too, these ashes, they are a call to your Lenten Discipline
—they are not the discipline itself.

          Imagine if Joel had been quiet about God’s call to repentance, or if Jesus had encouraged the crowd to be loud about their works
—surely Joel would have endangered Jerusalem and Jesus encouraged hypocrisy from the Mount of Beatitudes…
A quiet call and a loud work… does not work.

          What these perennial pieces of scripture are telling us, is that: The call is loud, the work is quiet.

          Prayer

          The Call is Loud, the Work is Quiet.

          On Ash Wednesday we are called out of idolatry:
-shaken from the many ways we forget our God,
-called to extasy, that is, called out of ourselves,
-called to recognize, at least in a small way, the needs of our neighbors.

          We heed this call through the works of
prayer—to remember God, fasting—to move beyond ourselves, and
alms—to remember that our neighbors matter.
These aren’t one and done, get a photo-op and get out, kind of things, but instead the quiet work of a lifetime, which we practice more intentionally in these 40 days.

          The Call is Loud, the Work is Quiet.

          Know thyself, calls out the Philosophers, and they must call loudly, for we would do anything to avoid even a few moments self-reflection:
we’ve invented a overabundance of distractions
—bright screens and enough electronic chirps to dwarf any orchestra,
Demagogues and Celebrities…
All just to keep us from being alone with our thoughts for five minutes
—we need to hear this call, a call to self-examination, a recognition of our own culpabilities and neurosis… and needs.

          Called to the long work of mending relationships, making amends, repairing the breach, to works of repentance… as well as kindness and self-care.

          The Call is Loud, the Work is Quiet.

          How can we look and see how people treat one another, the vicious selfishness, the rebellion against God, the stripping of His good creation, commodified without care… how can we see it all, and not cry out?

          But the healing this world needs!
Contending with evil within and without,
our vocation to woo the trembling goodness of this world from its hiding place,
the kind of quiet sacrifice that it takes to even just do no harm!

          The Call is Loud, the Work is Quiet.

          The mark of ash, the cross, soon to grace your brow, it calls to mind your mortality, calls you to remember you are dust and to dust shall you return.

          Our Lenten Journey, our Journey with Jesus these 40 days,
heading toward resurrection and Easter,
through the symbol of death...
that’s the kind of journey which requires work not found in headlines, nor often praised by people…
it is death and resurrection.

          The Call is Loud, the Work is Quiet. Amen.