Harry T. Cook

9/07/08

Ezekiel 33: 1-11

The words we hear today from a great remove of more than 2,500 years are credited to a sixth century B.C.E. public intellectual known as Ezekiel who may have been one of those exiled from Judah to Babylon near the beginning of that century — or at least he spoke to those who were. His message was one of freedom and also a more somber one basically saying that what befalls a person or a people is usually a consequence of behavior. It is said that Ezekiel was among the first to discern the principle of individual responsibility. My picture of Ezekiel is one of a rather cool and detached observer, hesitant to say “I told you so” when stuff happens, but knowing all along that it would unless . . . Unless what? Unless people pay attention to what is going on around them and what it may promise or portend. Thus, he crafts the image of a divinely appointed Paul Revere-type of sentinel who is to sound the trumpet of warning when disaster approaches in the hope that the trumpet will be both heard and heeded that disaster may be averted or at least mitigated. Here is how the text puts it: If any who hear the sound of the trumpet do not take warning . . . their blood shall be upon their own heads. They heard the sound of the trumpet and did not take warning. OK, then. Are these words of Ezekiel of any use to us as summer rolls into fall in the year 2008? I would say they are, and here’s how: If we listen, we will hear a number of different trumpets of warning being sounded. And if we pay attention to that of which they warn, we will not meet the kind of fate Ezekiel imagined would befall his people and nation if they did not take notice. One trumpet audible among the current world noise warns of American dependence on fossil fuels taken from the soil of other lands whose inhabitants and governments do not on the whole like us very much. The trumpet is not sounding a call to battle with those other nations but with our national addiction to petroleum products and the resultant damage to this fragile Earth, our island home. The warning is clear: We must demand that our leaders invest some of our national capital in the research and development of wind and solar power. The religious or spiritual aspect of this is that we humans did not create the world; we are one species in the biosphere, and we are demonstrably abusing it. Another trumpet is sounding an alarm to warn of the erosion of our nation’s constitutionally guaranteed liberties with a presidential administration run off the rails of legal integrity. We do not want to be singing this anthem in the past-tense: Our father’s God, author of liberty, to thee we sing. We want to be able to sing the next line and to know we have done everything responsible to make it so: Long may our land be bright with freedom’s holy light . . . Yet another trumpet blast warns of war – war that our own nation began pre-emptively and stupidly and which has by now consumed more than 4,200 lives of American military personnel and who knows how many tens of thousands of civilians. The trumpet also warns us away from a greater and more destructive war that a number of our current leaders would love to commence and which, by all accounts, would seriously destabilize the world for generations to come. The religious aspect of this issue is obvious. Yahweh, make us instruments of thy peace . . . Which is the poetic way of saying, “If anyone is in charge, please help us strive for peace and justice instead of returning blow for blow.” Among the trumpets sounding urgent notes of warning is one that may be the hardest of all to hear. It calls attention to those within our own American society who seek by means of stealth to drive us back into the Stone Age of religious and intellectual captivity: Those who would remove a woman’s choice to her reproductive freedom, those who would ban real science from public school classrooms and replace it with biblical certitudes, those who would stand in the way of embryonic stem-cell research that could end up relieving human suffering. If you believe any god has made you free, then hear that trumpet and respond to it immediately. Exactly 57 days from now, Americans properly registered to vote will have an opportunity that many of our fellow citizens of Earth do not now have and have little hope of attaining any time soon: the right and the responsibility to vote for those persons whose promise and abilities will best respond to the warning of the various trumpets whose sounds beg for our attention.

© Copyright 2008, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.