Rev. Jared Buss
Pittsburgh New Church; October 13, 2024
Readings: Judges 7:16-20 (children’s talk); Exodus 19:16-20; Secrets of Heaven §8815
The trumpets that Gideon’s three hundred men blew around the camp of Midian symbolize truth sounding from heaven—they symbolize a clear, strong message coming from within and resonating in our minds. That resounding truth is what we’re going to be focusing on today; and the big question is, what do we need to do to hear it? Perhaps you can remember a moment in your life in which the power of a true idea made itself felt—a moment in which you felt compelled by a truth, because you saw it with such clarity. But then, there are lots of moments in everybody’s life in which we experience no such clarity. Sometimes that’s because we’re confused: one good idea seems to conflict with another, and we don’t know what to believe. Other times it’s because our minds are down here in the world and we’re just not thinking on that higher level. But when we realize that we want something more—that we want answers that are more than just words on a page, we want to hear truth that gives us hope and confidence—what do we need to do?
This truth that resounds from heaven is symbolized by the blast of a trumpet, and there are lots of stories in the Word that feature trumpets—today’s story about Gideon being one of them. These stories illustrate the quality of this higher truth far better than any words of mine ever could; so here are two more passages that talk about trumpets. First, from the book of Exodus: [read 19:16-20]. After He’s come down on the mountain, the Lord speaks the Ten Commandments in the hearing of all His people [Ex. 20]. The next reading is from the Heavenly Doctrine of the New Church, and it explains the deeper meaning of those trumpets that sounded when the Lord appeared on Sinai [read SH §8815].
In all of the stories that that passage refers to, the sounding of trumpets is accompanied by a revelation. This is most obvious in the reading from Exodus: when the trumpet sounds, the Lord Himself appears at the top of the mountain and speaks the Ten Commandments. The revelations in the other stories mentioned there are symbolic: when the trumpet sounds, things that symbolize falsity are knocked down and scattered. The reading from Secrets of Heaven says that God’s truth passing through the heavens, “perfects the good but destroys the evil” (§8815.2). This shouldn’t be taken to mean that the evil are literally destroyed or killed when God speaks. Rather, when God’s truth sounds, the illusions that evil hides behind are blown away—so evil’s power crumbles. But everything good is strengthened and uplifted by God’s truth. As ever, it’s most useful to think of the stories of the Word as descriptions of things that take place within ourselves, not as descriptions of things that happen to other people. In other words, don’t dwell on the Lord’s power to scatter “those people who are wrong”—dwell on the Lord’s power to scatter the darkness within yourself.
As I said before, this sounding of the trumpet, this sudden influx of clarity, might feel really good when we experience it, but we don’t always experience it. A lot of the time we don’t even especially want it—our minds are on other things. We’re thinking about lunch and the Steelers, and we’re busy trying not to think too hard about the fact that tomorrow is Monday. But even when we want to go up to that higher place—where we can see something that we believe in—we don’t always know how. We don’t always feel as confident in the truth we know as we wish we did. Sooner or later everybody questions the things that they were taught as a child. That’s appropriate, because sooner or later everybody has to start believing the things that they believe, instead of the things that somebody else told them to believe. But questioning ideas that we once held with confidence is exhausting. And it can be really discouraging. When we get bumped out of our intellectual comfort zones, it’s like the floor gets taken out from under us. It’s hard to feel like a competent adult in that state of mind—we go back to feeling like we’re too small to navigate the world around us. And the world is full of conflicting opinions. Even the so-called facts sometimes seem to conflict with one another. Even within the church we’ll encounter opinions that challenge our own. Sometimes life makes us question even the bedrock of our faith, and while that’s normal, it is not enjoyable.
And all of this gets even more complicated when you throw in the consideration that having a strong sense of conviction isn’t necessarily the same thing as being guided by heaven’s truth. People can be passionate about ideas that are deeply flawed—and we don’t want that to be true of ourselves. Maybe it’s better to doubt than to be blindly swept along by an overwhelming need for certainty. It isn’t enough to believe something, or to cling to the ideas we have because they’re the ideas we have. We need the truth. We long to hear that clarity and that power that are not of this world. So, perhaps, we go to the Word—because most of us have been taught, since childhood, that the Word is the repository of truth. And it is. But sometimes even the Word seems like a sea of information that isn’t enlivened by any light from within. It isn’t enough to have the teachings: we want to see heaven within the teachings. Even the teachings of the Word can be bent away from heaven, if the wrong spirit champions them. When we want to hear the Lord’s spirit speaking to us, and we don’t hear it, what do we do?
In the story from the book of Judges that we heard today, the enemies of the children of Israel are the Midianites, and the Midianites have a vast army. We’re told that they were, “as numerous as locusts; and their camels were without number, as the sand by the seashore in multitude” (7:12). The reading from Secrets of Heaven says that these enemies symbolize “those immersed in evils and in falsities arising from them” (§8815.2) More specifically, the Midianites symbolize a spiritual state in which we have the truths of faith—we know what the Word says—but only in an external way. Those truths can’t rise up to the higher levels of our minds, because we aren’t living them: they aren’t being joined to the good of life, and the good of life is what opens the higher levels of the mind. So the truth we know is just so much information—and because it isn’t being used the way it’s meant to be used, it gets turned into falsity (SH §§3242, 4756, 4788; AE §455.9). The hells that are present with us use that falsity against us. Apparent truths or half-truths are sent out to war against real truths, and the result is that we end up second-guessing everything we believe. And when we’re in this troubled and frustrated state of mind, we often end up behaving badly. We do selfish things that we really know we shouldn’t do, and our excuse is that we’re just so troubled and so frustrated.
One thing to note is that we can’t get out of this situation until we’re willing to admit that it is what it is. But looking that honestly at what’s going on inside us can be difficult. So we simmer along in a stew of confusion—until we reach the point where we’re willing to say that we’re lost and confused, and that we see that unkind parts of us are using our confusion as a shield, and we’re ready to be done with it. We’re ready to roll that whole internal landscape into a ball and throw it away and be done. That’s the beginning of a solution, but only the beginning.
In the literal sense of the Word, the Lord’s solution to the Midianite problem was to go to Gideon, a man who didn’t believe that he was good enough to save Israel, and tell him that he’d been called to save Israel (Judges 6:14-16). Gideon assembled an army of thirty-two thousand, and the Lord winnowed that army down to just three hundred men (7:1-7). Then the Lord sent those three hundred men against the Midianites, armed with trumpets, pitchers and torches.
One of the main points of last week’s sermon was that Gideon was clearly not a very confident leader. He did what the Lord said, but he did it at night, because he was afraid (Judges 6:27). He was constantly asking the Lord for signs, or for reassurance (6:17, 36-40). His lack of confidence matches the story that he appears in: it makes sense that if we feel like we’re swimming in a sea of falsity and confusion, the part of us that stumbles forward will do so without much confidence. But the other side of that coin is that Gideon did what the Lord said, even though he wasn’t confident. He didn’t know everything, but he knew what the Lord was telling him to do, and he did that—and the difference that that makes cannot be overstated. This is an idea that we’ll come back to.
The other thing that was emphasized in last week’s sermon is that the Lord saved Israel not with a great big army, but with just three hundred men—and those three hundred men were the three hundred who lapped water with their tongues, as a dog laps, when they went down to the river to drink (Judges 7:5, 6). In the Heavenly Doctrine we’re told that dogs, in this context, symbolize appetite and eagerness (AE §455.9); so the three hundred who lapped like dogs symbolize an appetite for the truth—an eagerness or a longing for the truth, a willingness to be shown the truth. The Lord doesn’t ask us to somehow become so smart that we know the things we need to know without being taught. He asks us to let Him teach us. It isn’t our confusion or our lack of confusion that matters, our wisdom or our lack of wisdom. If we want to hear the truth, what we need is a heart that lets Him show us what we haven’t seen.
The bottom line is that the truth that resounds from heaven isn’t ours. It isn’t something that we figure out; it isn’t an essay that we write or a diagram that we draw. It is the Lord’s, and He reveals that truth to our spirits and speaks it to our hearts, when we make ourselves ready. Any truth that is clear enough and strong enough to rise above the noise of the world only is so clear and so strong because the Lord is in it. It is the Lord’s truth; it is His to give. We receive it, when we’re ready. And making ourselves ready involves all of the things that we’ve already discussed. We have to recognize, first of all, that where we are isn’t where we want to be. There’s no saving or fixing the sea of confusion—we just need to get out of it. We need to be lifted up. We make ourselves ready to receive the truth when we humble ourselves. We don’t need to be brilliant, and we certainly don’t need to beat our heads against the wall until we figure it out—buried underneath that sort of thinking is the assumption that it’s all about us. It isn’t all about us. There is a God in heaven who knows what’s good and what’s right, and He can teach us. He will teach us, when we’re ready.
And we make ourselves ready when we do as He says. The good of life is what opens the higher levels of the mind. We may not understand everything that the Lord wants us to do, but surely we understand some things. We can do those things. We can keep the Ten Commandments. We can do our jobs sincerely, justly and faithfully. We can come to church, and pray to the Lord, and read His Word. If we do what we know how to do—if we put ourselves in front of Him—then sooner or later He’ll show us something that we hadn’t seen before. In a quiet place within our hearts, a truth from heaven will resound.
All of these ideas are echoes of what the Lord Himself says to His disciples in the Gospel:
Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves…. You will be brought before governors and kings for My sake, as a testimony to them and to the Gentiles. But when they deliver you up, do not worry about how or what you should speak. For it will be given to you in that hour what you should speak; for it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father who speaks in you. (Matt. 10:16, 18-20)
Amen.