Listening to God
Rev. Mark Schaefer
Kay Spiritual Life Center
January 15, 2006
1 Samuel 3:1-10; 1 Corinthians 6:12-20; John 1:43-51
1 Samuel 3:1-10. Now the boy Samuel was ministering to the Lord under Eli. The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread.
At that time Eli, whose eyesight had begun to grow dim so that he could not see, was lying down in his room; the lamp of God had not yet gone out, and Samuel was lying down in the temple of the Lord, where the ark of God was. Then the Lord called, ‘Samuel! Samuel!’ and he said, ‘Here I am!’ and ran to Eli, and said, ‘Here I am, for you called me.’ But he said, ‘I did not call; lie down again.’ So he went and lay down. The Lord called again, ‘Samuel!’ Samuel got up and went to Eli, and said, ‘Here I am, for you called me.’ But he said, ‘I did not call, my son; lie down again.’ Now Samuel did not yet know the Lord, and the word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him. The Lord called Samuel again, a third time. And he got up and went to Eli, and said, ‘Here I am, for you called me.’ Then Eli perceived that the Lord was calling the boy. Therefore Eli said to Samuel, ‘Go, lie down; and if he calls you, you shall say, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” ’ So Samuel went and lay down in his place.
Now the Lord came and stood there, calling as before, ‘Samuel! Samuel!’ And Samuel said, ‘Speak, for your servant is listening.’1 Corinthians 6:12-20 ‘All things are lawful for me’, but not all things are beneficial. ‘All things are lawful for me’, but I will not be dominated by anything. ‘Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food’, and God will destroy both one and the other. The body is meant not for fornication but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. And God raised the Lord and will also raise us by his power. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Should I therefore take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never! Do you not know that whoever is united to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For it is said, ‘The two shall be one flesh.’ But anyone united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. Shun fornication! Every sin that a person commits is outside the body; but the fornicator sins against the body itself. Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body.
John 1:43-54 The next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee. He found Philip and said to him, ‘Follow me.’ Now Philip was from Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter. Philip found Nathanael and said to him, ‘We have found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth.’ Nathanael said to him, ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’ Philip said to him, ‘Come and see.’ When Jesus saw Nathanael coming towards him, he said of him, ‘Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!’ Nathanael asked him, ‘Where did you come to know me?’ Jesus answered, ‘I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you.’ Nathanael replied, ‘Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!’ Jesus answered, ‘Do you believe because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree? You will see greater things than these.’ And he said to him, ‘Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.’
I. BEGINNING
I used to hate caller ID. The very idea of it used to offend my sense of tradition. An incoming phone call should be a surprise, I thought. It should be like a Christmas present—a mystery until you open it. It seemed odd that a person should know who was calling them before they even answered the phone. Seemed wrong somehow.
Now, of course, I am a big fan. I was converted to Caller ID™ the same way I had been converted to answering machines a decade before. It’s only fair—I now reason—to know who seeks to invade your privacy. Phone etiquette had long demanded that the caller identify themselves before proceeding—you were always taught to say, “Hello, this is Mark, may I speak with Mr. Smith, please?” People don’t do that as much anymore. I wonder if it’s because caller ID has made such politenesses less necessary.
In any event, it is good to know, whether by caller ID, or by the “From” listing on an e-mail, or the return address on an envelope, where the message is coming from.
II. HEARING THE VOICE OF GOD
Samuel had no such help.
Samuel was the son of Elkanah and Hannah. Hannah was one of two wives of Elkanah and was barren. She had prayed to God for deliverance in her need had made a promise to God:
O LORD of Hosts, if only you will look on the misery of your servant, and remember me, and not forget your servant, but will give to your servant a male child, then I will set him before you as a nazirite until the day of his death. He shall drink neither wine nor intoxicants, and no razor shall touch his head.
Hannah later conceived and bore a son to Elkanah and named the child Samuel. True to her vow, after weaning the child, she presented him to the high priest Eli, to be dedicated to the service of God in the temple. There he grew up in stature and in favor with God and with the people.
Then one night—he receives a message.
Samuel hears a voice calling out, “Samuel! Samuel!” He does not recognize the voice as the voice of God, instead he assumes it is his master Eli the priest. In Samuel’s defense, the scripture tells us that “The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread.”
He runs to Eli and says “Here I am, for you called me.” Eli says, “It wasn’t me, go back to sleep.” This happens two more times and then Eli figures out what is happening and says “Go, lie down; and if he calls you, you shall say, ‘Speak LORD, for your servant is listening.” Then we are told that the Lord “came and stood there” calling as before and this time Samuel responds, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”
And Samuel’s life is changed forever—and that of Israel, too. For Samuel becomes the prophet who will eventually anoint King Saul and King David and will become one of the great prophets of Israel. But that all began with him responding to the call of God by saying, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”
III. KNOWING THE VOICE OF GOD
A. Hearing
I suppose it would not be any easier for us to recognize the voice of God than it was for Samuel. As in Samuel’s day, the word of the Lord is rare and visions are not widespread. We would likely not recognize a call from God because we’re not used to getting them. What would it look like? What area code shows up on your caller ID when God calls you? (It reminds me of that old joke where the Pope gets a phone installed that is a direct line from God. One day the phone is ringing and the Pope is dismayed to learn the call is coming from Salt Lake City.)
But more likely, our problem is in hearing the voice of God amid the clutter of our lives. Our lives are very, very loud these days. There are all kinds of messages competing for our attention. And it seems that most of them are screaming. The politicians are screaming. The pundits are screaming. The advertisers are screaming. The filmmakers are screaming. The sports radio guys are screaming the fans are screaming. Everyone is yelling their opinions as loud as they can and the result is a cacophony of noise that makes it hard to hear anything, least of all the voice of God calling out, a voice that is usually gentle and quiet. Our translations include exclamation points after the name “Samuel”—but there are no punctuation marks in Hebrew, so it’s just an editorial choice. The voice that called out to Samuel could just as easily have been soft, soft enough that he could mistake it for the voice of Eli. Soft enough that it becomes hard for us to hear it in a world dominated by noise.
B. Recognizing
And then there is the other perplexing issue—how to recognize what you’ve heard as the voice of God. Supposing we do stop our crazy, busy lives and hear a voice—what guarantee that we are hearing the voice of God?
Because there do seem to be a lot of people out there getting messages from God. Messages that God wants people to blow themselves up for political causes. Messages that God wants you to give money to those who receive the message. Messages of hate. Messages of intolerance. And those are just the famous cases.
There are a lot of people walking around out there laboring under the delusion that they’re doing what God wants them to do. I once had a co-worker tell me that her husband had an ex-girlfriend who believed that God wanted her and my colleague’s husband to be married. Others commit crimes because they believe God has ordered them to. Often times a person’s own brokenness will speak to them in their own mind and they will convince themselves that it is God speaking to them.
How on earth is a person to know that what they are hearing as the word of God is in fact the word of God? There is, of course, no caller ID, no return address, that helps us to know where a given message is coming from.
C. The Shema
Key to listening to God is the listening itself. The Great Commandment of the Israelites, the commandment that Jesus quotes when he identifies the “heart of the law and the prophets” is the confession of faith called the Shema. It begins shema Yisrael, Adonai eloheinu, Adonai echad “Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord alone”. The very first command in that commandment is shema—“hear” or “listen”. Listen to God. And listen to one another.
IV. LISTENING TO THE COMMUNITY
Here we get a cue from the story of Samuel. He does as Eli tells him and he receives a message from God. The message is a judgment against Eli and his sons, who are committing great injustices and sins across the country. He is reluctant to tell Eli but Eli tells him to reveal what he has heard, and Eli responds, “It is the Lord. Let him do what seems good to him.”
Samuel takes his message before the religious community—in this case, the person of Eli—and the message is validated. Even though the message is one that is bad news for Eli, he ratifies it as a message from God. It is the same idea expressed in the letters of Paul:
“If anyone speaks in a tongue, let there be only two or at most three, and each in turn; and let one interpret…. Let two or three prophets speak, and let the others weigh what is said…. And the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets, for God is a God not of disorder but of peace.” (1 Corinthians 14:27-33)
The point made is this: those who claim to speak on God’s behalf are subject to the approval of the community of faith. Those who speak in tongues should have someone interpret for them, or else they should remain silent. Those who prophesy, have what they say weighed by others. The communications we receive from God do not come in a vacuum for our ears only, they come as part of God’s word, continually spoken to the people of God.
Even Joan of Arc did this. She received messages from God and was brought before an ecclesial council who affirmed that God was indeed speaking to her. Now, that’s not to say that God’s speaking is by majority vote or by what’s popular. Sometimes the judgment of the church is late. For example, we read in the prophets that there were many other prophets at the same time, saying quite different things and who were quite popular. Isaiah, Jeremiah and many others contended with prophets who preached messages that were quite different than what they had to say. How then, do we know whether God was speaking to Isaiah and Jeremiah and not the others? Quite simply: Isaiah and Jeremiah made it into the Bible—the other prophets did not. That is, the people of Israel affirmed the messages of Isaiah and Jeremiah by including them in their sacred writings. Sadly, such approval often came too late—the prophets always suffered at the hands of their detractors.
But it doesn’t change the idea that a message from God must find some resonance among the people of God to be considered true. If I were to stand up here and tell you that God had told me that we were to begin building a giant landing pad for the spaceship that was coming and was going to take us all to heaven, you would be well within your rights to contact my bishop and ask his opinion on the matter.
On a more serious note, if I were to stand up here and tell you that God had spoken to me and demanded that we go out and exact violent retribution against some group or other, you would be well within your rights to challenge that “message” as being incompatible with how you understood the Gospel. If I refused to listen to the people of God, then I could be assured of not having received a message from God.
A. Calling and Community
The day after tomorrow, I leave for two days to go on what is misleadingly called an “elders retreat”. It is not a retreat at all in the sense that I’d be in a cabin somewhere reading a book, reflecting, and enjoying solitude. Rather, this will be a two-day session of oral examination by the Board of Ordained Ministry as the final stage toward my ordination.
In The United Methodist Church, ordination is a long complex process. It starts out when a person senses a calling from God toward the ministry. The very first step is that they have to be approved by their local church’s administrative board. They then meet with the District Committee on Ordained ministry and are assigned a guide to go through a book about discerning a call. That can take 6 months to a year, during which time the individual is called an “inquiring candidate”. At the end of that time, the guide reports back to the DCOM as it is called, and they vote on whether to continue the candidate. At that point the candidate becomes an “exploring candidate” and goes through another, longer book full of questions and exercises and reports back to the DCOM after that is completed, after another 6 months to a year. At that point, the DCOM decides whether to certify the candidate after which the candidate is now a “certified candidate.”
After a period of two years, and following graduation from seminary (which if you time it right should be the same time, it wasn’t for me) the certified candidate is eligible to become a “probationary member” of the annual conference. The certified candidate writes pages and pages of written answers to various questions and then goes to a two day “probationers retreat” where they go through two days of oral examinations. After that, at the following Annual Conference, they are presented before the clergy session and are Commissioned as Probationary Members of the Annual Conference.
Next, after three years of the practice of ministry, including monthly probationers meetings with a mentor and continuing ed courses, you write anywhere from 60 to 90 pages of written answers to questions from the Book of Discipline, then you prepare for another two day session of oral examination before the Board of Ordained Ministry. Finally, after all that, assuming the probationer passes all these steps, they are ordained at the following annual conference. For me it will have been six years from beginning to end.
Perhaps this is an extreme example, but it is evidence that the church expects callings from God to be vetted and affirmed by the community of faith. It is a reminder that God does not call us into isolated living but into community.
V. LISTENING TO GOD IN THE COMMUNITY
Indeed, community plays a bigger role than we might think. For in listening to one another not only do we affirm the messages that we may get from God, but sometimes the community itself is the source of our messages from God. Sometimes we need to listen to the community in order to listen to God.
A. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Martin Luther King, Jr. is one who did just that. While always a supporter of civil rights, he was not always in the forefront of leadership in the movement. After accepting a pastorate at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama he responded to the injustices in his community by taking leadership in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, in which for 382 days, black residents of Montgomery boycotted the segregated bus company. He listened to the community of faith speak of justice and liberation for God’s people and he had to respond. In so doing, he led a movement that would change the United States.
For King also listened to the voices of the tradition. The tradition that echoes down to us from the Sermon on the Mount, through the words of Jesus, challenging us toward non-violence. King listened to the words of Christ calling him to a higher way, and in so doing, King called America to a higher way.
VI. END: THE GOOD NEWS
In the end, Listening to God may seem like a complicated thing. With so many voices it can be hard to tell which voice is God’s, which voice is calling us, which voice articulates the will of God for us. It can seem like an arduous task to do all that listening, to listen to the still, small voices, to listen to the myriad voices in community, to sort them out, to test them against the community. In the end, we may feel that it is no easier to hear the voice of God in our lives.
And yet, the Good News is that God continues to call us. God does not give up on us. God comes to us in the person of Christ along the Galilean shore, saying to us as he did to Philip: “follow me.” God keeps calling us in the night as he did with Samuel, over and over, until at last we recognize God’s voice and stand and say, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”
