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Sermon - September 24th, 2006
Voices in the Night
Rev. Gwen Drake
Scripture: 1 Samuel 3:1 - 11
Prayer: Touch us, O God, with truth that burns like fire, with beauty that moves us like the wind; and set us free to see and listen and wonder at the gracious mysteries of life. Amen.
Do you wake up at 4 in the morning for no reason at all and find it impossible to go back to sleep? It is not an uncommon occurrence. It happens. I wake up at some ungodly hour and a thousand worries, at least, consume me. These are things that terrify me at night and become trivial as soon as the sun comes up. Do I see some knowing looks out there?
I've even heard many solutions to this common problem. One is to get up in the middle of the night and walk the dog. Another is to listen to a tape with the reading of Scripture on it--puts me right to sleep, usually, he said. One person gets up and cooks....now if I did that I would really start worrying about myself. I've tried reading, writing in my journal, making lists. I even read about someone who sang hymns. What seems to be a common denominator here, is an uneasiness, if not a downright fear of the night, of the literal power of darkness to make benign things seem bad and bad things seem much, much worse. Perhaps we could all agree that we hear certain voices in the night and they very rarely have anything good to say to us.
At 3 or 4 a.m. our beds can become our coffin. Everything we do not understand can crowd in on us: the meaning of life, of death, the fate of the earth, the size of the universe, where God is and what God thinks of the mistakes we have made. These thoughts can bear down on us without mercy until we figure out a way to numb them, calm them, or do something mindless and automatic enough to put our panicked brain to sleep. And I can not tell you what is more frightening--that I will hear a voice address me out of the silence or that I will hear absolutely, definitively, nothing at all.
But if WE think our own beds can be scary places in the middle of the night, imagine poor Samuel sleeping in the temple next to the ark of God. Young Samuel, he was his mother Hannah's firstborn son, a miracle baby because everyone, including her, believed she was barren until the day she went to the temple at Shiloh and prayed for a child. She would do anything to conceive, Hannah prayed, including give the baby back to God. The old temple priest Eli heard her prayer, blessed it, and true to her word she brought her baby boy Samuel back to Eli as soon as he was old enough. So it happened that Samuel grew up in the temple at Shiloh, serving Eli--who was old and going blind--and helping him with his priestly duties: like locking and unlocking the doors of the shrine, keeping the lamp of God filled with oil, scrubbing out pots used for sacrificing animals. It does not sound like a particularly pleasant childhood. But Eli was kind to Samuel, loving the boy as his own, loving the life the child brought into that dark, holy place.
And Samuel watched the faithful bring their burnt-offerings, their sin-offerings, their guilt-offerings to the temple during the day. At night he lay down by the ark of God, the legendary throne of the invisible king, the Lord God that Israel carried into battle on the frontline. It was known to contain all the sacred relics of Israel's past like a container of manna and the tablets of the covenant. Sleeping next to it had to be like sleeping in a graveyard, or next to a volcano. But Samuel was apparently used to it or oblivious to it. Night after night he lay down beside it and pulled his cloak around him, trying not to sleep too soundly in case Eli, the faithful priest with failing eyesight and worn out joints called him in the night.
And someone did call him one particular night. Not once but three times, and three times he answered, "Here I am," a variation on "IÕm coming," and Samuel went running to see what Eli wanted. But Eli told Samuel, "Go back to bed, I didn't call you." It was a time of settled and silent religion. Finally after the third time, Eli got it that the voice might be THE VOICE. Now, we are told that Samuel did not yet know the Lord. This seems remarkable, even though he is only twelve, because he had spent his whole life in the Lord's house. It reminds us that there is more to knowing God than being in church.
So, Eli rubbed the sleep from his eyes and told Samuel what to say the next time he heard the voice. "Say, 'Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.'" Eli told the boy and that was exactly what Samuel did. He was no longer a child, a temple lackey who came running at the sound of his name. He became a young man, a servant of God who was ready to hear what the Lord had to say to him. Compared to the courage that required, sleeping next to the ark was nothing!
The message itself took courage to hear as well, because it condemned old Eli's house forever--old blind Eli, the only family Samuel had ever known, damned because his loutish sons had gotten into the bad habit of stealing the best cuts of meat from the temple and taking them home to roast. Eli had warned them but could not make them stop, and now the bill for their wrongdoing had come due. Samuel did not want to tell Eli what he had heard. The next morning he opened up the temple as usual and when Eli called him he answered as usual, "Here I am." The same words he used to answer Eli before his vision, before the voice spoke from the night. Samuel wanted to go back to the way things were; he wanted to remain the child, but Eli knew better. He ordered Samuel to tell him all that he had learned, and here there is a peculiar glitch in the Hebrew. "What was it he told you?" Eli asked, using a plain masculine pronoun that did not presume to know who "he" is. There were plenty of voices that could be heard in the night, it seems, and Eli knew enough to hear the message before he decided who it was from. The boy balked but Eli made it clear that he, like Samuel, was ready to hear the message. So Samuel told him everything. It was the content of the message--the righteousness, the judgment, the bone-rattling power of it--that let Eli know who it was from, who the "he" was. "It is the Lord," he said, "Let the Lord do what seems good." And so it came to pass that the boy he counted on to be his eyes showed Eli the fiery vision of his own destruction.
Now if that is what happens when you answer voices in the night, then thank you very much but I would just as soon get up and cook something! Does anyone really want to hear the voice of the living God? I wonder. I wonder if I do, if the Church does, if we do? I wonder, as I said before, which is worse: to hear it or not to hear it, to face fainting at the power of it or to live oblivious to it, eaten up by the thousand little fears that may prevent its ever getting through. That is what I think about the night terrors. Sometimes I think all my worrying about the bills, my little aches and pains, my daughters, my life as a single mom, all the changes in my life, all the worrying I do about being your pastor, worrying about the church, the earth, the universe--all that stuff is what I worry about to avoid saying, in the middle of the night, "Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening." For, oh my God, what if I do hear something. Or worse yet, what if I don't hear anything. But all the evidence points toward hearing something, at least eventually. It is our faith, our hope, that, since the beginning of time when God's word created heaven and earth, through the word God gave to Abraham and our forebears forever, through the word God became flesh in Jesus. God has been speaking to us and is speaking to us still. But God has never forced us to listen. God has never forced us to hear.
Today's story about Samuel is a promise and a warning. The promise is that in a time like ours the word of God may be rare, however, God is not silent, not even in God's silence, is God silent. And the warning is that one night when we do decide to hear, or one Sunday morning when we are in church just going through the motions and something wakes us up, some word, some chord, some feeling, some smell, some flicker of light -- there will be a voice, we will hear our named called, and like twelve-year-old Samuel, our world will change. If we don't want to risk such disruption in our lives, then we probably should not be hanging around the church and we certainly shouldn't say, Lord, speak to me.
An ordained United Church of Christ pastor named Andrew Young shared a story about his daughter with his colleagues. His eldest daughter had become active in her local church. This pleased him. One day she announced that she was going to help with a Habitat for Humanity project. That was wonderful. But then she told her parents she was going to build a Habitat home for the poor in Uganda. This was not too many years after the fall of Idi Amin and Uganda was still a very violent country. Pastor Young confessed, "I tried to talk her out of it. I mean, I wanted her to go to church, to find a nice Christian man to marry, to have a relationship with God and settle down. But, believe me, I didn't have anything like this in mind. I didn't intend for her to go so far with it. I mean--Uganda! But she said she felt called by God. And what could I say?"
In one of Annie Dillard's books titled "Teaching a Stone to Talk", she wrote, "On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely evoke? Or, as I suspect, does not one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense...."
There's power in the word of God. Before you listen, perhaps you need to heed the sign that says, "Warning: God at work!"
So if and when you choose to hear, you can claim Samuel as your patron saint and remember his story of how the Lord waited to speak until Samuel declared his readiness to hear: how it took the wisdom of a weathered, experienced traveler, old Eli, to help Samuel make sense of what was happening to him and to discern whose voice he heard; how there was no going back once he had heard the word of the Lord; and how that word changed his life forever. It is not an invitation for the faint-hearted, but it is an invitation we have all been issued just the same. "See that you do not refuse to hear the voice that speaks," says the Letter to the Hebrews. The truth is, it is a voice that is speaking to us always--not only in the middle of the night, although that may be when it is easiest to hear, when all the other voices of our lives are still--and not only in words, although words tend to be easiest for us to understand. The truth is that ever since God decided to speak through a person, the person of Jesus, God's word has come to us in our persons, in our bodies, in all the events of our lives, if only we can learn to hear what they are telling us.
How can we find out? What is God trying, wanting, longing to say to us? His message is different for each of us, as different as our lives. Only our beginnings are the same, our first steps toward finding out, when we are able to summon all our courage, open our mouths, and say, "Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening." Amen.