Hear What the Spirit is Saying to God's People

 

Rather arbitrarily, I first decided to preach today on our first lesson about Samuel because it reminded me of my mother. She found her life-long calling as a Sunday School teacher, continuing to lead and teach the children at her church until she was well into her eighties. (Hear that, Barbara, Toni, Ellen?!) My mother had a favorite story about today’s lesson. She was reading it to the children, when a 5-year-old boy in her class blurted out excitedly, "Teacher! I heard God's voice, too! Last night!" When she asked the boy what God said to him, the child, named Gray, proclaimed in a voice filled with love, mystery and awe, "God said 'Gray ….? Gray….?'" Over the years, my mother loved to remind everyone--especially Gray--of that story, since he grew up to become a leader in the Presbyterian church.

I love my mother's story, and yet it’s the scarcity of “the Word of the Lord” that I really feel called to speak about today. I feel as if it’s getting harder both to hear and to speak our familiar words of faith. Words like salvation, hope, fellowship, grace, blessing, mercy... Once, these were words that we could hear and share, words that had meaning. More and more, though, I feel as if the hate-filled world has stuck a pin in our precious Christian words. It has popped them like a balloon—I feel God's Spirit drifting out of them, and the words falling hollow to the ground, limp and shriveled artifacts. I feel as if some of our fellow Christians are using our beloved words to promote hatred and injustice, day after day after day. And the rest of us are trampling the shreds of the words underfoot, ignoring them in our rush to get about our daily business. How do we hear the voice of our God in these troubled times?

"The word of the Lord was rare in those days," our first lesson begins. This is the only time in the Hebrew Bible that this phrase is used. The story is set during a deeply troubled time in the land of Israel. Change is shaking the old, trusted foundations. The story takes place when the familiar government by judges is about to give way to the unknown perils of monarchy. In the meantime, chaos reigns. Eli, the trusted high priest, is old and failing. His sons have filled the land with corruption and shame and greed as he sits idly by, doing nothing to stop them.

 As the story begins, night shrouds God's holy Temple in darkness. Eli is blind, lying helpless in his bed, no longer able to provide God's vision and hope to the people. Samuel is the long-awaited child granted by God to the barren woman Hannah. He’s then torn from her side as a toddler, offered to God’s service by Hannah, as a sacrificial gesture of thanksgiving. I wonder if young Samuel misses his mother and father in the quiet of the night? In this story, he's probably a young tween, still living and serving in the Temple.  He's just an apprentice--a teenage acolyte, let’s say, chafing under the weight of adult expectations and sweaty robes. He must feel the empty darkness of the Temple and the troubles of the land, even if he doesn't understand them. Even though he sleeps in the heart of his religion's holiest place, he still knows little of God.

          "What's the point?" Samuel must have been wondering in the darkness.

But wait! This story isn’t all darkness and gloom. Our text says that "the lamp of God had not gone out." Even in the darkness, God's light is burning beside Eli in his blindness. And God's voice is calling young Samuel's name. Over and over again. Despite his youth and his inexperience. The Word of God keeps calling.

          When I sit in church, or when I pick up the bible to read, I often announce proudly to myself: "Look at me, reading Scripture like I’m supposed to! Teach me something, God! Move me! I'm waiting! Make it quick, though, because I have a lot to do today!" I expect something to happen between me and God, one on one. I expect God to enter the words for me and bring them to life. But that's not the way it works in today's lesson, is it? Samuel needs Eli's wisdom before he can recognize God's voice. We all need the wisdom and support of other human beings in our faith journeys. The old and the young need one another. The strong and the feeble need one another. The educated and the innocent need one another. Because God speaks to us all.

As a matter of fact, do you know why we Episcopalians read so many scripture lessons as part of our Eucharist? It's because we believe that Jesus comes to us in Scripture when we’re joined together as the Body of Christ, just as he comes to us in the bread and wine. We surround ourselves with the voices of the Hebrew Scriptures, with the songs of the ancient psalmists, with the admonitions of the early church leaders, and with the good news of the Gospels. We take all of these varied, swirling, often confusing voices, and we wait together for God to appear in our midst through these words. “Hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people,” is just another way of saying, “Speak, Lord, for your servants are listening.”

          And there's another important piece. Our lectionary leaves out the end of this story—an end that we need to hear. When Samuel finally listens—really listens—to the voice of God calling him in the night, the word that he receives isn’t one of cozy comfort. When Samuel opens himself to God's word, God gives him a hard task. A task that’s going to change him forever. God tells him it’s up to him to stand up to his mentor Eli. He's told to proclaim drastic change, to tell Eli that God is going to take away the power and authority that Eli and his sons have misused.

When God calls me in the night, I'm hoping to be comforted, not changed and challenged. I don't want God's voice to turn my world upside down. Who here wants to tell their boss that they’re fired? Who wants to bring bad news to their beloved mentor? Who wants to stand up to power and oppose it? We all know how dangerous that is. Look what happened to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, whose courage-- and sacrificial love--we celebrate tomorrow.

          The most dreaded voice for a parent to hear in the night is that of their crying child. I remember it well: "Mama, Mama, Mama," it whispers in a mother’s ear, breath hot against her cheek. "Mama, mama, my tummy hurts bad." All parents know that this is the beginning of a sleepless night, a big disruption in plans, and a lot of laundry. It is a voice that inspires a loud, "Nooooo!" in your heart and a deep desire to hide under the covers. But it's a voice that you can't deny or refuse; it's a voice that makes you who you are—a loving parent.

          That's what God's true voice offers us—to make us who we’re meant to be: God's responsible and loving presence in the world. As Rowan Williams says, the Word of God that speaks to us in Scripture doesn't call us to "jot down ideas and think about them." God speaks our names in order to transform us, to make us see and live in the world in a new way.[1] Scripture is a summons, a voice in the night. It's an invitation to be part of Christ's Body acting in the world.[2] It gathers us and forms us around the Altar of sacrifice. It doesn’t ask us to mouth empty words like pious puppets. It asks us to translate what we hear into courageous, self-giving action, into shared dependence on God alone.

When the world rejects migrants and turns its back on the marginalized, God's Word invites us to embody love for the stranger. When the world armors up for protection, turning its back on the vulnerable, God’s Word calls us to turn our guns into plowshares. When the world destroys God's creatures in a greedy search for riches, God's Word invites us to "serve and preserve" creation, instead. When the world draws tight circles to exclude any of God’s beloved children, God’s Word encircles us all with the power of Love. When the world exploits the poor and rewards those who are number one, God's Word invites us to live in such a way that the first shall be last and the last shall be first.

God's call, God’s invitation, is also a promise. At the end of our reading, Samuel becomes a prophet. God is with him and lets "none of his words fall to the ground." As it was my mother’s little student, Gray …. As it was with Samuel …. So shall it be with you, beloved people of St. Ambrose. God is calling, and the world is desperate for words of meaning, words of love. Continue to open yourselves as a community to hear God's call. Continue to listen together. Continue to respond together. Don’t be afraid—you see, God never really leaves the words. As Christ's Body, we are "in the words," with Christ, and will never be forsaken.

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[1] Rowan Williams, Being Disciples: Essentials of the Christian Life (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016), 4.

[2] Williams, Holy Living: The Christian Tradition for Today (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 44.

Drowning in Love

 

         

I can’t help but wonder what Jesus was looking for when he came to be baptized by John. If he was without sin, why did he need to repent? Did he decide to set a good example for his cousin John’s followers? Was he wandering around waiting for a sign to begin his ministry? Was he suddenly prompted by the Spirit to step into the water? Of course, we can’t know what Jesus was thinking, but we can get a pretty good idea of what Mark is trying to tell us by beginning his Gospel with Jesus’ baptism. With the baptism story, Mark creates bookends for his entire account of the Good News.[1]

 You see, Mark doesn’t distract us with stories about Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem; he leaves out the stable, the angels and shepherds and kings. Instead, Mark’s story starts in the wilderness, on the banks of the Jordan River, in the place of New Beginnings, where God first led the people of Israel into the Promised Land. And then, at the end of Mark’s Gospel, Mark clearly repeats the same pattern that he described at Jesus’ baptism: Instead of receiving the Spirit, Jesus breathes out his spirit. Instead of the heavens being ripped open, the curtain of the Temple is torn in two. And instead of the voice from heaven naming Jesus as God’s Son, it’s the Roman Centurion who proclaims Jesus the true Son of God.  In placing his Gospel between two events that mirror each other, Mark makes it clear that Jesus’ baptism points to his death on the Cross, and his death on the Cross echoes his baptism. When Jesus wades into the Jordan, he’s already taking his first steps on the path toward his death.

It’s a strange, dangerous Love, then, that God pours out upon his Son at his baptism. Our cute little silver shells of warm water, spooned gingerly over babies’ foreheads, unfortunately no longer make clear to us the kind of love—and the kind of life--that we’re really being baptized into as Christians. But it was different for Christians in the first centuries of the faith. They entered the chilly waters of deep baptismal pools, built over springs of running water in dank, dark caves. Stripped naked, they were dunked completely underwater by the priests, Southern Baptist style. As they emerged choking, spluttering, and blue with cold from an experience much like drowning, they were clothed right then and there in new white garments, wrapped in a new life in Christ. It must indeed have been a very dramatic—even frightening--sacrament. While we don’t baptize like that anymore here at St. Ambrose, our baptism, too, is still an entrance into Christ’s death, as well as into his Resurrection.

No one puts her finger on the dangers of baptism better than author Flannery O’Connor. In her short story, “The River,” O’Connor tells us about a little boy in desperate need of love. Only about 4 or 5 years old, he already lives in a gray, flat world of despair, neglected by his parents, pawned off on a series of babysitters who ignore him. O’Connor describes the boy as plodding dully through life “mute and patient, like an old sheep waiting to be let out.”[2] He only knows the names of God and Jesus as curse words, until one of his sitters takes him with her to a revival meeting down at the river. There, the itinerant preacher speaks with passion about “the River of Life, made out of Jesus’ Blood.”

The preacher intones, “All the rivers come from that one River and go back to it like it was the ocean sea and if you believe, you can lay your pain in that River and get rid of it. It’s a River full of pain itself, pain itself, moving toward the Kingdom of Christ, to be washed away, slow, you people, slow as this here old red water river round my feet.”[3]

Pushed toward the preacher by his zealous babysitter, the little boy suddenly realizes that what’s happening at this river is serious stuff, unlike anything he has ever known before. “Where he lived, everything was a joke” writes O’Connor. “[But] From the preacher’s face, he knew immediately that nothing the preacher said or did was a joke.”[4]

And then, the preacher speaks to him the magic words, the words that we all long to hear in our desperate searches for approval in this world: If you are baptized, promises the preacher, “You won’t be the same again … You’ll count.” That’s what we all want, isn’t it, to count? To be someone in someone else’s eyes, to be recognized as the child of God that we are, to have a meaningful place in this world?

Grabbing the little boy and shoving him under the water, the preacher proclaims the truth triumphantly, “You count now … You didn’t even count before.”

Like Jesus and like us, the little boy in O’Connor’s story doesn’t get to remain long in the triumphant moment of baptism. He’s returned to the wilderness of his uncaring parents, to his boring, meaningless life, to a world where everything is a joke. But having tasted God’s powerful love, the love that makes him count, the little boy is drawn back to the river. Thinking about the river, “his expression changed as if he were gradually seeing appear what he didn’t know he’d been looking for. Then all of a sudden he knew what he wanted to do.”[5]

Not waiting around for God or the Church, he goes to the river to baptize himself one more time, to find the Kingdom of Christ hidden down in the River. Gasping and sputtering in the water that’s slowly rising around his neck, the boy keeps floating; he keeps being pushed back to shore by the waves. Despairing that he has misunderstood, that God doesn’t really want him, either, the boy fights and kicks at the water, until the current catches him and “like a long gentle hand” pulls him under and away.

 God’s love is a love that we must drown in, O’Connor seems to say. We must drown in it in order to re-emerge into the resurrected life, into the life where we “count.”

In hard times, it’s easy to feel that we don’t count. When our jobs are threatened, we doubt ourselves and our futures. When we have to move to a new place, or when disease or age diminishes who we think we are, when relationships end and we find ourselves alone … we need extra affirmation. In those moments, we’re more open to risking the wild currents of the Divine Life.

Yet, when we’re feeling cozy and confident in our familiar pews, and all seems right with the world, it’s tempting to forget the all-demanding divine love that laps dangerously at our toes. We’re afraid of what it might do to us, wary of how it might change us. We’re caught between our desperate desire for love and our insistence that we don’t need to change. So, we comfy Christians, we sometimes hang back, proclaiming that we don’t need to be dunked under the water of Love; we don’t need to be choked and battered by waves that escape our control. We claim, along with another of O’Connor’s characters, that, “What I can see and do for myself and my fellowman in this life is all of my portion and I’m content with it.”[6]

I wonder: How we who have been baptized continue to participate in the turbulent Spirit-life into which we have been reborn, into which we are invited by our crucified Lord? We might think we’re sitting safely on the shore. But God has marked our hearts with a cross in our baptisms, too. When the chrism is placed on the foreheads of the newly baptized in the sign of the cross, they are “sealed as Christ’s own forever.” You are God’s Beloved, no matter what, forever and ever. You count. And so do each one of our siblings in Christ. We are “one Body and one Spirit. One hope in God’s call to us.” [7] Together, we are the Body of Christ, dead to the old, and risen to new life. There’s no sitting apart in safe self-sufficiency. We will drown and rise together in the terrible, invincible Love of God.

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[1] According to Eugene Boring, in his commentary on Mark’s Gospel.

[2] Flannery O’Connor, “The River,” in Flannery O’Connor: Collected Works (New York: Library Classics of the United States, 1988), 155.

[3] Ibid., 162.

[4] Ibid., 165.

[5] Ibid., 169.

[6] O’Connor, The Violent Bear It Away, 172.