One of the privileges of serving our diocesan community in the area of Christian formation—which is my day job—is that I get to work with a lot of young people who are really passionate about faith. They constantly inspire me to imagine and to work for a the kingdom of God. But I pray for them continually, because the flip side of passion is the temptation to despair when change is slow to come. So the other day when I was talking to one such anguished young adult I asked her—as we clergy are wont to do—about what she was hearing from God. She paused for a painful moment and said “I’m not hearing from God right now. And that’s the worst part of this.”
That was a hard thing for her to have to say and for me to have to hear, but our Bible reminds us that there is plenty of precedent for a silent God. Listen again to how our first reading from the Book of Samuel begins: “The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread.” What do the people of God do when we cannot hear God’s word?
I feel the need to take a small detour at this point, to remind us that there are many ways to hear the word of the Lord. My husband hears God in music. Many of us hear God in our prayers, sometimes speaking very directly to the ear of our hearts. People also experience God’s voice in moments of comfort and clarity, or in the timely word of a friend. In a very real way, my young friend’s confession of the silence of God was the word of Lord for me this week, because it helped me to hear today’s lessons in new ways.
Which brings me to Holy Scripture. The Bible is an especially reliable way to hear God, especially if we can get comfortable with the idea of a God who speaks in diverse ways. The word of God in scripture is very present, but also very messy, mixed up in the context of particular times and places as it is. Reading the Bible has taught me to think of the word of God as something more like an ecosystem of voices than a singular decisive directive.
Still, remembering the grief of my young friend—who is very active in church—I am reminded that its quite painful to do ministry when you cannot hear the word of the Lord. I think of poor old Eli, serving faithfully in the temple all his life, whose greatest crime seems to be having ill-behaved children. By that measure I’m not sure I hold up the biblical standard of priesthood very well either. But Eli is so very hungry for the authentic word of God that he’s willing to have it preached against him by his own youthful protégé, Samuel.
So in our first lesson we have a story of God calling the clueless young upstart rather then the faithful old sage. A kind of reversal of the social order, and that’s a not the way its supposed to work, right? And then in our Gospel we are introduced to Philip, so astonished to encounter Jesus—the very word of God personified, as our tradition teaches—that he runs to tell his friend. And the best Nathanael can muster in response is “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Jesus just didn’t fit Nathanael’s pre-existing categories of where the word of God would be found.
All of which suggests the unsettling possibility that the word of the Lord might be made known to us not because it brings a sense of joy or peace or mystical unity, but rather because it brings bewilderment or even judgment. The word of God may well be the one we don’t want spoken by the person we’d rather not listen to: the young person, the annoying person, the too persistent person, or the person born in the wrong place.
Which brings me to a young Baptist preacher born on the wrong side of the color line in the Jim Crow south. Martin Luther King’s ministry of racial justice reminds us of how profoundly unsettling the word of the Lord can be, indeed for an entire nation. As one who came of age well after the civil rights struggles of the 1960’s, I have to be reminded of how profoundly unwelcome the prophetic call to integration and voting rights was in its time. But Dr. King’s voice continues to be uncomfortably prophetic if we read beyond the dream speech. What he preached about the moral crimes of poverty and militarism would make many of us equally uncomfortable even now. Martin Luther King was both more radical and more vulnerable than our sanitized remembrances of him.
Like Samuel who was afraid to tell Eli of his disturbing vision, the very human Martin Luther King experienced fear. In his 1958 memoir of the Montgomery bus boycott, King wrote of a sleepless night following a telephone threat on his life: “I was ready to give up… my courage was all but gone, I decided to take my problem to God. The words I spoke to God that midnight are still vivid in my memory. ‘I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But now I am afraid. The people are looking to me for leadership and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers, I have nothing left.’ At that point I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced him before. It seemed as though I could hear the quiet assurance of an inner voice saying ‘Stand up for righteousness, stand up for truth; and God will be at your side forever.’”
How do we hear God? Sometimes we only recognize God’s voice in hindsight by its impact on people, which is always to inspire greater freedom and courage to speak truth to power. The word of the Lord to Martin Luther King overcame not only his paralyzing fear those who threatened him, but also the greatest human fear of all: the fear of being abandoned by God. God was and is at his side, forever.
But sometimes courage and freedom are hard to find, and sometimes the word of the Lord really is rare. We don’t get to decide how and when God will speak; God’s ways are not our ways, as the prophet Isaiah reminds us. But we can know this much. If we really want to hear God, we are going to have to lean into the messy ecosystem of voices that bear the word of the Lord, and risk hearing things that might make us quite uncomfortable. Including the sound of sheer silence; but also the voice of the young person, the voice of the poor person, the voice of the upstart black Baptist preacher and his 21st century equivalent.
And when we listen to God, we will surely suffer bewilderment like Samuel, ask questions that reveal our prejudices like Nathanael, and hear things that challenge our privilege and way of life like Eli. Fair warning: listening to the word of the Lord sometimes makes things much worse before they get better. But God will be at our side, as Martin Luther King attested. And we like Samuel and those first disciples will know ourselves as people known by name and called by God, and— as Jesus promised Nathanael—we will see greater things than these.
Yes I do.