January 15, 2012 Sermon by Peter Terpenning
Community United Church of Christ
Boulder, Colorado
“Vocations – The Word of the Lord is Rare”
I Samuel 3:1-20
Barbara Brown Taylor, in her book, An Altar in the World, tells of a time she was asked to speak at a church and asked the wise old Priest what he wanted he to talk about. All he said was, “Come tell us what is saving your life now”. I think that’s a pretty good place to start with every sermon. In fact, I’d like to ask every one of you that question. “What’s saving your life right now?” Dramatic perhaps, but I think most of us are just getting by somehow, and struggling, listening, hoping to hear something that will make it a little easier to face the responsibilities and suffering of this life.
When the story we heard from Samuel was taking place, Israel was in a bad way. The old priest Eli, was just hanging on, and his sons had control of most of the rituals of the Temple, but they were corrupt and were milking the priesthood for all the money and power they could grab. Our passage says that, “The word of the Lord was rare in those days”. That could apply to almost any days, any time in history. Certainly, we could say today that the word of the Lord is rare. It’s comforting somehow, since misery loves company, to think that Eli’s time was not so different than our own. Few people were having visions, few were feeling that God was communicating with them, and probably the few who did were a little suspect. If someone tells me the word of the Lord has come to them, I would be immediately suspicious and skeptical. But the word of the Lord has always been rare, if we are talking about revelations and words we can hear.
Samuel was a little boy. His mother Hannah had been barren, and had a vision that she would have a son who would be a prophet. She became miraculously pregnant, and thanked God with Hannah’s song, a poem much like Mary’s song that she says when she finds she is miraculously pregnant with Jesus. Hannah sees Samuel as a gift from God and takes him to the Temple and asks Eli to accept him as a student –dedicates his life to serving God. Samuel sleeps in the Temple and Eli sleeps outside the door, and the word of the Lord comes to Samuel. But he doesn’t have much experience with such things (who does?) and thinks it’s Eli calling him. He runs out to answer and Eli, probably grumpily for being woken, sends him back to lay down. He hears the word again and runs out to Eli, who sends him back. After the third time it dawns on Eli that perhaps Samuel is being called by God. We aren’t told if Eli was ever called by God, but he has faith enough to think that Samuel might be, so he tells him to go back in if he hears the word again to answer: “Speak, Lord, your servant is listening”. It’s interesting that Eli didn’t try to horn in on the vision, or run in there to see if he can hear anything. Perhaps he knew that if the call wasn’t for him, he would hear nothing, just the wind in the tower, or the mouse rustling around behind the altar.
The word “to call” in Latin is Vocare. From this word we get our word, vocation. Vocation is to be called to some career, or action. Ministers and teachers, doctors and others are sometimes said to have a vocation – work that they are called to do. When I got to seminary, for the first time, people began to ask me what my “call” was. How had I been called to ministry. This was a tough question for me, because I didn’t feel called. I was, as I am now, skeptical of someone who said they felt called by God. And yet, I have to admit that I did have an experience when I was very lost and alone and prayed for help and had what John Wesley would call, “a warming of the heart”, or a sense of God’s peace passing all understanding. It was that experience that I’ve never been able to explain that has stayed with me over the years. Was it a call? I have no idea. But I don’t think most people have a sense that God is calling them to a particular work or action. Yet something in us hungers for this assurance, and listens carefully when the Bible describes Samuel’s call and the reaction of old Eli. Is God calling us? Does the word of the Lord come to some people?
What I want to say to you today is that one of the things that saves my life today is that I believe that God is present with us, and in us, and does call each of us to action to ways of living. It is possible to listen for the “still, small voice” of God amidst this noisy, busy world. There are many voices calling to us that are much louder than God: voices of our culture that tell us we need to make money, and seek success and power. Voices that tell us what kind of car, clothing, houses, hairstyles, romances and jobs we ought to have. Voices that tell we are not good enough, not successful enough, not thin enough. The voice of God is usually just that opposite of these voices. It comes to us through Jesus, and other wisdom teachers, through nature, through other people, music and art and love from others. There is that within us that recognizes the voice when we hear it. We know the truth when we encounter it. When someone loves someone else, or makes a sacrifice for the good of others. When a flock of geese flies overhead and calls to us that the world is beautiful and life is worth living. When another person shares their heart and their secret pain with us and it gives us the strength and courage to share our pain.
Henry Nouwen says: “God calls everyone who is listening; there is no individual or group for whom God’s call is reserved”. In one sense the word of the Lord is rare, but in another sense God’s call is all around us, all the time, calling out to us from life. For some reason, when we start listening, it gets louder. When we pay attention, it seems to become easier to hear it and see it. When we trust that God is with us, then, for some reason, it becomes stronger.
Thomas Merton heard the word of God, in a sense, in Louisville on a shopping trip. In “Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander”, he writes: “In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness…This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. And I suppose my happiness could have taken form in the words: “Thank God, thank God that I am like other men, that I am only a man among others.” To think that for sixteen or seventeen years I have been taking seriously this pure illusion that is implicit in so much of our monastic thinking…I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun. Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed…I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other. But this cannot be seen, only believed and “understood” by a peculiar gift.
God’s voice is all around us, calling us all the time. We need to open our ears to listen. We have to trust that God is present and be awake to the sacredness of life.