A Sermon for the Second Sunday after the Epiphany, Year B

 

“Samuel! Samuel!”[i]

 

 

This morning, we’ve heard stories about people hearing and responding to God’s call.  There’s the boy Samuel, who keeps mistaking God’s voice for that of his mentor, Eli (and I don’t mean Manning).  This Eli is a long-time priest who you’d think would have some clue about hearing God’s call --  but it takes him a while to figure out what’s going on.  Maybe that’s because, as the writer tells us, The word of the LORD was rare in those days; visions were not widespread. [ii]  So this seasoned old priest had little experience of hearing and responding to God’s call.  

 

In the Gospel, we’ve dropped into the middle of a series of invitations to “come and see” what this Jesus that John has just baptized is about. [iii] Andrew and Simon Peter have already responded to that call when Jesus finds Philip, who also responds quite readily.  Nathanael is another story.  When Philip tells his friend that he thinks they’ve found the promised Messiah, his first reaction is to bad-mouth Jesus’ hometown:  “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” he asks. [iv]  Nathanael starts being impressed only when he hears Jesus tell him what fig tree he was sitting under before Philip called him. [v]  Only then, does it begin to dawn him that he is hearing a call from the Incarnate Son of God.  

 

It seems then, that hearing and responding to a call from God is not a straightforward matter, even for folks in the Bible whom we tend to assume – wrongly --  are better at it than we are.  Encounters with God’s call often leaves people uncertain, confused, and puzzled -- sometimes downright resistant to the call and the One who gives it.  That may be some comfort to us when we consider our own struggles to hear and respond to God’s call.  If you’re at all like me and the people I have listened to over the years, hearing and responding to God’s call is not a straightforward matter for you, either.  

 

The first issue, often, is simply hearing the call -- noticing that there is more than our own minds at work in some urge, feeing, impulse or word that arises within or speaks from without.  There is a lot of stuff that can get in the way of hearing.  We live in an incredibly busy, noisy, overly-stimulated society.  There’s always noise around us -- have you ever tried to find a quiet corner in any public place other than a library?  There’s stressful anxious noise inside our heads, too – making family plans, worrying about school or work, all those mental “To do” lists we carry around.  We often have a hard time hearing ourselves think – how much harder to hear the One who often speaks in that silence that is so rare in our lives!  In the midst of all this noise and haste, it can take a long time for God’s quiet, insistent voice to break through so that we begin, maybe, to hear. 

 

Even when we do get a sense that there’s something being said that we should pay attention to, we’re often uncertain and confused.  Is it really God’s call that we’re hearing, we wonder?  It’s hard to know when there are so many voices demanding our attention.  Maybe, we think, it’s just old Eli or something our mother taught us coming to mind or an over-active imagination at work.  

 

Anyway, why would God speak to me, of all people?  If a call is being  made, it’s meant for somebody else, right?  I mean, who am I, that God would speak to me? But sometimes, behind all the seeming uncertainty about the call there is a deeper resistance --  a recognition that this really is God -- God calling, urging, nudging, inviting, maybe demanding that we take some new path in our lives – a path we’re not at all sure about.  Sometimes, if we’re honest, we know that the noisy busyness that keeps us from listening, or the claim that we don’t know who’s speaking, or the idea the wires got crossed and the call is for someone else –  we know that all of this is excuse for the deeper resistance of our hearts to responding in Samuel’s straightforward words:  “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”  [vi]  At least, I know it’s like that for me, sometimes.  Maybe it’s like that for you, too.

 

So what are we to make of this? How do we deal with God’s call --which, despite all our questions & confusions is real? 

 

For starters, it can help to remember, as I’ve already said, that the struggles we have aren’t unique.  Our biblical ancestors in faith struggled, too.  We can take some comfort that we aren’t alone in our confusion about and resistance to God’s call – it seems a pretty universal human phenomenon.  

 

That said, we can learn from those who have gone before how to become better listeners and more responsive servants.  That’s one of the reasons we return to biblical people and their stories again and again.  Our issues about relationship with God are the same as their issues.  They can be our companions in our struggle, and, sometimes, our teachers as well.

 

One thing we can learn from them today is that hearing and responding to God’s call is not something to do alone.  We need the community of faith.  We do better with God’s call when we ask each other for help.  Young Samuel might never have figured out that God was calling him if Eli hadn’t eventually tumbled to what was going on and told Samuel how to respond.  Nathanael might never have met the Rabbi he learned was the Son of God if Philip hadn’t said, Come and see.  Listening for God’s call, getting a handle on what God is saying, sorting out how best to respond is communal work, not a solo act.

 

That’s why when someone –  say, Deacon Amy – thinks she hears God calling her to be ordained, the Church requires her to talk with priest and leaders in her parish, committees of our Diocese, the Bishop and more over a period of years.  This discernment process, as it’s called, is an elaborately structured way the Church has developed to work as a community to help people hear and respond to this particular call of God.  

 

We do that in other ways, too.  Each of our young people in the CnC program has a mentor –

an older member of the congregation who serves as a companion, a questioner and listener as the  teens seek to hear whether God is calling them to be Confirmed.  Then there’s the ancient tradition of  the Church called spiritual direction, in which one Christian meets with another to discuss their life and their prayer --  a conversation whose aim is clearer hearing of and more faithful response to God’s call.  It is offered by both laity and clergy, and is available to everyone.  I’d be happy to talk about that with any of you who’d like to learn more. 

 

Helping each other with God’s call happens in less formal ways, too.  For instance, the following ideas about how better to hear and respond to God’s call come from vestry members, who reflected on the story of Samuel this week. 

 

At the top of their list is this:  when you have an inkling that God is trying to get through to you, stop, slow down, pay attention, listen.  Change your pace, make space and time in your life so that whatever word God has for you can rise to the surface, be heard, taken in. To that piece of wisdom, I’d add this:  make space for silence in your life.  Turn off the TV, the radio, the computer, the cell phone.  Find a quiet corner in your home, or get far enough out in nature to where you can find some real quiet for listening and reflection.  

 

Vestry members spoke, too, of asking God’s help in hearing God’s call, and for God’s guidance in how to respond.  You know, our call and response relationship with God is just that – a relationship.  We don’t have to figure out what God is calling us as if it were a puzzle to solve without help.  When we’re not clear as to what the call is, we can ask God for greater understanding.  When we’re not ready to respond, we can ask for the courage and strength to take the next step.  We can ask God to make us listening and responsive servants like Samuel, or like Martin Luther King, Jr., whose faithfulness to God’s call we honor this weekend.  We can trust that God will respond when we ask – because our response to God’s call is what God wants.  God wants that relationship, that connection, to grow and will help us to do our part in that  process when we ask.

 

Finally, remember that God is patient as well as persistent.  God knows that getting  through to distracted, confused, resistant human beings often takes time –  and God is willing to take that time.  God is willing to take that time because God loves us and wants to connect with us more than we can know.  God will call us again and again as God called Samuel, until we finally hear and respond.  God will wait to find that moment, that word that will get through the armor of our resistance, as Jesus did by telling Nathanael about that fig tree.  

 

God is patient and persistent –  with the patience and persistence of love.  For that, in the end, is what God’s call is about – love:  God calls us because God loves us; because God knows that responding to the call will not only make us partners in God’s work in the world, but will lead each of us to greater wholeness.  God calls us, persistently, patiently and not just as servants --  but as Jesus says, as friends. [vii]  That is good news, indeed.

 

The Rev. Jack Zamboni

January 15, 2012