Listen
A Sermon By Debbie Pitney
January 15, 2012
Now the boy Samuel was ministering to the Lord under Eli. The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread… Eli perceived that the Lord was calling the boy.
Therefore Eli said to Samuel, “Go, lie down; and if he calls you, you shall say, ‘Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.’”
1st Samuel 3:1, 8b-9
How many of us haven’t been awakened in the middle of the night? I know I have… too many times. Sometimes it’s for no reason at all. I simply wake up and then find it impossible to get back to sleep, the weight of the world keeping me awake. At those moments I just get mad. I look at the clock on the nightstand and begin to worry about the long list of things I have to get done and how tired I am going to be when I am trying to do them. I look back at the clock and think about all the mistakes I’ve made… all the ways I have let people down… and the weight on my shoulders gets heavier and heavier and I find myself wondering if I will ever get back to sleep. I especially don’t like to be awakened by voices in the middle of the night. They rarely have anything good to say.
There was my mother’s voice awakening me when I was just seven years old, telling me that my father had died, losing his lifelong battle with heart disease. All these years later, I can still hear her words and feel the impact of that moment. There was our neighbor’s voice my summer between high school and college. It was the first time I had ever stayed home all by myself. My mother was visiting her family on the East Coast. I was awakened in the wee hours of the morning by our neighbor’s voice telling me that her husband was being taken to the hospital by ambulance and since she didn’t know how to drive, she needed me to give her a ride. Her husband died and I was the one standing with her in the waiting room when she received the news. There was our daughter’s voice calling from Budapest where she had just arrived for a semester studying abroad. She had followed all of the instructions upon her arrival and found her way from the airport to the school only to be greeted by a locked door and nobody anywhere in the vicinity who spoke English and she was all alone and afraid and crying in a phone booth on a street corner on the other side of the world. There was nothing we could do but cry with her. There was a parishioner’s voice telling me that her boyfriend had beaten her up and pushed her out the door of their apartment and locked her out. He had a gun and too much beer and their three-week old son on the other side of the door. I remember how cold and dark it was on the porch as I convinced him to open the door and let me take the baby to a safe place. I don’t like being awakened by voices in the middle night. They rarely have anything good to say.
Imagine then, poor Samuel, sleeping in the temple next to the ark of God and hearing a voice, not just once, but three times in the middle of the night. Do you know the story of Samuel? Most of us are much more familiar with other Old Testament stories… Noah’s ark, Jonah and the whale, Moses in the bulrushes, maybe even Joseph and his coat of many colors. But what about the story of Samuel? If we have tried reading the Bible from cover to cover, Samuel’s story is a little too far into the Old Testament for us to have kept reading!
So let me remind us of his story. It is an important part of our faith. After all, according to the story, Samuel was David’s grandfather. Samuel was a miracle baby. His mother Hannah was one of those Old Testament women who everyone believed to be barren… that she could not have a baby. She went to the temple at Shiloh and prayed that she would have a child. She would have done anything to conceive. In her prayer, she even promised to give her baby back to God. The old temple priest, Eli, heard her prayer, blessed it, and when Hannah went home she became pregnant. True to her word, once Samuel was born and once he was weaned, Hannah brought him back to the temple, giving him back to God. And that’s where Samuel grew up, helping Eli, the same priest who had blessed Hannah’s prayer… now old and blind… with all his priestly duties.
If we let our imaginations go, we might find that Samuel spent his days locking and unlocking the doors of the temple… keeping the lamp of God filled with oil… scrubbing out the pots used in the animal sacrifices... and many “other duties as assigned” to him by Eli. And, from the story, we know that Samuel spent his nights sleeping next to the ark of God, that legendary throne of the invisible king Yahweh that the people of Israel carried into battle in front of the armies. For the faithful Israelites, the ark was like a time capsule, holding the sacred remnants of their nation’s history, including, we are told, the tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments. Not exactly a soft, warm bed for a good night’s sleep! But it is there, in the middle of the night that this morning’s Bible story unfolds.
Samuel must have tried never to sleep too soundly just in case Eli needed him in the middle of the night. Or so it would seem because according to the story, three times in one night someone calls out to him and three times he answers “Here I am” and goes running to see what Eli wants. I’m just going to say that after being awakened three times in the middle of the night, I am doubting that either Samuel or Eli was wanting to see the other – Samuel because he kept getting up to help Eli only to find that Eli was sound asleep and Eli because he was sound asleep and Samuel kept waking him up!
By the third time, Eli finally understood what was happening. Even though the story began with the admission that “the word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread,” Eli understood that it was the voice of God calling out to Samuel in the night. So he rubbed the sleep from his eyes and told Samuel what to say the next time he heard that voice. He was to say, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”
And that is exactly what Samuel did… he listened for God’s voice and his life was never again the same. In that moment he began to listen for God’s voice calling him and through him, calling all of Israel to a renewed faith in God and a new understanding of God’s justice. Now if that is what happens when you answer a voice in the night then it is no wonder that the sale of over-the-counter sleep aids is on the rise!
But is Samuel’s story in anyway relevant to us today or is it just another Old Testament story that makes us yawn, tempting us to close our eyes and catch a little nap because we were awake at 4 o’clock this morning? Does anyone really want to hear the voice of God? Especially in the middle of the night… especially calling us to renewed faith in God and a new understanding of God’s justice for our world? Does anyone want to hear God’s voice? Would anyone believe us if we did? And who among us is really ready to say, “speak Lord, your servant is listening?” .
It may seem that we are living in a time much like Samuel’s – a time when the word of the Lord is rare and visions are not widespread. When was the last time we saw pillars of fire leading us to a promised land? When was the last time the seas parted to keep us out of harm’s way? Like Samuel, we live in a time when the word of the Lord seems awfully rare and visions are not widespread. With all that is happening in the world today… that long list of issues and isms tearing us apart… with the weight of the world that wakes us up and keeps us from falling back to sleep, we begin to worry that we might never again hear the voice of God calling in the night. And yet, as people of faith, we believe in the promise, renewed again and again in the Biblical story… the promise that God is with us… the promise that God dwells among us… the promise that, to quote Eugene Peterson’s contemporary paraphrase of the Bible, “God has moved into the neighborhood.” There is no more powerful or important affirmation of our faith than this – God is with us. God is with us, no matter what.
Barbara Brown Taylor, an Episcopal priest who has been called “one of the most effective preachers in the English-speaking world,” reminds us that God’s voice “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.” She reminds us, that “ever since God decided to speak through a person, the person of {God’s} son, {this} 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.” (From “Voices in the Night” in Mixed Blessings by Barbara Brown Taylor) God is speaking. Are we ready to listen?
I am still not a big fan of middle-of-the-night wakefulness but listening for God is another thing altogether. That seems worth waking up for. But how do we know when the voice of God is calling to us? How will we understand what God is longing for us to hear? I’ve got no easy answers. I believe that God’s message will certainly be different for each one of us… as different as we are from each other. But there will be at least two things that we have in common. First, the starting place when we are able to summon our courage, open our mouths, and say “speak, Lord, I am ready to listen.” And then, once we have been awakened by the voice of God, I believe we will find that it is impossible to go back to sleep.