The New York Philharmonic Orchestra made the news this week when someone’s cell phone kept going off during a performance of Mahler’s 9th Symphony. Apparently every time the orchestra would get to a particularly quiet and moving moment in the music, suddenly in the darkness the sound of the iPhone Marimba ringtone would sound. And finally, for the first time in the orchestra’s history, the conductor stopped the orchestra. He turned around, pointed at a man on the front row, and demanded that he turn off the cell phone.
We’ve all had times when cell phones have gone off inconveniently, including me. But my favorite time was this: at a small meeting here at the church, we opened with prayer. We all closed our eyes, bowed our heads, and I began: “God, we know that you have a special call for each of us ….” And right on cue, BRRRIINGG! We all burst into laughter, and as the person hastily left the room, cell phone in hand, we called after him, “Be sure and let us know what He says!”
Let’s face it, most of us will never hear God’s call that directly! But the question posed to us by our scriptures today is, how do we hear the call of God? There are a few people out there who will hear God’s voice like the boy Samuel does in our Old Testament lesson today – in the silence of the night, calling our name. But many of us will hear the call of God within the community of faith. And Episcopalians have long recognized that hearing God’s call requires both of these elements – time alone with God, listening for God’s voice, and time with the church community, testing our call with other people who can see us better than we see ourselves and listening to their voices. This is why people interested in ordination can’t just decide it for themselves. They have to go through a process of meeting and praying with other people who exercise the gifts given to the church community – listening and discerning God’s voice the best they can.
But discernment of God’s call doesn’t just apply to ordained people. It applies to people exercising lay ministries as well. Every one of us has a call from God, and answering that call will help God build us into the people he created us to be.
So for each of us, how do we learn to distinguish God’s voice from our own? I think that our Old Testament lesson about the boy Samuel shows us two things. Hearing God’s call requires time alone, praying and listening, and it requires community.
So let’s talk first about time alone: is this something each of us makes time for? Do we pray each day, and not just pray by talking, but by listening too? Many of us find praying difficult, partly because it’s hard to make our minds concentrate, and partly because we are intimidated by the idea of trying to find the right words. The poet Mary Oliver writes about trying to find the right words for prayer:
It doesn't have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch
a few words together and don't try
to make them elaborate, this isn't
a contest but a doorway
into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.
A silence into which another voice may speak: praying is a matter, not just of talking to God, but of listening for God’s voice too. All of us are different, and different prayer practices work better for some of us than for others. This is why we are offering our Spiritual Practices Study in small groups – so that you can learn different ways of praying and listening for God’s voice, and decide which ones work best for you.
The second part of listening for God’s voice is what the old priest Eli did for Samuel: provided the voice of the church community, helped Samuel learn to respond. Samuel has been brought up within the temple, he is steeped in the worship, stories, and traditions of his people, and all those things help him hear the call of God as he is lying in the dark sanctuary where the lamp has not yet gone out. Yet an older person, suffering from lack of vision yet still with the experience to know how God speaks, helps him learn what to do. And Samuel becomes the next leader of Israel, a transitional leader, who eventually finds and anoints David as king of Israel.
This way of responding to God is an everyday experience in the church community, and it doesn’t have to happen through a voice in the darkness – hearing the voice of God can happen through ordinary interactions. Someone will come to us and say, I’ve seen you relate to people in touching and beautiful ways – have you thought about working with newcomers? Or, you have a healing and comforting touch – would you like to visit the sick? Or, you have a passion for helping the poor and suffering – would you like to take on a particular outreach ministry? You love children – would you like to teach? The people who come to us and ask us these things often see things in us that we never knew were there – this was the case for the first priest who called me into lay leadership in the church. But also, they have a gift for helping us articulate desires of our own hearts, the yearnings that may be expressions of God’s voice speaking to us. and this, I think, is one of the most important gifts of a church community – helping us to hear the voice of God through worship, prayer, service, calling.
I think it is vital for us to understand why the church community exists, because I would say most people in our world don’t – They Like Jesus, But Not the Church (as the title of a recent book puts it). There’s a YouTube video that went viral this week, with millions of hits and many, many young people sharing it with their friends – called Jesus > Religion. Watch it here. In this video, a young, hip-looking poet named Jefferson Bethke gives a long rap-like rant about religion, starting with the line: “What if I told you Jesus came to abolish religion: – and continuing with claims like:
“I mean if religion is so great, why has it started so many wars / Why does it build huge churches, but fails to feed the poor …." and
There are so many points made in this video, both good and bad, that it would take hours to unpack them all properly. But even if none of us here agree with what he’s saying about religion, we need to understand that there are lots of people who do agree. And if we’re going to minister to our community, to reach out to our world with the love of Christ we believe in and live by, if we’re going to invite others to come and see what we have found here, we need to understand why God calls us into church communities, and what church is all about.
So we can easily dispose of some tired old claims atheists like to trot out. Have people started wars over religion? Yes, and people have also started wars over communism, democracy, territory, power, money, slavery, land grabs, power grabs, money grabs, and on and on. Human beings are sinful – that is one of the foundational beliefs of our religion – and it takes God to set us free from our own tendency to sin.
Has religion built great churches? Yes. Has it failed to feed the poor? No. Christians have done huge amounts of charity work for two millennia. As the largest religious group in the world, Christianity may be the most potent force for loving others the world has ever seen, and all because people have heard the call of God in their church communities. Christians have done great work also to establish justice in the world – such Martin Luther King Jr., whose birthday we celebrate this weekend – who helped to finish the job of setting people free in this country – working through what he called “The Beloved Community.”
So when Jefferson Bethke says: “Religion might preach grace, but another thing they practice / … See the problem with religion, is it never gets to the core / It’s just behavior modification, like a long list of chores” - I have to say, don’t criticize religion for not helping the poor, then also criticize it for saying that religion involves behavior modification. We do believe that Jesus changes our lives, and that includes living differently, behaving differently, loving differently, than we otherwise would. Christianity IS something you do, not just something you believe.
It is abundantly clear from the gospels that Jesus did not come to abolish religion. He says he came not to abolish, but to fulfill, the Law and the Prophets. And Jesus took very intentional steps to create a community of faith – which we can see bits of in today’s gospel. All 4 gospels tell us that the first thing Jesus did when he decided to launch his ministry was not to go out to the mountain and start preaching, but to call a group of disciples who would be future leaders of his community. And I think Jesus did this very intentionally because he knew that we can hear the voice of God in community much better than we can individually. These leaders would learn by following Jesus and listening to him, but they would also learn from each other, like Philip and Nathanael. And after Jesus’ death and resurrection, the community they formed with each other helped them keep their faith strong and to make disciples of others. They formed a community of faith that has passed down the news of Jesus through 2,000 years. If Jefferson Bethke knows anything about Jesus, it is because other people in the worldwide community of faith have showed him and told him about Jesus.
So let me ask you, why are we part of a community of faith? What makes religion an important part of our lives? Why is this worth doing, why not follow Jesus alone? Sure, you can admire God’s creation on the golf course; you might even pray there. But what can you do in the community of faith that you can’t do there? You can worship in community, you can share in the sacraments, you can learn from the wisdom of other followers of Jesus. You have a community that prays for you when you’ve lost the ability to pray. You have a group of people that can help you hear the voice of God.
Most of us are not going to hear Jesus’ voice like a cell phone ring; most of us will hear God’s call from other people who say: that voice you’re hearing, that desire to do something more, that wish to know God more completely, that pull to do something new with your life – that is the voice of God.
Because the most powerful thing about being called into a community of faith is the idea of being part of something bigger than you are – being one member of a Body of Christ that can change the world – being a follower of Jesus, who knows us each better than we know ourselves, and has a call for each of us.
As Mary Oliver says: Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
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