All Saints Lutheran Church

Pastor Raita Neely

Epiphany  2B  ISam. 3:1-10; John 1:43-51

January 19, 2003

Ever wake up in the middle of the night and not be able to go back to sleep? Reworking the day, worrying about what you have or haven't done at work or at home, thinking about all the people on your prayer list, considering your relationships that seem to be losing some of their initial richness.  Worrying about our world which has so many places where a war could flare up and hurt everyone on the planet.  What is your solution to your night wakefulness?  Get up and read?  Cook dinner for the next day?  Walk the dog?  Pinch off the dead growth on your house plants?  Wake up someone else in the house and hope they will talk to you?  Pray and softly hum some hymns?  Are the voices and thoughts that you hear in the night good or bad?  Or do you hear no voices?  Is there nothing but deep silence?  Which would you prefer?  What are you more afraid of? That you will hear a voice addressing you or that you will hear absolutely nothing?

This waking in the night is no modern day illness.  Scripture tells us that some three thousand years ago twelve year old Samuel woke in the deepest blackness of night to a voice calling him, not once, but three times, and three times he answered, "Here I am."   Samuel thought that Eli, the old blind priest who was training him to be a servant of the Lord was calling him.  But it is not Eli who has called him.  By the third time Samuel comes dashing to Eli, Eli has a hunch who is calling, he tells Samuel- next time you hear the voice, say, "Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening."  And Samuel does exactly what Eli tells him to do.  It is a turning point in Samuel's life.  Because of what he hears he knows he is no longer a child, he has become a young man, a servant of God who is ready to listen to and obey God's voice.

The message Samuel hears, is a tough one, for it condemns old Eli, the only family Samuel has ever known.  Eli is judged by God because his loutish sons have gotten into the bad habit of stealing from the temple.  Eli has warned them but can not make them stop and now the bill for their wrongdoing has come due. Samuel does not want to tell Eli what he has heard.  But the next morning, when Eli insists on knowing, Samuel tells all.  In the righteousness, in the judgment, in the bone rattling power of the message, Eli knows that this is God's will.  And so it comes to pass that the boy he counted on to be his eyes shows Eli the fiery vision of his own destruction.

I wonder, does anyone really want to hear the voice of the living God?  I wonder, which is worse: to hear it or not to hear it.   Which is worse, to face fainting at the power of it, or to live oblivious to it?

If you heard a voice calling you, would you say, "Speak Lord, your servant is listening?"  or would you cover your ears and run as fast as you can to another part of the house, turn on the radio or TV and drown out the voice speaking to you?

For you see, God does still speak to us today.  Calling each of us by name.  For some, God may still come as a voice in the night.  For most of us, God's voice speaks in the nitty-gritty events and challenges of our everyday lives.  Often, God's voice comes in the voices and lives of others around us.  God's voice comes  to us through the word made flesh in Jesus.  But God has never forced us to hear.

But if and when we choose to hear, we could do worse than to remember the story of Samuel and how the Lord waited to speak until Samuel declared his readiness to hear.  We would need to remember how it took the wisdom of a fellow traveler, old Eli, to help Samuel make sense of what was happening to him and to discern whose voice he heard. No caller ID here.  Instead the risk of listening to something that was hard to hear, being open to something new and responding. And there was no going back once Samuel had heard the word of the Lord.  That word changed his life forever.  Samuel became  God's prophet and even challenged Israel 's most famous king - David, to change his life.

God's calling is not for the faint-hearted, for God is a God who loves you,  but God is also a danger to your life as you have constructed it.  God may do things in your life that right now seem unlikely, change your lifestyle, reprioritize your time, loosen your grip on your checkbook, change your friendships, help you see people you never saw before as brothers and sisters.  God may send you on a journey you never thought you could or would take.  God may help you examine your own life through a different pair of lenses and show you new ways to live.

Following God's voice is to be swept into the flow of God's will and giving yourself over to it.  Sometimes following may mean staying right where you are and faithfully continuing what you are already doing.  Sometimes following may mean changing your life completely.  For some of you it may mean doing less instead of more, so that there is time to go sit under  a tree , like Nathanael, or her in Minnesota this  time of the year I would recommend your rocking chair by the fire and open your Bible and get better acquainted with this God who wants your life enough to die for you.   The God who acts in a way different from what the world teaches us.

The truth is, God speaks to you and me always, not only in the middle of the night, although that may be when we are most open to hearing, when all the other voices of our lives are still.  God speaks to us through Jesus Christ.  God speaks to us through the Bible.  God speaks to us when we pray.  God speaks to us through the people we meet and the events of our lives. God speaks to us through the challenges and suffering we face in our lives. God speaks to us by placing the needs of others before us and opening our hearts to respond.

What is God saying to you?  How can you find out?  God's message is different for each of us, as different as our lives.  But always we are all called to love, to serve, to heal, to forgive.  We are called to work for life and not death.  We are called to imitate Christ, and to make choices that imitate his.
And just in case you think you're not material for God's work on earth, let me assure you, God has incredible power to recruit the most unlikely people to be God's own: people who along the way have made some terrible choices, people who have done ungodly deeds, people who have led hapless, purposeless lives and suddenly see a new light to follow, people who have been self-centered and suddenly see how interdependent we all are.  God has a way of sneaking up on you.  You never know when or how.  One day you may be  thinking about lunch, not God  at all, and  here comes God jolting you with God's call and giving you a bit of God's glory.  I have seen it happen, right here at All Saints.
 

Only our beginnings are the same, our first steps toward finding out, when we become open enough to say ,"Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening."  and every day asking God to show us, what it is that God desires from us for that particular day.  The possibilities for hearing the call and following Jesus seem endless to me.
 

Sometimes they will be big and involve all of us  - Stand With Africa project, Families in Need ,  winter coats for a needy community, Habitat for Humanity, - and sometimes it will be too small to mention, someone you love needs your presence and you go to be with the person.  But it is a mistake, I think, to focus too hard on our part in the miracle of following Jesus.  The God who calls you can be counted on to create people who are able to follow - Samuel, King David, Philip, Nathanael, Andrew and Peter and all the cloud of witnesses that you and I have known who have called on the name of the Lord.  Whenever and however our will spills into God's will, it is time to rejoice, a time to give thanks, a time to come and see what Jesus has in mind for us and for the world. 

We were once staying in a motel in a large city and were surprised to find, posted on the elevator door, a small, handwritten notice which read, "Party tonight!  Room 210.  8:00p.m.   Everyone invited!"  I could hardly picture who would throw such a party, or for what reason.  But I imagined that at eight o'clock, room 210 would be filled by an unlikely assortment of people-sales reps seeking a little relief from the tedium of the road; a vacationing couple or two tired of sightseeing, a man stopping overnight in the middle of a long journey, a few inquisitive  motel employees, perhaps some young people who had slipped out of their parents' rooms, curious about what was happening in room 210. But the sign by the elevator soon came down, replaced by a typewritten statement from the motel management explaining that the original notice was a practical joke.  That made sense, or course, but in a way it was too bad.  For a brief moment, those of us staying at the motel were tantalized by the possibility that there just might be a party going on somewhere to which we were all invited-a party where it didn't make much difference who we were when we walked in the door, or what motivated us to come; a party we could come to out of boredom, loneliness, curiosity, responsibility, eagerness to be with other people, or simply out of a desire to come and see what was happening; a party where it didn't matter nearly as much what got us in the door, as what would happen to us after we arrived. 
 

God invites you to such a party - come and see!

Amen.