January 16, 2015
The following is a homily based on the Scripture readings for Sunday, Jan. 18.
Three million people march in Paris. Thousands across cities in the U.S. wear “I Can’t Breathe” t-shirts. Decades after Martin Luther King was murdered, we still are debating racial issues. Hundreds of cops in New York turn their backs on their mayor. Saudi Arabia sentences a man to receive – over a period of months – 1,000 lashes.
We expend so much energy trying to get messages across. But the Scriptures today raise the question: What does it take to hear?
There are few passages as important as the one from the book of Samuel – Samuel’s call in the middle of the night. He hears God three times, but each time he thinks it’s only a dream, nothing real, nothing important. Eli, the old priest, has been around God enough to have the pattern down if there’s a call you can’t put aside, an ultimate call, you have to pay attention to it: “Speak, Lord, your servant is listening.”
To what level do we need to go to hear the voice of God? John’s Gospel gives us some important clues. At first sight the invitation seems almost incidental. “Come and see,” Jesus says to the future disciples when they ask him where he is staying. Before too long it becomes clear that you cannot hear God on a superficial level. You can’t chit-chat with God. When God speaks to us, he wants our hearts, our depths. By the end of the passage, the future disciples are excited: “We have found the Messiah!” they say. But really, they’ve only begun to find the Messiah. They’ve only begun to hear.
The Scriptures are saying that we can only hear God’s voice and respond when we have placed ourselves at risk. Ultimately God wants to engage our whole lives. Paul says, in effect, that God comes before one of the basic human impulses – the eroticism that drives so much personal life, and even dominates in an almost insane way the culture in which we live. Can we, in our culture, hear that message: that even our basic sexual impulses have to respond to God? When God speaks to us, we cannot hold anything back.
But of course we spend lots of time holding things back – from each other, from ourselves, and especially from God. We have our pretenses and our postures. We have the stories we invent in our heads about what our lives mean, and where they are heading. We only partially give ourselves to things because we know what it might cost us. What if I say, “I do?” What if I say, “Call me anytime?” What If I say, “Sure, I will?”
Yet until life gets to this level, we don’t really have a life. We have only part of a life. We know where people live, where they are, but we don’t know who they are. No believer has ever found out who God is without giving her- or himself to God. Entered the mystery. Opened their hearts. Heard not with their ears, but with their lives.
Do we think God stopped talking 3,000 years ago with Samuel, or 2,500 years ago with Isaiah, or 2,000 years ago with Jesus? Jesus speaks to us, right now, with the Spirit that penetrates all our evasions and pleasantries. It takes God’s infinite love to speak. He gives us his Holy Spirit. So we know what it takes to hear – our whole spirit. “Come and see,” says Jesus to each of us. What are we hearing, and what will we say in response?