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Long ago, in the darkness of a time when a word from the Lord was rare, the Lord called Samuel in the night. "Samuel! Samuel!" he said. He called him by name. And later, in the darkness of another time, Jesus called Simon Peter. Jesus looked at Simon and called him by name. "You are Simon, son of John. You will be called Cephas, which, when translated, is 'Rock.'" Jesus called him by name and told him who he was. And then he told him who he would become. Jesus spoke to Simon Peter. And Samuel heard voices. Does God speak to you? Apparently, in days of old, according to the Scriptures, God spoke to his people. Does God still speak? Does God still call people? Although the Scriptures tell us that a word from the Lord was rare in those days, God spoke to Samuel. God called him to be prophet and priest and judge. That was Samuel's vocation. And Jesus spoke to Simon and called him to be Cephas, Peter, the Rock. That was Simon's vocation. Fisherman was Simon's way of making a living, but Rock was his vocation. Is there still such a thing as vocation, still such a thing as being spoken to by God, as Samuel and Simon were, and called to be something and someone in particular? What is your vocation, your calling? And mine? Not what you do to earn money, but who is it that God has called you to be? How does God call you, not to make a living, but to make a life? Or does God speak at all any more? And, if he does, how would we know? But maybe - maybe if God does still call people these days - maybe we're all a little like Samuel. Maybe we're just not listening for God, but for other things, and to other voices. Even though Samuel lived and slept day and night at the very foot of the tabernacle of God, when he first heard a voice that night he thought it was Eli calling him. Samuel wasn't listening for God. He didn't expect to hear God speak to him, even though he lived on the doorstep of the church. I suspect that we human beings hear what we're listening for. Two men were walking along a crowded city sidewalk, when one stopped and said, "Listen to that bird!" But his friend heard nothing. And he asked his companion how in the world he noticed the song of a bird in the midst of all the traffic and people of the city. But the first man, a zoologist who had trained himself for years to hear the sounds of nature even in the city, did not explain with words. Instead, he took a half-dollar out of his pocket and dropped it on the sidewalk, and when a dozen people began to look about them, he said, "We hear what we listen for." Frederick Buechner tells about riding a train along a grim stretch of track between New Jersey and New York City. The day was gloomy and the windows were coated with dust and grime, and Buechner grew weary of watching the wilderness of tenements and smokestacks passing by. So he turned away from the window toward the inside of the car, and his eyes came to rest on the nearest bright thing that caught their attention. It was a large colorful cigarette ad on the wall in the front of the coach. It was a picture of a pretty girl and a handsome man, sitting together somewhere in a beautiful countryside. It was a lovely scene: blue sky, grass and flowers, with a pristine stream rushing by, a picture of beauty and youth and life. Then Buechner's eyes drifted down to the familiar warning of the Surgeon General. It read, in the flat language of bureaucratic labels, that cigarettes "can be hazardous to your health." Buechner had seen that picture and that label side by side hundreds of times before, but never until then, he said, had he recognized the combined message for what it really was: "Buy this," it said. "It will kill you." We human beings do hear what we listen for. A word from God, a call from God, a vocational word, is fundamentally an identity crisis, a moment of self-discovery, a moment, or perhaps a series of moments over a period of time, when one listens for what is true about life in order to hear what is true about oneself, a moment when, because one is listening for it, one hears God calling him to become who God created him, or her, to be. Although he had lived for years at the very door of the house of God, Samuel did not realize that it was God who was calling him until Eli said, "For heaven's sake, son! It is the Lord who is calling. If he calls again, listen to what he has to say." And Samuel lay down again, and once again God said, "Samuel. Samuel." And Samuel said, "Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening now." And from that time on "the Lord was with Samuel as he grew up," the Scriptures tell us, and Samuel and "all Israel from Dan to Beersheba" knew that God had called Samuel to be his prophet. And Simon. Jesus said to Simon, "I know who you are, Simon. You are Simon, son of John. I also know who you are called to become. "You will be called Cephas," for you will be a rock, the very foundation on which those who follow me will stake their lives. It is said that when Michaelangelo looked at a raw block of marble he could see within the block the image of the figure that could be released if he would just pick up his chisel and hammer to set it free. Just so, God sees us not only as we are; God also sees what we can be. God considers his young servant Samuel and his rough servant Simon, and says, "Give your life to me, and I will make you what you have in you to become." God released the prophet he knew was in Samuel, and Jesus released the rock, the faithful servant, he saw in Simon. Christian vocation, I think, boils down to this - that when we see in Jesus the human person he was and is, and respond to him, we are enabled to see in him the person that we can be as well. But a word from the Lord is rare in these days. Or is it just that a word from the Lord is rarely heard these days? Several years ago, the pastor of a church in Pasadena, California, told about an experience he had one Good Friday afternoon. He said that his church is on a very busy downtown street, a place that is used to accommodating large crowds - Tournaments of Roses, parades for athletes, huge conventions of everything from IBM to the Shriners and Salvation Army. And when Good Friday came that particular year, with the businesses and banks no longer closed on Good Friday afternoon as they used to be, the pastor looked out at the street and, except for New Years Eve, he said, he saw more traffic that afternoon than he had seen in ten years on that main street of town - hundreds of people, thousands of people, all making their way to the shops and the offices and the theaters, together with a few who had had to stop, if only for a moment, at the traffic signal, where they were piercing their ears with the noise of boom boxes and radios. "It was," he said, "as though the crucifixion of Christ were forgotten, as though God couldn't get a sound, much less a word, in edgewise against the din and confusion of our sounds." "Why?" he asked. "Why was our city making all that noise that afternoon while Jesus was hanging on a cross? Was it, perhaps, to put off as long as possible our own thoughts about dying, about the meaning of life and death, about the meaning of our own lives?" Do we do that? Do we live like that today, we might ask, when a word from the Lord is rare? Do we deny ourselves a break, or refuse to take a break, even while Jesus is hanging on his cross, in order to put off as long as possible the question of our vocation? Is all the clatter of our lives a way we have of putting our own personal iPods in our ears so that we can jog through life hearing only what we want to hear, without having to trouble ourselves with the voice of God, "Samuel! Samuel!...Simon! Simon!... Robert! Robert!...Sarah! Sarah!...and John!...and Dayle!...and Mark!...and Jennifer? Is all the clatter of our lives our way of not wanting to trouble with the voice of one who is calling us to become all that is within us to be? Martin Luther, that prophet of the 16th century, once had a congregation that complained to him, "But Martin, we never hear a call from God." And in a sermon Luther replied, "Look at your needle, your thimble, your beer barrel, your scales and measures. Look at them and you will find this saying written on them, for there are as many calls from God as there are transactions, commodities, tools, and other implements in your houses and in your shops. These tools and commodities and transactions all shout this word in your face every day: 'Use me toward your neighbor as you would want your neighbor to act toward you with that which is his.'" Well, what about us? What about us in our own day? Will we stop long enough tomorrow to remember the prophetic word and sacrifice of Martin Luther King, Jr., a modern prophet with a word from the Lord for us in our own day? Or will tomorrow be just another day of Mall Madness in preparation for March Madness? There were, of course, those in King's own day who claimed that God didn't speak in King's day any more than God spoke in Samuel's day, those who claimed that King was just hearing voices, crazy voices, the voices of crazy people. Not long before he was killed, King received a letter from a white brother Christian from Texas. "Are you sure that you aren't in too big of a religious hurry?" the man asked King over the clatter and noise of the 1960s. He suggested that King should give the people more time, that he should be more patient in his quest for justice, that he should relax his relentless struggle for civil rights. And from his cell in the Birmingham jail, King responded that time alone, chronological time, does not automatically make for moral progress, and that for the person of biblical faith there is such a thing as kairos time - that time which is "the fullness of time" - such as the time that comes when a pregnant woman is ready to give birth, a time that has come and that won't wait. And King said that "the fullness of time" for hearing the Word of God regarding the relationship of the races had arrived, and that justice now demands that the powers of the world serve all people equally. And so, in the 1960s - in your time and mine - Martin Luther King, Jr., continued to press for the end of apartheid in the United States. And for speaking this word in the fullness of time - a time like Samuel's time, a time like Simon's time and Nathanael's time and John the Baptist's time, a time like Jesus' time - King died among the garbage collectors in Memphis, paying the price of a prophet, the price of one with a word from God in a world that would just as soon not hear from God. So the question lingers: What about us? What about us now? Is a word from the Lord rare in our day, in the Year of Our Lord 2006? Or is it just that a word from God is rarely heard? What about us with all our engines of wealth and power, with all our instruments of needle and thimble and scales and measures and industries and weapons? Is there a word from the Cross for us in the madness of our day? Does the Word of God still cry out through the lives of his prophets and in the words of Luther: "Look at your tools. Look at your needle, your thimble, your beer barrel, your scales and measures, [look at your engines of wealth and power], and you will find this saying written on them, for there are as many calls from God as there are transactions, commodities, tools, and other implements in your houses and in your shops. These tools and commodities and transactions [and wealth and power] all shout this word in your face every day: 'Use me toward your neighbor as you would want your neighbor to act toward you with that which is his.'" What about us in the context of this week's headlines and advertisements? What about us, with the scales and measures of our engines of wealth and power? What about us, with the ways we use our freedom, including the ways we use our freedom toward our children, even toward children yet unborn? What about us, with our suspicion of those of other races or religions? What about us, fearfully and relentlessly at war again? With all this on our plate, is it really that a word from the Lord is rare in our day? Or is it with us just as it was with Samuel, and with the people in Martin Luther's congregation, and with the man with his question for Martin Luther King, Jr.? Is it just a problem of listening and of hearing? And a problem of responding? In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. |