Scripture readings:1 Samuel 3:1-21; 1 Samuel
13:2-14
I’ve been thinking a lot, this past year, about
hearing. I began to have a whooshing sound in my right ear, since early last
summer. I tried my doctor’s prescription for sinus drops, and that didn’t seem
to make any difference. My hearing finally seems to be getting better on its
own.
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| Palouse Falls, August 2013 |
About the time I was a teenager, I had a hearing test
which showed that I had much better hearing than most kids my age. I told my
dad about this and he was amazed, because I had never acted as if I had such
good hearing, as least not when he told me to do something. As for older,
married men, doesn’t hearing loss first appear when you don’t hear what your
wife is saying?
If we are God’s people, we have a special job related
to hearing and listening. On one hand we have to faithfully listen to this
world and to each other. On the other hand we must listen even more to God.
One of the great themes of the story of the Bible is
that God has a plan to make a new creation by means of creating a new people
who are specifically designed for that creation. That requires hearing: hearing
God and hearing others, because those people will live in a world of
faithfulness and love.
One of the great themes of the story of the Bible is
that God seeks to create people who will be what he calls priests. A priest is
a person who offers the world to God and God to the world. A priest is a person
who listens to the world and hears it on behalf of God, and who listens to God
and hears God on behalf of the world. A priest is someone who can speak and act
in the presence of God because they have listened to the world. A priest is
someone who can speak and act in this world because they have listened to God.
We are called by God, and transformed by faith and by
the grace of God, to be part of his new creation. We are called to be able to
represent God, to act for him and to speak for him. But we can only do this if
we listen more to him than we do to the world. Especially, we can only do this
if we listen more to God than we do to ourselves.
In the Book of Exodus, God spoke of this calling to
his people. “Although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a kingdom of
priests and a holy nation.” (Exodus 19:6) Peter wrote about this calling in one
of his letters in the New Testament. “But you are a chosen people, a royal
priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the
praises of him who brought you out of darkness and into his wonderful light.”
(1 Peter 2:9) We are called to declare God in this world: to speak for God and
act for God so that others can know God and have God living in them, and
through them. This requires hearing and listening.
In today’s part of the great story, as we go through
it from Genesis to Revelation, we are in the part of the story that includes
the priestly judge named Eli, Eli’s sons, Hannah, Samuel, and Saul. In their
own ways they all show us that how we stand or fall (or how we succeed or fail)
as God’s priests depends largely on what kind of hearers and listeners we are.
Eli’s sons, like their father, were actual priests in
the Lord’s Tent. They offered the people’s sacrifices and prayers to the Lord,
and they spoke God’s mercy and blessing to his people. They went through the
motions of priests and they talked the talk, but the real life of a priest was simply
not in them.
They didn’t listen to God. They didn’t listen to
their father. They didn’t listen to the people who came to them. They only
listened to themselves. They lived as if everything they had learned about a
life of faith, and a life with God, was nothing more than talk. They seem to
never have heard the voice of God, let alone listen to that voice.
In a way, the sons of Eli were users. They used God,
they used the place of worship and the fellowship of God’s people, they used
their father, and they used others for their own agenda.
God’s people include some who appear to think it is
all an act. They don’t hear God for themselves, and so they assume that other
people of God are all play-acting. Maybe this is because too many of God’s
people are play-acting; saying and acting words of love and words of faith, and
yet serving themselves.
The Bible is God’s word to us. Eli’s sons are God’s
word to us; not to other people. The words about them are written to speak to
you when you read or hear them. They are meant to speak to me when I read or
hear them. The story has been written so we can know God and know ourselves
truly.
This challenges us to look for examples of our own
play-acting and self-serving. When we are play-acting and self-serving we can
never speak or act for God because we are not hearing him or listening to him.
Eli, their father, actually knew very well what it
meant to hear God, and listen to God, so that he could speak and act for God.
He was able to teach this truth to Samuel, and so he was a much better father
to Samuel than he ever was to his own children.
Eli made Samuel listen to God and be willing to take
what he heard from God and give it as a gift to others, even when that was hard
and unpleasant. He made Samuel learn to be a real priest, a bridge between God
and his people, a bridge between God and the world in which his people lived.
But Eli, as able as he was to hear God, was not able
to speak or live out what he had heard for the sake of others. So he never made
his own sons learn the connection between God and their lives.
In a way, Eli could hear God and not know how to
represent God to the world around him. In Hannah’s case, Eli could see a
woman’s lips move in heart-felt prayer, and mistake her agony for drunkenness.
(You have to realize that ancient people didn’t read or pray silently. The ancient
writers explain this to their readers because Hannah’s silent prayer was so
unusual.)
Still, Eli should have known what was going on. He
needed help from her to know how to serve her on God’s behalf. He needed her to
speak up and he needed to listen when she did. (We all need that help.)
In his own family, Eli could clearly see his sons’
cynical, and selfish, and faithless way of life. What he could not see clearly was
what they really needed from their father, which was truth plus action. In
their case, they needed discipline, and their father never gave it to them.
Although we are never told anything that the sons
said to their father, we know that he must have allowed their voices to speak
louder to him than the voice of God, because Eli gave them what they wanted
from him. He gave them his surrender. He feared his own children more than he
feared God. Eli is a warning to us that, even though we hear loud and clear,
there is no real listening to God without being willing to speak (and to do)
what we hear from God.
Saul was a continuation of the same warning. The
people wanted a king who would make them like the other nations.
They didn’t want to be made new. They just wanted to
be made into more of the same old thing. It looked so much easier to fit in.
God gave them a king named Saul, but God refused to
let Saul get away with making them like everyone else. God insisted on giving
them a king whose kingly job it was to be a bridge between God and his people,
to keep his people on the road that required them to be priests, or else fail.
God transformed Saul into someone who could hear the
voice of God, and communicate the message of that voice to God’s people. Samuel
told Saul that he would be changed into a hearer of God. “The Spirit of the
Lord will come upon you in power, and you will prophesy…and you will be
changed. Once these signs are fulfilled, do whatever your hand finds to do, for
God is with you.” (1 Samuel 10:6-7) The Spirit of God gave Saul the ability to
be a king who could hear, and listen, and do what he heard.
Saul was given the gift that empowered him to speak
what he heard and do what he heard. He was changed into a bridge (a priest) so
that his people could understand what God wanted them to do and to be. This way
they would not be like the other nations. They would be something new. They
would be a nation of priests.
God always listens to his people and sometimes God gives
them what they ask for, but never in a way that lets them off the hook. Like
Paul says, “God’s gift and his call are irrevocable.” (Romans 11:29)
Saul failed, because he listened to the voice of his
people more than he listened to the voice of God. Saul listened to their fears
when they were outnumbered by the enemy and his troops were deserting. Saul
listened to their fears, and became a person of fear, instead of listening to
God’s promises. So Saul became disobedient.
Saul wasn’t merely disobedient because he offered the
people’s sacrifices to God instead of waiting for Samuel to do it, instead of
trusting that Samuel would show up when he said he would. Saul was disobedient
because he backed away from his calling to teach his people to trust God’s
power and grace.
If Saul had stood up to his people, they might have
understood and followed God’s path. They might have learned to listen to God
for themselves. They might have become a kingdom of priests for the sake of
Gods’ plan to create a new world of faith and grace.
Samuel learned, even as a child, to say, “Speak Lord,
for your servant is listening.” (1 Samuel 3:9) And he learned that, once he had
heard God speak, he must not hold back.
The story of the Bible always leads us to a God who
hears us and does not hold back. It leads us to Jesus. The Bible leads us to
God as he comes to us in Christ.
Samuel would have heard his mother’s stories about
his birth. After all they did get written down in his book. He learned that his
very life came from a God who hears. He learned that this fact that God hears was
the very meaning of his name. Samuel means “God hears”.
God heard the prayers of his people for a king and God
gave them a king whose job it would be to make his people truly God’s people.
God heard their prayers by giving them something better than they asked for.
This is the God we meet in Jesus. Here is the God who
heard the cries of a muddled and fearful world and gave us better than we ask
for. God heard a world of anger, and despair, and confusion, and doubt, and spoke
to that world (and to us) by coming into that world in a way that he actually
shared in the world as it is.
God stands by us in this world, in order to save us
from it. And he stands beside in Jesus us to save us from ourselves.
God took the risks and died the death that we would
fear, if he were not with us. He met and did battle with the dark powers that
seem to make the world, and all our good intentions, work in vain.
He overcame the darkness at its worst. He defeated
evil, and sin, and death on the cross, and in his resurrection from the dead.
In Jesus, God shows that he hears us and does not
hold back. Then he lives in us so that we can hear him very close, every day,
and not hold back. We can only stand in life effectively (for ourselves and for
others) when we hear this God speak and do what we hear, and not what we fear.
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