June 2, 2024
St. Andrew Church
Rev. Julianne Porras-Center
First Lesson: 1 Samuel 3:1-10, 19-20
Now the boy Samuel was ministering to the Lord under Eli. The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread. 2 At that time Eli, whose eyesight had begun to grow dim so that he could not see, was lying down in his room; 3 the lamp of God had not yet gone out, and Samuel was lying down in the temple of the Lord, where the ark of God was. 4 Then the Lord called, “Samuel! Samuel!” and he said, “Here I am!” 5 and ran to Eli, and said, “Here I am, for you called me.” But he said, “I did not call; lie down again.” So he went and lay down. 6 The Lord called again, “Samuel!” Samuel got up and went to Eli, and said, “Here I am, for you called me.” But he said, “I did not call, my son; lie down again.” 7 Now Samuel did not yet know the Lord, and the word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him. 8 The Lord called Samuel again, a third time. And he got up and went to Eli, and said, “Here I am, for you called me.” Then Eli perceived that the Lord was calling the boy. 9 Therefore Eli said to Samuel, “Go, lie down; and if he calls you, you shall say, ‘Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.’ ” So Samuel went and lay down in his place. 10 Now the Lord came and stood there, calling as before, “Samuel! Samuel!” And Samuel said, “Speak, for your servant is listening.” 19 As Samuel grew up, the Lord was with him and let none of his words fall to the ground. 20 And all Israel from Dan to Beer-sheba knew that Samuel was a trustworthy prophet of the Lord.
Second Lesson: Mark 2:23-3:6
23 One sabbath he was going through the grainfields; and as they made their way his disciples began to pluck heads of grain. 24 The Pharisees said to him, “Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the sabbath?” 25 And he said to them, “Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need of food? 26 He entered the house of God, when Abiathar was high priest, and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and he gave some to his companions.” 27 Then he said to them, “The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath; 28 so the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath.” Again he entered the synagogue, and a man was there who had a withered hand. 2 They watched him to see whether he would cure him on the sabbath, so that they might accuse him. 3 And he said to the man who had the withered hand, “Come forward.” 4 Then he said to them, “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to kill?” But they were silent. 5 He looked around at them with anger; he was grieved at their hardness of heart and said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was restored. 6 The Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him.
Good morning church. I know I said that already but I want to say it again, because it is a good morning. The sun is shining, we’re here amidst redwoods, the world seems to be falling apart in new and strange and disorienting ways locally and globally, and yet against all these odds we are here, alive, grateful, gathered together to encounter – we hope – a little bit of the divine.
I’ve preached a lot of different pulpits since I joined your Presbytery this last September – because I am engaged in a new kind of ministry, one which does not have a traditional Sunday morning service, I feel honored to now be the number that pastors call when they want to get out of town. So, I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know a few different congregations such as yourselves around this presbytery
And I’ve come to think of these Sunday worship services almost as a first date of sorts – I’m getting to know you, you’re getting to know me, we’re both a little nervous, not quite sure what to say or where to stand, filled with so many questions
except it’s more than that, really because this is also temporary, right? It’s like a first date of a short-lived romance with a—an expiration date.
We know this won’t last – summers only last so long, a million and a half romcoms tell us – but we want it to be meaningful while it happens. We want to leave each other with something memorable, or at least I do.
And so we cut through the small talk, the chit chat, and we start asking the big questions, right?
and so the question that I am asking you on this our first date, in the hopes of getting to know you, and in the hopes of expressing the kinds of questions that interest me, is:
Where do you hear God’s voice?
It’s a big question, and it’s a question that these two seemingly distinct Scripture passages pose to us, and that I ask that we begin to ponder and answer with all the vulnerability of a first date.
And as Christians, one of the many ways we begin to answer big questions such as this, is by delving into the Word of God as found in the Bible, this collection of stories and poetry and law and letters bundled together.
So we begin with Samuel. Samuel who was a young man in a time where “the Word of the Lord was rare” – a time when “visions were not widespread.” Familiar somehow, right? A time we might know something about. Now, Samuel was a sort of apprentice beneath Eli, Eli whose eyesight, we are told had begun to grow dim so that he could not see. We can take that literally – he was going blind – or we could take that with all the metaphor that the story suggests, and glean that Eli was not seeing as clearly as he once did. He was lo longer able to see reality, to see and chart God’s will as once he did.
We can imagine this frustrating Eli. We can also imagine him not recognizing it. I can easily imagine him knowing this and trying desperately to ensure that others did not. There are so many valid ways to react to this fact, and so therefore so many ways that we can empathize with Eli. Regardless, it is to this great leader that Samuel is entrusted, and it is under his command that Samuel hears a voice – a voice that he has been waiting for. Ever attentive, he runs to Eli, and Eli says “What?” “I did not call you. Lie down again.” Samuel, obedient does. And a second time, he hears the voice calling his name, and a second time he runs to Eli only for Eli to reply again, “What? I did not call you, my son; lie down again.” And a third time, Samuel hears a voice calling his name, and a third time he runs to Eli, and this time Eli seems to understand what is happening.
Eli is no longer the one to whom God is speaking. He is no longer the prophet. Unable to see so clearly, this he does see, and with grace, he tells Samuel to “lie down” one more time and, if he hears the voice again to tell God, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” This Samuel does, and so Samuel for the first time hears the word of the Lord in a time in which the word of the Lord was rare, yes, but also in which the “lamp had not yet gone out.”
How awesome must that have been – awesome in the true sense of the word – awe-invoking, terrifying in the way that stepping into your calling is.
Because the words that the Lord was speaking to Samuel, well they weren’t easy words to digest. The word of the Lord often isn’t. For homework, you can read the 8 verses that the Lectionary skipped for brevity’s sake.
And so we hear from this story that God often speaks out of darkness. God often speaks to the young and unaccomplished. God often speaks to us words we might not be ready to hear. We also hear from this story that if we think we are hearing God call to us, we can simply say “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”
This is one way to hear from the Lord – through, well, hearing.
As we turn to our Gospel, we find another way in which we can hear the Lord’s revelation.
In these stories, Jesus is not quite so obedient to authority as Samuel. We are told that on the day of the Sabbath he did two forbidden things. The first, he allowed his disciples to pluck grain from the fields. If this were 2000 years ago, you might have heard a gasp of outrage as I said that. You don’t seem to alarmed! That’s because we know that Jesus, as the son of God, has authority to break or alter our understandings of God and laws and reality itself. And so we are prepared to be on his side, to condemn the Pharisees and their law and order.
And yet, and yet Jesus was not worshipped in those days. Jesus was something of a rebel. A young upstart preacher of the wrong class, from the wrong place, with the wrong ideas about the way that society should be structured, Jesus broke the rules and didn’t even bother to be sorry about it. He didn’t go through the normal processes. He did what he thought was right. His friends were hungry and he let them eat, claiming that he had heard the Lord and that the Lord had said it was alright.
You’ll notice that in his rebellion of one kind of religious authority, that of the Pharisees, he appeals to two different kinds of authority. One, of tradition, of Scripture. He reminds the Pharisees of David, the great King David, who maybe was not so great in the eyes of the high priest in his day as he too broke religious law. He reminds the Pharisees that David basically did the modern-day equivalent of taking the consecrated host in the Catholic church and giving it to his friends to eat. Not something that you can do.
He also appeals to his own authority, or what I would call the authority of the Holy Spirit. He as someone who knows God and God’s heart reminds the Pharisees that “The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath.” In other words, not to let the letter of the law get in the way of the purpose behind the law. The purpose behind the law always and ever being human flourishing and right relationship with God and neighbor.
We don’t hear the Pharisee’s response in this particular story, though I think we can assume they weren’t happy and think we can empathize with their unhappiness. But we do get their response in the next.
Jesus enters a synagogue and sees a man with a withered hand. He sees a person who is in need of healing and he knows that he can provide that healing. And, like a rebellious upstart, he makes a point out of it. He watches the Pharisees watch him, wait to accuse him, and he asks, “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to kill?”
In other words, he asks, “Did you hear me before?” Did you think about what I was saying when I said “The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath?” Did that penetrate your sureness that I am wrong and you are right? Did my words, did the words of the Spirit, break through your hard-pressed ideology? Did you open your heart to hear the Lord?
And the Pharisees were silent. And Jesus, it says, was grieved. Grieved at their hardness of heart. And so he healed the man, saved the life, but he did not change the hearts of the Pharisees.
And it is after this healing that “the Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him.”
Where do we hear God’s voice?
This is a big spiritual question. For Samuel it was in the temple, in the words of his trusted mentor, in the seeming darkness of the age. For Jesus it was in the hunger pangs of his friends, in the brokenness of the downtrodden people around him, in the Scripture, in the Spirit.
Where do we hear God?
You see, the greatest Spiritual question to me, is not whether we can hear God’s voice. Whether the Lord can and is speaking to us through our human fallenness and brokenness. I think, no, I know that we hear God’s voice every day.
I am sure so many of you can share testimonies of when the Lord was speaking to you. And I am sure that each one of these stories is different. Maybe you have heard God through the words of another – a trusted friend in time of trouble. Maybe you have heard God through an ongoing dialogue with the natural environment – the rush of wind, the songs of birds, the bubbling of a brook. Or maybe you have heard God in silence – in the quiet intuition of your own Spirit, gently aligning your own will with God’s. Maybe you have heard God through the words of Tradition – through a lesson taught in Sunday school, through the lyrics of a hymn, through the Holy Scriptures.
The heavens, we are told, declare the Glory of God. The Word of God, we are told, has become flesh and dwelled among us. The Spirit of God, we are told, is within us.
We can hear God’s voice.
The great Spiritual question to my ears is whether or not we can ever really know when we are hearing God’s voice. Afterall, maybe the rush of wind wasn’t God at all – maybe it was just the rush of wind. Afterall, maybe the intuition, the inner call, that I thought was the voice of God was really just the echoed and reverberated voice of my own pride, or my own fear, my own past hurts dressed up and given authority. Afterall, maybe the kind words of the friend or the pastor in a time of trouble were just wrong. Maybe they were just speaking for themselves, not for God. Maybe they didn’t have all the information. Maybe the translations and interpretations of the Scripture you read that spoke to you were hijacked by special interest groups centuries ago…
You see where this goes. There will always be a reason to doubt that God has truly spoken. There will always be other voices, including our own, drowning out or testing or contradicting God’s voice. This is not necessarily a bad thing – it is important to analyze and test what we think we’re hearing. That’s one of the reasons we live faith in community. For external validation of internal calls.
But how can we ever be sure that what we have heard was God?
Afterall, the Pharisees were pretty sure they had heard God. They were following the Law that God gave them and their people. They were keeping the Sabbath, they were walking the straight and narrow, they were the people tasked with listening to the voice of God…
and they were deaf to it when it arrived.
Afterall, this is Pride month, the month in which so many celebrate their LGBTQIA identities. For centuries, millenia, Christians were pretty sure they had heard God. They were following what they thought were the words of God. They were walking the straight and narrow, and they – we — were oppressing people.
We were deaf to our neighbors, our family members, our friends, our loved ones when they told us who they were, who God had made them to be.
We, like the Pharisees of Jesus’ time, neglected to remember that God has not just spoken, but God is still speaking.
But if God is still speaking, and if God can speak through the voices of our neighbors — how can we ever be sure that what we have heard was God?
How can we be sure that we have heard God correctly? How can we keep listening?
I am not a believer that there is one person you can talk to who can verify or validate that God has spoken. I am not a believer that we can ever really be sure, that we can access that kind of truth unfiltered, unblemished by our fallen humanity. “For we see in a mirror dimly, but someday face to face.”
But I do hear in our Scriptures today a few lessons that, if we are willing, we can hear and abide by to test and to trust the voice of God.
- If God is truly speaking, God will repeat themself.
You don’t have to worried about missing it. Three times the Lord cried out to Samuel and three times he misinterpreted the voice.
If we think that we have missed God’s voice, or if we haven’t been sure that we have heard it, we can pray to God like Samuel, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”
And then, we can keep listening.
- God tends to favor the underdog – the poor, the weak, the young, the powerless, the upstart, and the rebel — to the Old Guard or the authorities of the day.
Samuel was not the prophet – he was the apprentice. And yet he was the one to whom God spoke.
Jesus was not Son of God to the world – Jesus was the son of Joseph, the Carpenter. Jesus was not reigning in heaven – Jesus was walking here on imperfect Earth, born in Nazareth, of which his contemporaries said, “Surely nothing good can come from Nazareth.”
Jesus was not a religious authority. He was a human who spoke of love and justice with conviction. So compellingly and dangerously that the religious authorities and the state sought to and succeeded in destroying him.
- God will choose love over law.
Just as humanity was not made for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath was made for humanity – all of this, all of creation, all of us, were made with love to be loved. God desires that we are joyful.
John 15:9-12 reads, ”As God has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love. 10 If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept God’s commandments and abide in their love. 11 These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.
12 “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”
This teaching tells us that laws, that rules, that structure and organization and order – it’s only a means to an end. And that end is love – that end is joy. So, if those laws, those rules, that structure is not leading to greater love which mirrors Christ’s own, well then it is bankrupt. It is a noisy gong or a clanging symbol. It is not helping us to hear God’s voice, it is simply contributing to the noise.
So with these lessons in mind, friends, may we tune out the noise this week and listen closely to what the Lord might be saying to us. May we reflect on the ways in which God has already spoken to us, in ways that we might have missed. And may we say, as Samuel did ‘Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.’ Amen.
By: Rev. Julianne Porras-Center
