Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
Epiphany 3, 2006
The Rev. Melissa Skelton
The story of the call of Samuel is the kind of story some parishes read on youth Sunday. In it, the young boy Samuel is sleeping in the temple near the ark of God’s presence when he hears someone repeatedly call his name. Samuel keeps going to Eli, the older priest, thinking he is the one who has called him. Eli, however, realizes that God is the one who is calling Samuel and teaches the boy what to do to invite God to speak to him.
In the days before “Godly Play” my son Evan and I used to act this story out. It would go something like this:
I would recline on the couch pretending to be old Eli, with dim eyesight, fast asleep. Evan would go and get his pillow and quilt and make a little pallet for himself on the floor where he would play the boy Samuel also asleep.
After a while, I (who was also playing the voice of God) would whisper: “Samuel, Samuel.” At this, Evan would pop up, come over, tug at my sleeve and ask. “Eli, did you call me?”
“No,” I would growl, “Go back to sleep.”
We would repeat this, many, many times, and each time I would pretend to be more impatient and gruff at being awakened, and each time Evan would be more and more delighted.
The best part of our play for me, however, came at the end of our play.
For after I sent him back for the last time telling him that when he heard his name called, he should stay in his bed and invite God to speak, and after I whispered his name, Samuel, for the last time, what I got to hear was the pure, clear voice of a child, saying: “Speak, Lord for your servant is listening.”
Another story about a young boy:
In the mid 1930s in Atlanta, Georgia, a boy whose name was Martin Luther King, Jr. rode in the family car with his father. On that day his father accidentally drove through an intersection where a stop sign was posted. A policeman pulled up to the car and said to young Martin’s father: "All right, boy, pull over and let me see your license."
As King tells in his autobiography, recounting formative moments in his early life, “My father instantly retorted: "Let me make it clear to you that you aren't talking to a boy. If you persist in referring to me as boy, I will be forced to act as if I don't hear a word you are saying."
Both of these stories, the story of Samuel in the temple that Evan and I acted out and the story of Martin riding in the car with his father, are stories about the power of listening and its connection to the clarity of our sense of call. And both make the point to me that listening to God and to the people and events of our lives is not child’s play at all, but can be one of the most powerful activities we engage in, potentially changing the direction of our lives and the direction the world takes.
Take little Samuel for instance. This seemingly charming children’s story is not just about the coming of age of a young boy. It’s about a nation’s dramatic change of direction under a new leader, Samuel, the one who is the connecting link between Israel’s time under the Judges and Israel’s time under the its kings. And as the story suggests, exercising this critical role depends on Samuel’s recognizing that the one who calls his name and claims him is not Eli, that is, continuity with the old order, but the Holy One, the one through whom a new order and a new future come into being.
Likewise, the boy Martin, had to sort out from a very early age who or what had claim upon him, who or what defined him. Would he be defined by the society he found himself in, the one that did not recognize him or his people as worthy of respect? Or would he be defined by the reality mediated through the church he grew up in and through the voice and actions of his fierce Baptist minister father who would not tolerate the racial prejudice of others?
In his 1950 essay An Autobiography of Religious Development, ML King Jr. wrote-about his father’s influence on his entering the ministry.
“…The influence of my father…had a great deal to do with my going in the ministry. This is not to say that he ever spoke to me in terms of being a minister, but that my admiration for him was the great moving factor; He set forth a noble example that I didn't mind following.” Once when a white salesperson asked father and son to go to the rear of a shoe store to be served, Martin remembered his father leaving the shop. “This was the first time I had seen Dad so furious, “ he said. “That experience revealed to me at a very early age that my father had not adjusted to the system, and he played a great part in shaping my conscience. I still remember walking down the street beside him as he muttered, ‘I don't care how long I have to live with this system, I will never accept it.’”
And so the stories of both Samuel and Martin are about the triumph of listening to the voice of God whispering to us in the pre-dawn silences of our lives and listening to the life-giving words and actions of others, and the part that both play as we try to move into and create a new, hopeful future for ourselves and for our world.
Where might be God whispering to you in the stillness and silence of your life as you wait for the dawn? What is God saying to you about the new order, the new future prepared for you? And secondly, what are the words and actions of those closest to you trying to tell you, trying to draw out of you?
This coming Tuesday night, forty people will begin our next Foundations course on the dynamics of spiritual life using a Benedictine approach. This approach is based on Benedict’s Rule, a handbook of behavior for monks living in community. That handbook begins with the word: “Listen.”
As the rule unfolds, what we find out is that this idea of listening is not just about the monk listening to and doing what his superiors tell him to do. It’s about cultivating an openness of spirit and an ability to respond to what we hear in the silence of prayer, in Scripture and in the interaction both with others and the stuff of our lives. For Benedict, this idea, of “listening with the ear of your heart” is about allowing God and the people around us to have an impact on us. Benedict understands this to be lifelong process. What I would add (which I think Benedict would agree with) is that this process of openness and listening is led by the part of us that is like a little child.
And as I think about the young Samuel, about young Martin, about myself and about all of us when we’re able to be open, it seems that this being led by the child within is the key. Understood in this way, listening to God and to one another deeply and intently is a kind of serious child’s play, a serious child’s play that comes when we see ourselves as the children of God: sons and daughters who are at their adult best when they are not full of high sentence and brittle, impenetrable self assurance; sons and daughters of God who have a lot to learn from the great and loving mystery who comes in the silence and stillness before dawn and before all our new dawning’s; sons and daughters of God who have just as much to learn from the specific people given to us in our families, our workplaces, our churches, our communities and in the times into which we were born; sons and daughters of a God who has been listening to and learning about us from before we were born, and who, in the words of the psalmist, has searched us out and known us, has known our sitting down and our rising and has discerned our thoughts from afar, has traced our journeys and our resting places and is acquainted with all our ways.
Works Consulted or Cited
The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., “Early Years” found at http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/publications/autobiography/ch_1.htm
Seeking God: The Way of St. Benedict by Esther de Waal
Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan William’s sermon given at Trinity Institute in 2003, quoted at http://www.anglican.ca/news/news.php?newsItem=2003-04-29_trinity.news
