January 18, 10:30am (Sare Gordy)
Shhhh…somewhere floating around in here in this sanctuary, in your pew, in this moment -- is an invitation being whispered to you… As quietly as a butterfly’s wing ripples the air, so is a whisper landing within this moment, spoken to you.
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Sermons @ Trinity
January 21, 2009
A whisper with your name on it
The Rev. R. Cameron Miller
***
Okay,
if you haven’t done it already,
I want you to mentally put down your “To Do” list
and put away your “Let’s get it over” antsy-ness
and take a deep breath.
Even close your eyes if might be so bold,
and just make the effort
to arrive in this moment –
here and now, and…listen.
It is so rarely done,
and after all,
what else is there to do right now,
right here,
except be present and hear the whispers within?
So,
if you haven’t already,
just stop and listen…
Shhhh…somewhere floating around in here
in this sanctuary,
in your pew,
in this moment --
is an invitation being whispered to you…
As quietly as a butterfly’s wing ripples the air,
so is a whisper landing within this moment,
spoken to you.
The whisper is an invitation;
it is a request;
from God to go somewhere you have needed to go; or,
move in a direction you have been nudged; or,
become something you have been afraid to be; or,
love someone you have not loved well enough; or,
know something you have not wanted to know; or,
do something you have left undone; or,
hope something you have not found the courage to hope.
So Listen…
that is why we came here after all,
even if we didn’t really recognize it along the way.
You and I came to a place like this
to receive something
we can’t quite hear
in the usual and normal chambers of our lives.
We know it is there in those places,
in every place we go,
but we just can’t quite hear well-enough
in so many of the more cluttered moments we live.
So listen now.
In the music,
the words of the liturgy,
maybe even in the words I will offer now;
if we listen attentively to the silence,
to the noise of our thoughts,
or even glimpse it in the posture of the person across the way…
there is something coming to you
as quietly as a gossamered-winged insect
lands on honeysuckle.
Listen. Watch. Notice.
Open. See. Know.
Let’s listen first to Samuel.
If all we know about the call of Samuel
is this little selection we just heard
then it might seem like a nice little visit
by God to a boy
– sort of like Jimminy Cricket to Pinocchio.
But the call of Samuel
begins the overthrow of a dynasty
that has pretty much run the show for years;
a dynasty that, as so many dynasties do,
had thoroughly succumbed to the lure of
materialism, greed, and the defiance
of God’s best dreams for creation.
In the story,
the dynasty that governed
the young Hebrew tribal society
had to be replaced.
So God gives a shout out to Samuel –
at night
in that state between wakefulness and slumber
when we often hear things
that we usually bat away as if a screaming mosquito.
But then Samuel listen’s…
and then responds…
And then, Samuel finds himself the instrument of subversion,
he finds himself a tool of subversion against the state...subversion against the king.
So the first thing we might hear in this story,
if we are listening deeply enough,
is that while God may whisper to us like a butterfly kissing a flower,
the consequence of responding to God
may not be quite so peaceful.
Take our friend, Sare Gordy.
She wanted to come back to Western New York
when she graduated form seminary,
but I bet that when you thought about
becoming a priest
you never, in your wildest dreams,
imagined she would start out at Trinity Church…
or that the experience would undermine so much of what you learned in seminary.
And I bet she never imagined
that she would become the vicar
of the congregation in the very building
where she worshipped as a child,
and where,
because of the extreme conservatism of the clergy
and its congregation,
she could not serve as an acolyte
because only boys could do that.
I bet that Barack Obama never,
in his wildest dreams,
8 year old living in Indonesia,
imagined himself in the Oval Office.
I bet that if you think about the course of your life,
you are not living along the path
that you would have predicted for yourself,
and that even if you are –
because some people pick a path
and ride it hard until it’s tamed –
that you have been taken along detours
that utterly changed you in some way.
Some of those detours may well have been a response
to an invitation
coming to you from a source outside yourself –
or should I say,
from a source that is deep
and at the very center of yourself.
An invitation you may have heard
and responded to
or even one that you did not hear
but stumbled onto and
which somehow you made the best of.
Now you see,
in our rational, prove-it-to-me mind,
the idea that God evokes a direction for our lives;
that God even knows us personally,
let alone by name;
is ludicrous.
In our rational mind,
the idea that God could have anything to do with
Barack Obama’s direction in life,
and even with what is about to happen on Tuesday,
or that God would have anything to do
with the chastening of the United States
and so-called Free Market Capitalism,
is ludicrous.
The idea that God would call a boy named Samuel
to bring down a king is ludicrous.
Or that God would chose a boy named David
to become a king, is ludicrous.
Or that God would inspire the movement of history
so that the King of Persia
would step in and save the exiled Hebrews
so they could go home from Babylon, is ludicrous.
Or that God would inspire
mystical and erotic love songs and poetry
in a woman named Julian, is ludicrous.
Or that God could power and empower
a shrunken old woman named Theresa,
to stand with the most abandoned and abused people of the world,
even though she become deaf to the presence of holiness in her own life, is ludicrous.
Or the notion that God would ride upon the life
of a Baptist minister named King,
and upon the balance of his life
finally turn the course of a 400 year history of oppression and degredation,
is ludicrous.
But listen…
the smallest,
most infinitesimal
and, at the time, seemingly insignificant events
have radically altered history –
Natural history and human history.
The most profound scientific achievements
leap from accidental discovery.
The most awesome and even frightening environmental alterations
hinge upon decimal points of change in the atmosphere.
Your life and mine
have been completely and totally altered
by random encounters with people
and unplanned experiences,
and we have been changed
in ways too profound to articulate
by things we never even noticed at the time.
Listen…
There is no way to prove to you
that God is afoot in the world,
in history,
even in your very life.
I wouldn’t bother trying.
But what I will say is: have some humility.
I mean, really;
what we know
and can know
after a million and a half years of our species’ evolution,
can fill a thimble in presence of the Cosmos.
Let’s just have a little humility
about what is possible,
and what we might hear
were we to listen just a little bit more.
When I say,
“Listen…”
perhaps that resonates with you in some way,
because few of us take the time to listen to our lives.
We are so busy.
There are so many needs and demands.
We have so many choices.
Listening takes time
and we just don’t seem to have much time…
Even those who are retired seem so busy.
Even our children,
well before they start school,
seem so busy.
We just don’t have time,
so when I suggest that we “Listen”
we intuitively know that means “Stopping.”
We have to pause to listen,
and that sounds great –
like a drink when we are thirsty.
But you and I both know that
there is a reason
we do not stop to listen.
There is a very good reason why we do not pause.
As good as “Listening”
sounds right now,
and as wonderful as a pause might feel right now,
we know why we don’t…why we won’t.
If we stop to listen
what we will hear is more
than the one or two voices we would chose to hear.
If we stop to listen we will begin to hear
all the voices within us,
and even all the voice around us
that we now turn off, deflect, or reject.
When first we pause,
take a deep breath and stop, we will greet the quiet.
It is a blessing,
a peaceful respite.
But then they creep in, one or two at a time.
For a moment we can focus on the one we want
to listen to and the one we want to hear.
But before long
we will find ourselves distracted,
and suddenly captured by the sound of a voice
we don’t feel comfortable with or that we do not want to hear.
Listening, pausing to listen,
means hearing the ache in our heart
and the pain in our bones.
Listening,
stopping to notice,
means hearing a lonely inner plea for greater intimacy
as well as the whisper of our fears
about trusting others.
Listening,
stopping to hear,
means understanding the inner voices of our many
needs and desires
in all their different languages.
Listening, pausing for the moment,
means thinning our calluses to hear the excruciating pain and needs of those around us.
Oh, right,
that’s why we don’t pause more often.
Now we remember:
if we stop
then eventually we will catch up with ourselves
and notice what we have heard,
and apprehend what we have seen,
and be challenged by what we have deflected.
Listening,
pausing to hear
all of those voices,
requires deep courage
and it requires a well of trust in ourselves,
even in God, and in one another.
But here is the problem.
And by the way,
I am going to leave it with the statement of the problem rather than a how-to book,
because I believe that over half the battle
is clearly understanding and clearly describing the problem.
It comes down to this:
if we continue to tune out all those voices
we do not want to hear –
especially the most painful ones –
then God’s still small voice
is unavailable to us as well.
In fact,
we won’t even be able to hear
the most important voices
that have only to do with ourselves,
let alone God and others.
As our friend Marielle Murphy was saying last week
at her presentation about Solidarity after lunch,
Solidarity with others,
instead of a paternalistic do-gooderism
where we “take care” of those on the margins
but never bother to know them
or stand with them in our common humanity,
requires that we be able to be uncomfortable.
Solidarity requires that we be able listen and hear
even when we cannot do anything,
or fix anything, or change anything.
The same can be said for listening to ourselves.
To stand with,
and be in solidarity with ourselves,
we must be able to be present to the pain of our lives,
and the compassion we feel
for the pain in other’s lives,
even though we cannot change it
or fix it
or make it all better at the moment.
We must be present and listen
to the voices of our own pain.
And if we do,
and when we do,
eventually,
in the good and the bad,
in the joyful and the painful,
in the scared and in the brave voices within ourselves,
we will begin to hear
the whisper of the one who knows us by name.
So listen…
Take some time,
and pause,
and get ready to be uncomfortable
when you listen to all the voices
within and around you.
Listen…
There will be,
there already is,
a whisper with your name on it.
Amen.
