THE SECOND SUNDAY AFTER THE EPIPHANY

January 15, 2006

I Samuel 3:1-10 (11-20)

I Corinthians 6:12-20

John 1:43-51

Year B

Picture this morning the old temple priest Eli, at the end of a long day, finally being able to spread his weary body upon his mat in the temple. He is looking forward to drifting into sleep, but when he does he is startled into wakefulness by the small boy Samuel, asking if he called him. Much like Dennis the Menace pulling up Mr. Wilson’s eyelids to ask if he is asleep, Eli, irritated at being ripped from the luxury of sleep, tells him to go back to bed.

Hannah, Samuel’s mother, had promised to do anything to have a child, including giving the child back to God. That is how it came to be that Samuel grew up in the temple at Shiloh, serving Eli, at least ninety years old and mostly blind. It could not have been a pleasant childhood, keeping the lamp of God filled with oil, scrubbing out the pots used to boil the slaughtered sacrifices. In spite of growing up in the temple Samuel did not know the Lord, so scripture says; reminding us that altar keeping or pew sitting does not guarantee a relationship with God.

While Eli was a faithful priest his sons had been running off with things that belonged to the temple – and worse. Eli had warned them to stop, but eventually he had just given up. So God chose to speak to Samuel instead. That’s what God does when the religious authorities stop listening. God goes to those who are fresh and open enough to have the living daylights frightened out of them as opposed to those who have shut the door and bolted it tight against God’s voice. After Samuel had disturbed Eli three times, even old Eli began to think it was more than the wind whistling through the cracks in the temple walls, so he told Samuel that if he heard the voice again he was to say, “Speak Lord, for your servant is listening”.

Jesus said to Nathanael today, “Here is an Israelite in whom there is no deceit”, or “guile” as other translations say. Jesus almost seems amazed to meet an Israelite who doesn’t have three game plans up his sleeve at any given moment. Nathanael was equally astonished to hear from Philip that anyone of significance could come out of Nazareth. Nazareth was an undistinguished place, not unlike the villages in Afghanistan, where tribal lords constantly vie for power. It was a questionable place, but Philip had said, “Come and see for yourself”.

So Nathanael did. And something just clicked. Have you ever encountered someone that seemed to understand you immediately; seemed to know you immediately? Nathanael says to Jesus, “Where did you get to know me?” Jesus says, “I saw you under the fig tree”. For the Jew the fig tree stood for peace. Because of its shade it was a common place for quiet and prayer. So it was not so much that Jesus had seen him under the fig tree that surprised Nathanael as the fact that Jesus had seemed to peek into his innermost self and touched his soul in that moment of encounter. And Jesus, no doubt smiling, said, “You will see greater things than this!”

The words in Samuel say, “The word of the Lord was rare in those days”. It could be said that the word of the Lord is rare in these days, but perhaps the real truth is we have become experts at tuning the Voice of the Lord out. When God calls people respond in various ways. Some immediately seek ordination and others just turn the television up louder. In the Bible lots of people are minding their own business when God comes and interferes. That’s what happened to Abraham and Sarah, to Mary and a host of others in between. They were all occupied with minding their own business when God comes and interferes with their lives.

We like to think of ourselves as those who search out God, but scripture says God is the One who pursues us. Israel found God absolutely irresistible. She experienced God’s call the greatest gift she had ever known but God also became her greatest problem, because life became complicated when God called. And we are no different. We don’t like God interfering with the way we have structured our life, so we build up complex defenses, excuses and ways to shut God out, to silence the Voice that calls to us.

Paul says today that answering God’s call involves the fullness of our being. He says that it is in answering God’s call with the fullness of our being that life grows strongest and most secure, remembering that God’s Voice is constantly calling us to new maturity and deeper love. But we, like the Israelites, are always devising ways to silence God, ways to try and convince ourselves that God might have spoken once in history, but no longer.

Martin E. Marty, writes: “Some years ago…at a historian’s convention, a presenter spoke about the mass of southern Protestant clergy just prior to 1861. Almost to a person – he was setting us up – they came across as oral, devout, pastoral, learned, caring, informed, and generous preachers. And also to a person they defended human slavery, claming that it was a response to divine mandates and divine will, biblically authorized”.

We must never assume that God’s call is only answered by those who externally seem the most pure, while we must also never assume that those who seem the most pure have actually answered God’s call. “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Most Israelites answered absolutely not.

William Willomon writes of going to speak to a fraternity at Duke University some years ago. The Dean required the fraternities to have a certain number of programs each year in order to give them some respectability. Willomon’s topic was “Character and College”. When Willomon arrived at the Fraternity House a small boy about nine or ten opened the door. Willomon wondered what he was doing there as the little boy led him to the room where all the fraternity brothers were waiting. As Willomon began his talk he noticed that the little boy climbed onto the lap of one of the brothers. Shortly he fell asleep with his head on the shoulder of this college kid.

Willomon writes, “I hammered them for the moral failures of their generation for about half an hour. When I finally finished my talk I asked if they had any questions or comments. Dead Silence. So, I thanked them…and made my way out. I heard the college kid say to the little boy, ‘You go on and get ready for bed. I’ll be in to tuck you in and read you a story’”. The young college kid escorted Willomon out and so he asked, “Who was the kid there tonight?’ “Oh, that’s Darrell. The fraternity is part of the Durham Big Brother program. We met Darrell that way. His mom’s on crack and having a tough time. Sometimes it gets so bad that she can’t care for him. So we told Darrell to call us up when he needs us. We go over, pick him up, and he stays with us until its okay to go home. We take him to school; buy him his clothes, books, and stuff”.

One can only imagine how the Rev. William Willomon felt just then after the chastising talk he had given the fraternity boys.

In every genuine faith encounter God asks, “Where are you? Where do you stand? How is it with your soul?” To answer these questions, to even hear them, means recognizing that we are transparent to God. Recognizing this is part of coming to mature faith. Once we leave behind the world of keeping God at a safe distance we enter into a world of personal encounter with the living God – and when that happens there is no going back.

Someone has written that God’s call is like this:

“You wake up one January morning, you look out to check the weather, and find that the world has ended, a new one is being born. What do you do? The earth heaves beneath you, great crevices split down the middle. Would you try to contain the earthquake? Can you put a raging, wild sea, into a bottle? What if the earthquake has a name? What if the hurricane has a face? What if the wild fire becomes flesh.”(Encountering God’s Voice, God’s call) is either your most dreaded and avoided foe who becomes your friend, or it is a silly exercise in wish fulfillment. It is either the most devastating disclosure, the most important thing going on in the world, or it is silliness. It takes guts to worship this God, courage to follow him…If he beckons you forth, would you go? Would you follow? Would you, like those whom (Jesus) summoned in today’s gospel, leave everything and follow him?”

Most people don’t. Most people stay safely under their fig tree, whatever their own particular fig tree happens to be. Nathanael did not stay under the fig tree and his life was changed from that time on. According to the gospel most people stayed put when offered the opportunity to follow Jesus. No doubt most of them remained in their settled existence, safely living out their lives. But they missed what Jesus had promised Nathanael that day Nathanael first laid eyes on Jesus. They missed the blinding light of the Kingdom that Jesus revealed to them and an encounter with the living God.

Who can say how God speaks to us – or through us. But God does speak. Pay attention. Listen well, and be as brave as a little boy in the ancient temple who had the courage to say, “Speak Lord, for your servant is listening”.

AMEN

The Rev. Virginia L. Bennett, D.Min.

St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church

Edwardsville, Illinois