Getting on the right frequency
Commentary
One of my proofs for the existence of God is that as a child I neither set the neighborhood ablaze nor did I manage to burn down our home. I don't believe that I had any more pyrotechnic propensities than other children. However, property within my vicinity was under constant threat of incineration by my constant experimentation with sunlight, optics, basic chemistry, and the electromagnetic properties of radios. There is a thin line between being a young Leonardo da Vinci and a juvenile delinquent of the first order. Only the larger hand of a God that was all merciful as well as almighty spared my fellow neighbors and me from serious harm.
Like many youth, I was not so much trying to blow up the world as get into harmony with its deeper mysteries and rhythms. If I could penetrate the veil that seemed to separate me from the adult world of privileged power, which could only come from maintaining a monopoly over such secrets, it seemed well worth the risk. My particular specialty was the alchemy of trying to get FM and short wave frequencies out of AM radios. It seemed to my child's mind a simple task of merely rearranging a few tubes. Many can recall that pre-transistor electrical innards emitted enough heat to smelt steel. Undeterred by singed fingers, I went at it with an aplomb that resulted in few meltdowns and considerable acrid smoke in the midst of minor pyrotechnics ... but no major damage to life, limb, and property.
Such child's play became the theme of an adult life and a career in ministry. Trying to get on the right frequency with God, others, and the mood of the moment has proved no less arduous than my childhood play. Certainly there has been an equal amount of heat produced and not a few misses with catastrophe. Yet, there have been several moments when I felt something like well-modulated frequencies. From time to time in my life, I have known the joy of experiencing the crackling hardness of signals that took a great deal of time and distance to cover before they were decipherable.
The Second Sunday After The Epiphany presents us with three texts that signal God's presence in the world and challenge us to see if, by getting in tune with what God is doing, we can be on the right frequency. The Hebrew lesson tells the tale of the struggle of a young apprentice and an old priest to decipher the message and get on the same frequency together. In the Corinthian text, Paul struggles to hear God's message in a world that is on a different wavelength in regard to human sexuality and the meaning of embodiment. In the Gospel Lesson, Phillip and Nathaniel find that they are making serious adjustments in the range of self-understanding as they seek to fine tune their theological understanding of Jesus. Nathanial is drawn to Jesus precisely because of Jesus' high definition, full-color imaging of Nathaniel's whereabouts and activity.
It seems that nowadays we have a wider range of reception than ever before. Yet I wonder if we will be anymore successful in picking up on the message and meaning that God is trying to convey to us. Frankly, having been born in a pre-television era, I am still amazed by color television. I am no less astounded when now and then the background static of life is penetrated and we find God coming in loud and clear. The season of Epiphany suggests that from time to time in our adjusting and fine tuning we may pick up a presence and power far beyond our usual wavelengths. We may even discover that in the fullness of time, God overrides all the background noise and comes through loud and clear even on the most humble crystal AM sets.
1 Samuel 3:1-10 (11-20)
When are you likely to get it wrong and miss the message? Two things cause my reception to drift off frequency. I begin to pick up static when I over or under theologize. I have probably missed a lot by simply failing to ask these questions "What does God want with me in this moment? What does God expect of me in this time and place? What is it that I need to respect that God is trying to do with and through others?" Sometimes it is not just the floorboards creaking, or two branches rubbing against each other, nor is it the noise of the gardener. Such incidental moments just might turn out to be the signals of a God trying to hone in on us and reminding us that the original intention was that home be in a garden. Then there are times when I am off the beam by doing too much theologizing attempting to draw meanings and find revelation with more certainty than is available to human reception. Sometimes it is just the gardener to talk with, and two branches to watch, or floorboards broadcasting the need for some basic carpentry.
The word having been rare in those days, we can suspect either end of the broadcast spectrum here. The time is ripe for hearing or the human ear is overripe for being plucked by too much imagination. In either case, the lamp of God had not gone out and perhaps the voice of God will now be heard, less in the official voice of the system than in the nocturnal wonderings of a youthful apprentice. Yet, it is the voice of the experienced Eli that recognizes that Samuel might not just be hearing things but could be tuned into what God is doing. At any rate he tells Samuel to stay tuned. Oftentimes I jump around on the dial when I would benefit from simply staying on one frequency.
It was a time when, no doubt, many were tempted to give up listening. A time when things are not clear; certainty is rare; clarity unusual; direction infrequent. The light of the Lord has dimmed, but not completely gone out. These are often the times when we find it hard to stay tuned. It does seem that such times become opportunities for people who do not usually talk with each other to find themselves on the same wavelength, having a conversation about the shared experience of God's silence! Stay tuned. Eli and Samuel find themselves having a discussion that they might not otherwise have had. Stay tuned when youth and experience have a conversation about shared need. Who knows what God is up to here in letting both Eli and Samuel find their voices? Perhaps only God's silence can provoke such a conversation.
Stay tuned when a congregation finds itself at a moment in which the congregational plot thickens and folk must write a new chapter. Stay tuned and see what God is up to in a life that discovers that the usual reruns are no longer sufficient and they are signaling the need to rethink his or her living. We tend to tune out the way Jesus' followers initially responded to Good Friday. As human possibilities have exhausted themselves, human imagination grows dim and human reception becomes lost in background static. Yet the light that is the energy of God has not gone out.
What should we fine tune here? We ought to hone in on the conversation between youth and experience. We ought to sharpen our attentiveness to those like Samuel who find the strength to speak a difficult truth in love and power. Stay tuned to those folks. Stay tuned to those like Eli who find they are coming to the end of a chapter in life and in the life of his or her community. Not knowing where things are headed they keep their antenna up. Stay tuned to those folks.
The Samuel saga signifies some significant changes and transitions in the life of Israel as they move toward monarchy, to the centralized role of worship in Jerusalem, and to the rise of prophets, like Elijah and Elisha. The silence and rarity of the word of God has prepared the way for a new conversation. Stay tuned.
1 Corinthians 6:12-20
As Paul puts it elsewhere, "What then are we to say to this?" Preachers are to be on your guard here; we are getting down to "where the pedal meets the metal and the rubber hits the road." We have to be concerned here not with theoretical issues dealing with the names of Christ or the return of Christ, but with the basic questions of understanding the body and what it means for humans not just to have a body but to be embodied.
In a way, the modern church has found itself revisiting many of these same issues that challenged and divided the Corinthians. The dietary issues surrounding what was permissible to eat in the Christian community were viewed in my seminary experience as the quixotic preoccupation of people who had not reached the existential heights of modern theological discourse. In my current congregation, we now struggle over the common meal. For many, we do not discern the Lord's body, eating, and drinking judgment to ourselves, if we do not provide vegetarian alternatives. No one in America can escape awareness of the intense emotions that swirl around the issues of human sexuality in many congregations today. The question of "for whom" the body was made now dominates denominational meetings, ordination councils, and judicatory deliberations. Many of us have had a grand time reflecting on and commenting about the nature of the Hollywood version of the Passion as it involved the price paid for our redemption. Just what emphasis should be placed on the role of the bodily suffering of Jesus? Many struggle now with whether the glory in the body should mean principled self-sacrifice or self-fulfillment. The Corinthians would no doubt find our struggles familiar.
As one approaches any practical question of ethical concern, part of the process is discerning what the "controlling authority" is. In this case, the underlying ethical norm that permeates Paul's writing is love. For him, the bodily issue involved in eating is whether we have gotten things out of sync with the love that "never ends." Those who are on the right wavelength know that "food is made for the stomach and the stomach for food." Love asks of us: "Do we eat to live or live to eat?" When it is the latter we tend to do unloving things. The unloving situation in the Corinthian church was to eat up the fellowship meal before everyone arrived. In our case it might be to enjoy the ham and bean supper without attending to the needs of those who find such eating and drinking repulsive. In our time, loveless consuming might mean failing "to live simple that others might simply live." Paul's vision is expressed in 2 Corinthians 5:14-15: "For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died. And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them." Does "living for him" mean suppression of the body or expression of the body in a way that does not merely take more punishment but rather takes away the sin of the world? The potential for exciting sermons hangs on such questions.
John 1:43-51
Ernest Campbell, former preaching minister at Riverside Church in New York City, tells the story of the startup of color television in Germany. The initial response was frustration at not being able to pick up the color signals. Intense investigations led to the discovery that many did not know that they had to buy color sets to pick up the new advance in televised entertainment. In some sense, the Gospel of John deals with the difficulty in picking up God's signals that something new is about to happen. We may have to reorient and redirect our minds and hearts in order to understand what God is doing if we are to get beyond our "black and white" thinking.
This Gospel Lesson describes two disciples whose ability to interpret things is somewhat behind the curve. Similarly, in trying to change frequencies, the church has always played catch-up. It took several hundred years for the church to gain clarity on the nature of Jesus and the meaning of the Trinity. From time to time, we have to make considerable adjustments to pick up the frequency on which God is broadcasting. Sometimes we can only find the frequency by changing where we frequent. Either way adjustments are going to occur. Nathanael seems, like many of us, to have the wrong geographic fix: expecting little good to come out of a minuscule backwoods town such as Nazareth. Tourist guides in modern Nazareth point out that the entire town, in Jesus' day, would fit inside the current Roman Catholic Basilica. Perhaps we don't do any better at discerning what God is doing because we have our own "frequent frequency" problem.
Nathanael is astounded that Jesus already knows where he has been frequenting. Like many of the characters in John's story, Nathanael is amazed but he still does not quite pick up on where Jesus is coming from. Calling him "Rabbi" is a good start, yet falls short, in John's understanding, of adequately bringing the picture of Jesus into focus. "Son of God" is very, very good, but Nathanael seems to have spun the dial just a bit too far. In the next breath he says, "You are the king of Israel." This poses problems in John's story. Jesus withdraws when the crowd wants to make him king by force.
In a sense, Nathanael "ain't seen nothing yet." What he does see is not yet fully in focused. The story will have to progress so that we can see that Jesus is not only a teacher but also a "new Moses." It will take some movement in the plot before we know that Jesus' throne will be a cross, and that the spirit will pour forth from his life and from these events in a saving act that will take away the sin of the world.
There is no doubt that at a certain level we can see that Jesus is special and that he is a teacher who merits our attention. However, if we stay at this level we have not seen anything yet. We may have to change our "frequency" if we our going to get this story live and in living color.
Application
Tuning in ... adjusting the color ... picking the radio station ... rarely do these activities seem to be a joint venture. Actually, family fights over which station to watch, how loud the volume should be, and what tint the color should have are basic familial "lore." Churches as well have had their share of fights over bathroom color, carpet texture, and organ volume. If anything, it seems that getting on the right frequency is best achieved by benevolent dictatorship. Yet in these texts, honing in on God's voice is a joint enterprise. Paul invites the church to test the spirit and his witness. Nathanael and Philip approach Jesus together. Eli and Samuel worked together to receive God's message. Can we come into focus that all have been given a voice and are heard? Can we get a clear picture without developing the kind of relationships that can allow many hands to be on the dial?
An Alternative Application
1 Samuel 3:1-10 (11-20). "The Lord said to Samuel, 'See, I am about to do something in Israel that will make both ears of anyone who hears of it tingle.' " Now there is a moment in living stereo. When have you found your ears tingling? Was it at the response to a proposal of marriage? Was it something like the words, "That's the ballgame and the Boston Red Sox are the World Champions"? Or maybe your moment came when your oncologist said, "I see that your CEA level has dropped markedly. I think that we can talk longevity in your case."
Let us contrast these moments with Sunday morning worship. Do we get within hailing distance of such joy? In John's Gospel, Jesus says that he has come that our joy might be complete. That sounds like tingle time to me. Yet all too often we fall short of such worship and common life, or we reserve such "let loose" moments only for Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost. Is this why mainline churches have greater worship attendance at these times and why Pentecostal churches are growing?
Is it that we have not learned to do that dance well -- of standing up to and with people? Do we miss tingling ears because we do not know how to speak the truth in love? Is it that we have grown tone deaf to what we are missing because many have grown too used to speaking in academic, philosophical, or psychological terms? Perhaps we cannot distinguish between lecture and a sermon in a way that excites.
Of course, there are those who say that the way forward is not through the ear at all and that it is time to get out the PowerPoint presentation and have at it. Yet Paul ponders how people can be saved without a preacher. Having grown up near New York's Riverside Church I was exposed to terrific preaching early in my faith journey: Harry Emerson Fosdick, Robert McCracken, Ernest Campbell, and William Sloan Coffin. I am a Christian partly because of the sermons I heard. Not that they answered all my questions, but they did make my ears tingle. I knew early on that this was a form of communication that moved me and touched me, and was not found in other places in our culture.
In the season of Epiphany this might be a Sunday to celebrate the ministry of ear tingling. Preaching defined as "truth through personality" opens the question of sharing your story. How has your preaching changed through the years? Where do sermons come from? How does the rhythm of sermon preparation shape your life? What might it be like to live with someone who, in some form, measures themselves by the answer they give to the question, "Do you have anything to declare?" This could be a lot of fun. It might even get the congregation's ears to tingle at the weekly miracle of preaching that, amazingly, has gone on for well over 2,000 years.
Preaching The Psalm
Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18
There's something about someone who knows you really well. It is a state of grace that slices across all other interactions. Sit across the table from a spouse of twenty years, a best friend of half a century, a sister or brother who has grown with you through the victories and the defeats. It's an amazing moment to look into the eyes of such a person and know ... that they know.
With a person like this all bets are off, all delusions and pretexts are washed away. The little lies we tell ourselves and the bigger ones we broadcast to others melt away across a table like this. For some, such vulnerability is terrifying. How does the old saying go? Once wounded, twice wary? Such fear is understandable. But the untold reality is that the fear wounds more deeply than that which causes it. The truth is that such vulnerability is the key to a liberation like no other.
When you are known completely, the constant grinding and wearing efforts to be that which we are not ... suddenly seem as silly as they have been all along. When we are completely known, there is no cause for fear -- no reason to hide. When we are known completely, we are free to be who we really are.
Spouses, siblings, and friends may be a part of the equation in all this, but God knows it all. Across the table from the holy, there is nothing hidden or kept secret. As the psalm says so powerfully, God knows when we sit down or stand up. God knows our thoughts and our thinking. Even the words we speak are known before they slip from our lips.
And the thing that is almost "too wonderful" to comprehend is that knowing all this, God loves us still. In our weakness and our frailty, God loves us. In our bluster and our bravado, God loves us. In our seemingly limitless capacity for self-delusion, God loves us. God loves us as we are. Whether we sally forth, protected with our much-vaunted sense of self, or step into the storm stripped clean and vulnerable, God sees, knows, understands ... and loves.
This God with us, this God who knows us, this Emmanuel is hard to comprehend sometimes. The thoughts, as the psalmist notes, are "too weighty" for us. They are more numerous and vast than the sand. And yet, in it all, this God stays with us and goes the distance for us.
To quote an old Gershwin song that waxes eloquently about "plenty o' nuthin'," we have to ask the question, "Who could ask for anything more?"
Like many youth, I was not so much trying to blow up the world as get into harmony with its deeper mysteries and rhythms. If I could penetrate the veil that seemed to separate me from the adult world of privileged power, which could only come from maintaining a monopoly over such secrets, it seemed well worth the risk. My particular specialty was the alchemy of trying to get FM and short wave frequencies out of AM radios. It seemed to my child's mind a simple task of merely rearranging a few tubes. Many can recall that pre-transistor electrical innards emitted enough heat to smelt steel. Undeterred by singed fingers, I went at it with an aplomb that resulted in few meltdowns and considerable acrid smoke in the midst of minor pyrotechnics ... but no major damage to life, limb, and property.
Such child's play became the theme of an adult life and a career in ministry. Trying to get on the right frequency with God, others, and the mood of the moment has proved no less arduous than my childhood play. Certainly there has been an equal amount of heat produced and not a few misses with catastrophe. Yet, there have been several moments when I felt something like well-modulated frequencies. From time to time in my life, I have known the joy of experiencing the crackling hardness of signals that took a great deal of time and distance to cover before they were decipherable.
The Second Sunday After The Epiphany presents us with three texts that signal God's presence in the world and challenge us to see if, by getting in tune with what God is doing, we can be on the right frequency. The Hebrew lesson tells the tale of the struggle of a young apprentice and an old priest to decipher the message and get on the same frequency together. In the Corinthian text, Paul struggles to hear God's message in a world that is on a different wavelength in regard to human sexuality and the meaning of embodiment. In the Gospel Lesson, Phillip and Nathaniel find that they are making serious adjustments in the range of self-understanding as they seek to fine tune their theological understanding of Jesus. Nathanial is drawn to Jesus precisely because of Jesus' high definition, full-color imaging of Nathaniel's whereabouts and activity.
It seems that nowadays we have a wider range of reception than ever before. Yet I wonder if we will be anymore successful in picking up on the message and meaning that God is trying to convey to us. Frankly, having been born in a pre-television era, I am still amazed by color television. I am no less astounded when now and then the background static of life is penetrated and we find God coming in loud and clear. The season of Epiphany suggests that from time to time in our adjusting and fine tuning we may pick up a presence and power far beyond our usual wavelengths. We may even discover that in the fullness of time, God overrides all the background noise and comes through loud and clear even on the most humble crystal AM sets.
1 Samuel 3:1-10 (11-20)
When are you likely to get it wrong and miss the message? Two things cause my reception to drift off frequency. I begin to pick up static when I over or under theologize. I have probably missed a lot by simply failing to ask these questions "What does God want with me in this moment? What does God expect of me in this time and place? What is it that I need to respect that God is trying to do with and through others?" Sometimes it is not just the floorboards creaking, or two branches rubbing against each other, nor is it the noise of the gardener. Such incidental moments just might turn out to be the signals of a God trying to hone in on us and reminding us that the original intention was that home be in a garden. Then there are times when I am off the beam by doing too much theologizing attempting to draw meanings and find revelation with more certainty than is available to human reception. Sometimes it is just the gardener to talk with, and two branches to watch, or floorboards broadcasting the need for some basic carpentry.
The word having been rare in those days, we can suspect either end of the broadcast spectrum here. The time is ripe for hearing or the human ear is overripe for being plucked by too much imagination. In either case, the lamp of God had not gone out and perhaps the voice of God will now be heard, less in the official voice of the system than in the nocturnal wonderings of a youthful apprentice. Yet, it is the voice of the experienced Eli that recognizes that Samuel might not just be hearing things but could be tuned into what God is doing. At any rate he tells Samuel to stay tuned. Oftentimes I jump around on the dial when I would benefit from simply staying on one frequency.
It was a time when, no doubt, many were tempted to give up listening. A time when things are not clear; certainty is rare; clarity unusual; direction infrequent. The light of the Lord has dimmed, but not completely gone out. These are often the times when we find it hard to stay tuned. It does seem that such times become opportunities for people who do not usually talk with each other to find themselves on the same wavelength, having a conversation about the shared experience of God's silence! Stay tuned. Eli and Samuel find themselves having a discussion that they might not otherwise have had. Stay tuned when youth and experience have a conversation about shared need. Who knows what God is up to here in letting both Eli and Samuel find their voices? Perhaps only God's silence can provoke such a conversation.
Stay tuned when a congregation finds itself at a moment in which the congregational plot thickens and folk must write a new chapter. Stay tuned and see what God is up to in a life that discovers that the usual reruns are no longer sufficient and they are signaling the need to rethink his or her living. We tend to tune out the way Jesus' followers initially responded to Good Friday. As human possibilities have exhausted themselves, human imagination grows dim and human reception becomes lost in background static. Yet the light that is the energy of God has not gone out.
What should we fine tune here? We ought to hone in on the conversation between youth and experience. We ought to sharpen our attentiveness to those like Samuel who find the strength to speak a difficult truth in love and power. Stay tuned to those folks. Stay tuned to those like Eli who find they are coming to the end of a chapter in life and in the life of his or her community. Not knowing where things are headed they keep their antenna up. Stay tuned to those folks.
The Samuel saga signifies some significant changes and transitions in the life of Israel as they move toward monarchy, to the centralized role of worship in Jerusalem, and to the rise of prophets, like Elijah and Elisha. The silence and rarity of the word of God has prepared the way for a new conversation. Stay tuned.
1 Corinthians 6:12-20
As Paul puts it elsewhere, "What then are we to say to this?" Preachers are to be on your guard here; we are getting down to "where the pedal meets the metal and the rubber hits the road." We have to be concerned here not with theoretical issues dealing with the names of Christ or the return of Christ, but with the basic questions of understanding the body and what it means for humans not just to have a body but to be embodied.
In a way, the modern church has found itself revisiting many of these same issues that challenged and divided the Corinthians. The dietary issues surrounding what was permissible to eat in the Christian community were viewed in my seminary experience as the quixotic preoccupation of people who had not reached the existential heights of modern theological discourse. In my current congregation, we now struggle over the common meal. For many, we do not discern the Lord's body, eating, and drinking judgment to ourselves, if we do not provide vegetarian alternatives. No one in America can escape awareness of the intense emotions that swirl around the issues of human sexuality in many congregations today. The question of "for whom" the body was made now dominates denominational meetings, ordination councils, and judicatory deliberations. Many of us have had a grand time reflecting on and commenting about the nature of the Hollywood version of the Passion as it involved the price paid for our redemption. Just what emphasis should be placed on the role of the bodily suffering of Jesus? Many struggle now with whether the glory in the body should mean principled self-sacrifice or self-fulfillment. The Corinthians would no doubt find our struggles familiar.
As one approaches any practical question of ethical concern, part of the process is discerning what the "controlling authority" is. In this case, the underlying ethical norm that permeates Paul's writing is love. For him, the bodily issue involved in eating is whether we have gotten things out of sync with the love that "never ends." Those who are on the right wavelength know that "food is made for the stomach and the stomach for food." Love asks of us: "Do we eat to live or live to eat?" When it is the latter we tend to do unloving things. The unloving situation in the Corinthian church was to eat up the fellowship meal before everyone arrived. In our case it might be to enjoy the ham and bean supper without attending to the needs of those who find such eating and drinking repulsive. In our time, loveless consuming might mean failing "to live simple that others might simply live." Paul's vision is expressed in 2 Corinthians 5:14-15: "For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died. And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them." Does "living for him" mean suppression of the body or expression of the body in a way that does not merely take more punishment but rather takes away the sin of the world? The potential for exciting sermons hangs on such questions.
John 1:43-51
Ernest Campbell, former preaching minister at Riverside Church in New York City, tells the story of the startup of color television in Germany. The initial response was frustration at not being able to pick up the color signals. Intense investigations led to the discovery that many did not know that they had to buy color sets to pick up the new advance in televised entertainment. In some sense, the Gospel of John deals with the difficulty in picking up God's signals that something new is about to happen. We may have to reorient and redirect our minds and hearts in order to understand what God is doing if we are to get beyond our "black and white" thinking.
This Gospel Lesson describes two disciples whose ability to interpret things is somewhat behind the curve. Similarly, in trying to change frequencies, the church has always played catch-up. It took several hundred years for the church to gain clarity on the nature of Jesus and the meaning of the Trinity. From time to time, we have to make considerable adjustments to pick up the frequency on which God is broadcasting. Sometimes we can only find the frequency by changing where we frequent. Either way adjustments are going to occur. Nathanael seems, like many of us, to have the wrong geographic fix: expecting little good to come out of a minuscule backwoods town such as Nazareth. Tourist guides in modern Nazareth point out that the entire town, in Jesus' day, would fit inside the current Roman Catholic Basilica. Perhaps we don't do any better at discerning what God is doing because we have our own "frequent frequency" problem.
Nathanael is astounded that Jesus already knows where he has been frequenting. Like many of the characters in John's story, Nathanael is amazed but he still does not quite pick up on where Jesus is coming from. Calling him "Rabbi" is a good start, yet falls short, in John's understanding, of adequately bringing the picture of Jesus into focus. "Son of God" is very, very good, but Nathanael seems to have spun the dial just a bit too far. In the next breath he says, "You are the king of Israel." This poses problems in John's story. Jesus withdraws when the crowd wants to make him king by force.
In a sense, Nathanael "ain't seen nothing yet." What he does see is not yet fully in focused. The story will have to progress so that we can see that Jesus is not only a teacher but also a "new Moses." It will take some movement in the plot before we know that Jesus' throne will be a cross, and that the spirit will pour forth from his life and from these events in a saving act that will take away the sin of the world.
There is no doubt that at a certain level we can see that Jesus is special and that he is a teacher who merits our attention. However, if we stay at this level we have not seen anything yet. We may have to change our "frequency" if we our going to get this story live and in living color.
Application
Tuning in ... adjusting the color ... picking the radio station ... rarely do these activities seem to be a joint venture. Actually, family fights over which station to watch, how loud the volume should be, and what tint the color should have are basic familial "lore." Churches as well have had their share of fights over bathroom color, carpet texture, and organ volume. If anything, it seems that getting on the right frequency is best achieved by benevolent dictatorship. Yet in these texts, honing in on God's voice is a joint enterprise. Paul invites the church to test the spirit and his witness. Nathanael and Philip approach Jesus together. Eli and Samuel worked together to receive God's message. Can we come into focus that all have been given a voice and are heard? Can we get a clear picture without developing the kind of relationships that can allow many hands to be on the dial?
An Alternative Application
1 Samuel 3:1-10 (11-20). "The Lord said to Samuel, 'See, I am about to do something in Israel that will make both ears of anyone who hears of it tingle.' " Now there is a moment in living stereo. When have you found your ears tingling? Was it at the response to a proposal of marriage? Was it something like the words, "That's the ballgame and the Boston Red Sox are the World Champions"? Or maybe your moment came when your oncologist said, "I see that your CEA level has dropped markedly. I think that we can talk longevity in your case."
Let us contrast these moments with Sunday morning worship. Do we get within hailing distance of such joy? In John's Gospel, Jesus says that he has come that our joy might be complete. That sounds like tingle time to me. Yet all too often we fall short of such worship and common life, or we reserve such "let loose" moments only for Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost. Is this why mainline churches have greater worship attendance at these times and why Pentecostal churches are growing?
Is it that we have not learned to do that dance well -- of standing up to and with people? Do we miss tingling ears because we do not know how to speak the truth in love? Is it that we have grown tone deaf to what we are missing because many have grown too used to speaking in academic, philosophical, or psychological terms? Perhaps we cannot distinguish between lecture and a sermon in a way that excites.
Of course, there are those who say that the way forward is not through the ear at all and that it is time to get out the PowerPoint presentation and have at it. Yet Paul ponders how people can be saved without a preacher. Having grown up near New York's Riverside Church I was exposed to terrific preaching early in my faith journey: Harry Emerson Fosdick, Robert McCracken, Ernest Campbell, and William Sloan Coffin. I am a Christian partly because of the sermons I heard. Not that they answered all my questions, but they did make my ears tingle. I knew early on that this was a form of communication that moved me and touched me, and was not found in other places in our culture.
In the season of Epiphany this might be a Sunday to celebrate the ministry of ear tingling. Preaching defined as "truth through personality" opens the question of sharing your story. How has your preaching changed through the years? Where do sermons come from? How does the rhythm of sermon preparation shape your life? What might it be like to live with someone who, in some form, measures themselves by the answer they give to the question, "Do you have anything to declare?" This could be a lot of fun. It might even get the congregation's ears to tingle at the weekly miracle of preaching that, amazingly, has gone on for well over 2,000 years.
Preaching The Psalm
Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18
There's something about someone who knows you really well. It is a state of grace that slices across all other interactions. Sit across the table from a spouse of twenty years, a best friend of half a century, a sister or brother who has grown with you through the victories and the defeats. It's an amazing moment to look into the eyes of such a person and know ... that they know.
With a person like this all bets are off, all delusions and pretexts are washed away. The little lies we tell ourselves and the bigger ones we broadcast to others melt away across a table like this. For some, such vulnerability is terrifying. How does the old saying go? Once wounded, twice wary? Such fear is understandable. But the untold reality is that the fear wounds more deeply than that which causes it. The truth is that such vulnerability is the key to a liberation like no other.
When you are known completely, the constant grinding and wearing efforts to be that which we are not ... suddenly seem as silly as they have been all along. When we are completely known, there is no cause for fear -- no reason to hide. When we are known completely, we are free to be who we really are.
Spouses, siblings, and friends may be a part of the equation in all this, but God knows it all. Across the table from the holy, there is nothing hidden or kept secret. As the psalm says so powerfully, God knows when we sit down or stand up. God knows our thoughts and our thinking. Even the words we speak are known before they slip from our lips.
And the thing that is almost "too wonderful" to comprehend is that knowing all this, God loves us still. In our weakness and our frailty, God loves us. In our bluster and our bravado, God loves us. In our seemingly limitless capacity for self-delusion, God loves us. God loves us as we are. Whether we sally forth, protected with our much-vaunted sense of self, or step into the storm stripped clean and vulnerable, God sees, knows, understands ... and loves.
This God with us, this God who knows us, this Emmanuel is hard to comprehend sometimes. The thoughts, as the psalmist notes, are "too weighty" for us. They are more numerous and vast than the sand. And yet, in it all, this God stays with us and goes the distance for us.
To quote an old Gershwin song that waxes eloquently about "plenty o' nuthin'," we have to ask the question, "Who could ask for anything more?"
