LISTEN TO YOUR OWN VOICES Jonn M, Buchanan
I Samuel 3:1-10 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
October 15, 1978 Columbus, Ohio

One Sunday every summer, during the years I was a Divinity School student, I
was invited to preach from the pulpit of my home church in Altoona, Pennsylvania,
Those were auspicious occasions as I reflect on them now, My memory of them was
triggered recently by an incident I read in an autobiography, The author is de-
scribing his maiden sermon as a sixteen year old to a rural Southern Baptist con-
gregation in Mississippi on Youth Sunday, "It was, in many ways," he wrote, “"heret-
ical and modernistic for East Fork, But on that occasion I could have denounced
Christianity as a capitalist myth cunningly designed to keep the masses under control,
and our youth choir could have sung Ukranian folk songs, and our Sunday School
Superintendent could have Lectured on ‘The Origin of tie Species', and all the
veople would have said, 'Amen', Never had they been so proud of us," (Will Campbell,
Brother to a Dragonfly, p,77).

As I recall it now, that is not unlike what happened on those summer Sundays,
My father was almost embarassingly proud, And my sermons were the distilled essence
of all the wisdom of Western civilization from Aristotle to Freud to Niebuhr. On
one of those Sundays, however, I learned one of the most important things I have
ever learned about being a minister, or a Christian, or a person, for that matter.
After the service - my father and £ sat in the living room: he paid me the customary
compliments and told me, again, how proud he was. And then he said, very gently,
"You told them this morning what Karl Barth and Paul Tillich believe. Next time,
“hy not tell them what you believe? That's what they're interested in,"

The simple truth is that much religion, particularly middle class American
religion, is second hand, One of the reasons is that theological education itself
directs people away from the personal and experiential and directs them toward the
impersonal and intellectual, Generations of preachers have been taught to avoid
the personal pronoun "I" at all costs: to avoid personal references: never to risk
directing a congregation's attention to oneself. Part of the reason is that many of
us have had a smattering of experience with religion that relies almost exclusively
on personal testimony, The trouble with lifting up and celebrating personal ex-
perience is that there is no way to submit it to any criteria of integrity, We are
uncomfortable with the subjectivity of a religion that says, in effect, "because I
felt it, it is ture,"

John Biersdorf wrote recently, "There is nothing that seems to worry some
Christians more than when someone claims the authenticity of one's own experience,
It is as though, if one trusted people on their own, they probably would do awful
things," (The Christian Ministry, 3/78, p.5).

And yet one of the startling new realities of our day is an open hunger for
honest religious experience, Young people who barely endured a dozen years of
Sunday School suddenly turn up in the Jesus Movement, or as Moonies, or disciples
of Hari Krishna, Staid Episcopalians show up in the Charismatic gatherings and
somber Presbyterians who never spoke in Church in anything but a whisper, turn to
the emotional excesses of the media evangelist.

Out of it all is coming something new and intriguing: a recovery of personal
testimony, personal experience as the location of religious truth, It is described
academically by the phrase "Theology as Story", And it means simply that the
formative religious events for most of us were personal, emotional, intimate: that

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what we believe cannot be separated from our lives, It suggests that our growth in
faith involves stretching our minds, but also Listening to our own experience -:
reading what others have said, but also Listening to our own voices,

And so to the text, Like most of the Old Testament it is someone's story, a
testimony about a time when a person met God, Samuel's mother, Hannah, in gratitude
for his birth, had taken her young son to Eli, the priest, to be dedicated to the
Lord and to serve in the Temple. It was there, in the Temple, that the young Samuel
vne night heard the voice of God calling him,

Now there are some interesting things about this story, First, no one seems
to recognize the voice of Gad, Samuel didn't: when he heard the voice he went to
Eli, And Fli - Eli acted like we might under the circumstances, If one of my
children came to me in the middie of the night and said a voice had spoken, I would
conciude that he or she had watched too much television that day, or was dreamins,
I would do what li did: teil him to get a drink of water and go back to sleep,
“ewrmately, after the phenomenon occurred a second time Eli supcested that Samuel
might answer, But the point is that the person tellin: this story wants us to
understand that it wasn't very clear; that it took three times for God to get. through
to Samuei: that Samuel mistook the voice of God for the voice of someone else,

in fact, before the author tells the story he sets the scene with what is
perhaps the most significant statement in the text: "And the word of the Lord was
rare in those days: there was ne frequent vision." We don't knowv whether that's a
description of God, or “those days", It's not clear whether the author means God
wasn't talking or the people weren't Listening. Whatever the intent, the writer
wants us to understand that people weren't hearing God, I am sugyesting that it was
because they weren't listening,

Iam suggesting, further, that our religion is not as personal, experiential,
and real, because we may have forsotten the discipline of listening, E am suggesting
that part of what we must recover is the ability to hear our own voices,

There is a lot about us as people, however, that makes what I just said a very
ambitious proposition, In fact, there is a let about us that moves in the opposite
direction altogether, Fundamental to the very title of this sermon is time and space
and an inclination to listen, The life we live does not permit any of that very
easily,

Time to listen? We're too busy living. Busyness is our dcarest status symbol,
A Puritan legacy, perhaps, but ve clearly identify goodness and success with being
busy, Ministers, particularly, are guilty, We don't punch a time clock, or sell a
product, or manuracture a machine and we act sometimes as if the justification for
our being alive depends on keepin, busy, At gatherings of clergy, being busy often.
appears to have pecome synonymous with being faithful. And you, to your discredit,
not only allow us to get away with it, but actually encourage it. You tell us, "Z
wanted te see you, but you're so busy," One of my strongest reactions to Life as a
Minister in Scotland this summer was precisely here, The role of minister as
administrator and program director simply doesn't exist there. There was no office,
no secretary, no dictaphone, and very few committee meetings, The result was a lot
of empty time - which made me very uncomfortable, We know, intellectually, that the
good life is a counterpoint between busy activity and solitude: we know, intellectually,
that we need quict times, to think and meditate and get in touch with ourselves and
pray. But very few of us are strong enough to give ourselves the permission to use
time in that way.

- 3+

Time to listen ~ and space - 4a quiet place, We are surrounded on all sides by
noise: the noise of traffic, and jet planes, and sirens and music, We wake to it,
and go to sleep to it, and fill our automobiles with it and turn the television on
automatically in our empty house because we are so unaccustomed to the quiet. But
some lonely place, some quiet space, is the only way your own voices can penetrate
the incessant noise of our cultura,

Time and space and the inclination, Dutch Theologian Henri Nouwen observes
that when he first came to this country he was astounded by the absence of privacy,
and a false sense of honesty that requires Americans to reveal ail, He writes:

"The American Way of life tends to be suspicious toward closedness, When L came to
this country I was struck by the opendoor Life style. In schools, institutes and
office buildings everyone worked with open doors, It seemed as if everyone was say-
ing to me, "Do not hesitate to walk in and interrupt at any time,' and most conversa-
tions had the same cpen quality - giving me the impression that people had no secrets
and were ready for any question ranzing from their financial status to their sex
life." (Reachine Out, p. 21),

An accurate observation, I would sugsest, In the name of communication, scre-
times we talk too mich, Intendiny to be open with one another we Leave no private
space unexposed, And after a while it seems that there is nothing to us that is not
known to others, no voices we have not already revealed to others,

Our culture is not helpful. But beneath it all we don't listen to our own
voices because we have been convinced that they have nothing to say. It's a crisis
of self-esteem once again, We don't Listen to ourselves - because we don't think
it's worth our time, And the tragedy is that our own voices, our innermost selves,
our most personal experiences, are precisely the place where God addresses us.

I have alvays felt that one of the places God speaks to us most clearly is in
the arena of human creativity, We know that creativity always involves Loneliness,
the willingness to be quiet and listen, the intentional shuttine out of the world
and hearing what is going on in one's self,

Dag Hammarskjold wrote in his diary: "The more faithfully you listen to the
voice within you, the better you will hear what is sounding outside." (Markings,p.13),

Being an honest and authentic person depends on knowing yourself, and trusting
yourself and listening to yourseli, I suggested last week that we can't love God or
other people until we come to terms with ourselves: that we can't sive anything until
we believe that ve have something to give. Relationships become suffocating and
clinging and oppressive ualess we know and value our own autonomy. Henry David
Thoreau, who knew something about the gubtect wrote: "When our life ceases to be
inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere possip, We rarely mect a man
who can tell us any news he has not read in a newspaper, or been told by his neighbor...
In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the
post office, You may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the
greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has not heard from
himself this long while," Qlalden and Other Writings, p. 723-4: in Nouwen, p.i8).

it is healthier to know oneself, It is potentially creative to listen to one's
own voices, We vill be better conversationalists, better company, better husbands,
wives and friends if our seript is first hand and our material experiential, But my
concern is not essentially with self-improvement, Jt is with our experience of God,
My assumption is that God does address us - but that we don't hear very well: that God
speaks to that deep, inner self ve have been ignoring,

a ow

My concern is that active, on~the-so Christians slow down a bit, realizing
that their very busyness is one o£ the reasons their religious experience is so
shallow,

My concern is that we lock for and Listen for God carefully: intentionally,
with discipline and patience,

My concern is that we acknowledge the importance of our own personal story:
that we take the time to remember and locate and think about those events which caused
us to believe - to respond to Jesus Christ. There is an element of Loneliness in the
act of believing in God, We can read what the theologians have said: we can check
our inclinations with friends: but,ultimately, authentic faith means standing alone
and saying - "This I believe", My concern is that we recover, in that process, che
truth that we have learned in our own lives: that we put a high premium on those
personal experiences that have told us we are not alone: there is a God who loves us
and cares about us,

In his opening sermon at the recent Lambeth Conference, Arcubishon of Canterbury
Donald Coggan told the Anglican 5ishops: "We have stopped listening to God: our
spiritual life has died on us, though ve keep up appearances and so through the
motions, We noisy, comfortable Westerners have much to learn from our Eastem brothers
materially poorer and often spiritually richer,”

My concern is that we learn from the Samuel story that God addresses us quietly:
that He weaves His word te us into the fabric of our lives in ways we may not ever be
able to describe or document or prove, It doesn't matter that you have not been
knocked down by lightning, mor that God has not addressed you as clearly as He always
seems to speak wnen Hollywood tells the story, He addresses us with subtlety and
gentleness in the solitude of our personhood, He comes in love shared between you and
your dearest: He comes in the miracle of the birth of your child: He comes as you stand
alone in the valley of the shadow of death: He comes in moments of tearful happiness
and profound joy. He speaks quietly, in a voice you may not recornize at first,

Elizabeth Barrett Browning teaches me that Lesson every October, There are tuo
fire bushes in front of our house which turn a hrief bright red at this time of year.
And every time I see it I look up her poem and carry it around with me for a few days:

"Tarth's crammed with heaven,

And every common bush afire with God

And only he who sees takes off hig shoes«-
The rest sit round it and pick blackberriaes,!!

One time, en a hill outside Jerusalem, a man was crucified, A noisy crowd of
people stood around His cross, jrtering, shouting. And His followers thought that
God had never been more silent, more absent, But later they came to the conclusion
that the event was the clearest word God had ever spoken: that for those who could
hear, it began more and more to sound like a symphony of love and victory and beauty,

The Gospel of Jesus Christ is the good news that Ged has come and has spoken:
and that He continues to come and to gpeak: and that He does address us ~ quietly:
and that to hear we must listen very carefully: and that the place He comes may be
in the quiet, aloneness of your personhood: and that His word to you may be in the
sound of your own voices. Amen,

Father, we confess that we have not heard because we have not listened, Bless
our lives with a little solitude: help us to hear as you speak: give us courage to
answer, Co rise up and follow, Through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen,