VOICES John M, Buchanan
I Samuel 3:1-10 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
January 20, 1985 Columbus, Ohio

Faith is a combination of ideas about God and the mystical voices we have
heard. Religion begins when we hear a voice summoning us to some kingdom other
than this one,

it is Martin Luther King moving from the safety of an academic life to a
bus boycott in Birmington.

It is Albert Schweitzer leaving behind the beauty and accomplishment of
music to be a physician in Africa,

it is ordinary people you know who leave hearthside and TV one night a week

to tutor, or stand with, or listen to sisters and brothers who need them at Open
Church.

It is Jesus, hearing a voice, leaving the stability of a family carpenter shop
in Nazareth and ending up waist deep in the Jordan River.

Faith is a combination of ideas about God and the mystical voices. It is an
elderly couple, Elkanah and Hannah, who to their great surprise and joy have a
baby. They don't talk about it much, but they've heard a voice, and as is the case
with people whe have been married a long time and don't always need to say what
they are thinking, Elkanah and Hannah don't talk about the voices they hear but
they do take their son to the priest Eli, who presides over the sanctuary in Shiloh,
and they give their son over to Eli's custodianship as an act of profound gratitude
and religious commitment. It is there that young Samuel hears the voice.

What a wonderful old story this is. The voice comes in the night. Samuel
thinks it is Eli calling, wakens EH and asks what he wants. El concludes Samuel
is dreaming and sends him back to bed. Three times it happens, Eli doesn’t think
it's a real voice! What I love most about this story is that old Eli acts like most
of us would act under the circumstance, Finally, more out of desire to get some
sleep than profound religious conviction, EH tells Samuel to listen. "If the voice
comes again, listen to it." And what came of that listening was Israel's first prophet,
one of the pivotal figures in our family tree... "Listen," old Eli advised.

It seems that from the beginning of recorded history when people have listened
to the world they have heard a voice. One of the major theological assertions in
the Old Testament is that if you listen to the creation, what you will hear is the
voice of the creator. "The heavens are telling the glory of God," the psalmist
said. They are, So is the earth. So is the complex and magnificent evolutionary
story of Hfe. To listen to it is to hear the voice of the creator. "The voice of the
Lord is upon the waters," that's a provocative favorite of sailors and beach people
and of ali who love the ocean and who return to it annually with the commitment
of religious pilgrims.

At the ocean each morning the sound of the water wakens and beckons. Know-
ing it is there, nevertheless we look, checking to be sure, and in earliest ight walk
out to greet It as if in answer to a voice,

~2-

The psalmist was right, of course, "The voice of the Lord is upon the waters."

If you listen to the creation, the voice you hear will be the voice of the creator.
There's nothing exclusively Judeo or Christian about that assertion, It is shared
by many religions, C. S. Lewis wrote a little volume on the Psalms in which he
observed:

"ythe doctrine of creation leaves nature full of...the presence of God...
The ight is his garment, the thunder...his voice, the eruption of a volcano
«in answer to his touch...AH this is clearly close to paganism. Thor

and Zeus also spoke in the thunder.” (Reflections on the Psalms, p.
70}.

The theologians have always argued the issue of how much of God we can
know through nature. “All you need to know," some have said, quoting the Psalms.
"Nothing," others have said, suggesting that a person just victimized by a tornado
would not have adequate nor accurate knowledge of God. St. Paul first suggested
the Christian contribution to the discussion. Paul thought that a kind of knowledge
of God was available to all people through nature, but not complete knowledge
or “saving knowledge." That comes in Jesus Christ. What Christianity maintains
is that the voice of the Lord is on the water...God does speak through creation,
But when God is done creating the talking doesn't stop. There is more to be said
than gets said in thunder, beautiful sunsets, and quiet early morning at the ocean.
But faith can and does begin when we listen to creation.

Listen to the voice, Eli advised Samuel, It's amazing what we might hear
if we listened - to each other, We simply don’t do that very well. We are inclined
to be talking when we should be Hstening: talking, often times, not with but past
one another. Instead of listening to another, we are inclined to use the time while
she or he is talking to organize and compose our response. In the close relationships
which characterize life for most of us, Hstening is a creative, life-giving skill.
In intimate relationships listening to the other is a powerful and affirming dynamic
which says more eloquently than any gesture that we care and love and desire each
other, Yet on rare occasions when another opens and tells us a deep hurt or profound
joy or private dream, we are inclined not to listen, accept, share so much as trot
out our deeper hurt or mere profound joy and place it on the table. Instead of listen-
ing, we play verbal one upmanship. Our ritualized exercise in social intercourse,
the cocktail party, becomes an arena in which we hone our skills in shouting sequen-
ces of banalities at each other. In retrospect, I've conclided that my graduate
school invested one entire core sequence of academic and clinical courses to teach
us four words ~ "Shut up and listen." Physicians keep telling us that the largest
single demand and the most difficult for them to meet, is the need of people for
someone to listen,

Listen to the voice, Eli advised Samuel. As we approach the anniversary
of the Supreme Court decision this week, puaranteeing every woman's right of
choice in the matter of abortion, it would be enormously helpful if people started
to listen to each other. Eric Hoffer once noted that "to know a person's religion
we need not listen to his profession of faith but must find his brand of intolerance.”
(see Martin Marty, Context, 1/15/85, p. 6). That is too frequently true. The people
who are perpetrating a reign of terror in more than thirty bombings of women's

-3-

reproduction clinics around the country are often answering what they think they
hear the voice of God - or the yoice of conscience dictating. "I did it as a present
to Jesus on his birthday," an earnest and arrested young woman said. My hope
and prayer is that we will listen to each other about this issue and learn to love
and respect each other even as we are coming to different conclusions. You are
not listening - you are not respecting - if my position is simply obliterated in a
torrent of subjective opinion and religious dogma expressed as the truth of God.
We must learn to listen to each other.

The trouble with basing your life on mystical voices is that you may be the
only one who hears them, The pragmatic problem which remains is this, how do
you evaluate the voices? How do you discriminate between what is the voice of
God, or the voice of the culture, or your own super-ego, or your parents? What
do we do when someone claims to have heard a voice ordering her to blow up a
clinic as a birthday present for Jesus? In the first scene of G. B. Shaw's play, St.
Joan, she says!

"I hear voices telling me what todo. They come from God."
A military official scoffs: "They come from your imagination.”
Joan responds: "Of course. That is how messages from God come to us."

The standard by which the voices are measured in Christian faith is the one
event in which we believe God's voice may be heard most clearly and most eloquently.
Jesus Christ is the word of God. What the scholars call "the Christ event" is the
voice of God, God saying what he wants to be heard by the whole human race,

When Jesus was baptized, the voice said "This is my son. Listen to him."
And ever after being a Christian has meant listening to that word, and measuring
all the other voices we hear by this singular, clear voice of God, And so when the
voices tell us to bomb a clinic ~ they need to be corrected by this voice. Or when
our voices tell us that it's all right to hate, or that love isn't worth the effort, or
that things will never get any better for the world or for us personally so why keep
fighting, those voices need to be corrected by this singular, strong, and eloquent
word from God.

The faith is not altogether subjective. We need to leam the spiritual discipline
of listening, but what makes us Christians is the voluntary submission of the voices
we hear to the judgment of Jesus the Christ.

"Listen to the voice," EH advised Samuel. People of deep spirituality have
known that a good portion of faithfulness is listening as a religious discipline. Saying
prayers, for instance, is universally regarded as a minimal spiritual discipline: grace
before meals, prayers before sleep, Some pray stylistically, some pray on the run,
some ~ maybe most - pray little or not at all, not always because of a lack of faith,
but sometimes because of a sense that this rote verbalization, this hurling pious
Phrases at God does not seem to have meaning. But what if praying were at least
fitty percent listening? What if we listened instead of talked - as prace before
meals, The mystics have always known that secret.

~4-

New interest in meditation techniques have begun to teach us a lesson that
Western Christianity forgot centuries ago in its love affair with words, and that -
is you have to learn to Hsten if you want to hear the voice of God.

G. B. Shaw's play about the life of Joan of Arc is, at least in part, about the
validity of personal religious experience. Joan, of course, hears voices. In the
next to last scene she is heing questioned by the Archbishop and by King Charles.
The Archbishop asks: "How do you know you are right?" Joan answers: "I always
know..my voices." King Charles interrupts her: “Oh, your voices. Your voices.
Why don't the voices come te me. I am king, not you.” Joan responds: "They do
come to you but you do not hear them. You have not sat in the field in the evening
listening for them, When the Angelus rings you cross yourself and have done with
it; but if you prayed from the heart and listened to the thrilling of the bells in the
air after they have stopped ringing, you would hear the voices as well as I do."

What if you listen and hear nothing? Some may have vivid experiences of
God and hear actual voices and see actual visions. But what if you listen and what
you hear is the clock ticking in the silence, nothing more,

What most of us hear when we listen fer God is, at least, the sound of our
owff voice asking the question. At a meeting of the Presbytery last week a young
woman from Bethany Presbyterian Church was taken under care, the first step
in her ordination. In her personal statement of faith she caught my attention with
this confession, "There have been no voices calling my name," she said, "but there
have been plenty of sleepless nights." That's true for most of us. What we hear
is the silence, the sound of our own questions.

And for the most of us - the word is, "keep Hstening, not only in the silences,
but in the other places where Christ went. The word for the most of us, I think,
is ~ keep listening in your praying, but listen as well in the world, particularly where
you sense Jesus Christ would be, where hurts are healed, and lives renewed, where
injustice is corrected and captives are set free. Listen for the voice of God where
love reconciles and breaks down walls between people, where faithfulness and com-
passion and deep caring and strong joy are affirmed and lived and celebrated. Listen
particularly where you are feeling impatient, where you are sensing the need to
grow and become. Listen particularly where you are summoned to live in a kingdom
other than the one in which you now live. Listen...

Now to the ruler of all worlds, undying, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory
for ever and ever. Amen,