Listening to God
1 Kings 19: 9-18,; Mark 9: 2-9
March 5, 2000
Last week at a conference, someone turned to me and asked a question that I’ve been mulling over ever since. The question was, “What is the major difference between the church today and the church of your ordination?” in other words, how has the church changed in the last forty years?
Forty years ago, we concentrated almost exclusively on describing God, trying to understand who God was. What did it mean to call Jesus the Son of God, or, if you were a Paul Tillich fan, what did it mean to say God was the ground of all being? Today, we don’t seem to care much for descriptions. We focus more on experiential theology. The task of the church today is to help us encounter God, not to describe the attributes or characteristics of the God that we meet.
We’ve changed quite a bit in our teaching and preaching.
Let me share an example of what it was like forty years ago. Here’s an introduction to a sermon of written back then. In those days, it seemed pretty relevant.
A little girl was saying her bedtime prayers with her mother. (Is this still done in families?) She began her prayers, “Dear Harold, please bless mother and daddy and all my friends.” “Wait a moment,” interrupted her mother. “Who is Harold?” “That’s God’s name,” was the reply. “Who told you that was God’s name?” asked the puzzled mother. “I learned it in Sunday School.” “What did your teacher tell you?” She said, “Our Father who art in Heaven, Harold be thy name.”
That got a chuckle, but it doesn’t catch our attention today. We’re not even interested in whether we use a He or a She when referring to God. Nor are we curious about the attributes of God.
Those might be the problems of theologians, but for most of us pedestrian types, we’re simply concerned with how we might encounter God, whether his name is Harold, or Susie, or Jesus.
Somewhere in the late 60’s or 70’s, I began to change my theology. As near as I can recall, it was about the time I discovered an English Bishop named John Robinson. Robinson wrote a book that influenced the whole church. It was called Honest to God. It was about what he labeled the end of Theism. Theism meant the end of searching for God, up there and out there. Bishop Robinson said that we must search for God, not somewhere else, but right in the midst of human experience. This new notion of God changed a great deal of our thinking about Him. Suddenly, we began to realize that God was found in the very thick of things, in the ups and downs of life. The voice from Heaven doesn’t come down from above. Instead, it emerges from the depths of the here and now
In the 70’s and 80’s, I began to preach with force on such passages as the one we heard read from the Old Testament. Elijah, running away, life is a mess, hiding from his enemies in a cave, and the voice of God reaches him and says, “Elijah, what are you doing here?
It was only in the 80s that I began to appreciate how remarkable those last five words were: “What are you doing here?” The voice of God didn’t say, “What are you doing there?” The God we worship is not distant, aloof, looking at our scene from afar. We’re not talking about distance. In this story, we are talking about promise. The promise of God to be present to each one of us, in good times and bad.
And so we come down to the Gospel this morning, the Transfiguration experience – the mysterious, marvelous, mountaintop encounter that the disciples have with Jesus. The three, Peter, James, and John, are confused, stumbling around, not quite sure what to do. They represent the church of forty years ago. They look around to identify who is there at that ecstatic experience. They see Elijah and Moses. Elijah, the one who hid in a cave on a mountain, and Moses, who hid in the cleft of a rock. But does it matter who they see? Possibly, we might say they are asking the wrong question.
Consider for a moment what Saint Augustine has written,
“Before experiencing God, you thought you could talk about God. When you began to experience God, you realized that what you were experiencing cannot be put into words.” The sense of Mystery, the sense of God’s presence, cannot be explained. It’s not a problem to be solved; a mountaintop happening to be memorialized. Rather, it’s an experience to be cherished, a mystery to be entered into, a God to be encountered.
There’s more here to be explored. I told the Altar Guild that I could preach on the Transfiguration for a year. But, getting back to this incident, the disciples, like most Americans, want to do something. “Let’s put up a marker, ” they say. But a voice comes from the clouds and stops them, it says, “Listen. Listen to him.”
Let me develop this a bit. The way to encounter God, the way to experience Jesus, is to listen. Not very new is it? We’ve heard it all before. Just listen, don’t go running around, and don’t go trying to do anything. Just for a moment, stop, look, and listen. The problem, of course, is that most of us are dreadfully deaf to this kind of advice. We’re sure God speaks, but we are usually too busy to hear the Word.
Bill Stringfellow, an Episcopal lawyer as well as an old friend who died several years ago, once wrote, “Listening is a rare happening among human beings. You cannot listen to the word another is speaking if you are preoccupied with your appearance or with impressing someone, or trying to decide what you are going to say when the other stops talking, or are debating about what is said, or whether you are winning or losing. Listening is a primitive act of love, whereby you give yourself to another and encounter God in the experience.
Listening is what the Gospel encourages us to do. It isn’t easy. It takes a certain discipline, a certain grace, and a loving heart. But the payoff is, if you can do it, you will encounter God. Listen to Him, the Gospel says, in the midst of the storm, the fire, the chaos of your world. Listen to Him – in the midst of whatever life deals you.
Listen, and you will experience God.
Now I have been going through a bad patch. I’ve been misquoted, maligned, and generally beaten up. Some have said, “Isn’t it a shame that your final year is being spoiled by all this controversy. Who needs it?” And I have surprised myself by saying, “No,- I really feel God has given us an opportunity in the chaos, and there certainly has been a lot of chaos at St. Philip’s lately, we have an opportunity to listen. And if we can stop running and be quiet for a moment, we might even hear God’s voice. Wouldn’t that be a wonderful outcome of the River Road controversy? A gift from God, an encounter with God in the midst of chaotic times.
Dear friends in Christ, we are fast coming upon Lent. It starts on Wednesday. If you want to do something during Lent, if you want to share in the dying and rising of Jesus, skip the fancy diet forget the carrots, cottage cheese, and diet drinks. Simply listen. Listen as Jesus speaks to you in the world, listen to the still small voice as you go through ups and downs. And remember, remember, we are here not to learn about God, but to experience God. So please, please listen.
Amen