Here I Am
1 Samuel 3:1-20; John 1:43-51
January
18, 2015
“Speak,
Lord, for your servant is listening.”
Perhaps
that should be a call to worship every Sunday. Perhaps that should be our call
to living every day. “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”
I’d
like to say that’s how I begin the average day, or the average week, or, heck,
even the average year. “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” I’d like
to say it, but I’d be lying. Oh, sure, sometimes I offer up some variation on
that theme: “yo, God, what am I supposed to do now?”
But
most of the time, that’s just not what’s at the front of my mind. I could claim
that I’m just too busy, that family and work obligations get in the way. Or, I
could say, “oh, sure, I’ve got that all figured out already so God doesn’t have
anything new to say to me.”
But
sitting in traffic the other day an old Eagles song came on that cut a lot
closer to the truth. It’s that one called “Wasted Time.” It made me stop and
ask myself, “how often do I miss the moment when God is speaking because I am
simply wasting the time that I’ve been given?”
These
two disparate texts – the story of the call of Samuel and John’s story of the
call of the first disciples – demand that we confront the crucial question of
how we choose to spend our time, and whether or not we are attentive to the
movement of the spirit in our midst because
of how we use our time.
“The
boy Samuel was ministering …” the story of his call begins. He was, by dent of
how he was raised and prepared, dedicating his life to the service of God even
though he was unsure of what that meant and how it would play out. “The word of
the Lord was rare in those days,” the story continues. In other words, Samuel
was laboring in an unlikely vineyard. It’s not like the culture was
particularly attuned to the concerns of God. The reign of the house of Eli was
coming to a close precisely because the people were no longer concerned with
justice and righteousness. Nevertheless, Samuel was listening. He was paying
attention.
Similarly,
in John’s gospel Philip can say to Nathanael, “We have found him about whom the
prophets wrote, Jesus from Nazareth,” because Nathanael is paying enough
attention to understand what that means. Nathanael is living a life in
expectation of God’s action in the world such that when God does act, even in a
way that surprises Nathanael completely and upsets his own expectations – “can
anything good come out of Nazareth?” – even then, Nathanael is intentionally
open to hearing God speak.
In
both of these stories, the faithful, practiced attention opens individuals to
the spirit moving in their lives, and both individual and social transformation
flow forth from that attention. Samuel hears the word of the Lord, and then he
speaks truth to power, telling the elderly Eli that the reign of his house must
end. Nathanael hears the word of the Lord, and becomes part of the inner circle
of the Jesus movement that profoundly shakes the structures of power in
first-century Palestine and beyond.
It’s
easy to read scripture as being the stories of particularly holy, special,
not-quite-real human beings – giants and heroes of the faith. It’s easy to read
these stories and imagine that they happened to people not at all like us, and
that they happened in a time when the culture itself was particularly “godly”
and “pious.”
But
the truth is, that while the time was certainly different and the understanding
also different, these are stories about ordinary people with ordinary concerns
– food, clothing, shelter, family life, work.
The
problem with “hero stories” is that when we hear them we tend to imbue the
heroes with supernatural powers, and in doing so we let ourselves completely
off the hook.
It’s
the Sunday of the Martin Luther King Day holiday. Talk about an American hero!
It’s so easy today to think of King in literally monumental terms – a figure carved
in granite towering over history leading a transformative movement by virtue of
powers beyond our grasp. If that’s our narrative of change, however, we let ourselves
completely off the hook.
My
friend David LaMotte’s got a new book out – Worldchanging
101 – in which he challenges such hero narratives. He does so, in part, by
way of the story of Rosa Parks, which, as I read it again last week, connected
powerfully in my mind with today’s readings from 1 Samuel and John. Without
Rosa Parks the story of Martin Luther King likely never gets told.
Now
the story of Dr. King has been reduced for many to a single speech – I have a
dream – but the story of Rosa Parks has been compressed even tighter. Most of
us know about a single day in her life: December 1, 1955, when she sat still on
a Montgomery, Alabama bus. Even that moment in her life is often lost in the
haze of hagiography.
Quick history pop quiz:
How
old do you suppose Rosa Parks was when she was arrested? She was 42, hardly a
“little old African-American woman,” though she’s often thought of as such when
her story is cited as the starting place of the modern Civil Rights Movement.
Second
quiz question: What was Rosa Parks arrested for? Her story is often summed up
as “arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white man,” but the truth
is, she was arrested for refusing to stand up and move back so that a white man
could have an entirely empty row of seats between himself and the black folks
at the rear of the bus. The Jim Crow rules of the system were such that the
white section expanded as white people got on the bus, and often an entire row
of black passengers would have to stand up and move back so that a single white
passenger could be seated without having to share a row with a black person.
That
was the Alabama that I was born into almost exactly four years later. Well,
actually, not quite. By 1959, Alabama was already changing.
The
pivot in the texts today – and the point at which they connect powerfully to
King’s story and to ours lies here: the moment of call and response. God calls
us – all of us – to live faithfully in the time we have been given. God calls
us, in the words of Micah, “to do justice, to love kindness, to walk humbly
with God.”
Do
that – do justice, love with a kindness the leans us always toward
righteousness, live faithfully with God – do that and the world will change.
Now
the hero narrative of world-changing suggests that change happens when
extraordinary people confront moments of crisis and fix the problem. But most
deep and lasting change in the world happens when folks like Rosa Parks live
faithfully day to day.
You
see, by the time Ms. Parks sat immovably on that Montgomery bus she had already
been working for the NAACP for more than a decade. She had already attended
countless community meetings. She had already trained in nonviolent social
change at the Highlander School. She was already an activist.
She
was already Samuel, living faithfully, listening for God to speak, and
responding, day by day, with a simple declaration, “here I am, Lord.” She was
already Nathanael, aware of the social situation of her people, attentive to
what God was already doing in their lives, anticipating God’s call to her.
The
problem with the hero version of Rosa Parks’ story is this: when we consider her life, “we wonder if we
would have the courage to be arrested on that bus, rather than wondering if we
can clear the time to go to a meeting about an issue in our community.”[1]
You
know that’s what Samuel and Nathanael and so many other Bible heroes were
signing up for: lots of community gatherings to discern together how God was
calling the people to respond to situations of injustice, to feed hungry
people, to give voice to the concerns of the voiceless, to welcome into the
center of the circle people consigned to the margins.
God
is still speaking. God is still inviting us to set aside the busyness, look
beyond the distractions, listen through the noise to discern the signal. God is
still calling.
What
will it take, in our own lives, to say, “speak Lord, for your servant is
listening,” and then “here I am Lord. Send me.”
posted by David Ensign at
7:40 AM
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