What can we say June 2? 2nd Sunday after Pentecost

    1 Samuel 3:1-20. I preached on this in January when this text also appeared in our lectionary. Check it out here! I’ve been trying to name out loud (out louder?) that children figure so prominently in Scripture – and when it happens, to dare to suggest God might be calling one of our children in our church, right now, today, into something amazing for God. When we gave Bibles to 3rd graders in worship, I looked at them long and hard and asked this question. Some were being silly, some squirmed, but a handful looked me in the eye, deeply, as if wondering.

   The lovely vignette in 1 Samuel 3:1-20 must delight the naturally spiritual while baffling cynics. If someone says I heard God speak to me, I tend to think he’s hearing his own hunches or preferred stirrings. How does anyone hear God in 2024? We should recall that Samuel was in the temple – all the time. Prayers, sacrifices, the retelling of Israel’s old stories: these were constants for him. For us, the more deeply we are absorbed in liturgy, daily prayers, weighing Scripture, and conversation with wise people (Samuel did have Eli to test what he heard), the more we hear God, however indirectly.

   Israel was in a mess. Eli was getting too old to lead (his loss of vision is what happens to the elderly but also symbolic of the people’s inability to see the things of God), and his sons were wicked. How weirdly encouraging is it that the Bible so often narrates parents with children who have utterly lost their way?

   “The word was rare in those days” – because the Lord was quiet? Or because no one was listening? Does this sound like our days? But “the lamp had not gone out” – so clever, as it’s a lamp, but it’s also theological! God does speak: “I am about to do a thing at which the 2 ears of everyone that hears it will tingle.” The preacher has to play on this business - and even dare to dream that God will do a new ear-tingling thing even in our day.

   As Barbara Brown Taylor explains so eloquently in When God is Silent, prayer should be less “Lord, hear our prayers,” and more “Speak Lord, for your servant is listening.” Through all those disciplines the church offers, we may begin to hear – but the ears will tingle. God won’t speak conventional wisdom, and God won’t pander to our preferences. Thomas Merton was right about why we don’t hear or have a vibrant spiritual life: “Much of our coldness and dryness in prayer may well be a kind of unconscious defense against grace.”

   What does grace feel like? Marianne Williamson suggested that “When you ask God into your life, you think God is going to come into your psychic house, look around, and see you just need a new floor or better furniture, that everything needs just a little cleaning – and so you go along thinking how nice life is that God is there. Then you look out the window one day and you see that there’s a wrecking ball outside. It turns out your foundation is shot, and that you’re going to have to start building it over from scratch.” For Israel, the building of the whole nation is collapsing and needs radical reconstruction – which may sound like our nation and world…

   In addition to those crucial thoughts on 1 Samuel 3, I want to explore Eli a bit further – partly because it occurs to me you could do a lot with maybe my favorite post-apocalyptic film, The Book of Eli ("the word of the Lord was rare," he's blind, a young child figures prominently, etc.) - but then also because a good friend, Rev. George Ragsdale, spoke on this recently, and I was moved and stirred by what he did. Speaking to clergy about to screen candidates for ordination, he raised the question of how Eli understood (or didn’t!) that Samuel was being called by God.

   Eli’s ability to figure out what was going on was compromised – first by his own physical frailty. He’s old, tired, visually impaired. How often do our aches and pains, or our own physical weariness, keep us from hearing God, or from realizing what God might be doing? How often, simply being tired, do we go back to bed and assume it can’t really be God speaking or doing a new thing?

   Eli’s mounting blindness isn’t just physical; it’s symbolic of his leadership. He’s blinded by love and attachment to his own sons (as was Samuel, and David) who were scoundrels, who “had no regard for the Lord,” and abused their priestly prerogatives. As I explored in my book, Weak Enough to Lead, all leaders show up for work with whatever they left at home still rattling around in their heads. When you preach or pastor, you carry, probably hidden in silence, a struggle you had with your son, a spat with your spouse, a harsh word from your mother – and it impacts what you do; the people to whom you preach experience the same thing in their worlds. And so we name these Eli situations – the recognition and naming offering some mercy where there isn’t much other mercy to be had. And then, of course, God might use that hidden brokenness – which can become compassion for others…

   And finally, doesn’t Eli suspect that if he helps Samuel hear God’s Word, that would prove to be the final blow against him and his own family’s failed leadership? As George put it, might it be that God will even call the church to something we don’t recognize, as much as we love the place, and that we’ll be the ones left behind? Can we help the church hear even that calling that will cost us plenty?

   2 Corinthians 4:5-12. Paul clarifies what we know but don’t put on resumes or admit to pulpit committees: “We have this treasure in clay jars” (or a Victor Paul Furnish translates, “earthen pots”). Many understand these to be vessels used for the offering of sacrifice – so they could then be broken up and disposed of it they became ritually unclean. Like Eli, we are such earthen vessels… and the image of the broken, breakable, sacrificial pottery piece can be probed endlessly. Wasn’t it Leonard Cohen who wrote “There is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in”?

   And then we have Lillian Daniel’s moving story from her childhood: her father would go on long trips, and then return with collectible pottery pieces from around the world. As the years passed, she kept noticing, next to the fabulous samples of artful pottery, there was one shabby piece that looked like it had been glued together by an amateur. While the other pieces were labelled with indications of their provenance, this one simply said “Precious.” Lillian asked her mother about it – and learned the story. Her father came home after an especially long trip. Little Lillian saw him pull up in the driveway, bolted out of the house, and ran to her dad – who was holding his pottery treasure but could do nothing but let it fall to the pavement as he embraced and lifted up his little girl. Precious. The broken one.

   Paul’s poetic cadence (“afflicted in every way but not crushed; perplexed but not driven to despair; persecuted but not forsaken; struck down but not destroyed”) requires no explanation at all. The preacher can just repeat it, reiterate it, maybe invite the people to stand and declare it out loud with her.

   And I’m dumbstruck by Paul’s daunting brilliance in adding “Always carrying in our bodies the death of Jesus.” How do we make sense of suffering? You bear it, you pray for God’s healing, etc. – but what if it feels and is interpreted as a carrying within our own bodies the death of Jesus? Oh my. St. Francis of Assisi sought this and an even more intense kind of solidarity with Jesus. Two years before his death, Francis withdrew from the crowds to rocky Mt. LaVerna.  It was September, 1224, when the Catholic calendar featured the “feast of the Exaltation of the Cross.”  He prayed intently, with words of unmatched theological power:

   “My Lord Jesus Christ, two graces I ask of you before I die: the first is that in my life I may feel, in my soul and body, as far as possible, that sorrow which you, tender Jesus underwent in the hour of your most bitter passion; the second is that I may feel in my heart, as far as possible, the abundance of love with which you, son of God, were inflamed so as willingly to undergo such a great passion for us sinners.”

   In my Conversations with St. Francis, I spend some time on this remarkable prayer, talking about the place where it happened and how Francis then experienced the greatest or the worst miracle ever: being wounded in his hands, feet and side. The “stigmata” – as Paul put it, “carrying in the body the death of Jesus.”

   And then there’s the incandescent moment in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury: his pitch perfect portrayal of a single preacher, the pastor of the maid of the affluent Dilsey family, is frankly my ideal for who I want to be when I grow up as a preacher. “The preacher had not moved.  His arm lay yet across the desk, and he still held that pose while the voice died in sonorous echoes between the walls. It was as different as day and dark from his former tone, with a sad, timbrous quality like an alto horn, sinking into their hearts and speaking there again when it had ceased in fading and cumulate echoes. ‘Brethren and sistern,’ it said again. The preacher removed his arm and he began to walk back and forth before the desk, his hands clasped behind him, a meager figure, hunched over upon itself like that of one long immured in striving with the implacable earth, ‘I got the recollection and blood of the Lamb!’ He tramped steadily back and forth beneath the twisted paper and the Christmas bell, hunched, his hands clasped behind him. He was like a worn small rock whelmed by the successive waves of his voice. With his body he seemed to feed the voice that, succubus like, had fleshed its teeth in him. And the congregation seemed to watch with its own eyes while the voice consumed him, until he was nothing and they were nothing and there was not even a voice but instead their hearts were speaking to one another in chanting measures beyond the need for words, so that when he came to rest against the reading desk, his monkey face lifted and his whole attitude that of a serene, tortured crucifix that transcended its shabbiness and insignificance and made it of no moment, a long moaning expulsion of breath rose from them, and a woman’s single soprano:  ‘Yes, Jesus!’”

   I’m so taken with 1 Samuel 3, and then 2 Corinthians 4 that I don’t know if I’ll get to the Gospel, Mark 2:23-3:6 at all. On the Sabbath, I cannot recommend highly enough what may be Walter Brueggemann’s best little book, Sabbath as Resistance. Stunning, profound, devotional, political, liberating, challenging. And Jesus: wasn’t the Sabbath his best day of the week? Not because of his own rest, but because he cut to the heart of the thing, healing, letting the disciples eat, spinning it all not as antinomianism but a robust sense that the Sabbath was made for people… We are totally loose on Sabbath observance, so we actually need the opposite lesson that the Pharisees needed.