[Propertalk] 2 Epiphany b

[robertpmorrison at charter.net]

Here's the late-ish first draft of Sunday's sermon 8 - )

THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH OF ST. ALBAN, ALBANY  		          	THE SECOND 
SUNDAY IN EPIPHANY
1 SAMUEL 3:1-20	                          		    	    	 
15th JANUARY, 2012
1 CORINTHIANS 6:12-20		 
PSALM 139:1-6, 13-18
JOHN 1:43-51

	“The next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee.” – and from that Jesus 
further developed His cadre of disciples.

	It sounds so hit and miss. Does God roll dice? It’s an ancient 
question, an attempt on our part to try to approach the mind of God to 
decipher how God works, and what God wants us to do. Then, when we can’t 
seem to penetrate God’s mind, we invent things. We attribute things – to 
our home-work eating dog, or our brother or sister, or our parents, or 
those crazy Christians down the street – sometimes we even attribute 
things to God.

	You know, life would be SO much more simple if God would just speak up, 
preferably in unaccented English. But that’s not how it works. God, with 
infinitely more finesse, uses burning shrubbery; talking donkeys; 
descending doves; blinding sun shafts. God uses dreams, even when we 
claim not to have them.

	Not only does this get the point across, but it opens our eyes, our 
minds and, I hope, our hearts to the take a much wider angle view of 
creation. We HAVE to – I repeat, HAVE to have such imaginations so that 
we see God acting, and speaking, and listening, and responding to us 
every moment of every day. This means that God is at the gas station; at 
the grocery store; delivering our mail; driving on I-5; serving our 
breakfast; maybe even sitting twenty feet up a tree or on a power line – 
God is everywhere, and is able to interact with us in ways we can’t even 
imagine. And that may be the problem. We need a crash course in 
imaginative thinking and feeling.

	Think of everything that’s happened in your life that’s grown out of an 
apparently random event. What a sense of humour God has! Thank God, at 
least some of the time we actually pay attention and follow what we 
shrug off as a hunch, an idle thought that crosses our mind. But what 
WAS it, REALLY? Might one of God’s angels have zipped through our 
neuronic cortices, leaving the DNA of an idea there? Might one of God’s 
faster moving agents have whispered the name of a place, or a person, or 
an event, or even something apparently totally normal, something so 
every-day, that we might ignore it? And we might have paused, or looked, 
or listened, or thought, or spoken – and something incredible happened, 
something that has changed our lives in ways we may never have imagined 
possible. And not only our own lives, but the lives of untold numbers of 
people both close and totally removed from us.

	The first reading reminds of the well known story of the call of 
Samuel. He’d been dedicated to God’s service by his grateful mother. He 
lived right there where prayer could be heard at just about all hours, 
every day of the week. Incense swirled around. Some people were giving 
thanks for God’s blessings; others were coming in distressed and 
heart-broken at some event which was troubling and maybe even crippling 
them. Samuel would have been used to that, as well as to the bustle of 
the Temple staff. Yet the saddest line in the story – one of the saddest 
in the whole Bible – is that “The word of the Lord was rare in those 
days; visions were not widespread.”

	The point is that God wasn’t absent. God is ALWAYS present. The point 
is that so often we fail to hear, or to see, or imagine.

There are times when I’ve thought to myself, “God doesn’t want to hear 
about this or that little thing. There are much more important things 
than a disappointment about not being able to do something.” There are 
times when we ALL do this, and sometimes we do it over considerable 
things.

The point is that we fail to allow our imaginations to recall that God 
IS interested in everything that’s going on; that God wants to know how 
we feel, what issues are troubling us, even if we have trouble putting 
them into words.

This is something which we should be encouraged to remember at every 
opportunity. That’s the whole premise of Advent, Christmas and Epiphany. 
God wouldn’t have bothered had God not cared. But God not only cares, 
God speaks, God slips reminders into every day of our lives as signs 
that God cares. What we need to be prepared for, though, is that God 
expects us to be able and willing to hear.

The young Samuel had ears – he didn’t have a jaded heart; he wasn’t 
preoccupied with maintaining the status quo; he was learning about life, 
so he heard God in what others may have felt was a silent space. Samuel 
heard and responded. He ran to the leader, his mentor, his friend, and 
said, “OK, what would you like me to do?” To which Eli said, “Go back to 
bed. Don’t mess with me!”

It WAS the Temple, though, the place where people of Samuel’s and Jesus’ 
day expected to experience God for
their lives. Samuel was young enough, inexperienced enough in being able 
to know what God might sound like, that he had to depend on those who 
worked there, who’d been there long enough. THEY should have been able 
to help, but they couldn’t; and it seems as if Eli didn’t have any 
thought that Samuel could possibly have been contacted by God.

The same sort of surprise is attached to Nathanael. Who was he, sitting 
around, half-minding his own business, half-watching those who were 
passing by when Philip began to scout around until he found him and 
brought him to Jesus? That’s when Nathanael discovered what the psalmist 
had tried to express centuries before. God knows who we all are and what 
we’re capable of doing to celebrate God’s reign AND help bring more 
people to become part of the festivities.
The point of this is that far too often either we get stuck in a rut and 
don’t look for new people, new plans, and so on; or else we limit our 
imaginations and don’t believe that God would want to use us, or do 
something for us.
	Theologian and biblical scholar John Howard Yoder provides a good 
antidote to this when he wrote, “The work of God is the calling of a 
people, whether in the Old Covenant or the New… That men and women are 
called together to a new wholeness is itself the work of God, which 
gives meaning to history.” 1

Why is it that we’re afraid of new things? Why is it that, so often, we 
don’t say what’s on our minds or do the things that we feel in our 
hearts needs to be done? Why do we procrastinate? Probably because, in 
one way or another, we’re afraid of what might happen. We may have a 
strong dislike of what’s going on, or what people are saying, or of how 
we feel. But I suspect that I’m far from being alone in sometimes being 
willing to tolerate the discomfort and pain rather than risk having to 
give up certain relationships, or face something different in my life. 
We all tend to think that way. So we risk losing an opportunity, or 
creating something better, or deepening our understanding of who we are 
in relationship with God.

Sometimes things ARE so silent, so blah, even so barren, just like the 
situation in Eli’s day, that we need to be willing to let our 
imaginations, our dreams, guide us. We need to remind ourselves that 
God’s loving knowledge of us is so complete, and so filled with hope, 
that we NEED to respond in trust and wonder just as Samuel and Nathanael 
did.

God has never stopped calling people to ministry, and when we stand at 
any of the doors of these buildings we can see that God needs us to 
respond. There are people who are crying – literally – to hear God speak 
a good word, a kind word. There are people close enough to whom we don’t 
even need to shout from these doors, people so depressed, and hurting, 
and confused that they don’t even remember that God said, as recently as 
four weeks ago, “I love you! Come to see Me, for comfort and support.”

Some Samuel, some Nathanael is sitting here this morning, who ought to 
be encouraged to take up the gifts they have and to be able to ask God 
what can be done. As a simple example, at the end of last week I was in 
the office when I heard the back door open and someone call out to see 
if anyone was here. I responded. A man was holding the door open, just 
standing there. He said, “All I need is a prayer.” He didn’t feel that 
he belonged inside.

I mentioned the episode during our diocesan convention when a friend and 
I were asked for exactly the same thing.

The man this week said that his wife’s son had just died that morning, 
and that they were devastated. All he asked was that I pray with him. 
Anyone could have done this. I happened to be in the building.

Shortly, we’ll go from worshipping here in a formal sense to listening 
to reports of the previous year’s ministry, and then we’ll eat, and 
talk, and laugh. But in all of this we should never forget that someone 
MAY come in the door, looking for prayer, for some warmth, for rest from 
struggling with all that burdens. And that cold, tired, confused person 
may also meet up with us anyplace else in town.

You don’t need to come running to Marj or me to say, “What am I to do?” 
Of course, you CAN come. We’d be happy to offer advice. But God can use 
any one of us, at any time. All that’s needed is a little faith, a 
little imagination, a little courage – just the things God reminded us 
about last week as we renewed our baptismal promises.

The texts this morning talk about exciting possibilities. The question 
is, are we ready for a little of God’s excitement!

Scientist and theologian, Teilhard de Chardin, wrote, “We are not human 
beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a 
human experience.” 2

	God does NOT operate on a hit-or-miss basis. There IS a purpose behind 
all of God’s calls, which are given with
the ability to respond.

	Let’s listen. Let’s each say to God, “Speak, for your servant is 
listening.”

NOTES:
1 	Voice of the Day: Sojourners. 4th January, 2012 
http://sojo.net/blogs/2012/01/04/voice-of-the-day   John Howard Yoder 
(December 29, 1927 – December 30, 1997) was a Christian theologian, 
ethicist, and Biblical scholar best known for his radical Christian 
pacifism, his mentoring of future theologians such as Stanley Hauerwas, 
his loyalty to his Mennonite faith, and his 1972 magnum opus, The 
Politics of Jesus.

2	Quoted by Omid Djalili on “Belief” with Joan Bakewell, BBC Radio 3 
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0107239


Robert P Morrison
Interim Vicar
The Episcopal Church of St Alban
PO Box 1556
Albany OR  97321   541-921-1076 (cell)