Hearing is difficult. For young and old. Partly because our expectations and experiences are tied so closely to our ability to hear and understand.

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1 Garrett Vickrey 10:45 AM Worship Woodland Baptist Church San Antonio, Texas Hear - Hear, Know, Go, Keep Psalm 85; 1 Kings 8-13 Let me hear what God the LORD will speak. Surely, God is still speaking. Surely, the Lord is here. God is with us we learn in scripture. But, we have trouble hearing. It must have been last January. I was visiting family in Dallas when I got a call from a church member. He was checking to see how my Christmas was, and then he paused a moment and after a brief silence he asked, Are you OK. I think so, I said. And then I began to wonder if I was OK. He said, OK good. I heard somebody say that he heard that you had a heart condition, but the person I heard it from is deaf (and I m a little deaf too) so even he said he could have heard it wrong. Hearing is difficult. For young and old. Partly because our expectations and experiences are tied so closely to our ability to hear and understand. And If we have a hard time hearing each other who we can see and touch how then do we ever hear God? God uses a medley of methods to get his point across. God speaks to people in varying ways in the bible, which ought to teach us. To Joseph he spoke through dreams. To Elijah he spoke in a deafening silence. The call sounds different to different people. And we each need to be equipped to respond. A few years ago in a sermon on the story of Lydia in Acts, I noticed a spiritual progression within Lydia s story that I think provides us some markers for best practices on our journey with God. And so in the coming weeks we are going to dig deeper into four words which might help to give our discipleship shape and direction as we each try to discern what God is doing and how God is inviting us to participate in that work in the world. Those four words are: Hear, Know, Go, Keep. Hear, Know, Go, Keep is a guide for navigating the way of discipleship. It s a pattern of spiritual growth we see over and over again in scripture. And so we will be focusing on Psalms and stories of Old Testament characters in the coming weeks to see how these ancient people discerned God s presence in their lives through struggle and pain. We ll see how the easy answers of their faith folded in the face of real life, and how they picked up the 1

2 pieces and cried out to God. And in that brokenness God found them and renewed their strength by offering a vision of hope. Hear, know, Go, Keep positions us in a posture to follow Jesus... because he calls each of us to do something, to be something, and always to take up our cross. The first step is to hear. Spend time listening. And not just to the noise that pollutes our ears everyday. Turn off the TV, turn off itunes, find silence every now and then. I wonder if we are more comfortable in the noise because we fear what waits for us in silence. The kind of hearing we are talking about this morning is more than audible. It's being given ears, it's being given an opening to God; it's an encounter; And unless we put ourselves in a position to be open to that encounter we might go on unable to discern the closeness of God beckoning us behind the clatter of our calendars. We re already united with God. Our journey of faith is about practicing an awareness of that union. There s a parable about several applicants seeking a job as a ship's Morse Code operator. While they're waiting to be interviewed, the room was filled with the sounds of the applicants talking to each other and engaging in the pleasantries of conversation. And so they're oblivious to the sound of dots and dashes coming from an intercom. Then another applicant comes in, sits down, quietly waiting. Suddenly, she jumps up, walks into the private office, and after a few minutes, walks out with the job. The other applicants protested, "We were here first How could you go ahead of us and get the job?" To which she replies, "Any of you could have gotten the job if you had just been quiet long enough to pay attention to the message on the intercom." "What message?" "The code said, 'A ship's operator must always be on the alert. The first person who gets this message and comes directly into my office will get the job. Much of our lives is polluted by noise which distracts us from hearing from the depths of truth disguised in silence. Before we can begin to hear we have to get rid of some of the noise. Parker Palmer once wrote, Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am. If we aren t ready to listen to ourselves would we ever be able to listen for God. Surely, God will speak but it may not sound like what we expect. 2

3 A big part of hearing someone is understanding them. To truly hear somebody you have to know them; where they are coming from, and what they want. Psalm 85 tells us what God is all about, and what God wants for creation. Psalms are messy, raw, honest, openings to visions of God. They sound like us. Our best, most pious selves at times and our darkest, desperate inner counterpart at others. Psalm 85 is a poem Elijah needed to hear. He was desperate. Depressed. Anxious. He had defeated the prophets of Canaanite gods in a prophetic contest, and then slaughtered them with his sword at the river. And now he knew he had enemies. People were looking for him to get vengeance. He didn t know what to do, and he felt as if the God who had been with him earlier in his life now had abandoned him. So perhaps, that s why he went to the holiest place he could think of to Mt. Sinai. The mountain of God where Moses had talked to God face to face. Yes, this is the place to be. What better place for a spiritual awakening? What better place to hide from his enemies what better place to forget the blood on his hands? Psalm 85 would have been a good one for him to hear. Elijah, like the Psalmist, wanted God to forgive him and not be angry with him. He wanted God to restore his fortunes make me feel like you are with me again make me feel like I matter. Elijah needed to be reminded of God s vision for creation. Faithfulness will spring up from the ground, and righteousness will look down from the sky. In the bloodsport of kingdom politics Elijah had lost the vision of who God is and what God was doing in creation. No wonder he hadn t heard from God in a while. Maybe he really did need to get away from it all, go back to the mountain from which his people came. After all, that is the place of the covenant, the place where they became God s people. But, they kept forgetting. Maybe because they kept forgetting to listen within their own story for God to tell them who they are. And so Elijah limped his way to the mouth of a cave to spend the night on the mountain. And God said, What are you doing here, Elijah? A question that has probably arisen within each of us at some point in life a question that rises from deep within that makes us uncertain the origin of 3

4 such a question. What are you doing here? And Elijah went and stood in the footsteps of Moses on the mountain perhaps in the same place they said that God hid Moses as he passed by him in those old stories. Elijah stood there on that sacred ground and watch as the wind blew; but, God was not in the wind. An earthquake knocked him to his knees; but, God was not in the earthquake. After the quake, an explosion of fire scorched the earth in front of him; but, God was not in the fire. The smoke cleared, the earth stood still, the wind calmed, and in the vacuous moment after all that came nothing. Some translations say there came a still small voice. Others say of this mysterious Hebrew phrase that it was a sound of sheer silence. And in that moment of nothing at the end of his rope Elijah hears nothing but a fine silence and from that nothingness Elijah discovers God. The emptiness is transformed (like it was in the beginning). It s like poet Christian Wiman writes, God s absence is always a call to his presence. Abundance and destitution are two facets of the one face of God, and to be spiritually alive in the fullest sense is to recall one when we are standing squarely in the midst of the other. 1 It took getting past the trauma of the fire, the dizziness of the quake, and the anxiety of the wind before in the stillness Elijah could hear the nothing that echoed in his ears and in this echo the still small voice of God speaking peace to his people. As the world seemed to be spinning out of control in 1964, Paul Simon sought refuge in playing guitar in his bathroom. In the midst of the civil rights movement, the Vietnam conflict, and a few months after JFK was assassinated, he was trying to make sense of things (as were many). He said, "The main thing about playing the guitar was that I was able to sit by myself and play and dream. And I was always happy doing that. I used to go off in the bathroom, because the bathroom had tiles, so it was a slight echo chamber. He said he would turn off the lights and play in the dark. And he began to play a tune and sang, Hello darkness, my old friend / I've come to talk with you again. He began to write a song that would become one of this singer s greatest hits The Sound of Silence. I think any of you artists could understand this sacred moment. An artist is simply one that makes decisions, whose canvas and 4

5 tools in its simplest and yet most grand form is time and space. In some small way we all make these decisions, creating our lives. And you know, before you create you have to enter the abyss of a blank page, white canvas or some kind of silence to hear what might be before you. These fertile moments aren t just for painters or musicians or writers, they are for each of us to enter the presence of God in silence and humility, to enter empty handed and return full. This is what it means to practice hearing. Because until we learn to enter that sacred moment waiting to be given ears to hear we will always be waiting waiting for God to speak in some earthquake or fire, some antiquated notion of God s presence God is whispering now. But, to hear that sheer silence you have to know something of the intersection of steadfast love and faithfulness. And if you find yourself there, listen closely you might just hear them kiss and hear God talking back. 5

6 1 Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer, (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York: 2013)