January 31, 2008
Listen
Epiphany last (Mt 17.1-9; Lk 9.28-36)
When the prophet Elijah was called by God, he searched for the evidence of that call in some spectacular sign — earthquake, fire, wind, thunder, lightning. How he finally got his answer is described in what I feel is one of the loveliest phrases in all of scripture. It’s the KJV’s “still small voice,” but it’s translated far better in the early 20th century American Version as “the sound of gentle stillness” (1 Kgs 19.12).
Theologically, even biblically, we’re “from Missouri.” We want evidence. It is a great temptation for us to look for signs, rather than to listen for them.
The Transfiguration tells such a story in today’s gospel. It would be hard to imagine a more brilliant scene than Jesus carrying on with Moses and Elijah — two dead guys, even though of considerable repute — and having his clothing suddenly light up, a wardrobe malfunction to end all wardrobe malfunctions.
We can’t fault Peter, James, and John for being overcome by the razzle-dazzle in such an ambiance and wanting to negotiate a more permanent arrangement. It was only natural. It is only natural with us churchers. Majestic cathedrals, fancy duds for ourselves, great music and liturgy, all pointing to us in the hope that maybe like those disciples, the world will want to negotiate and sign on.
Well, it hasn’t exactly turned out that way. The Voice from the clouds up there on the mountain agrees, up to a point. “This is my beloved son with whom I am well pleased,” it says. Our usual presumption is that it can’t be anyone else’s voice but God’s, and maybe we think James Earl Jones. But the Voice doesn’t stop with “This is my beloved son with whom I am well pleased,” as when John baptized Jesus. The Transfiguration story this time seems to suggest that there’s been an attention deficit, almost as if that simple recommendation was not enough. For the Voice adds a simple command… “Listen to him.”
Witnessing takes at least two forms. The obvious one is telling the gospel story, telling our story, enacting our story, and making it as attractive as we possibly can. But the perhaps less obvious way of witnessing is to listen to the other’s story, the neighbor’s story, the world’s story, listening for God’s presence, for Christ in the other. Listening, giving audience, paying attention may be, after all, the most profoundly magnetic and winsome form of witnessing and evidence there is.
“This is my beloved son with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.”
In his little monograph, “Reaching Out,” Henri Nouwen rings changes on the Great Commandment to love God and neighbor as self. He calls our growth in fulfilling this commandment “spiritual maturity” and describes it as offering audience to self and to neighbor and to God.
That we don’t listen to ourselves, he suggests, results in our profound loneliness. Whereas, to give ourselves unrestricted, unconditional audience, Nouwen says, offers the most profound experiences of solitude, actually defining the difference between loneliness and solitude.
As well with our neighbors must be our gift of audience, of truly listening without condition, without presumption, without planning our next speech, opening from hostility to a true and welcome hospitality. And finally does Nouwen say, we must offer such audience to God also without condition, by opening up from illusions about God to prayer or put another way, by attending not to God as we understand God, but prayer as searching, enquiring of God to discern how God understand us and the ways in which he has imagined us to be.
In so many ways, we can be deaf. Through arrogance, vanity, compulsive talking, dismissiveness, aloofness, and so much more subtly through self-righteous obsession with always having to be right (and just happening to have the biblical text on hand to prove it).
The church is called to be a listening community, a community where such deafness can be healed. There is much in our corporate worship to hear. Great stories of our long family history. Thoughtful prayers. Better than average hymns. And, of course, each other with mutual greetings, exchanges, and catching up. But our good liturgy also offers us moments in certain of its parts when we can simply be silent, listening, reflecting on what or who we have just heard or seen, surely awed by the majesty of the possibilities of access to God. Surely, when James counseled us to be not only hearers, but doers of the word, he would be the last to suggest that such doing is altogether impossible without first hearing, without first listening.
The prophet Isaiah once admonished us in one of his more provocative ways to “Seek the Lord while he wills to be found… ” (Is 55.6a) Thankfully, God was more gently gracious to those who waited for Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration and for those who wait for him here when he said, “This is my son, my Chosen, listen to him.” (Lk 9.35b)
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