TUNING IN TO THE VOICE OF GOD

(Preached on Sunday, January 15, 2006)

Nathanael said to him, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”  Philip said to him, “Come and see.”                                                                    -John 1:46

 

One of the latest evidences that our society and culture are hungry for a connection with something deeper in life than what we usually experience debuted on television recently.  Have you seen “The Book of Daniel?”

I confess, I have not, other than the rather lengthy commercials for it, which, like most movie trailers today, practically show you the entire show before it ever actually airs.

It is the story of an Episcopal priest and his rather unorthodox family.  From what I have heard about its first episode, it seems very far-fetched and is evidently intended to be a comedy, falling on the farcical side of depicting life.

It has also generated some controversy, angering conservative Christian groups, some of whom are organizing a letter-writing campaign to express their dismay and disgust to NBC, because the show “mocks Christianity.”

 

I rather doubt that it does that, at least not intentionally.

But I do not doubt that it struggles to actually connect its viewers with a sense of the sacred underlying life.

We have a real problem with tuning in to the presence and activity, the word and message of God in our world today.

It may be that there is too much background noise and static, after all, we are bombarded today, not only with words and sounds, but also images and pictures, everywhere we turn, so that our hearing and seeing faculties and our brains are overloaded with stimulation.

We can take in enormous amounts of stimuli.

But can we process it all?  Can we process it in such a way that we not only see and hear it, but we perceive and understand it?

When that occurs, then we are tuning in.

 

This perceiving and understanding are the fruits of faithful spiritual practices in our lives.

Ernest Campbell, former preaching minister at Riverside Church in New York City, tells the story of the startup of color television in Germany.

The initial response from the public was great frustration.

They heard about this wonderful new technology in television but they were not able to pick up the color signals.  Finally, after much intense investigation by those in charge of bringing this wonderful innovation to Germany, they discovered that many people did not know that they had to buy color sets in order to pick up the new advance in televised entertainment.

 

In the same way, we are often behind the curve in picking up God’s signals.

We live with this illusion that people had it made in the good old days of the biblical stories.  Those days, when the voice of God was the voice of God and believers could hear it plain as day.

The gospel stories suggest that the disciples easily recognized Jesus as messiah and Son of God.  After all, Simon, Andrew, James and John all drop their nets and follow Jesus; Matthew gets right up from his tax table; Philip responded immediately; sure, Thomas took a little longer, not fully believing until after the resurrection, but all the rest had no trouble at all.

But such is the seduction of literature and story-telling.

 

What John records in a few lines, as he remembers it fifty years after the event, was probably experienced in similar fashion to our own experience of the calling and life of Martin Luther King, Jr.  If a modern scripture writer were telling the story of Dr. King, it would probably read something like this:

“In those godless days, when the children of light skin were persecuting the children of dark skin, God raised up the servant Martin.  God said to him, ‘Say to the powers that be, Let my people go.’  Martin, his throat tight with fear, said, ‘Lord, what can I say to them they have not already heard?’  And the Lord said, ‘I will give you words of fire that will kindle the dreams of your people, and furthermore, I’ll put you on commercial television.’  And so Martin, full of the spirit, led his people to freedom until his martyrdom.”

 

That is a fairly accurate description of the story of Dr. King, such as it is.

We who lived through that time realize there is a whole lot more detail that could go into that story.  In the same way, there are a lot more details that could go into the story that John tells.

We also realize that there are people who lived through the story of Dr. King who would not perceive or understand it in the same way that description does, or in the ways that we might.

They lived through the same story.

They saw it and heard it, just as we did.

But they never perceived it or understood it as we did.

The same is true for the stories of Jesus in the Bible.

There were a lot of people who lived during Jesus’ life and the years after, who heard him, saw him, heard about him, but who never perceived or understood who and what he was all about.

So, in a sense, they never really heard or saw him, not really.

But those who did see and hear him and who also perceived and understood him, were forever changed by that experience.  That is what tuning into the voice of God does to one, it changes lives.

 

There are several things we can do that are spiritual practices that will help us tune in to the voice of God.

First is, make sure we spend time in silence.

The old saying, “Silence is golden” is very true, for God often comes to us in the silences of our lives.

But there is very little silence in our hectic lives.

All the space around us seems clogged with multiple sounds.  The radio, TV, DVD, CD or MP3 player, rule our waking hours.  You go to the beach and see people sunning themselves with earphones plugged in.  Noise is no longer an affliction for many, it is an addiction.

Silence is one of the ways in which God can approach us, address us, soothe us, stir us, renovate us.

In the silence the Word can speak and be heard.

Because silence does not come readily in our noisy, frenetic world, it takes self-discipline to create space and silence in our lives.  We can practice making space and time in our lives for silence a little bit every day and open ourselves more readily to hear the voice of God.

 

A second way God speaks to us is in the world around us.

As we reflected on in last week’s sermon, this is an amazing universe in which we live and the evidence of God’s activity and design is all around us.

Jesus drew many of his lessons from the natural world; and from observing people and how God worked through them.

Nathanael made the mistake we so often make of judging someone or something by their origin or their outward appearance or their status or class.

From time to time, we have to make considerable adjustments to pick up the frequency on which God is broadcasting.  Sometimes we can only find the frequency by changing where we frequent.  Either way adjustments are going to occur.

Nathanael seems to have had the wrong geographical fix: expecting little good to come out of a minuscule backwoods town such as Nazareth.  They say tourist guides in modern Nazareth point out that the entire town in Jesus’ day would fit inside the current Roman Catholic Basilica.

We need to be careful in making assumptions about how and where God speaks.