How lovely it is to have the Sophia Singers…and the Beacon Bells… with us this morning…sounding bright notes of hope as we enter this time of long darkness.
The Russian carol the choir sang speaks of the wind seeming to be “full of singing.” Perhaps that singing in the wind is the still, small voice of this season speaking to us…if we will only listen.
A still, small voice.
The prophet Elijah had defeated his enemies, all of the prophets of the foreign God, Baal. But Elijah was not enjoying his triumph. In fact, he was in trouble.
Jezebel had ordered his arrest. She was Queen of Israel, but hers was a political marriage, and she remained faithful to Baal, the God of her childhood.
Jezebel has gotten a bad name, although she was just being true to her own faith.
In any case, Elijah was in crisis. What was he to do now? He had won the day for Yahweh. That very victory had gotten him in trouble. Who was he, now? A prophet still? And what was he to do?
An angel sends him to Mt Horeb, the mountain of God, promising that God would speak to him there:
“Go forth, and stand upon the mount before God. And, behold, God passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks…; but God was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but God was not in the earthquake: and after the earthquake a fire, but God was not in the fire: and after the fire [only after the fire] a still small voice.” (1Kings19)
A still, small voice.
God spoke to Elijah in a still, small voice. That is the language from the King James…most of us know it…but there are many other translations of that phrase:
A whisper.
A gentle blowing…perhaps that wind full of singing from our anthem.
The voice of fragile silence. I’m particularly fond of that one.
Elijah had to quiet his fear and listen hard to hear that still, small voice.
God’s voice was not in any of those violent disasters, not the wind, not the earthquake, not the fire.
Today…Hurricanes in Florida and Puerto Rico. Earthquakes…just this week in Alaska. And the fires. The fires.
We have been living through a time of violent destruction.
We have also been living through a political whirlwind, with daily scandals, constant lies and a cacophony of angry and hate-filled speech.
This has been the nosiest and most divisive time in my adult life, almost drowning out the still small voice of hope.
We are entering the season of long dark when the turning world invites us into silence, invites us to silence the war of words and take time to listen for what is true in our lives and what we want to become true in our world.
The season invites us to listen. We do not want to lose the ability to hear a word of hope.
Poet David Wagoner writes of a night in the Kalihari Desert when Laurens van der Post told the Bushmen, the indigenous people with whom he was staying…he told them that he could not hear the stars singing.
They did not believe him.
“They looked at him, half-smiling. They examined his face to see whether he was joking or deceiving them. Then two of those small men…led him away from the crackling thorn-scrub fire and stood with him under the night sky and listened.
One of them whispered, Do you [hear the stars singing] now?
And van der Post listened, not wanting to disbelieve, but had to answer, No.
They walked him slowly, like a sick man, [back] to the small dim circle of firelight and told him they were terribly sorry. And he felt even sorrier for himself and blamed his ancestors for their strange loss of hearing, which was his loss now.”
He couldn’t hear the stars singing.
Van der Post was a complicated character. An Afrikaner, a white colonizer, whose privilege was largely unexamined and whose tales often stretched the truth.
A complicated character, just as Elijah was complicated in his own way…a prophet who proclaimed the power of his God, but who finally had to know that God, that Spirit, not as a warrior but as a whisperer.
Complicated characters. Just as we are complicated folks in so many ways. Courageous AND frightened. Courageous AND cowardly. Up to the task and overwhelmed…all at the same time. Complicated human beings.
And there are times when we all need to listen…to focus…and to strain to hear that still small voice that can only be heard in the fragile silence.
“Always there is the need of mooring,” Howard Thurman writes, “the need for the firm grip on something that is rooted and will not give.”
“Something rooted.”
Grounded. Grounding is what Elijah needed and I think that is what many of us yearn for as well.
Elijah only heard God when he listened to a sound so fragile, it could easily go unheard. Once he heard that voice, he stopped being a zealot and a warrior. He handed over his power and became a fatherly mentor to the younger prophet Elisha.
Elijah was grounded by that voice and transformed by it.
He listened.
We need to listen.
There is never perfect silence, to be sure. Certainly not living in the city. The sounds of the city are constant, so constant that we city dwellers learn to shut them out…to pay no attention to them.
Listening is paying attention. Listening is a decision. Listening is a decision of the heart.
Because the sounds are always around us.
Even our bodies are not silent. Composer John Cage, at one point, spent some time in a soundproof chamber…it is called an anechoic chamber…designed to absorb all sound. No sound enters. No echoes within the chamber. Perfect silence…well… no.
Inside, Cage’s trained and sensitive ears picked up two distinct sounds—one high and one low. When he described those sounds to the engineer in charge, Cage learned that the high sound was his own nervous system in operation, and the low one his blood in circulation. “Until I die, there will be sounds,” he wrote afterward. “And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music.”
There are always sounds, but who is speaking? In the Jewish and Christian scriptures, God speaks often in the early days. He walks in the Garden and talks to his creatures. But as the scriptures move forward, God speaks less and less…and less. In fact, the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments, can be read as the story of God’s gradual withdrawal from the world.
Elijah’s victory over the prophets of Baal is the last public miracle in the Old Testament. The public spectacles are replaced by what?…a still, small voice.
God’s withdrawal from the world…well that suits many of us just fine. The range of our theologies…our ideas about what god or gods may be or not be…the beliefs among us are many and varied.
Still we listen…
Is our listening, at least in part, to remember? To re-call our commitments and the promises we have made to ourselves and to our loved ones and to our communities?
Yes, I think in part we listen to remember. In a time of so much shouting, it can be too easy to forget what is important and to confuse intensity for truth. We listen to remember what matters to us.
And we listen to find direction as well. That is what Elijah was listening for. He needed direction. And he got a whisper…a fragile silence.
Like Elijah, we are all on the journey of life and at certain points we need to discover, to discern direction.
Each day, and often many times a day, we decide whether to bless or to curse the world. As religious people, we want to ground those decisions, just as many of them as we can, in our best hopes, our most forgiving and empowering impulses. We want to bring the Beloved Community into being whenever and wherever we can, in ways small and grand.
We want to operate out of our deepest grounding and our ability…our power to bring love to life in this hurting world.
Victoria Safford writes:
Here is a place where I forgave someone, against my better judgment, and I survived that…
Here’s where I was once forgiven, was ready for once in my life to receive forgiveness and to be transformed. And I survived that also…
Here is the place where I said “no,” more loudly than I thought I ever could…and those [who questioned me] settled down into harmless grumbling and over me they had no power anymore.
Here is where I was first astonished by gratuitous compassion and knew it for the miracle it was…
Here is a place, a murky puddle, where I have stumbled more than once and fallen…I don’t know yet what to learn there.
Here is where I began to look with my own eyes and listen with my own ears.”
Victoria listened.
Listened to life’s lessons? Yes, certainly that.
Listened to her best self? That too.
Listened to the Spirit of Life? That spirit that is within us and beyond us…all at the same time?
Listened to God? Who knows for certain? And does it really matter whose voice speaks to us on the wind?
I believe that, for us, the question of whose voice is so much less important that how we learn to listen and to hear.
There is more mystery than certainty in our living. In our liberal religious tradition we say that revelation is not sealed. And that is true, I am certain of that.
But knowing that truth tells us only to distrust those who claim certainty. Knowing that truth, alone, does not give us much direction or solid ground on which to move forward.
Perhaps the very best we can do is to listen to the voices, even that still, small voice…those voices that seem to be speaking the greatest truth, deal with our fear to trust the moral judgments we claim to live by, and pray for courage.
What I know is that we need to take time to listen.
Today, rather than a formal spoken prayer, let me invite you into a meditation inspired by the need to listen and the hope we might hear from that still, small voice.
Make yourselves comfortable. As comfortable as you can.
Feel the hard seats or the cushioned pews holding your weight.
Relax your neck and your shoulders. Let the relaxation move down your body toward your legs and your feet.
Take a deep breath in. … and exhale.
And another breath…and exhale.
Try to clear your mind. Focus on your breath.
And listen…
Hear the sounds of the city outside the sanctuary…but don’t focus on them.
Focus on the sound of your breathing and of your being.
And listen…
I will say a word…followed by a short time of silence.
Listen to that word. Let that word in. Hear it. Focus on that word and what that word calls up in you. What that word calls out in you.
Compassion
Courage
Forgiveness
Confidence
Love
Begin returning your focus on your breathing. A deep breath in…and exhale.
Another…and exhale.
As you return, bring with you the compassion and courage, the confidence and the love that you listened for and heard in the silence.
May that compassion and that courage, that confidence and that love be your companions in this season of both darkness and of hope.
May it be so.
Amen
Topics: Listening