Redeemer Evangelical Lutheran Church - New Paltz

Matthew 2:1-12; 1 Corinthians 6:12-20; Psalm 139; 1 Samuel 3:1-10

God knows us by name and has given us gifts with which to serve the Lord, both individually and as congregations.

There’s a great story from Delmer Chilton, asst to the Bishop for Southeast US. Loved breakfast with his extended family because his aunt was a good cook, but didn’t love that they always listened to the obituary on the radio while they ate. Over time, Delmer describes how in his kid’s mind, he started to thin the voice on the radio must be the voice of God, because who else would know all these details about all these people’s lives? Then one day while waiting alone in the barber shop for a hair cut, he heard the voice of God from the radio say “just a simple trim, please.” “Oh my gosh,” thought Delmer, God is here in the barber shop, and he ran and hid under the sink in the dark bathroom until he was sure he had left!

“Tobias, Tobias, are you listening?” Who’s that? =-) Voices inside my own head or the Word of the Lord? The Lord is calling, but how often is my line busy? Or do I refuse to pick up on call waiting? Or do I run and hide under the sink until the voice stops? Redeemer Lutheran Church, are you listening? Who’s that? Our egos trying to manage this congregation or God calling us to learn how to serve and give glory to God together? God calling us to learn ever-better what our individual and collective gifts are so that we can serve God better. God calling us to learn time and time again about the communities around us; their needs, their hurts, their hopes. We do this to be able to respond to God’s call to us with our gifts to serve them.

Christ calls us as a community. You may think you arrived here at Redeemer by chance, or by the invitation of a friend, or finding the homepage online, by church shopping (which is, by the way, a terrible name for the process of discerning, or listening, for where God is leading us to reside in spiritual community with other Christians). You may think many things about how and why you arrived here at Redeemer, but the truth is that God in Christ has called us here and has plans and purposes for us, whether we understand then yet or not. Learning how to listen together to better understand those plans is not something we do once, but time and time again. After all, people come and go, pastors come and go, communities around congregations change, and God’s purposes for us through the years will probably also change. The constant is God seeking to move through us to bring Christ’s light, hope, and reconciling redemption to the world.

Samuel is serving in the temple while his teacher and boss Eli has already gone to bed. Samuel is lying there in the temple because, though prophets and prophecies were rare in those days as the text tells us, the lamp of the Lord in the temple had not yet gone out. People were still serving God. God needed Samuel, and Samuel was waiting. But it should encourage us all to see that Samuel did not at once recognize God’s voice for what it was. He assumes it must be Eli calling him and it is only once Eli tells him to go and acknowledge it is God calling that Samuel is ready to listen.

Becoming ready to hear God’s call to us is a life-long process for us as Christians.

Hopefully we were blessed with a good Sunday School like ours here at Redeemer, full of the stories of God in Scripture as well as lively and creative teachers. And as we grew through the years hopefully we were blessed with parents who made Church and God the center of our lives, providing the foundation to know what is essential. Yet the call from God and the ability to listen to God blossoms forth in different ways and at different times for each one of us.

Maybe for some it is in Sunday School years that they learn to hear God in their lives and this stays with them forever. Maybe for some it is during their teenage years, when they begin to help as assistants with the little kids. For some this call may be heard during service projects or in worship; in the music, in the breaking of the bread, in the Word preached and the fellowship of life shared. Maybe for some it is through a person or persons they admire and observing how those lives are grounded in and by practices of faith in Christ.

We are all called, all needed. Learning how we are called, how we are needed is something we must teach one another and practice time and time again.

So how do we learn to listen?

First, like Samuel, we need to be in the temple. We need to be in worship regularly, but we also need to develop lives of regular prayer more than just on Sundays. If you aren’t yet praying in the morning, maybe it is time to start, write a prayer to say every day after the alarm goes off, or simply begin by reciting the Lord’s Prayer, savoring each word as it passes over your tongue. If you already pray every morning, maybe add a daybook such as Christ in our Lives. If you already use Christ in Our Lives, maybe read the full Scripture passages instead of just doing just the snippet included with the daily reading. The point is to continually deepen our practices of daily faith. This is one of the ways we begin to make ourselves more available to “listen” to God, and thereby discover our calls.

You know, lest we think badly of Eli or Samuel for being asleep when God sought to call them…How often have we gone to sleep in life when God needed us to be awake and ready to listen? How often have we hardened our hearts or figured out the answer to a question without actually requesting God’s input along the way? And if you’re thinking you’ve always been awake or never hardened your heart to the Lord, just take a minute to review your personal pie chart of how much of your day you spend in prayer and reading scripture, singing hymns and silently listening for God’s revealing Word, the still small voice? In contrast with how much of your day is spent with your own agenda of things to do, people to see, shows and movies to watch, arguments to win, etc…

The bad news is that we the people of God are no less prone to falling asleep on the job than Eli nor are we any better at recognizing God’s voice than Samuel.

The good news is that we the people of God are no less called than Samuel, and God seeks just as much to speak with us, to open our ears to hear as with Samuel. The good news is that Christ calls Nathaniel not because he is worthy but because Christ is faithful, Christ is worthy and Christ has chosen Nathaniel as a disciple. Period. We are disciples because God in Christ chose us!

As we enter 2012 as a congregation, I pray and trust that with God’s help we will find ways to be deepened in learning and deepened in prayer. I trust that with God’s help we will be opened to listen for God’s call to us as a congregation and come to better understand what and who God needs us to be.

Called, like now retired ELCA pastor Robert Graetz and his family, who arrived in Montgomery AL, around the same time as Martin Luther King Jr, who actively worked with them on the bus boycotts and other activities leading to major change in this country, to greater justice not just for the few, but for the many. Like the people of Shekinha Chapel in IL, an ELCA congregation that focuses especially on music and the performing arts, youth, and mentoring programs to reach out to the surrounding community and equip those drawn in so that they in turn may become part of reaching out to others.

It is a strength of this congregation that we jump in and work on whatever surfaces, be it packages for soldiers in Iraq, improvements to classrooms, or new worship groups. Yet perhaps we might benefit from greater focus, from discerning, listening for a central mission that would define more clearly which projects, ideas, and activities should receive more of our focus. For the one congregation that focus became performing arts as a means to communicate the Gospel, for another to work ceaselessly for justice, equal rights for all. How and where are we called? What is our central purpose in this time and place?

Maybe we will need to learn more about our own individual and collective gifts in order to discover our central focus as well.. The congregation focusing on performing arts has access to a plethora of leaders and teachers with those gifts so it makes sense for them to do this.

Redeemer’s council will use our annual retreat this year to listen with Scripture and learn more about concrete steps we might take as a congregation to go from good ministry on God’s behalf to fantastic ministry on God’s behalf. Though we will be sharing more about this process with the congregation we all need to start praying now! Or step our prayer lives beyond where they have been. Listen more in the temple! Get to know God’s voice and call. Praying for Christ’s wisdom to be revealed to us as a congregation, praying for God’s will to be done in our midst, praying for further clarity and purpose so that we can become ever more who God would have us become.

Of this we can be sure: God knows us by name and has given us gifts with which to serve the Lord, both individually and as congregations. Now we need to roll up our sleeves, permanently bookmark Scripture on our homepages, and carve out increased prayer time on our blackberries.

Oh, and I should probably get myself fitted for a hearing aid.

Amen.