Listening For God's Call - 1 Samuel 3:1-10

(Click on the above title to listen to the sermon)

We live in a time where everyone, it seems, claims to speak for or have special insight into God – secular leaders, religious leaders, ordinary people, even Oprah. It is always difficult for a church to discern God’s will, but when everyone claims to have it, who do we listen to? Put differently: when are the words of disciples, especially leaders, the words of God? When do we hear God and think it’s someone else? When do we think someone is speaking for God when they are not?

I believe our lectionary passage from 1 Samuel 3 touches on these questions.

The collected book of Samuel (1 & 2) begins at the end of the period of the judges in Israel. As it opens, Eli is the current reigning judge over the tribes of Israel. Though we don’t know it at the beginning of Samuel, Eli is destined to be the last judge in Israel. In fact, though they certainly didn’t know it at the time, Israel was poised for a period of great transition. They were getting ready to transition from a tribal state to a nation; from rule by judges to rule by kings; and from Eli to Samuel. One of the first things that God told Samuel was that he was going to do something new, something that would make the ears of those who heard about it tingle (vs. 11).

I am sure that on a macro, geo-political level, there were many reasons for Israel to make these transitions. However, there are some clues in 1 Samuel 3 that give us at least one perspective for the transition. The chapter opens by telling us that a time had arisen when hearing the Word of the Lord and visions were rare. This is probably due in no small part to the situation at the end of the book of Judges, where we are told that everyone did right in their own sight (the evil ways of Eli’s sons, who were also priests, probably didn’t help things either, and were the specific reason for Eli’s downfall). Additionally, we are told in chapter 3 that Eli was losing his vision. Now while this is a physical condition, its placement in the text dramatically symbolizes the fact that the word of the Lord and visions were rare. Furthermore, the story takes place at night, a dramatic effect that only enhances our understanding of the bleak spiritual landscape in Israel.

As chapter 3 begins, we are told that Samuel, who at this time appears to be a young boy serving as a mere functionary in the temple at Shiloh, received a call from a nameless, faceless voice while he was sleeping. Three times he heard this voice and three times he believed it was the voice of Eli, calling from another room. We, the readers, know that it is God calling Samuel, but Samuel doesn’t know it. (The fact that Samuel doesn’t recognize the call of God is no bad reflection on him, in fact the text even tells us that he had not yet received God’s call and did not yet know the Lord (vs. 7). I suppose if I had been Samuel hearing this voice in the middle of the night, I might be tempted to seek out psychiatric care.) It was only after the 3rd time that he heard this voice that Eli, perhaps due to his diminishing ability to discern God’s voice, recognized the possibility that it was God calling. So, on the fourth visit by the voice of God, Samuel responds and begins his prophetic career.

On its face, the story marks the beginning of Samuel’s call to be a prophet, and as such there is little surprising to it – Samuel joins a long list of people in scripture who are also called to be God’s witnesses and prophets. What is surprising to me in the story, however, is that God called Samuel. I mean, if I were God and needed to get my message out and disseminated to the people, I would probably operate through the hierarchical structures that I had already established. I would probably start talking to Eli again, or maybe go through one of his sons who were priests and leaders of the people themselves (I know they were reprobates, but so were a number of people that God called to work with). If I didn’t like either of those options, I might even go to another recognized leader among the people, someone with some standing and credibility. I certainly would not choose a mere boy serving as a functionary in the temple. It is to Eli’s credit that he not only recognized that God might be calling Samuel, but accepted that God was calling Samuel and not him. Eli seems to have been able to accept the fact that God was acting in an unexpected way, calling an unexpected person, to do something new in Israel.

It is at this point that Samuel 3 intersects with the questions that I posed a few paragraphs ago. Sometimes we grow comfortable in the temple - grow comfortable with our worship services, comfortable with our lives, comfortable with our ministries. But maybe it is precisely because of our comfort in the temple, so to speak, that we forget that God does not always do what we expect; that the voice of the Lord can be found in unexpected people from unexpected places. Isn’t this the challenge of our gospel reading from John 1? When Philip told Nathaniel that the Messiah had come in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, what was Nathaniel’s response? “Can anything good come from Nazareth?”

I do not believe that the challenge of the church is to follow God. I think that if we collectively figured out what God wanted us to do and where God wanted us to go then we would show up in our millions. I believe the challenge of the church is to remember that God does not come to us in expected ways from expected people and expected places. God’s will is not always disseminated to us through the expected channels. Therefore, we must find ways to intentionally look for where God is speaking, acting, and calling. It will require wiser heads than mine to figure out the process for how to engage this process. But I believe that remembering to look and listen is a good first step.