Mediation: by Wendell Berry, a Sabbath Poem
I go among trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places
where I left them, asleep like cattle.
Then what is afraid of me comes
and lives a while in my sight.
What it fears in me leaves me,
and the fear of me leaves it.
It sings, and I hear its song.
Then what I am afraid of comes.
I live for a while in its sight.
What I fear in it leaves it,
and the fear of it leaves me.
It sings, and I hear its song.
After days of labor,
mute in my consternations,
I hear my song at last,
and I sing it. As we sing,
the day turns, the trees move.
Reading: by Marc Hartzman from God Made Me Do It – True Stories of the worst advice the Lord has ever given his followers (p.32)
False Prophesy – “I heard the Lord saying, ‘I have something else for you to do. I want you to run for president of the United States.’ I assure you that I am going to be the next president of the United States.” (Pat Robertson, religious broadcaster, during his presidential bid of 1988)
Robertson has been chatting with God since the 1950s, when he received divine instructions to purchase a bankrupt UHF station. It eventually became the Christian Broadcasting Network and has spread to 180 countries, where it is heard in seventy-one languages.
Since that time Robertson’s many conversations with the Lord have led to many not-so-accurate predictions over the years. Of course, in this case, Robertson may have simply misinterpreted the message. God said, “I want you to run.” He didn’t say, “I want you to win.”
George H. W. Bush won the election in a landslide, while Robertson didn’t even make it on the ticket…
Reading: from a poem by Pattiann Rogers entitled “The Creation of the Inaudible”
Maybe no one can distinguish which voice
Is god’s voice sounding in a summer dusk
Because he calls with the same rising frequency,
The same rasp and rattling rustle the cicadas use
As they cling to the high leaves in the glowing
Dust of the oaks.
His exclamations might blend so precisely with the final
[Cries] of the swallows settling before dark
That no one will ever be able to say with certainty,
”That last long cry winging over the rooftop
Came from god.“
Breathy and low, the vibrations of his nightly
Incantations could easily be masked by the scarcely
Audible hush of the lakeline dealing with the rocky shore,
And when a thousand dry sheaths of rushes and thistles
Stiffen and shiver in an autumn wind, anyone can imagine
How quickly and irretrievably his whisper might be lost…
…Even if he found the perfect chant this morning
And even if he played the perfect strings to accompany it,
Still, no one could be expected to know,
Because the blind click beetle flipping in midair,
And the slider turtle easing through the black iris bog,
And two savannah pines shedding dawn in staccato pieces
Of falling sun are already engaged in performing
The very same arrangement themselves.
Reading: by Anthony De Mello from Taking Flight (p. 29)
An old man would sit motionless in church for hours on end. One day a priest asked him what God talked to him about.
“God doesn’t talk. He just listens” was his reply.
“Well, then what do you talk to him about?”
“I don’t talk either. I just listen.”
The Voice of God
A Sermon Delivered on March 4, 2012
By
The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann
“You have the voice of God.” That’s what someone said to me after a worship service a few weeks back. “You have the voice of God.”
Now, it often happens that after church a few folks tell me they enjoyed the service, or that a reading I selected seemed particularly relevant to them that day. And, of course, I am always glad when that’s the case.
But what doesn’t often happen, is that someone describes my delivery of the morning’s message as “the voice of God.” “Wow, was the sermon that good?” part of me wanted to ask. Before I could, though, he continued, “yes, the settings of the sound system are just right.”
You see, he was one of the audio experts who helped acquire and install our new sound system last year. He has a keen ear for the pitch and timber of a voice amplified with the help of this pulpit mic, the loud speakers, and all our new and assorted digital and computerized audio equipment I couldn’t begin to explain to you.
The voice of God, he told me, is when a voice has that perfect round and full tone. You can sometimes hear it on a well-done radio show, or when using a particular old-fashioned but high-quality microphone.
I was humbled to learn that the divine dimensions of the morning’s service had less to do with my brilliant theological message, and more to do with technologies I could neither control nor completely understand. But, I was glad that our sound system was working well.
The exchange has stuck with me, because it left me wondering, where can we really hear God’s voice? If not in a preacher’s pronouncements, or in perfect sound system settings – where then?
Have you ever heard the voice of God? A lot of people claim they have. Prophets and politicians, it seems, have a direct line to the divine. Pat Robertson’s story about God telling him to run for president is just one of many examples of people claiming a divine mandate. Strangely, it often seems God’s will is remarkably compatible with their own ambitions.
“I heard the Lord saying, ‘I have something for you to do…’” Robertson recalls. I wonder what God’s voice sounded like to him. Did he hear the Lord, the way I hear Morning Edition on Public Radio? Was it like my wife Elaine’s voice on the phone, telling me what I should get from the grocery store on my way home?
I wonder if Robertson had a chance to engage God in conversation, like one of the people we see more and more often at street corners now, who seem to be carrying on animated conversations with themselves. And only as we walk by, do we see they are wearing a wireless cell phone earpiece, and we realize they are not hearing imaginary voices in their head.
* * *
It is a wonderful thing to have a clear sense of the sacred. Feeling God’s benevolent presence in our lives, seeing a divine design in the events of the world, being seized by a sense of wonder and awe at the splendor of the stars on a clear winter night, or the beautiful blazing colors of the sunset across a big mid western sky – these are surely some of life’s deepest joys.
But things get a lot more complicated once God actually starts speaking to us. People sometimes do dangerous and desperate things, because they believe God told them to. God tells some people to bomb abortion clinics, or to fly airplanes into tall buildings, or to go to war.
We are right to be wary when anyone claims to have heard the voice of God, and uses God’s ultimate authority as justification for unthinkable acts: It wasn’t my idea. I didn’t want to do it. God told me to.
Some people who hear voices in their head are mentally ill. There is a medical term for this. Doctors and psychologists have studied it. There are treatments and medications that can help.
With these pathologies in mind, some say all “God talk” is nonsense. There are no voices and there is no God. But I think that is going too far.
People whose religious imagination allows for the possibility of a heavenly voice are not mentally ill. Imagining God’s voice as an audible sound, powerful, loud, compelling, and clear as a bell – throughout religious history this has not been considered pathology but poetry.
The poet who wrote the book of Job beautifully describes one way we might imagine the voice of God. He or she writes:
Listen! Listen to the roar of his voice,
to the rumbling that comes from his mouth.
He unleashes his lightning beneath the whole heaven
and sends it to the ends of the earth.
After that comes the sound of his roar;
he thunders with his majestic voice.
When his voice resounds,
he holds nothing back.
God’s voice thunders in marvelous ways;
he does great things beyond our understanding.
(Job 37:2-5)
This is the way someone imagined God’s voice twenty-seven centuries ago. But this is not the only way it was understood. Another ancient author from the same period describes God’s voice in a story about the prophet Elijah.
As the story goes, Elijah is hiding in a mountain cave, pursued by his enemies, and hoping for some sort of divine intervention that might save him. He is waiting for a sign from God. So while he is cowering in his cave, Elijah hears a mighty wind, that tears at the mountain, and breaks rocks to pieces, but God is not in the wind. Then he hears an earthquake, that shakes the earth and throws him to the ground, but God is not in the earthquake. Then he hears the sound of a raging firestorm that lights up the sky, burning up everything within its reach, but God is not in the fire. And after that there is silence. And in the silence Elijah hears a still, small voice. This still, small voice is the voice of God.
* * *
Silence is a central part of Quaker religious practice. Worshippers gather in their place of meeting, and sit in silence, expectantly waiting for the Holy Spirit to move someone in the room to speak. And when someone is indeed inspired to speak, it is the voice of the Holy Spirit the worshippers hear spoken aloud, by a person in their midst.
The author Parker Palmer is a Quaker. He wrote a small book called Let Your Life Speak – Listening for the Voice of Vocation. It’s a largely autobiographical reflection on the meaning of vocation, and our human effort to figure out what to do with our lives – or how to live a life of purpose and meaning. He writes: “The story of my life journey is no more or less important than anyone else’s. It is simply the best source of data I have on a subject where generalizations often fail but truth may be found in the details.” (p. 19)
He grew up in Chicago, and went to Carleton College in Minnesota and from there to Union Theological Seminary in New York City. At that stage of his life, as a young man, he was certain that ministry was his calling - just as certain as he had been a few years earlier, that he should go into advertising, and then into aviation.
He writes,
“So it came as a great shock when, at the end of my first year, God spoke to me – in the form of mediocre grades and massive misery – and informed me that under no conditions was I to become an ordained leader in His or Her church. Always responsive to authority, as one was if raised in the fifties, I left Union and went west, to the University of California at Berkeley. There I spent much of the sixties working on a Ph.D. in sociology and learning to be not quite so responsive to authority.”
As it turned out sociology was also not the final place God seemed to be calling him. Parker Palmer’s journey was marked by twists and turns, that also led him into the deepest depths of depression, and out the other side. Now an author and teacher, his journey continues.
The voice of God, for Palmer, is the voice of his own life. Hearing God means discerning his own deepest knowledge. The insights he gained were not what he expected. As it turns out, God spoke to him through his failures as much as through he achievements, as much through misery and despair as through a clear sense of calling.
* * *
How do we know whether we are right or wrong about God’s voice? Are we deluding ourselves? Are we mistaking our own small-minded interests with sacred intent? We may sincerely believe God wants us to go into advertising, or aviation, or be president of the United States, but we might be mistaken.
What does God’s voice sound like? There is no single answer to this question. But it is still a very good question, that leads to more questions.
“What does God’s voice sound like?” leads to the question: Is there indeed something sacred at work in the world? Is there something sacred in the sound of cicadas on a summer night, in the gentle waves of a lake touching the shore, in the whisper of the autumn wind? Is there something sacred in the sound of the click beetle flipping in midair or the slider turtle easing through the black bog?
“What does God’s voice sound like?” leads to the question: Is a deeper purpose guiding our lives? And if there is, what should we do to fulfill it? And if we don’t have a sense of purpose, what we should do about that?
To stop and think about the possibility of a greater purpose challenges us to be more purposeful. Simply contemplating the possibility of deeper meaning puts us on a path to more mindful and meaningful living.
We will never know with certainty where the sound of God’s voice begins, and the sounds of the world end. Or in the case of the Quaker: where God’s voice ends and our voices begin.
Life will always remain something we can neither fully control, nor completely understand.
The one thing we know for sure, is that we don’t know for sure what God sounds like. Instead of expecting absolute answers, the wisest among us know it is better simply to wonder.
Maybe the old man who sits motionless in church for hours got it right. He simply listens, knowing that God will not speak – not in any intelligible way. But by simply listening deeply he keeps open a door between the highest heavens and the depths of his soul. He creates a direct line between his highest aspirations and his deepest longing.
Maybe simply listening is enough. Maybe listening for sound is the best way to find a deep stillness. Maybe questioning is enough, even if we know we will never find a final answer. And maybe this is as it should be.
Our lives are still unfolding. Deeper meaning and greater purpose is still within our reach. There is more for us to do. There is more for us to learn about what it means to live our lives to the fullest. We can learn to be more loving, more forgiving, more generous, more kind. We can learn to better serve the greater good.
May we have the wisdom to listen and the wisdom to learn.
May we have the courage to live the life we truly long to live:
each of us a better person,
each of us doing our small part to build a better world.
Amen.
