Episodes
Sunday Feb 15, 2015
Listen!
Sunday Feb 15, 2015
Sunday Feb 15, 2015
Listen!
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC, February 15, 2015, Transfiguration Sunday.
Text: Mark 9:2-9
“Listen for what the Spirit is saying…” This is often the invitation as we prepare to hear the words of scripture here in worship. Listen and hear what the Spirit is saying… I remember how this invitation struck me my first Sunday here at Foundry. There is, it seems to me, an openness about it, an admission that there is meaning in and around and underneath the printed words, a message that may be for all of us and—on some occasions—something that the Spirit might be trying to say especially to me or you—something that others might not hear at all. The invitation to listen for the Spirit and to hear what the Spirit is saying also affirms that God is involved, that (as our United Church of Christ sisters and brothers remind us) God is still speaking.
I trust that we all know the challenges involved in truly listening. When I have counseled folks who are preparing for marriage, we spend time practicing “active listening” a process in which one person speaks and then the other person reflects back to the speaker what was heard. It doesn’t take long to realize just how much practice it takes to really listen and to hear what the other person is saying. Without practice, we end up receiving the other person’s words, but mostly hearing what we think they are going to say, or—even as they are still speaking—we are formulating our response. In other words, often when we think we are listening to someone else, we’re mostly hearing ourselves. Bede Griffiths, the late English Benedictine monk who founded an ashram in India, once said that he didn’t think “Western Christianity has the power to lead people to God anymore. All they keep doing is meeting themselves and calling it God.”[i] Though I think this is an exaggeration and that people in both East and West can fall into this trap, Griffith’s point certainly resonates. What he experienced in India were folks with the willingness to get themselves out of the way so that God could enter in.
Six days prior to the extraordinary events we read about today in our Gospel, Jesus told his disciples what was going to happen to him—that he would suffer, be rejected, killed, and then after three days rise again. Peter didn’t want to hear it. And Jesus’ response was, “You are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” (Mk. 8:31ff.) Jesus goes on to speak to the disciples and the larger crowds about what a “divine thing” would look like: deny self, take up your cross, lose your life for Christ’s sake and for the sake of the gospel, because that is the only way to truly have or save or keep your life. And six days after Jesus shares these words, he takes Peter, James, and John up a mountain to pray. And in the midst of wondrous and fearful visions, difficult to explain, there comes one very clear message for everyone present: “This is my Beloved child. LISTEN to him.” Listen.
One would think that such an amazing experience coupled with this clear message would have an impact on those present. But it seems that listening was just as hard for the first disciples as it is for us. Because Jesus has to keep repeating himself; the same scenario that happened before the trip up the mountain happens again—twice! Jesus speaks of his suffering, death, and resurrection. The disciples, clearly NOT practicing active listening, completely miss the point. The first time they immediately start arguing about who is greatest among them. And the next time James and John—who witnessed the vision on the mountain and heard the voice from the cloud—ask to be seated next to Jesus in his glorious reign to come. Both times, Jesus responds with the same message: “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” (Mk. 9:35, 10:44) Die to self so that you can rise to a new life in God’s love, a life that manifests in self-giving service to others. Three times this pattern plays out; three times Jesus speaks of dying and rising. Why was it so hard for the first disciples to listen and to hear what the Spirit was saying? Why is it so difficult for us?
Well, I think Bede Griffiths was right about how difficult it is for us to get ourselves out of the way so that we can actually be open to receive from God, so that we can truly listen to a voice that is not just the echo of our own. And then, if we are able to grow quiet enough to get the message, the message itself presents its own challenge—even when we know, intellectually, its promise. Because Jesus’ teaching about dying to self and rising to a new life of loving service threatens the status quo of our lives—it requires change. Jesus’ words about denying the false self and claiming our true humanity is in direct opposition to the world that tells us to invest in self-help, self-promotion, and self-defense. Jesus’ insistence that we can both receive his message and follow him challenges any notion of ourselves as either too important or too insignificant to serve others. Jesus’ call to serve others is not a cozy, comfortable idea that we can accomplish by simply “liking” certain posts on FaceBook or reTweeting the pithy ideas of other people (though in my experience even doing that can put us in an uncomfortable position with friends and family). To really listen to Jesus is to hear ourselves being called out of complacency, to hear ourselves being given work to do, responsibility not only for ourselves and our own stuff, but for the loving care of all that we encounter. It is to hear a call to true solidarity with suffering, to sit with it in ourselves and with others and to allow brokenness to lead you where it will. Jesus knew where it was leading him. // And it was only after he was led there, all the way to the cross and beyond, that those first disciples really heard what the Spirit was saying. Their lives were changed forever.
I don’t know how we finally manage to get to the point where we get ourselves out of the way so that we can actually listen and to be changed by what we hear. My faith and experience suggest that God’s grace is the primary agent. But however it happens, I know it does, these moments of revelation when somehow the voice of God manages to get through. I’ve heard testimonies describing some of them: a vision in the desert, the consolation of friends in the midst of loss, a transcendent experience on a mission trip, the birth of a child, a moment of deep suffering... Spiritual writer, Frederick Buechner, tells of a moment in his life when something broke him open so that he could really listen. He received a phone call from a friend who was in crisis and needed help. At that time in his life, Buechner was in a kind of retreat from the pain and suffering of the world, trying to discover a sense of peace. But, he says, “my friend’s broken voice on the phone was a voice calling me out into that dangerous world not simply for his sake, as I suddenly saw it, but also for my sake. The shattering revelation of that moment was that true peace, the high and bidding peace that passeth all understanding, is to be had not in retreat from the battle, but only in the thick of the battle. To journey for the sake of saving our own lives is little by little to cease to live in any sense that really matters, even to ourselves, because it is only by journeying for the world’s sake—even when the world bores and sickens and scares you half to death—that little by little we start to come alive.”[ii]
This, it seems, is the deep truth that Kayla Mueller had discovered at a very young age. Like so many others, I have been inspired by Mueller, the 26 year old woman who was held hostage by Islamic State militants for 18 months and whose death was recently confirmed. She devoted her life to serving others, most recently working with Syrian refugees. In a letter she wrote to her family in 2011, Kayla says, “I find God in the suffering eyes reflected in mine…I've known for some time what my life’s work is, using my hands as tools to relieve suffering.”[iii] Somehow, Kayla Mueller not only listened and heard God’s voice, but was given grace and courage to respond and to be a loving, healing presence in the broken places of the world. Hers was a life of sacrificial love and service and is a powerful testimony to the impact that such a life can make—in life and even in death. And, I must add, I am thankful for Kayla’s life that truly reflects the beauty and the heart of our Christian faith in a time when, as one writer says, “a perverse form of Christianity has emerged in American culture: a Christianity that conflates the glorification of God and guns, that incites the hatred of Muslims, that sees wealth and power as signs of God's blessings.”[iv] The words and actions of Kayla Mueller offer a welcome corrective to these perversions of the Way of Jesus. She listened and heard the true call of the Gospel.
A couple of weeks ago, a post appeared on my FaceBook page from a young man I met four years ago in Liberia. Michael must be about 16 years old now. He was a student at the school where my former congregation is engaged in ongoing mission and, like most of the students there, faces a very challenging future with few resources. Every so often, I will receive a message from Michael, but the other day I found myself staring at the screen for longer than usual. His post simply said, “Don’t forget me.” Michael’s post seemed to slice through the inner prattling that would keep me from hearing him and I just held his words for a while. That same week, I had an encounter with a woman who said to me, “You don’t see me.” And another conversation with a man who said, “I want you to know me…so that I won’t feel so lonely.” And I began to hear a voice—as out of a cloud—saying “Listen! Listen to my beloved one…” Listen to Jesus in the voices of the vulnerable and the hurting and the angry. Listen for what the Spirit is saying even in the midst of overwhelming need, even in the midst of deep discomfort and struggle, even in the midst of heartbreaking loneliness… I have been bringing these thoughts and words and encounters into my prayers these past weeks, asking for guidance, mindful of the fact that I am finite and can only do what I can do. But I trust that God wants to teach me something or lead me somewhere or stretch me somehow to be a more humble, loving servant through the words I have received. I have been trying to listen.
And that is what we are all asked to do today, to try to listen. And to remember that what we’re asked to listen to is both spoken by Jesus and embodied by him: humble service and self-giving love. No one of us can meet every need. Only some will be led to refugee camps and foreign countries. But we can pray for the grace to truly hear the voice of Christ—in the words of scripture, in the witness of the saints past and present, in the voices of those all around us who may be saying things hard to hear—and to be open to the particular ways that God is speaking, calling, acting in our own lives. Listen for what the Spirit is saying in the suffering of your life as much as in the joy, in the anxiety as much as in the peaceful place, in the drudgery as much as in the beauty. Listen with a humble heart, a quiet mind, an open door. And be ready to step back onto the journey from the place of revelation and transfiguration to wherever the path—and God’s love—leads. It won’t be simple or easy—that is certain. But what is even more certain still is that life, deep and true, awaits.
[i] Bede Griffiths quoted in Richard Rohr’s Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, Cincinnati: Franciscan Media, 1995, p. 95.
[ii] Frederick Buechner, Listening to Your Life, HarperSanFrancisco, 1992, p. 22
[iii] Found at http://ncronline.org/blogs/grace-margins/kayla-muellers-encounter-suffering-god on 2/14/2015.
[iv] Ibid.
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