St
Luke’s
“Hear what the Spirit is saying to the Church.”
Words we should all recognise, after all we hear them often enough – twice this
morning alone. Bit do we really hear them? What is it, I wonder, that the Spirit is saying? If anything, or are we just not
paying attention?
I’m quite deliberately taking as many
opportunities as I can at the moment to focus us on identifying our vision, and
today’s no exception. Once again, I’m spending so much time on this because I
honestly believe it’s crucial for us to get our head around it. We can really
only begin to look at what our ongoing mission is – as a parish and as
individuals – after we first figure out what our big picture vision is, and
that, I believe, is not an easy thing to do.
Last week I spoke a bit about what we might need
to expect in terms of a response to our vision from others, this week I want to
get down to brass tacks and ask the question, where should we be looking to
find it?
‘Looking’, of course, is an apt word when we’re
considering our vision, but I don’t think it’s terribly accurate. Listening, I
suspect, is a much more accurate term. Certainly that’s the case if we’re going
to take our first reading this morning into account.
It’s a great story, that first reading – one of
my favourites actually. Elijah has been off carrying out the work he believes
God has set him to do, and grizzly work it was at that. More
importantly though, it’s work that has set some very powerful people against
him, most notably Queen Jezebel. So now she’s after his hide and Elijah
runs away scared. Who can blame him? Well, he blames himself and in what we
might call a crisis of faith he sets out to find God again, and in this quest
he hears a voice telling him to go up and stand on the top of the mountain and
God will soon pass by.
There’s just so much we can take from this
reading. We could talk about God’s call or faith or how we respond when we feel
threatened or the difference between being on the mountain and living in the
valleys, but I don’t want to look at any of that today. What I do want to focus
on is Elijah’s quest to find God.
So Elijah’s at the top of this mountain, and
he’s waiting for God to pass by and of course he’s expecting this to be quite a
spectacular occasion and then suddenly there’s a great wind. We’re talking an
absolutely massive wind, a wind that could split mountains, the Bible says, and
Elijah thinks, ‘this is it, here comes God.’ But God wasn’t in the wind. Then
comes a huge, earth-shattering earthquake, and again Elijah thinks, ‘here comes
God,’ but God wasn’t in the earthquake. And then, in the wake of the quake
springs up a gigantic fire, and Elijah’s convinced, ‘this time, here comes
God.’ But God wasn’t in the fire. And then there was silence. Sheer silence. And just as Elijah thinks, God’s not coming,
he finds God, in the silence.
I think it’s a great story, and a very, very
important one, although we might easily miss the point. When I first sat down
to think about it I thought, ‘OK, so God was in the silence, ipso facto, God is
found in ordinary things. After all, what’s more ordinary than silence?’ And I
thought I was very clever, because it would have made a great sermon – God in
the ordinary, especially as we’re now into ordinary time, but then I realised I
wasn’t really all that clever, because I realised that, actually, there’s
nothing very ordinary about silence.
Rob Bell, an American teacher and the frontman for the Nooma DVD series
that some of us are familiar with, Rob tells the story of meeting Bernie
Krause. It’s a name that probably doesn’t mean much to us, but Bernie Krause is
the man who has specialised for nearly 50 years in recording nature sounds for
films and TV programmes, and he recounts that in 1968 if he wanted to record an
hour of natural sound – no cars, no aircraft, nothing artificial or mechanical
– in 1968 that took around 15 hours of recording. In 2005, Bernie Krause says,
to get that same hour of natural sound took more like 2 thousand hours of recording.
2 thousand hours. We live in a world of almost
constant noise. There’s always some sort of sound around us. It’s so constant,
in fact, that most of us never even notice it. That’s the world we live in,
that’s the world we’re used to, and our church really isn’t any different. When
you think about it, if we’re honest, in every hour of worship service how much
time do we spend in silence? I’d suggest no more than about 3 minutes – and
that’s including the 90 second to 2 minutes of deliberate silence we allow
after our sermons.
That’s it. When we think about it I suspect we
actually spend so much time talking about God and to God and even for God, that
we forget to actually listen, we forget to actually do what we say we’re going
to do every week – hear what the Spirit is saying to the Church.
We forget because it’s just not part of who we are, it’s not part of our culture. We’re not used to
silence and when we do encounter it we’re not particular comfortable. We leave
the TV on at home, even when we’re not watching it. We have the radio on in the
car as background noise. Wherever we go we encounter sounds designed to make
sure we don’t have to deal with silence. Even libraries these days will often
have music playing. It’s almost impossible to find silence and when we do we
immediately try to fill it with something else.
But what if we were Elijah, on the mountain,
waiting for God to pass us by, would we then take the time to stop, to be
still, to be silent, and to listen? To let the silence just be silent so that
God can actually, eventually, get a word in? Could we do that? Could we give
God space to speak, knowing – as our Gospel reading today demonstrates – that
when God does speak incredible things can happen?
That’s our invitation for today, although really
it’s more of a challenge. Where should we look for our vision? Probably not in
the flashy and the dramatic, or even in the most obvious of places, or maybe in
all of the above, but I doubt they’re the only ones. Ultimately I believe we need
above all to make time and space to listen and to hear, and I want to invite us
to do that now. As we sit in silence, let us be still and hear what the Spirit
is saying to the Church …