Hearing voices 010707
Ps 29 Luke 3
Can you see God? No but can see what God does.
Can you hear God? No but can hear what God says
Listen….coughing, wind, rain, baby etc.
God is speaking all the time
Listen
Bumper sticker: I do what my rice krispies tell me.
Hearing voices can be seen as a sign of mental illness—if J was being baptized here today and we all heard a voice from heaven, we’d be pretty surprised and not a little scared! Doo doo doo doo
But hearing voices shows up in both of our readings today.
In psalm 29, the thunderstorm psalm, God’s voice is the pelting rain on the waters, the rolling peal of thunder, the flashes of lightning, the shaking of the earth that a thunderclap makes
I remember one year we had a wild windstorm during a sermon on that psalm, and that really was a bit disconcerting!
The psalmist is incredibly alert to the voice of God, not taking it literally, like the schizophrenic who really hears voices, but as a metaphor – this poet is open to the possibility that God is trying to communicate, even through the weather.
Of course, the ancients had a much more involved sense of the gods than we have in our western world. To them, everything spoke of the divine – poor crops meant God’s displeasure, wealth meant God’s pleasure, success in battle meant God was on your side. In our culture, over the last few centuries, the west has relegated God to heaven where ‘he’ might be in control, but ‘he’d’ better stay there, except when we want to claim ‘he’ is on our side.
Generally we believe we can function quite well on our own, thank you – rugged western individualism.
Fortunately, many of us are beginning to regain a sense of the ancient mystery of the ungendered divine, while managing to be less literal than both the ancients and the current fundamentalists. This cosmic God is indeed an active part of nature, but without the control; God’s voice is indeed to be heard calling in thunderstorm and mountain beauty, whispering in shuffling feet and crying babies, singing comfort by hospital beds, shouting challenges in comfortable pews, and speaking hope in homeless shelters.
And God’s voice comes again, quite differently, tho still as a metaphor, in the Luke reading, where we find Jesus putting himself in a situation where the voice might be heard. This text might well reflect an early Christian liturgical setting – a church scene if you like…he comes to be baptized by John, is in an attitude of prayer, when the HS shows up like a dove (another metaphor within a metaphor), and the voice is heard:
Who would not want to hear such a voice? I LOVED it growing up when my mother or father affirmed me. Whom of us does not yearn to hear the voice that says
And to hear it from God! Wow.
That’s one reason I come to worship. To put myself in a position where I might hear more clearly the voice of God…more clearly than I can in my too busy life.
Quote from Wayne Muller in Legacy of the heart re Chinese word for busy – two characters, heart and killing.
It is hard to hear the voice of anyone if we’re not listening, if we’re not attentive to the possibility, if we’re too busy.
In our comfort zones, at home, at work, in college dorm or school, even in church, we can be too heart-killing to listen.
But
In worship, I can be still long enough to listen. As we pour water on a baby’s head, the voice can be heard; as we dip bread into juice, the voice speaks
On a mountain peak, or a deserted beach, we can be still enough to listen
From a warm room looking out on a thunderstorm, we can be attentive enough to hear
Out of their comfort zone, like at a homeless shelter, many of our people can be still enough to listen
…because, like Jesus, we put ourselves in a place where hearing the voice is possible
Isn’t it awesome, that the power and majesty of the psalmist’s cosmic divinity is interested in the individual human being?
God is always speaking, trying to get our attention, trying to make us hear what we need to hear: a voice of affirmation, a voice of pleasure, a voice of challenge….
X you are my child Y I love you Z you give me great pleasure.
God’s voice is speaking. Are we listening?