Not everyone who calls you by name actually knows you.
My inbox is full of emails that begin with lines like:
“Hi Benjamin, Thanks for your recent order!”
“Greetings Benjamin! The bill from your recent visit is now due.”
“Benjamin, If you upgrade now, you can get free carry-on bags…”
“Benjamin – It’s urgent that you sign this petition now!”
“Hey Benjamin, We’re so glad that you’re a part of the Visible Mobile family…”
Even if companies and organizations have my name from my credit card info – it doesn’t mean that they know me.
If they knew me then they would know that most folks haven’t called me Benjamin since I was a little kid, except my mom and soccer buddies.
Not everyone who calls you by your name actually knows you and loves you. So, how do you know when it is God who is calling?
Sometimes the voice of God might sound at first like folks of our lives bothering us. In the dark stillness of nighttime, a boy named Samuel hears someone calling out his name.
“Samuel, Samuel!” the voice calls out.
Samuel is used to hearing his name called out by Eli, the priest and guardian of the tent of meeting and the ark of the covenant at Shiloh. Eli is Samuel’s caregiver and mentor and he’s an old man who can’t see well, so he often pipes up when he needs help. Samuel goes and checks on Eli. “Go back to bed,” says Eli, “I wasn’t calling you.”
Two more times this happens, Samuel hears his name being called out, goes to Eli, saying, “Here, I am, for you called me.”
Finally on the third time, Eli senses that it is God who is calling Samuel. And he tells him to go back, wait for the voice again, and respond “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”
Eli could have blown Samuel off and done what I do when I can’t sleep – gotten him a glass of milk and some graham crackers and told him to try to turn his pillow to the cool side and turn the and count slowly to fifty. But he didn’t. Eli isn’t perturbed or bothered by these midnight interruptions, he simply invites Samuel to be open to what God might be saying.
Who are the Eli’s in your life?
Who are those people who have listened to the deeper question behind your questions and invited you to wait for God there?
Who are the wise souls who have counseled you to remain attentive in the dark, reminding you that the night is as bright as day to God and you don’t have to fear?
Who has invited you to bravely ask the question, “God, is that You?” and invited you to wait for the answer?
Waiting and actually listening to someone can be a really scary thing, because you don’t know what might be said and you don’t know what might be asked of you.
God ends up telling Samuel that the message he is about to give, “will make the ears tingle of anyone who hears of it” – it’s a message of judgment, that Eli’s priestly lineage will end, that the wrongdoing of Eli’s two sons Hophni and Phinehas can’t be made right:
These two guys weren’t just ornery PKs (priest’s kids) – they were corrupt and abusive. The author of I Samuel calls them “scoundrels.” They took for themselves the best fatty and delicious parts of animals that people had brought to be sacrificed as an offering. They used the power of their religious position to coerce women who worked at the place of worship.
God gives Samuel, even though he is only a boy, an intense message: Go critique your mentor and his sons.
I don’t think Samuel was able to go back to sleep after his encounter with God. But I think that this fierce message also might have made sense to him.
And that’s because of his mom, Hannah. After not having being able to have kids, she became pregnant and gave birth and named him Samuel, which means God has placed, God has given. After Hannah had breastfed him and Samuel was able to eat solid food she brought him to live with Eli in service of God.
She prayed a remarkable prayer of exaltation to God at this moment of releasing Samuel, a prayer that is echoed later in the gospels in the songs of Elizabeth and Mary. Hannah’s prayer is about the God who breaks the weapons of the mighty and girds the feeble with strength and gives rich food to the hungry and children to the barren. Hannah’s God raises up the poor and needy.
As Samuel tosses and turns after hearing God speak, I imagine him testing what was just said to him, sifting the words through all the words he’d heard others say about God in the short years of his childhood.
And for us, whenever we sense that God might be calling us or nudging us, that God might be speaking our name and trying to get our attention…we test this direction from God alongside the best resources passed down to us in the tradition of the faith. We listen to God alongside living companions in the church and the songs and theology and wisdom and stories of the centuries.
And this is why I can get a little bit queasy when folks talk flippantly about how God has told them something, if they don’t also have deep relationships to a community of accountability.
But do I also believe that God continues to speak to us.
As a church, we cultivate curiosity, and plant seeds of patience in one other so that we can listen to God. We make space for one another to come to know that truth that God calls each of us by name and knows each of us intimately, just as we are.
After sitting with this passage for this past week – the thing that lingers with me – isn’t the prophetic critique of the abuses of Eli’s priestly lineage, valid as they were. It isn’t even this amazing story of faith development – where a precocious child challenges the establishment.
What sticks with me is just how many times God calls Samuel by his name. Three straight times God calls out, “Samuel, Samuel!” to no response. But on the fourth time, “Samuel, Samuel!” Samuel is listening.
Before God invites us to share a risky message or follow on the unknown journey of discipleship, God calls out to us by name. The calling of Jesus’ disciples took this pattern.
The rest of our life of faith flows out from our response to God’s calling to us. “Here, I am,” we say back to God. “Speak, Lord, your servant is listening.”
Prayer is listening before it is speaking.
Prayer is being with God so we can hear what God commands.
So today what I hope you will take from our worship together is that you are fearfully and wonderfully made and that God knows you on a deeper level than you can comprehend. And God calls out to you by name, wanting you to be present with God.
I pray that are you awakened at night in your bed and stopped in your tracks in the bright humid noonday sun by the God who calls out to you, inviting you to an abundant life of love.
And as as community, I pray that we support each other in listening for this God who searches us and knows us. May we encourage one another to rest, to sleep, and to listen for God in those dusky nighttime spaces where holy dreams coalesce.
May we look at each other with a twinkle in our eyes and say – be brave and wait – I bet God is moving here. And when it’s unclear where God is, we discern together, trusting that eventually a way will be shown, a word will be spoken, God’s love will be felt.