"Revolutionary Love: Listen & Reimagine"

1 Samuel 3:1-10

Rev. Caela Simmons Wood

First Congregational UCC, Manhattan, KS

October 24, 2021

This is a sermon in three scenes. And throughout the sermon there are places for you to respond with the words printed in today’s bulletin. When I say, “God is still speaking,” you say, “God, help me to listen with the ear of my heart.” That’s a quotation from the Rule of St. Benedict. Let’s practice.

God is still-speaking. God, help me to listen with the ear of my heart. 

Scene One: Listening to God

There was a boy whose mother believed was an answer to her prayers. In thanksgiving to God, Hannah dedicated her son, Samuel, to God and left him at the temple, to be raised in the faith by an old priest named Eli. Each year she would come back to make her sacrifice at the temple and bring new clothes for her son. And each year, the boy grew in stature and in favor with the Lord and with the people. 

One night, as Samuel settled in to sleep, he heard a voice calling his name. Assuming it was the priest, Samuel ran to him and said, “Here I am!” but Eli was confused. “I didn’t call you. Go back to bed.” Again, the voice came, “Samuel! Samuel!” And, again, Samuel ran to Eli - only to be told the same thing, “I didn’t call you, Samuel. Go back to bed.” 

Reader, you and I are both told that the voice was not Eli. It was the voice of God. But Samuel is not yet acquainted with God’s voice. So when the voice came AGAIN, I imagine he was either confused or terrified or both as he ran back to Eli for a third time. By now, Eli has figured out what’s going on and says to Samuel, “It’s God calling you, son. Go back to bed. If the voice comes to you again, say, ‘Speak, for your servant is listening.’”

This story - along with many others in our sacred scriptures - are why we say “God is still-speaking.” God’s voice is not a one-time event. Nor is it only heard by monarchs and priests. It’s a voice that continues to reach out to us - all of us - again and again. 

God is still-speaking. God, help me to listen with the ear of my heart. 

Scene Two: Listening to Each Other

A church basement on a cold February night. Valarie Kaur, a Yale law student, stomped the snow off her boots and descended into the warm room, crowded with families from the community. Children wiggled on their parents laps and the priest, Father James Manship, welcomed everyone and began the meeting with a prayer.

Then he turned and wrote on the board: poder. 

He turned to the group, “Quien tiene poder in esta ciudad?” Who has the power in the city?

The answers were quick. “La policía!” y “Los politicos!”

A pause. Father Jim turned back to the board and made two columns: “the world as it is,” and “the world as it ought to be.” He mused, “In the world as it is, the police and the politicians have the power, sí. But what about in the world as it ought to be?”

A longer period of silence. And then someone in the back cried out, “El Dios!” God! And someone closer to the front whispered quietly, “Le gente.” The people. [1] 

In Spanish, poder as a noun means “power.” And poder as a verb is “to be able to” as in “sí, se puede.” Yes, it can be done. This moment - in that church basement, was Kaur’s introduction to “movement lawyering,” harnessing the power of a community to say, “yes, this can be done.” In listening, there is power. In reimagining the world, there is power. 

As we continue our journey through Kaur’s book, See No Stranger, today we wrap up the second part of her Revolutionary Love compass. We’ve pondered what it means to love others - to wonder, to grieve, to fight. And a couple weeks ago, Pastor Sue helped us contemplate what it means to honor rage - as we seek to love our opponents. Kaur beckons us forward on this journey of loving our opponents with two more invitations - to listen and reimagine. 

In doing so, we “tend the wound” and find ways to love our opponents. Remembering, of course, that love is not primarily a feeling that we feel. Kaur says it’s “sweet labor: fierce, bloody, imperfect, and life giving - [love is] a choice that we make over and over again. As labor, love can be taught, modeled, and practiced.” [3] We don’t have to feel warm and fuzzy in order to act in loving ways. Kaur says we just “need to feel safe enough to stay curious.” [4] 

In fact, Kaur says that when it comes to listening to others, having too much empathy - feeling TOO much - can sometimes get in the way.  If we listen to those who are different than us and feel their plight, we can sometimes think that just feeling what they’re feeling is action - without doing the hard work of actually changing systems that harm. We feel all the feels but haven’t actually made anything better. [5] 

My guess is that loving our opponents is always done imperfectly. Kaur says that when we choose to stay curious and approach our opponents in wonder, we are giving ourselves a gift: “a chance to live in this world without the burden of hate.” [6]

Think about what a gift that is. “A chance to live in this world without the burden of hate.” Wow. 

God is still-speaking. God, help me to listen with the ear of my heart. 

Scene Three: Listening to Ourselves

A woman was sitting on the floor of her closet, surrounded by shoes and dirty clothes. Before that, though, she was staring at her device at 3am, typing these words into the Google, “What should I do if my husband is a cheater but also an amazing dad?”

Yes, friends. Glennon Doyle asked Google to make one of the most important decisions of her life. As you might guess, the internet had a lot of opinions - most of them conflicting. And so Glennon realized maybe she’d have to listen to herself instead. 

And that’s how she ended up on the floor of her closet. A friend had sent her a card in the mail that said, “Be still and know.” Glennon said she’d heard that Bible verse forever, but it hit different this time. It didn’t say “read books from experts and know,” or “scour the internet and know.” It said, “Just. Stop...If you just stop doing, you’ll start knowing.”

And so after her kids left for school each day, Glennons sat on the floor of her closet for 10 minutes to just breathe. She said every 10 minute session felt like 10 hours at first. But she stayed with it, telling herself, “Ten minutes a day isn’t too long to spend finding yourself, Glennon. For God’s sake, you spend eighty minutes a day finding your keys.”

Over time, she began to feel herself sinking deeper within herself. “Eventually,” she says, “I sank deep enough to find a new level inside me that I’d never known existed.” And in this low, still place she felt something new inside of her: knowing. 

She began to know down there. She found she could know what to do next and then do it. “The knowing,” she said, “feels like warm liquid gold filling my veins and solidifying just enough to make me feel steady, certain.”

Over time, she discovered that God lives in that deep place within her. And that when she is still and listens to God’s presence and guidance within her in that deep place, God is delighted. And God celebrates by “flooding [her] with that warm, liquid gold.” [7]

And so we are invited, friends, by these three stories from long ago and right here and now. Stories of listening to God, to our neighbors, to ourselves. And, as it turns out, those three things - God, neighbors, ourselves -  aren’t quite as neatly divided as we might think. 

In this great circle of listening, may we come to reimagine a new world together - held within God’s great imagination. Kaur says, “We create the beloved community by being in beloved community.”

Beloveds, God is still-speaking. God, help me to listen with the ear of my heart. 

NOTES:

[1] Kaur, See No Stranger, p 179-180.

[2] ibid., 183

[3] https://valariekaur.com/learninghub/introduction/ 

[4] Kaur, 143. 

[5] Ibid, 144.

[6] Ibid., 139. 

[7] This story and all quotes in this section are from the chapter “know” in Untamed by Glennon Doyle.