“Let those with ears to hear listen”

Sermon by the Rev. Caela Simmons Wood

First Congregational UCC of Manhattan, KS

1 Kings 19:9-13

May 11, 2025

Last week in worship we talked about experiencing the Holy through taste and the kids gathered up a special Bible snack bag to take to Fellowship Hour. Several people in the congregation brought along favorite snacks to share, which reminded us of the story of Elijah running for his life in First Kings. Exhausted and overwhelmed, he sat down under a tree and wished for death. But then a messenger from God came and told him to do what? Have a snack and take a nap. He did and then he felt like he could keep going. 

The story we heard today comes immediately after that - Elijah is no longer desperately wishing for death, but he’s still feeling defeated and a bit abandoned by God. He’s traveled for 40 days and 40 nights and stops to rest in a cave at Mount Horeb. Again, he hears a Divine Word. This time telling him to “go out and stand on the mountain because the Lord is about to pass by.” The story goes that a great wind blows on the mountain, but God is not there. And then there’s an earthquake and a fire, but God is not there. Finally, Elijah perceives the sound of “sheer silence” and rises to go to the month of the cave and listen for the voice of God. 

How do we listen for God’s movement in our world? Lord knows our ears are filled with plenty of noise. TVs, traffic, birds singing, kids playing, podcasters pontificating, TikToks repeating. And that’s just the external noise. My guess is most of us also have a strong internal monologue, too - songs running through our heads on repeat, items we don’t want to forget, replaying conversations over and over, practicing conversations we don’t want to have, that kind of thing. 

How, in the midst of all this sound, do we carve out space to listen for God? 

When I was a young girl, I was taught that prayer is “talking to God.” And that is one kind of prayer. But if we focus so much on the talking part, we lose track of how important it is to listen for the Spirit’s movement in our lives. This is why I like to think of prayer as anything that orients us to God’s presence. We don’t even have to use words. We can simply turn our spirits toward The Spirit and seek a connection with Love. And we all know that listening well is an important part of feeling truly connected to another spirit, isn’t it? 

As we orient ourselves toward God and try to open our ears to listen, we’re likely to find that God sometimes speaks in a whisper and sometimes a shout. Sometimes the words are clear and other times we can’t quite make them out. We might hear God speaking to us through a friend or even the song of a bird or the breeze. And often, as Elijah found on the mountain, God comes to us in the sound of sheer silence. 

I’ve been reading this book by a spiritual teacher named Adyashanti. Although he was trained in Zen Buddhism, he is also very drawn to Jesus and this particular book is called Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic. Learning about Jesus from a spiritual teacher who isn’t Christian is very enlightening. But the part of his story I wanted to share with you today isn’t so much about Jesus, it’s just about listening for God. 

Adyashanti tells a story about how, after years of practicing Zen, it started to feel a bit dry to him. About this time he picked up the autobiography of St. Therese of Liseaux. He fell in love with the way she expressed her open-hearted love for God and he experienced a bit of a spiritual reawakening as he felt his own heart opened. 

He continues: 

Not long after my encounter with St. Therese, I had a profound experience while at a Zen retreat. Zen retreats are very strenuous, with as many as fifteen forty-minute periods of meditation each day, so it required a lot of silent sitting, a lot of being in quiet. I had been to Zen retreats before and had just begun to think I was getting good at it when I showed up at this seven-day retreat. I was really looking forward to being there, but as the retreat unfolded, something started to go haywire. It began to turn into a nightmare. I felt an intense sense of discomfort, and I had no idea why it was happening. I felt a feeling of profound confinement, like a caged animal, and I wanted to break out.

Now by that time I knew how to sit in meditation through all sorts of different states of mind and emotions, and I had long since realized sometimes you just have to sit through these discomforts. But this really had me stumped; I was so profoundly emotionally uncomfortable, with intense anxiety and fight-or-flight symptoms going on inside me. At a certain point I literally couldn't take it any more. I just cracked. It was devastating for me; I felt humiliated in a very profound way. And so I wrote a little note to say that I was leaving, and when everybody else was meditating, I tacked it up onto the teacher's door. You weren't supposed to leave without seeing the teacher in person, but I was so humiliated that I just couldn't face him. I left the note and got in my car and drove home.

I was so devastated that I really thought that this was the end of my quest. I thought to myself: Well, you gave it a good five or six years, you really put yourself all into it, but you failed. You're not cut out for this; throw in the towel. I was twenty-five years old, and I was certain, absolutely certain, that that was the end of my spiritual search. So I drove home thinking it was all over, but when I pulled up at my house, a little voice in my head said, "Just go right through the front door and out the back, sit down in your meditation hut and meditate." I'd learned to trust that still small voice in my head over the years. It didn't make any sense to me because I was sure that this was the end of my spiritual search, that it was all over, but I just did what the voice said. I literally walked from the car, in the front door, straight through the house to the back door and into my meditation hut.

No sooner did I sit down than that spiritual heart—the heart of love I'd first experienced reading St. Therese - literally exploded. It wouldn't even be true to say it expanded; it was like an explosion in my chest. I went from a state of despondency, certain that my whole spiritual search was over and I had failed, this immensity of love, of a well-being beyond anything I had ever experienced. And then I heard these words in my mind, as if the God of the Bible was talking, and the voice said, "This is how I love you, and this is how you shall love all beings and all things." It literally felt like the voice of God, and that explosion of the heart changed everything.

That night the teacher from the Zen temple called me up, and asked, "So, what happened?" I said, "I don't know!" He asked, "Why don't you come back?" and I said, "Ok, I'll be back tomorrow!" That was the end of the conversation; it was literally that fast, because I didn't have any reservations about going back. I didn't necessarily feel that my spiritual life was back on track, but in this immensity of love that I'd experienced, I felt like a feather in the wind. Come back? Ok, I'll go back.

So I drove back to the temple, and as I was about to enter the meditation hall, I saw the retreat leader, the one who holds people to the rules. At the door of the hall, this monk looked me straight in the eyes and said, "You shouldn't have left, and you shouldn't have come back." And, you know, those were the best words he ever could have said, because I saw that, when he spoke, nothing in me budged-that love didn't shrink, didn't diminish, didn't move one iota. In fact, I just wanted to throw my arms around him and kiss him, because he showed me that nothing could budge what I was experiencing.

This little story is so relatable and timeless. Here’s a person who is doing their best to tune their ears to listen for God in the world around them. Sometimes he finds it by seeking silence - and sometimes that just doesn’t work. He gives up on his retreat and returns home, embarrassed and despondent. And then, when he least expects it - a nudge, a whisper - “Go. Sit.” And so he does. He barely sits down and - BOOM - an explosion of Love. He feels it before he hears it - just feels the Love of God washing over him. It’s overwhelming. And THEN the voice, explaining, “This is how I love you, and this is how you shall love all beings and all things." Adya says, “It literally felt like the voice of God, and that explosion of the heart changed everything.” And finally, he picks up the phone when his teacher from the retreat center calls - still open and listening. It feels right to return to the retreat, and so he does. And when he gets there, he is faced with a person who has been given formal spiritual authority in this setting. This person scolds him, but Adya is so sure of what he’s already heard from God that he can’t be bothered to listen. 

Beloveds, it is my prayer for you that you will go into the world with open ears and open hearts. Whether you hear God while sitting on a mat for 12 hours a day at a retreat center or in the silence of your own heart - whether you pick up the phone and find God on the other end or you keep waiting for a call that never seems to come - whether you run away from a spiritual encounter embarassed or transformed - may you keep listening for Love. 

May all of us with ears to hear listen. Amen.