March
17, 2003
Lenten
Noonday Preaching Series
Calvary Episcopal Church
Memphis, Tennessee
Listening
for the Voice of God
Dr.
Marcus J. Borg
(This sermon is also available
in audio.)
I
was struck this year during the season of Epiphany, that
season of the church year that immediately precedes the season
of
Lent. The Epiphany both begins and ends with stories from
the Gospels in which we hear the Voice of God.
On
the first Sunday in Epiphany we hear the story of the baptism
of Jesus,
with
its climax in the Voice of God speaking to Jesus, "You
are my beloved. In you I am well pleased."
And
then on the last Sunday in Epiphany, immediately before Ash Wednesday
and the beginning of our Lenten journey, we hear the
Transfiguration
story in which Jesus and the inner core of his disciples
ascend
to a high mountain. And this time it is the disciples
who hear the Voice of God. The Voice of God says this time, "This
is my beloved son. Listen to him." The
disciples, in a way, represent us in that passage. "Listen
to him." Listen
to Jesus.
This
phenomenon of the Divine Voice actually has a name in the Jewish
tradition. The Hebrew phrase that names this Divine Voice [because
the Divine Voice is known in stories of the Rabbis as well
and not just in stories of Jesus] is bat cole. Let me translate
that for you, because it's very interesting. Translated into
English, bat cole means "the daughter of a sound." What
kind of metaphor is this? The Voice of God, the Divine Voice,
is the daughter of a sound.
We
hear this same voice in the Hebrew Bible in I Kings 18, the
story of Elijah in a cave when the presence of God passes past
him. We are told in the English translations of that story
that Elijah hears a still, small voice -- that's the bat
cole,
the daughter of a sound.
The
Hebrew for the voice that Elijah hears, translates literally
into English as "Elijah heard
the sound of thinnest silence." So the daughter of a sound,
the sound of thinnest silence, a still, small voice, all different
ways of attempting to express this that lies perhaps beyond
the boundaries of speech.
Have
you ever heard this Voice? My wife was leading a Sunday morning
group a couple of weeks ago in which she explained to the group
this notion of the bat cole, and after explaining it, she asked
the group, "Have any of you ever heard this Voice?" And
several in the group had.
One
woman spoke about a time when she was seven years old and when
she heard a Voice speak to
her as clearly as any voice has ever spoken to her, "You
belong to me." Then she said, "I didn't hear it with
my ear. But I heard it."
Another
woman reported an evening when she had an extraordinarily strong
sense of the presence
of Jesus in the room, and she said to Jesus, "Where have
you been?" And she heard a Voice say back to her, "I
never left you." And, again, she said, "I
didn't hear it with my ear. But I heard the Voice."
It
would be very interesting to ask you, "How many of you
have heard such a Voice?" I'm not going to ask for a show
of hands. But it would be interesting to know that. Even if
you've never heard such a Voice, it's okay, because God also
speaks to us in less dramatic ways.
We
sometimes hear the Voice of God in our dreams, if we know how
to listen for it. We sometimes
hear the Voice of God in what our Quaker friends refer to
as leadings or proddings, colloquially as I mentioned last
night,
in nudges and clobbers; if you don't get the nudge, you might
get a clobber.
We
sometimes hear the Voice of God, again, in a less dramatic
way in the events of our lives. The contemporary Christian
writer, Frederick Buechner, has a wonderful way of putting
this. Bueckner writes,
Listen
to your life. Listen to what happens to you, because it is
through what happens to
you that God speaks. It's in language that's not always
easy to decipher, but it's there, powerfully, memorably,
unforgettably.
(Excerpt from Listening to Your Life
: Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechner by Frederick
Buechner)
And
so God speaks to us in the events of our lives. Now,
don't do something weird with that and think that that means
that everything that happens to us is somehow God trying to
get our attention. It doesn't mean that. It's more sacramental
than that; that in, with, and under the events of our lives,
we are being addressed by God.
God
sometimes speaks to us through Scripture, through that meditative
devotional use of Scripture that many of you are familiar with,
perhaps, in a daily practice.
And
God also speaks to us through the liturgical seasons of the
church here. Indeed, that's one
of their central purposes.
So
we are back to the season of Epiphany and Lent and back to
that bat cole--that voice that
we hear in the Transfiguration story on the Sunday before
the beginning of Lent.
In
that story, as I've already mentioned, the Voice of God--the
bat cole--speaks to the disciples,
to
us, and it says, "Listen to him." That is, listen
to Jesus.
And
immediately after the Transfiguration story in Mark's gospel--also
in Matthew and Luke--immediately after that Voice has said, "Listen
to him," we
get the story of Jesus' final journey from Galilee
to Jerusalem.
As
I've said other years when I've been here, the
season of Lent is about journeying with Jesus on
that journey;
listening to
Jesus as he journeys from Galilee to Jerusalem. On
that journey Jesus speaks about the way--the path
of following him. To listen
to Jesus means to follow him on that path that leads
to Jerusalem. Jerusalem,
in that story, is both the place of confrontation with a domination
system, and it is also the place of death and resurrection,
the place of endings and beginnings, of endings and new life,
the place where what we feared was the place of death becomes
the place of new life.
Listening
to Jesus means embarking on that journey, and
it is the journey at the very center of the
Christian life. Jesus,
himself, says, "If any person would come after me, let
that person take up their cross and follow after me." To
follow Jesus is to follow the path of the cross.
Paul
says the same thing. Paul says, "I have been crucified with
Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in
me."
To
take the cross of Jesus seriously, to take the Lenten
journey seriously means to die with Christ and to be
resurrected with Christ, to be reborn in Christ. Indeed,
this is what is meant by that metaphor, "to be born again." The
journey of Lent is about being born again. Listening to Jesus
is about being born again. And all of this together means dying
to an old way of being and being born into a new way of being.
Dying
to an old identity and being born into a new identity,
into an identity in God, in the spirit, in Christ. And this
is what we do every Lent.
This
is what our Lenten journey is about. Indeed, in a
sense, we're invited to do
this every day--to die to that old way of being
and be born into a new way of being. Now,
in some ways, the heart of my sermon: Why do we need
this? Why do we need to die to an old way of being and be born
into
a new way of being? Well, it's because of something that happens
to us very early in life, perhaps as early as infancy, and
certainly by the time we are toddlers.
It's
something that happens in the pre-verbal stage
of life, and what I'm speaking
about here is the birth of self-awareness, the birth of self-consciousness,
that awareness that the world is something separate from
us.
You
know if you're a newborn baby and you have excellent
parenting,
it might take a while before the realization that the world
is something separate from you would emerge. If you're
hungry, you get fed; if you're cold and wet,
you get changed; if
you cry, you get picked up.
But
at some point, the world ceases
to be immediately responsive to your needs, and you become
aware that the world there is something separate from
you. That's the birth of self-consciousness,
or even more simply,
that's the birth of the separated self. And it happens
very early in life. This
is one of the central meanings of the Garden of Eden story,
one of the central meanings of the Fall. The Fall isn't really
about disobedience, though it's there in the story. The Fall
is much more about the fact that we begin our lives, each of
us individually, with a sense of undifferentiated union with
what is. We begin our lives in paradise. But the birth of the
separated self suddenly means, "We live our lives east
of Eden in a state of separation and estrangement."
Let
me use a story that I've used at least once in my nine years
here before, but it's the best story I know for making this
point. So if you've heard it before, I apologize. It's a story
that I've been told is in one of the books of Parker Palmer.
It's
a story about a three-year-old girl who was the only child
in her family. But now her mom is pregnant, and this three-year-old
girl is very excited about having a baby in the house. The
day comes where the mother-to-be delivered, and the mom and
dad go off to the hospital. A couple of days later come home
with a new baby brother. And the little girl is just delighted. But
after they've been home for a couple of hours, the little girl
tells her parents that she wants to be with the baby in the
baby's room, alone, with the door shut. She's absolutely insistent
about the door being shut. It kind of gives her folks the willies,
you know? They know she's a good little girl, but they've heard
about sibling rivalry and all of this.
Then
they remember that they've recently installed an intercom system
in preparation
for the arrival of the new baby, and they realize that they
can let their little girl do this, and if they hear the slightest
weird thing happening, they can be in there in a flash. So
they let their little girl go into the room. They close the
door behind her. They race to the listening post. They hear
her footsteps move across the room. They imagine her now standing
over the baby's crib, and then
they hear her say to her two-day-old baby brother, "Tell
me about God. I've almost forgotten."
I
find that to be a haunting and evocative story, because it
suggests that we come from God, and when we are very, very
young, we still remember that. We still know that.
But the
process of growing up, of learning the language of this world,
is a process of progressive forgetting; in a sense, even a
process of progressive obliterating of that memory.
Because
as we learn the language of this world, the categories
of this world get imprinted upon our psyches, and our sense
of being
a separated self grows stronger and stronger. That sense
of disconnection continues throughout childhood, until, by
the
end of childhood, we may have lost that sense of connection
altogether. There's
something about the very process of growing up that wounds
us. We all grow up wounded. Our sense of separation increases
through our adolescence as we continue to internalize all of
these messages that we get from our culture about who we are
and what we ought to be like.
Our
sense of being a separated self with an identity conferred
primarily by the identity-conferring
values of culture grows and grows. I have a sense of being
okay or not okay to the extent that I measure up to these
messages, and we fall further into that world of separation
and alienation,
of comparison and judgment, of self and others. The
result is what the contemporary Benedictine teacher, Thomas
Keating, calls "the false self," the
self conferred by culture. Our identity is wrapped up in that false self.
Or
to refer to Frederick Bueckner again,
Increasingly,
we live our lives from the outside in rather than from
the inside out, taking our cues from the world, taking
our cues
from others, taking our cues from culture.
It
is that way of being and that kind of identity that the Lenten
journey calls us to die to. Listening to Jesus means
undertaking this journey, embarking on that path of dying to
the false
self, to that identity, to that way of being, and to be born
into an identity centered in this spirit, in Christ, in God. It is the process of internal redefinition of the self so that
a real person can be born within us.
We
all know that Lent historically is a season of repentance.
I don't know what your associations with repentance are. Going
back to my childhood, mine are pretty negative. Repentance
means to feel really, really bad about the horrible person
you are, okay? To feel really, really bad because you've got
impure thoughts. A big issue in adolescence. Repentance for
me always kind of meant just feeling really, really sorry for
being so disobedient to God.
The
Biblical meanings of repentance are much richer and much more
important. To begin with the Greek word for repentance that
we find in the gospels in the New Testament, metanoya or the
verb metanoyata.
In
terms of its Greek roots, to repent means "to
go beyond the mind that you have," and the mind that you
have gotten from culture. From all of those messages, the identity
you have is one that you've gotten from culture. To repent
means to go beyond the mind that you have to a mind in Christ. The
meaning of the Hebrew word for repentance is very rich. It's
shoo-vog, and the home of this word in the Hebrew Bible is
the Jewish experience of exile. To repent is to return. That's
the meaning of the word. To return from exile, to return from
that state of separation, to begin that journey of return from
the separated self to a new self in God.
To
repent is to reconnect with the one from whom we came and in
whom we live and move and have our being. And we do both --
return and go beyond the mind that we have by hearing the Voice
of God which says to us: Listen to him. Listen to Jesus. Listen
to the way that he teaches and follow him on this journey of
Lent, with its climax in our participation in Good Friday and
Easter, with its climax in our dying with Christ and being
born again into life in God.
Amen.
Copyright
2003 Dr. Marcus J. Borg |