A reader's theater presentation of the entire Book of Jonah, followed by reflections by Hal. 

​The Rev. Jake Miles Joseph
Plymouth Congregational UCC, Fort Collins, Colorado
1 Samuel 3: 1-10
 
Will you pray with me? May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be good and pleasing to you, O God, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
 
On this Sunday of Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend, it is important for us to take time to reflect on the life and impact of a great leader and visionary. Of course, we remember that MLK was a community organizing, a grassroots coordinator, and a national hero. What we often overlook, however, is that he was The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. The Bible and its stories, especially the Old Testament in his tradition, would have been the inspiration for his life and work. Today, we have a story that I am sure MLK knew and lived.
 
The story of Samuel is one of miracles and God in unexpected places and direct communication. Before he was conceived, Samuel’s mother Hannah was found by Eli (the older priest in this story) crying on the steps of the temple begging God for a son. Eli, I am now convinced, must have failed Pastoral Care 101 in seminary because he assumes that Hannah is drunk and tried to send her away rather than help her. Hannah then proves to Eli that she isn’t drunk, and so Eli promises her that she will have a son… so Hannah dedicates her son to God’s service. Soon she gives birth to Samuel, and the minute he is weaned she brings him to the temple and gives him to Eli and the priests to take care of and bring-up. It is paradoxical because she prayed for a son then when she is given a son she gives him away. Let this be a lesson for us that nothing in the Bible is exactly as it seems. This is a reminder that the story we are dealing with today is not from our context or culture or our time.
 
Now, we catch up with Samuel when he is a young boy serving and living in the temple (he only sees his parents when they come for high holidays), and he receives a very usual alarm wake-up call! Some of us have odd alarm clock sounds (mine sounds like a cricket—I am now terrified of the sound of crickets), but this is especially weird. How many of you are woken up at night by God calling your name? Not many of us, right?

This is not normal for us, but it is a common theme in Biblical call story narratives of the Old Testament. Our passage today falls into a whole subgenre of Biblical literature called the “Call Story.” This is a genre of Biblical stories that is important to look at when we are talking about how God communicates or doesn’t communicate. While call stories in the Bible often have themes in common, no two are the same. This shows us, even today that each and every individual hears from God differently.
 
Last week, I was in Arizona at an educational intensive for the Next Generation Leadership Initiative (NGLI) of the UCC for “promising young clergy” (don’t ask me why I was invited…I have no idea). The focus for my class this year was on family systems theory, so there was a lot of sharing. All of us had some great stories to tell, and you know what? None of the 16 in my class and 64 total young ministers there had the same story or the same way God communicates with us. Likewise, none of the Biblical call stories is like any other.
 
So today, our job is to see what is unique about Samuel’s story, and then I want us to think about how it applies to our world today. Okay, are you ready? Ready to put our Sherlock Holmes hats on and start the investigation? Because there are three big things about Samuel that we need to pay attention to that are unique to this story and offer us clues to our own lives with the Divine.

1. Notice that God demands a dialogue. The first two times God calls his name, Samuel doesn’t respond to God, and Samuel rather runs to Eli. We can imagine Eli is getting tired of being woken up. Finally, Eli is probably so tired of being woken-up by Samuel that he says, “Go lie down; and if he calls you, you shall say, ‘Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.’ So Samuel went and lay down in his place. Now the Lord came and stood there, calling as before, ‘Samuel, Samuel!’ And Samuel said, ‘Speak, for your servant is listening.” This is fascinating. God won’t do all of the work when you are called to something. God may still be speaking, as we say in the UCC, but our God does not monologue. God is looking for a conversation, a response, and an action on Samuel’s part. So long as Samuel doesn’t tell God that he is listening, God won’t continue the conversation. God needs dialogue.  

Question 1: What is God calling you to in your life right now? What is your response to God in your life? Is something keeping you up at night that you are too scared or don’t know how to reply to? What is holding you back? Remember, God is not a God of monologue. You need to say yes or no and engage with these questions rather than sleep through the alarm of God’s voice.

2. Alright, so this brings me to the second thing about Samuel’s call story that is particular to this account. Samuel needs help from an elder and a mentor. Unfortunately for Eli, if you keep reading the account later on, what Samuel has to say once he has listened to God has to do with Eli’s family’s sins. Sometimes the mentor is the one who has something to learn from the student, but I digress. The main point is that Samuel has to have help discerning how to respond to God’s call on his life. Samuel has no shame in waking Eli up not once, not twice, but many times. “Here I am, for you have called me.” The Bible doesn’t say, but maybe this is something Samuel does often! Unlike other call stories in the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament, Samuel goes to a mentor and an elder for assistance. This is something NGLI clergy are likewise encourages to do: develop mentoring relationships outside of our home church or home conferences to retain perspective.  

Question #2: Who are some mentors or people outside of your own internal knowledge system, household, or person who you can ask for guidance in the calls or decision making processes ahead? Here is a hint: sometimes mentors are not older than you. In a multigenerational church, advice flows both ways. The second thing we learn from Samuel’s call story is that sometimes we need to ask others for advice, guidance, or insights to learn how to answer God’s call on our hearts that is keeping you up at night?

Who do you need to ask for advice from? On the flip side, pay attention to when in life you are called to be Eli—do not be annoyed by the questions, by being woken up at night by the discernment of a friend of mentee. In life in community, we are both Samuel and Eli.

3. Okay now for the strangest and coolest part of this particular story! So first, God is a God who wants or requires a yes from us—a dialogue. Then we see how in the story, the community, the mentors, the wisdom of others is essential to the discernment, and now we come to the best part that makes Samuel’s call unique and relevant for our lives. Verse 10: “Now the Lord came and stood there, calling as before, “Samuel, Samuel!” Now the Lord came and stood there. God meets us where we are. God doesn’t give up on your purpose. You are valuable, loved, and followed by God. When Samuel doesn’t respond to simply being called, God tries a new tactic, a different approach for a different call: God comes and stands right by Samuel’s bedside and yells in his ears. “SAMUEL! Wake up!”  

Question #3: Do you know that God won’t give up on you? Did you know that? I know that. Additionally, each of you is being called, no matter how old or how young (Elis and Samuels alike) to new adventures with the Spirit. I know that. I feel it in my bones, friends. Let me ask it again: Do you know that God won’t give up on you?
 
Let’s pull all of this together. On this Martin Luther King Jr. weekend when we remember one in our own time who was called to something extraordinary, we need to all think about what God is calling us to do in this world. What is our greater purpose for a time such as this?
 
What the call story of Samuel reveals is that God is a God who is looking for a dialogue, a conversation, a two way street and requires your response. God doesn’t want to talk at you. God wants to talk with you. Secondly, mentors, community, elders, and getting advice from other people are good ways to figure out how to respond to God. Don’t be afraid to wake someone else up and alert him or her to your problem even multiple times. You are not in this, this current dilemma, and this Meshuggeneh life alone. Thirdly, and most exciting and unique to this story, know that God doesn’t give up on you and you have a purpose that God is moving through your being and your life. Are you all with me?
 
Let me now in closing take this one step further. A common theme in my preaching is what I see as disconnect between our lives as Mainline Christians (an imagined life that looks a lot like 19th Century Victorian Vermont) and the real life we struggle through on the other hand.
 
The disconnect I see possibly arising here is that you all, like me, might think that God is going to only speak to you when you are on a meditation retreat or sitting in silence, or staring into the actual physical face of a stranger. Here is the reality: What actually is most likely to wake you up at 2 AM? For me, it is a text message from one of you with an emergency or a call. A text from my mom… who wakes up at 5 in the morning and sends inspirational quotes to her adult children.
 
While we like to idealize how God communicates with us, just like we idealize God as having stopped speaking a longtime ago (that would be convenient), I have to tell you that the Divine Deity is more tech savvy than your computer programming grandchildren. While the divine can and does speak to us in voice and in spirit on those yoga retreats or palates pilgrimages, we also find God sightings and marking on text messages from a friend in need, in a Facebook post from a wise friend, or in the emails from a stranger reaching out for help.
 
Look for God in the text messages, in the emails, in the online materials. Our God sightings are no longer limited to face to face. Treat the texts and emails you write with the same care as in-person interactions, for it matters just as much now.
 
It is a brave new world. It is a world in need of new call stories to be told, and I think I know of just the congregation to tell their stories and to bring something new to a time such as this. Now the Lord came and stood there, calling as before, Plymouth, Plymouth! And Plymouth said, “Speak for your servants are listening, reading, following.” We are ready for what God has to say. Amen.

The Rev. Jane Anne Ferguson
Matthew 2:1-12
Plymouth Congregational Church, UCC
 
1 In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, 2 asking, "Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage." 3 When King Herod heard this, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him; 4 and calling together all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Messiah was to be born. 5 They told him, "In Bethlehem of Judea; for so it has been written by the prophet:  
 
6 'And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel.'"  
 
7 Then Herod secretly called for the wise men and learned from them the exact time when the star had appeared. 8 Then he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, "Go and search diligently for the child; and when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage." 9 When they had heard the king, they set out; and there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen at its rising, until it stopped over the place where the child was. 10 When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. 11 On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. 12 And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.  
             
One of my favorite authors and spiritual mentors is the late Madeleine L’Engle. You may know her for her fiction, A Wrinkle in Time, being her best known work. She also wrote poetry, personal memoir, books of spiritual and theological reflections on art, scripture and seasons of the church year. I turn to her writing when I need hope. In her book of Advent, Christmas and Epiphany writings, Madeleine shares a very early childhood memory. Her family was visiting her grandmother’s house on an almost uninhabited beach in North Florida. Born in 1918 this night time experience took place well before the days of light pollution. She writes:
 
“It  must have been an unusually clear and beautiful night for someone  to have said, ‘Let’s wake the baby and show her the stars.’ The night sky, the constant rolling  of breakers against  the shore , the stupendous light of the stars -– all made an indelible impression on me. I was intuitively aware not only of a beauty I had never seen before but also that the world was far greater than the protected limits of the  small  child’s world which was all that I had known thus far. I had a total, if not very conscious, moment of revelation; I saw creation bursting the bounds of daily restriction and stretching out from dimension to dimension,  beyond any human comprehension. This early experience was freeing, rather than daunting, and since it was the first, it has been the  foundation for all other such glimpses of glory.”i

I wonder if the magi who followed the star to Bethlehem experienced a night like this night in Madeleine’s life. The brilliance of the stars overhead, the radiance of the new star they followed out shining all the others, the sound of breakers on a beach, or perhaps, wind whistling across desert sands and rattling the dry leaves of palm trees. Surely they did, even though I also imagine their journey was long and tedious at times, even dangerous.

Matthew writes that the revelation of this new star in the east, a first glimpse of glory, set them on their pilgrimage. What other revelations might they have had along the way? Small glimpses of glory in their daily travel experiences? What bits of heart light and intellectual insight did they gather as they traveled that illuminated their journey? I imagine that they each had a fine collection, bits and bobs of glory glimpses, when they finally they reached the place where the star stopped over the house that held the One they sought, the new king, the Light of the world.
The season of Epiphany which we entered yesterday on the twelfth day of Christmas is a season of light, a season of the revelation of God’s glory, particularly in Jesus the Christ. One of its primary images is the shining star that led the magi. The scriptures we will encounter as we journey through this time of year leading us to Lent will all hold images of brightness, of stars, of new days dawning, of miracles, of the deep mystery of God with us in human form. Epiphany is a time of gathering light and glimpses of God’s glory even in the darkest hours.

I know that we preachers talk a lot about light in the darkness. About trusting in God to guide, about the need to keep on keeping on. Maybe to the point of our listeners’ exhaustion. And ours. We talk about such things to keep our hope alive along with yours.

We live in exhausting times. We long to figure out solutions to the problems of the world. To make ways for peace and justice. To be the change we long to see. Epiphany is a time to gather light for our journeys of justice, to gather hope in the stories of mystery and miracle that will sustain our ministries here at Plymouth and our personal pilgrimage through the year. It is a time to tend the stars that guide us like the star cleaners, to listen to their music, to receive their tears of joy. And all so that we can hold them in our hearts.

In a poem titled, “Into the darkest hour,” Madeleine L’Engle wrote:

It was a time like this,
War & tumult of war,
a horror in the air.
Hunger yawned the abyss – and yet there came the star
and the child most wonderfully there.
 
It was a time like this
of fear & lust for power, license & greed and blight --
and yet the [One] of bliss came into the darkest  hour in quiet & silent light.
 
And in a time like this how celebrate his birth when all things fall apart?
Ah! wonderful it is
with no room on the earth the stable is our heart.ii
 
When we open our hearts like the stable doors and once again they are filled with the light of Christ .... what then? I think you know. It is our privilege and responsibility to show up in the dark places of the world and let the stars of God’s love shine.

We let God’s love shine in the dark places of our own hearts and souls and minds. This is important and sometimes hard work. It takes prayer, study, a community of faith for support....sometimes even therapy or counseling. Its all worth it because we cannot share what we do not have. Its all worth it because each of us deserves to know in our heart of hearts that we are beloved beings made in the image of the Holy One.

We let God’s love shine in the dark places of our communities, family, work, school, through the outreach, calling and caring, Christian formation ministries of Plymouth. We show up here to care for one another and to let that care spill over into the world, through working for justice for the homeless, for the immigrant and refugee. We show up here for the sustenance of study and prayer and fellowship with one another. So that we may more effectively work for the sustenance of Plymouth, this beloved community, and its ministries, to work for peace in the world.

We let God’s love shine in the dark places when we gather to worship God each week. To give ourselves up wholeheartedly to God’s presence in community as we sing and pray and listen to God’s word in scripture and sermon. Our mission here at Plymouth is first and foremost to worship God SO THAT we may shine like the stars with the light of Christ. SO THAT we may experience glimpses of God’s glory in one another and wherever we else we may be.

On his much beloved 1980’s science show, “Cosmos,” the late astrophysicist and cosmologist, Carl Sagan made famous the notion that we human beings, as well as most of the matter on Earth, are literally made of the stuff of stars, of star dust. Sagan said, "We are a way for the universe to know itself. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return. And we can, because the cosmos is also within us. We're made of star stuff.”iii Sagan’s statement sums up the fact that the carbon, nitrogen and oxygen atoms in our bodies, as well as atoms of all other heavy elements, were created in previous generations of stars over 4.5 billion years ago. Scientifically, we are made of star stuff.

And in the mystery of theological and spiritual metaphor/truth, we are made of star stuff....made of the light of God. We hold that light within our hearts, hold the One born in the light of the stable within our very being, the One born to be God with us. How can we not share the glimpses of glory, the light we gather along the way?

I leave you an invitation to this season of gathering light through the power of Madeleine L’Engle’s poem, “Epiphany”:
“Unclench your fists Hold out your hands. Take mine.
Let us hold each other.
Thus is God's Glory Manifest.”iv Amen.
​
©The Rev. Jane Anne Ferguson, 2018. May be reprinted with permission only.
 


i “The Light of the Stars,” Miracle on 10th Street and other Christmas Writings, Madeleine L’Engle, (Harold Shaw Publishers, Wheaton, IL: 1998, 39-40).
ii Ibid,47.
iii https://www.livescience.com/32828-humans-really-made-stars.html
iv L’Engle, 49.