A Sermon from
the First Church….
A sermon offered by the Rev. Ian
F. “Jack” Steeves in the public worship of the First Congregational
Church of Scarborough, Maine on Sunday, February 3, 2008 (Transfiguration).
The principal readings were Exodus 24:12-18, Responsive Psalm 99, and
Matthew 17:1-9.
“Silence and the
Beautiful Voice”
“This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!”
(Matthew 17:5)
It is traditional to close the
Season after Epiphany with the story of the Transfiguration, that astonishing
revelation of Jesus clothed in the glory of God on the mountaintop.
When I first read today’s gospel
reading, my eyes stopped on the fourth verse. In what must have
been one of those eye arresting and drop your jaw moments in his life,
Peter breaks the silence: “Lord, it is good for us to be here.
If you wish, I will put up three shelters – one for you, one for Moses
and one for Elijah.” Peter wants to capture the moment and bask
in the glory of the mountain-top. He is interrupted by another
voice, the voice of God: “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I
am well pleased. Listen to him!”
Preachers, and let’s be frank,
talk too much. We are people who stand at the threshold where
sound and silence meet. One of the critical tasks for a preacher
is to find his or her own voice. When you begin to preach, you
hope that you are speaking great prose; then you hear other preachers
and find that they do speak great prose. You realize that you
were unconsciously or otherwise imitating them. It takes a long,
long time to sift through the more superficial voices of one’s gift
of speech.
There is a voice within you that
no one, not even your nearest and dearest, has ever heard. Give
yourself the opportunity of silence this Lent to develop your listening
in order to hear the voice of your soul. Then, let it speak, speak
to all of us! In the presence of great preaching, there really
is no alternative but to listen closely, and to live out the words heard.
We live in a chatty and noisy society.
Silence is a fearful thing. Silence creates itchiness and nervousness.
Many experience “silence” as strange, empty and hollow. Silence
is like a giant hole that can swallow you up. Let someone say,
“Let us be silent,” and the listeners quickly become restless and
occupied with one thought: “When will all this be over?” We
avoid silence to ward off the anxiety it provokes. We begin searching
for the slightest sound or movement or anything that will break the
horrible silence.
Silence is not an argument for
the absence of God; silence is an experience of the existence of God.
Silence is one of those “thin places” – to borrow a popular, spiritual
term – in which the human and the divine encounter one another.
Silence must be entered into, not escaped. The danger comes when
we choose to see silence as a problem to be avoided, rather than an
opportunity to be savored.
If you dare to sit in silence,
a new sound will be heard. It is the flow of blood through the
tiny vessels of your ears. You cannot hear the sound now, but
it is there. If all sounds are stilled, you soon learn to hear
your own blood coursing through your head.
Does God speak louder than that
tiny sound? Does God even make a perceptible noise? Is God
whispering amid the competing sounds in our world? Can we listen
in what may be a new way? It is a bit scary to contemplate the
message we might hear and the terror of the prerequisite silence while
we wait to be spoken to and with.
Many years ago, George Albee wrote
“The Next Voice You Hear.” It was a story that tells what
might happen if the Divine voice reached the ears of people via the
medium of radio. Over a period of time, the Voice repeatedly breaks
into radio broadcasts. The story ends with a final, spoken message:
“All
across the world the radios hummed. Then there came silence and
the beautiful voice. It said, ‘Forgive me, dear friends, for
my trespass in coming to you as I have. It was necessary.
Now I shall take my leave. You will find that most of your problems
remain with you. You still have pain and unhappiness: you still
need to feed and clothe and govern yourselves. You still confront
uranium. Need I tell you why? Surely it must be plain to
you that, if God exists, He must from the very fact of His existence
have a purpose. Surely you see what your part in that purpose
is. A planet is a school. Live, dear children, and learn.
And now – until we meet again, good-bye’.”
Thomas Kelley, a Quaker, made the
point: “Words should not break the silence, but continue it.”
How easy it is to assume that effective communication demands “sound”
instead of “silence,” words instead of the presence of the Word.
In our closest relationships with other human beings, we know how often
the words we speak are a cloak or a veil in which to wrap ourselves,
shielding our selves from those who are around us. We live in
the same family, we sit together in the same room, and we eat at the
same table. “We just don’t talk anymore,” we say, but in
fact, “We don’t listen anymore” is the truth. We do not
listen to the persons behind all the words and disguises; we do not
perceive the lonely silence behind the loud faces. Opportunity
is ever present. Indeed, it is in “the little silences” between
the words spoken that we do hear and possibly do understand what is
being said to us.
When we fall silent, our most courteous
God interrupts and takes a turn, speaking to the speakers who have become
the listeners. Silence is an invitation to God to put God’s
word before us. What a rebuke the silence can be. For it
is in the silence that we stand or sit or kneel in the light of Truth,
uncovered and known. What a medicine the silence can be.
In the silence the seed of faith is planted, and tended, and grows,
and becomes the fullness of a human life.
We are about to enter the season
of Lent on Wednesday. It is fitting to close Epiphany using the same
words with which we began it in January. This morning, “the
beautiful voice” again says, “This is my Son, whom I love…”
and the voice now adds, “Listen to him!” God is powerful and
mysterious and persistent beyond our understanding. God is also
passionately interested in a relationship with us, and reaches out to
us; through the same Jesus, so that we might yet glimpse the mystery
a little more closely and a little more clearly. Silence allows
God to speak and the future to become the present.
For every word spoken, there should
be a listening for truth; for every sound uttered, a marked silence
permitting comprehension; for every approach a sincere welcome; and
for every sister and brother’s proclamation of the truth, a warm response
of love and peace.
A story about Abbot Marcarius, one of the Desert Fathers of the 4th century, makes the point. “Once the Abbot, after he had given the benediction to the brethren in the church at Scete, said to them, ‘Brethren, fly!’ One of the elders asked him, ‘How can we fly further than this, dear Abbot, seeing we are here in desert?’ Then Abbot placed his finger on his mouth and said, ‘Fly from this!’ So saying, the Abbot fell silent, entered his monk’s cell and shut the door.”
