The Call: Listen to the Word, Speak the Word

[This message was shared yesterday afternoon during the Service of Installation of Brian McGee as associate pastor of Grace Lutheran Church in Springfield, Ohio.]

1 Samuel 3:1-11
Ephesians 4:1-16
A colleague of mine sat down on the steps of the chancel at the church he served to do the children’s sermon. The gospel lesson appointed for that Sunday was Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son. My friend had planned his message and began by asking the children if they had ever heard about the prodigal son. 

One boy raised his hand and proceeded, in his own words, not only to tell the parable but to unpack its meaning. 

He said that God the Father never gives up on finding us no matter how lost we may become. And that was why the Father sent His Son Jesus: so that everyone who turns away from their sin and follows Jesus will have life with God forever. I heard a recording and can vouch for both what the boy said and for what happened next. The pastor and congregation had listened with rapt attention. There was silence for a few moments.

Then the congregation burst into applause not, I suspect, only for the boy who told the gospel story, but also and more importantly, for the gospel itself: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:16) That is always good news! 

It’s the hearing of this Word--read, sung, proclaimed, embodied in Holy Baptism and Holy Communion--that is, as Saint Paul reminds us in Romans, “the power of God,” the gospel that, when believed, transforms our lives now and forever. The good news about Jesus, this Word of God, brings forgiveness, reconciliation with God, the ability to live each day with hope, and everlasting life with God!

I recently gave a ride to a woman from our church. Macular degeneration has significantly robbed her of her sight, so she relies on rides from friends or Uber or Lyft to get to and from events at our building. She was talking about the people of the congregation. I said, “Yes, it’s a wonderful church.” 

“No, Pastor,” she said, “it’s not just that. We have the gospel. I had been a Christian for seventy years. But I finally heard the gospel among the people of this congregation. I finally realized that as I turn to Jesus and spend time with Him in His Word, He gives me life!” “And,” she went on to tell me, “by getting close to Jesus through the Word each day, God has helped me share Him with others and I’ve learned something: People are starving to hear God’s Word!”

I’m convinced that she’s right. People are starving for the Word about, the Word of Jesus: the Way, the Truth, and the Life. When they hear it, they respond like my colleague’s congregation did when a five-year-old boy hijacked the children’s sermon. 

Even when people don’t consciously know it, they are hungry for God’s Word, hungry for the God we know in Jesus. 

When God and His Word are absent from our lives, we may not notice. But when God and His Word invade our ears, our minds, our hearts, our wills, we know that God is at work in our lives...and we rejoice. We know what we have been missing and are overjoyed when God finds us!

In the first Bible lesson that Pastor Brian has chosen for this afternoon, we meet another boy, Samuel. Samuel’s mother had prayed fervently for a son. God heard Hannah’s prayers and, being so blessed, she decided her son was to be in service to God at the temple under the supervision of Eli the priest. 

That’s where young Samuel was, trying to fall asleep one night when God and His Word came to him. 

Samuel didn’t know what to make of it because, as one of the saddest passages in all of Scripture tells us, “In those days the word of the LORD was rare…” Days when the Word of the Lord is rare should be non-existent for those who know the God first revealed to Israel and then revealed to us all in Jesus Christ! If you and I aren’t hearing the Word of God every single day--in quiet time, in study with other believers, in regular worship, it doesn’t mean that God has stopped talking with us; it means that we have stopped listening. If we refuse to hear God, we won’t hear God.

When Samuel heard the Lord calling him, he thought that it was Eli. He ran to Eli several times to see what the old priest wanted. Finally, Eli  told Samuel, “Go and lie down, and if he calls you, say, ‘Speak, LORD, for your servant is listening.’” When God called Samuel again, Samuel responded, “Speak, for your servant is listening.” In verse 11 of our lesson, we’re told, “And the LORD said to Samuel: “See, I am about to do something in Israel that will make the ears of everyone who hears about it tingle.”

Pastor Brian, your call here at Grace Lutheran Church in Springfield, no less than that of Pastor Tom, with whom and under whom you serve, is to listen to God’s Word, then to share it so that “the ears of everyone who hears about it [will] tingle.”

This doesn’t mean that your preaching, teaching, praying, visiting, serving, or leading need to be dramatic or memorable or eloquent or, God help us, cute. 

In fact, the word in the Hebrew in which 1 Samuel was written connotes something more mundane than we might mean when we use the English word tingle. It refers to the simple vibration that words or sounds we hear make on our eardrums. In a world like the one in which Samuel lived, where the Word of God was seldom heard, simply hearing it would bring about a reaction. 

That is no less true in 2019: If we will speak the Word of God, if we will share Jesus, that message will reach its target and God will go to work to create the faith to listen to it and the boldness to speak it in those who listen.

I concluded after the events of 2009 when many of us who were part of a church body saw that body’s witness for the Word and for Christ being hijacked and syncretized with false teachings by those who seemed to specialize in drama and cuteness and relevance, that what the Church needs and what the world needs is not preachers who are clever or brilliant or dazzling. The Church and the world need pastors who listen to the Word of God and speak the Word of God. 

It is precisely such faithful pastors who fulfill the pastoral calling as described in our second lesson this afternoon. They “...equip [God’s] people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.” 

That’s because it’s this Word of God, heard, spoken, enacted, that creates faith: “...faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word about Christ.” (Romans 10:17)

Pastor McGee, my friend, listen to the Word of God, speak the Word of God. If you do these two things, you will be equipped to fulfill the call to which you, with the help of God, commit yourself today.

Dear friends of Grace Lutheran Church, your charge is similar, to listen to the Word of God here proclaimed and shared in the water, bread, and wine, considered in your quiet time with God, discussed in your small groups, and prayed over and then to speak that Word to others.

As you join together today as pastors, people, and staff, may you be seen by a world hungry for the God we are privileged to know in Jesus Christ as a congregation in which all of you listen to God’s Word and speak God’s Word. Amen

[Pictured above: Artist Marc Chagall's etching of God's call to the boy Samuel.]

[This picture was taken after Pastor McGee's installation. He's shown here in the center. The other colleagues, from left to right, are: Pastors Bruce Kramer, Tom Brodbeck, Patti Morlock, and me.]

[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

God Ain't Too Proud to Beg

I know you wanna leave me,
But I refuse to let you go
If I have to beg and plead for your sympathy,
I don't mind coz' you mean that much to me

Ain't too proud to beg, sweet darlin
Please don't leave me girl, don't you go
Ain't to proud to plead, baby, baby
Please don't leave me, girl, don't you go

Those words from the Temptations song, Ain't Too Proud to Beg, crossed my mind while reading Jeremiah 44:4, this past week.

Jeremiah was an Old Testament prophet who lived in the early seventh- and late-sixth centuries BC. God gave him a series of prophetic messages not only to God's people in Judah (the southern portion of what had once been a larger Israel) and to neighboring nations. Through Jeremiah, God called all to repent. But nobody listened.

In Jeremiah 44, God uses Jeremiah to recount His people's sorry history of trying to find life in dead things like false deities, foreign alliances, economic power, injustice toward foreigners and the powerless, and child sacrifice. God says, "...I persistently sent to you all my servants the prophets, saying, 'I beg you not to do this abominable thing that I hate!'"

God begged!

Is that unseemly behavior for the God of the universe?

To beg people to whom He had given everything--life, blessings, a land--as free gifts to beg the people to trust in Him alone, not for His ego, but for their good to turn from their persistent sin and to know life, whole and pure, again?

Eventually, of course, time ran out on Judah, and God let the Babylonians overtake the promised land, turning God's people into refugees or slaves. (But even after that, He promised restoration to all who will turn from sin and believe in Him.)

But God, it would seem, still does this begging thing. In Luke 15, in the New Testament, God in the flesh, Jesus, tells the story of the prodigal son. Throughout the whole story, the father, Jesus' parabolic representation of God the Father, does all sorts of unseemly (some would say unmanly, unfatherly) things.

First, the father violates cultural norms by giving inheritances to both his oldest and his youngest sons. Neither boy earns their estates, mind you, but in those days, a younger son could have expected nothing. The old man is a softie though and, on demand, gives the young boy his inheritance.

Second, after the younger son wastes every gift he's given and fallen into poverty and dishonor (feeding pigs and envying their menu), he heads back home to ask his dad for a job alongside the servants. Instead, showing what would have been seen as unseemly compassion, the father runs to the boy when he sees him approaching the estate, and wraps his arms around him in forgiveness and acceptance before the boy can utter a word of repentance.

With the younger son returned, the father throws a party, Jesus' parabolic representation of the kingdom of God to which all people are invited through Him. The older boy, offended by the charity and forgiveness that the father was showing the younger son, refuses to join the party. (He apparently was too good for the kingdom of God.) Jesus says the father came out of the house to plead with the older son to come and join the party.

Sin, which is separation from God, can take many forms.

It can be seen in the kind of idolatry and injustice exhibited by God's people in Jeremiah's time.

It can look like the hedonism seen in the younger son of Jesus' parable.

It can look like the stuck-up, holier-than-thou priggishness of the older son.

But whatever the form of our sin, God ain't too proud to beg us to return to Him.

There will come times--in this world, maybe, and in the age to come, for certain--when God will allow those who refuse His begging love and forgiveness, to live with the consequences of their decisions to go it alone without God.

Like a jilted lover, God told the people of Israel through Jeremiah that they had broken the covenant He had with them, "though I was their husband" (Jeremiah 31:32). But He spent years begging His people to return and remains faithful to them and to the whole human race to this day.

God is begging us now to return to Him. Through Jesus Christ, God has made Himself known to us all and wants us to be part of His eternal party.

He's begging because, paraphrasing the message of the Bible in the words the Temptations could have sung, "you mean that much to Him."

[The prophet Jeremiah by Marc Chagall. Click to enlarge.]