I may be betraying my age when I mention, “The Sounds of Silence,” However, my father’s stock response to, “What would you like to hear, Dad?” was always, “the sounds of silence.” Dad didn’t mean Simon and Garfunkle – he meant silence. I didn’t understand him then, but over the years I’ve grown to see his point and to understand that, truly, “silence is golden.”

We live in a frenetic and very noisy world. It used to be that I could find some quiet while driving, but no longer. The bone-rattling “boom thumpa-thumpa” coming from the car with speakers almost as big as it is, or the high volume in the other, or the inattentive chattering on a mobile phone in a third make even the get-away ride in the car a noisy place. Noise is all around us. Music is piped into every store and every elevator. We automatically turn on the television or the radio when we come into the house. Or we log on to the computer to talk with someone on the internet, or dial the ever-present mobile phone. I am convinced that we fear silence, we run away from it.
If you remember back to your courses in communication you’ll recall a basic model for human communication that was represented as SMR – sender/message/receiver. It’s the most basic model, but it was discovered early on that N (noise) was a huge factor. Noise, and it can take many forms beyond just audible sound, gets in the way of the message, and adds layers of difficulty to comprehending the intended message. We could take off and spend a great amount of time on describing all the different forms noise can take, but we won’t. Suffice it to say, noise – in multiple forms – is everywhere in human life, in our society, and it keeps us from the sounds of silence.

Noise gets in the way, interferes with, our spiritual lives, too. We see a good example of this in the story of Elijah. First, Elijah has tried to be the faithful servant of God. He’s tried and tried to do “the right thing” and all, seemingly to no avail. He stood up to Jezebel, Ahab and their false faith; which should have brought about a restoration of true religion, but it didn’t. Instead, there’s a contract out on him and he has to flee. The Psalmist’s words could be his, “Why have you forgotten me? Why must I walk around mournfully because the enemy oppresses me?” Elijah allows the noise of his situation – and of his emotions – to get in the way of his communication with God. Many is the time that Christians, ministers and members alike, find themselves in just the same sort of frustrating, depressing situation.
Elijah is not the first, nor will he be the last, servant of God to come to the place where it is said, “That’s it! I’ve had it. I’m tired of doing what’s right and frustrated that it’s not making more of a difference!” I can say that with some assurance because I’ve been there. However, we have to realize that Elijah forgot how to stay attuned to God. When Elijah lost touch there was nothing to keep all of the competing feelings, the noise, conflicting messages and values from overwhelming him. Again, I know this from experience. What did Elijah do? What many do – he ran.
Many of us run, too, but it’s not off to a mountain alone. We run into the pursuit of professional advancement – “if only I work harder I can do this.” We run into sports. We run into hobbies. In short, we look for things to assuage the hunger inside us, to quiet the noise. Yet, all we do is compound and increase the noise – making it more and more difficult to hear what God is saying to us.

Elijah felt persecuted, forgotten, and alone, he couldn’t hear the message that he was anything but that. There were many who, like him, had been faithful and stayed that way. God’s promise made at Creation and again in the Exodus, “I will be with you always,” held for Elijah and it continues to hold for us. Add to that the liberating Good News we hear from Paul to the church in Galatia that now the walls we make to isolate, separate, and divide are broken down in Jesus Christ and you have truly a message that uplifts. Paul is telling us that we are the Lord’s free people and, as a result, are to live out of that freedom toward God and others. However, we first have to get the noise and clutter out of the way so that message of loving freedom can reach deep within us. How do we do that?

Silence is golden, remember? When God spoke to Elijah it wasn’t in the flash and bang, the rumble and roar, but in the “sound of sheer silence.” If we are going to grow in our relationship with God we must learn how to listen for the voice of God. Cultivating a desire and, yes, a discipline of silence – not just exterior, but interior as well – is the primary way we listen for God. To improve the reception of the message, we have to begin to deepen or remove the noise so that we may listen with the ear of our hearts.

Exteriorly, in our daily lives, we can begin to do that by setting aside quiet times and quiet places. Spaces and times that give us the holy leisure, the freedom we need to grow in relationship with God. Particularly this means we designate space and time that is there for us to be quiet, to rest in God’s presence (which is part of one of my favorite definitions of prayer). If we’re talking all the time then God never gets the opportunity to enter into the dialogue. Even when we read the Bible, the Word, if we’re so busy trying to assign meaning or figure out if it’s authentic or not, we don’t allow it be what it was meant to be – a message to be received.
Ah, I can hear the noise in the room. “One more thing to clutter up my life!” Now think about it. We always do what we hold as a priority. If we have the time to do the things that increase the noise, why can’t we make the time to deepen the silence and to open the ears of our heart? It’s about what matters – does being in touch with God, growing in our spiritual lives matter? I hope so. Then there’s time, isn’t there?

Bishop Anthony Bloom, recently deceased Russian Orthodox bishop in the UK, wrote a book that I return to again and again, Beginning to Pray. He says something in that book that just makes so much sense and that we tend to forget – even Elijah the prophet forgot it. Bloom writes: “. . . it is very important to remember that prayer is an encounter and a relationship, a relationship which is deep, and this relationship cannot be forced either on us or on God. The fact that God can make Himself present or can leave us with the sense of His absence is part of this live and real relationship. If we could mechanically draw Him into an encounter, force Him to meet us, simply because we have chosen this moment to meet Him, there would be no relationship and no encounter. We can do that with an image, with the imagination, or with the various idols we can put in front of us instead of God; we can do nothing of the sort with the living God, any more than we can do with a living person. A relationship must begin and develop in mutual freedom. If you look at the relationship in terms of mutual relationship, you will see that God could complain about us a great deal more than we about Him. We complain that He does not make Himself present to us for the few minutes we reserve for Him, but what about the twenty-three and a half hours during which God may be knocking at our door and we answer ‘I am busy, I am sorry’ or when we do not answer at all because we do not even hear the knock at the door of our heart, of our minds, of our conscience, of our life. So there is a situation in which we have no right to complain of the absence of God, because we are a great deal more absent than He ever is.” [Beginning to Pray, p. 26]

God is not absent from us – God is ever-present. It is we, as Bloom says, through our noise and our busyness, who keep God at a distance. Cultivating a sense of the Divine Presence, an interior silence – a quiet, listening heart – opens us to the reality that God is, indeed, always with us. God is faithful to God’s promise of presence and relationship.

Tilden Edwards, Episcopal priest and contemporary spiritual writer, describes an approach to this prayer of presence called “centering prayer.” It’s based on some ancient practices and I can tell you from experience that it is simple, helpful, and refreshing. Edwards describes it this way: “ 1. Close your eyes. Take a moment or so to become silent. Then offer a brief prayer for openness and trust, in your own words. 2. Let a simple, sacred word spontaneously emerge from deep within you that expresses your relation to God, your being in God. Slowly let this word repeat itself whenever the mind strays. If the word does not arise spontaneously, then introduce one very gently. Gently let it absorb everything else that clutters your mind: all your thoughts and images, all your memories, plans, worries, and hopes. There is nothing else to do during this time except say the word. Be very present in it. 3. After 20 minutes, slowly say the Lord’s Prayer, or some other prayers to ‘ground’ you. Pray in this way twice a day.” [Living Simply Through the Day: Spiritual Survival in a Complex Age, p. 97]. He quotes Abbot Thomas Keating who says that this process “is the denial of what we most love and are attached to: our own thoughts and feelings. This is a kind of asceticism that . . . goes to the very roots of attachment to our superficial selves, our egocentric manipulative tendencies, and teaches us to let go. . . . This is detachment of the most intimate, liberating, and delightful kind.”

Over the weeks and months ahead you’re going to hear a lot about spirituality and ways that we can grow in it as a community of faith – because we can’t grow out until we’ve grown in. Since there’s no time like the present, I’d like us to experience this prayer together. I can’t think of a better conclusion to a sermon on the importance of silence than silence itself. Fear not, we won’t take twenty minutes, but we will take a few. Follow the practice as Edwards outlined it, let the noise go quiet and then listen; listen deep inside yourself for God’s voice in the “sound of sheer silence.”

After we’ve had a few moments, I’ll offer prayer to close. I urge you to try this method yourselves, please. Take some time and, if this doesn’t work for you, call one of us for a chat. There are many methods and we’re here to help you find the one that works for you. After all, the wise spiritual writer Cuthbert Butler said it best, “Pray as you can, not as you can’t.” Nevertheless, we do need to pray to discover that silence is golden and God’s voice is still speaking in our noisy world.
We enter into the silence….