Hear With New Ears
Rev. Samuel Schaal
First Congregational Church of Wauwatosa
September 30, 2007

Isaiah 30:18-22
Psalm 91: 1-6, 14-16
Luke 16:19-31

I live on Harwood Avenue, just past the bridge, and that part of Harwood is right on the path of fire trucks leaving the fire station on Underwood and ambulances going to Froedtert Hospital, further down on Harwood. So at home, even when the windows are closed, I am aware of the noise of our community; that is, when I am tuned into it. But most of the time I’m not tuned into it because it’s something I’ve learned to filter out. Though my ears pick up the decibels of the noise, my brain filters it out because it’s not information I need, and so I am often unaware of it as I go about my day.

Even if you don’t live on a busy street with emergency vehicles, you still likely tune out a lot of extraneous noise in our world. We experience a lot of noise, but we don’t hear much of it. So how, in all this, do we hear the voice of God amid that noise, amid the clamor and cacophony of our world? How might we hear the voice of the holy with new ears?

Listening for the voice of God isn’t an easy task these days. For that matter, it has never been an easy task and that’s why there are so many old wisdom stories on how to do this. Belden Lane tells one such story. Lane is a Presbyterian theology professor teaching at the Catholic/Jesuit school of Saint Louis University in Saint Louis. Our own Dr. Peay knows Belden, as Steve earned his Ph.D. there.

Belden tells this old story of the desert fathers in his book The Solace of Fierce Landscapes. A monk was looking for a sign of God’s approval for his long years of monastic devotion. God told him that his sanctity was nothing compared to that of a common grocer in a nearby town. So the monk seeks out the grocer and found him in an open market busy among the noise and hurry of the streets. He noticed the grocer faithfully attending to each and every of his customers, even with the people growing rowdy and singing loudly in the streets. But even late into the night, the grocer carefully tended to the needs of his customers without growing weary.

Looking at all this, the monk was surprised that God had told him of the grocer’s great devotion to prayer and holy things. He cried out to the grocer, “How can you ever pray with noise like this? The grocer answered simply, “I tell myself they’re all going to the kingdom. They’re concentrating with single-minded attention on what they do, singing songs with all the joy they can muster. See how they prepare for the kingdom of God without even knowing it! How can I do less myself than to praise in silence the God they inadvertently celebrate in song?”

Belden concludes: “That night the old monk walked slowly back to his cell, knowing himself to have received—from a grocer, no less—an important lesson in the craft of desert attentiveness.”

The grocer knew God by paying attention to others. By engaging what is really happening and yet seeing in those commonplace circumstances a spiritual component, by seeing that the people are expressing their own God-given joy and are, as he said, “preparing for the kingdom.” The grocer tuned-in to God, even amid the clamor of a busy marketplace, simply by being present to others.

In opposition to how the grocer engaged those around him, the rich man in Luke’s parable does not at all engage the needs of other. While the rich man feasted, Lazarus lay at the gate, so the rich man had separated himself from the poor. Once both had died, the rich man is again separated from Lazarus, by a “great chasm” and their roles had been reversed. The rich man, now in torment, sees Lazarus for the first time, though in life he was blind to Lazarus. And, we might say in the spirit of this morning’s message, the rich man was deaf to Lazarus’ cries.

The rich man did not hear the cries of the poor until he himself was suffering. Then his eyes and ears were open and he acknowledged Lazarus, but it was too late.

The parable is not a description of what happens after death, but suggests that it matters how we use our resources. It also suggests something about how aware we are of each other while on earth.

The Luke passage is a study of separation: The rich man and Lazarus are separated in life by a gate and in eternal life by a great chasm. In the Isaiah text we see an expression of closeness and unity with God. God speaks through the prophet to a people who are exiled and yearn for relief from misery. God hears the people and answers them, proclaiming they will cry no longer, that “the teacher,” being either God or a prophet, will be present to them, that when they turn to listen to God, God will say, “This is the way, walk in it,” directing them. So God is present, near, intimate. God is a God, says the psalmist, whose wings will provide refuge, whose deliverance is near.

Notice the dichotomy of these passages. In this we find a lesson, though stated negatively, about the spiritual principle of reflection, that as God gives to us, so should we reflect to others. Isaiah and the psalmist speak of God’s protective presence and engagement with us in the difficulties of life. But the rich man in Luke doesn’t reflect God’s generosity and creates distance between him and others. He does not fulfill the spiritual principle of reflection and so is separated through eternity.

As Christians, we are called to act as Christ, to reflect Christ’s care and compassion. According to Paul, we are the Body of Christ. Christ in not a disincarnated spirit. We as church embody Christ and continue the incarnation as Christ for the modern world. So our faith is an active faith, not passive. Our faith is bold, not merely status quo. Our faith expects something of us. God expects us to take care of each other, so that God might be known more fully in the world.

But sometimes we hide behind our gates. It’s a telling statement in our world that more and more people are living in gated communities, seeking protection by walling themselves off from the outside world. The church stands as one of the few institutions in our society whose mission is to help people engage each other and then engage the world.

The principle of reflection I mentioned applies to congregational life. When I think of church, I often think of two images. One is of members of the church standing in a circle facing each other, attentive to each other’s needs. Perhaps holding hands, feeling the touch of another, seeing each other’s faces and engaging each other openly. Perhaps we gather in a circle for prayer, such as many boards and committees do in ending meetings with the Lord’s Prayer. This is one image of church, but it is an incomplete image. The problem is, we have our backs turned on the world. We can become so absorbed in the life of the church that we forget how that church should reach out to others outside its own fellowship.

So the second image of the church is all of us holding hands, but shoulder-to-shoulder, facing the world, engaging the world amid society’s noise and clatter. (Perhaps even better, not holding hands but extending our hands to help others.) But if we use only this second image to define church, we forget that we need the support of each other to care for our own problems. We need times of quietness and reflection, time to regenerate our batteries, time to ground ourselves in the fellowship of the community.

It seems to me that each image balances and completes the other. Church is, at once, both us holding hands in a circle, caring for the needs of each other and asking for God’s help in that process. And turned around to face the world, to be in ministry with the world. It’s listening: listening to each other, listening to the world, and in that process, hearing God’s voice.

In these days of our Stewardship celebration, we speak of more than money, though we do speak of money. We speak also of what binds us together as church, what holds us together. One of my favorite texts along these lines is from a sermon preached in 1841 by Dr. William Ellery Channing of Boston, when he was the pulpit guest at the First Congregational Unitarian Church of Philadelphia. The sermon was titled “The Church” and he speaks here of how we can hear God through engaging each other. Channing says:

“We come together in our places of worship that heart may act on heart…that we may hear God’s word more eagerly by knowing that it is drunk in by thirsty spirits around us…

“To myself, the most effectual church is that in which I see the signs of Christian affection in those around me, in which warm hearts are beating on every side, in which a deep stillness speaks of the absorbed soul, in which I recognize fellow beings who in common life have impressed me with their piety. One look from a beaming countenance, one tone in singing from a deeply moved heart, perhaps aids me more than the sermon. When nothing is said, I feel it good to be among the devout; and I wonder not that the Quakers in some of their still meetings profess to hold the most intimate union, not only with God, but with each other. It is not with the voice only that (one) communicates with (another). Nothing is so eloquent as the deep silence of a crowd.”

So God can be heard in the stillness of quiet worship or in the clamor of the crowded marketplace. Moreover, God can be heard where two or three are gathered and seek to know God. Where people engage in the spiritual journey, where people do not turn their backs on each other or the world.

But you’ve got to be tuned to it. You’ve got to open your ears to it. God speaks to us, I think, not in loud voices from clouds or in thunderbolts, or even from a burning bush. Most often God speaks in the opening of our gates, in the narrowing of the chasms between us and the world, in the ways we serve the least and the lost, and in the acknowledgement of us as beneficiaries of God, meant to then reflect that grace, that goodness, that generosity, to others.

May it be so. Amen.