Second Sunday in Epiphany, from I Samuel 3.1-20.
Okay, in my estimation it’s really only possible for children to talk-back. The same dynamic exists for us (adults) but we treat it differently. I mean, you would rarely, if ever, hear a boss tell an employee, ‘Don’t sass me.” No, we use other language that is more properly passive aggressive and obtuse. You might hear an adult say to their boss, “let me push-back on what you just said.” It shares some of the language (push-back, talk-back), but it’s deferential, its really asking permission of the person in authority.
One of the challenges of being a parent or working with children, is trying to distinguish between when a child is talking back in a disrespectful, derisive manner (with the sass-tank full) and when they are giving respectful push-back.
In fact, I hate to blow my cover with some of you teenagers here today, but I admit to you that I truly am sympathetic to your plight. You live in a world of in-betweens. You alternately, and sometimes simultaneously, have permission from all of us (and your culture), to act like a child and to act like an adult. In most cases, we praise when you act with maturity, and in most cases, we celebrate when you act like a little kid. But here’s the dance that you have to learn, right? Trying to figure out which behavior and in which circumstance the two things are required by us, the adults in your lives? Good luck with that.
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Samuel was likely around the age of thirteen when he was placed in the custody of Eli, a high priest and judge in Israel. Thirteen. He was put there by his mother who, as a young Jewish woman struggling to conceive, promised God that she would give any child she bore over to God, which in that culture meant she would see to it that such a child would be prepared for the priesthood.
Many of us are at least somewhat familiar with this story. Three times in the middle of the night, Samuel hears a voice and easily mistakes it for the voice of his mentor. Finally, Eli, the old priest, realizes what is happening and tells Samuel to go back to his bed and if he hears the voice again, to sit up and say, “Speak Lord, for your servant is listening.” Samuel did, and it did, and he did.
And we usually end the story. Right. There.
It’s a good story. We tend to use it when we are romanticizing the idea of attuning ourselves to God’s voice, discerning God’s direction for our life. Symbolically, it’s useful for high school and college students who are trying to pinpoint a vocation, a calling. But that isn’t where the story ends. In fact, our Church’s lectionary today gives us the choice of ending our reading here with the quaint story, or continuing on to a darker part.
Here’s what the voice said.
“I’m getting ready to do something that will make your ears tingle, that will make your ears hot. I am going to punish your teacher Eli because his sons, who are priests under his care, are corrupt and Eli hasn’t done anything to restrain them. So for him and his family, all the sacrifices made will not cover their sins.” That’s pretty heavy for a thirteen-year-old boy.
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About a year ago, an 11 year old from China named Zhang Hao challenged the Chinese Edible Fungi Association. Seems his mother had stopped preparing his favorite dish, Roasted Mushrooms, because she read a report that the whitening agents, the bleaches, used to make the mushrooms look more presentable at market made them toxic.
But eleven-year-old Zangh, loved Roasted Mushroom casserole, and so as a part of his “Scientific Inquiry Class” at school, he asked his teacher if he could do an experiment to try and quell his mother’s anxieties and get the roasted mushrooms back into the dinner rotation. So he and his mother proceeded to buy 16 different species of edible fungi at the Beijing supermarket, farmer’s market and wholesale produce market.
Here’s what he found. That ninety percent of the mushrooms purchased indeed had traces of bleach. Now, you’ve got to really like Mom’s Roasted Mushrooms to keep making that dish. It’s one thing trying to prove your mother wrong, right? (Don’t sass me) But it’s quite entirely something else telling Chinese officials they are allowing their citizens to eat toxic mushrooms.
But that’s what Zhang did, and found himself in a very public squabble with the Chinese government.
Samuel lay there until morning; staring up at the ceiling because he could not sleep. Samuel was afraid to tell the vision to Eli.
It’s almost can go without saying that it requires extraordinary amounts of courage to speak truth to power. But it also takes courage to be the person in power to be willing to hear that truth; to be the person, like Eli, who says, “Tell me what the Lord said, don’t hide it from me.” It takes a different kind of strength.
Tomorrow our nation celebrates one our great truth-tellers, Martin Luther King Jr., who wrote this in his Letter From a Birmingham Jail, and it’s important to note that one of the primary targets of his letter was the then Episcopal Bishop of Alabama, Charles Carpenter: St Martin writes:
“The contemporary church is so often a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. It is so often the arch supporter of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's often-vocal sanction of things as they are. But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If the church of today does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authentic ring, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century.”
It takes as much courage to hear and receive the truth, as it does to speak it. Sometimes, it takes even more to receive it, to truly listen so that we can respond to God’s words.
Now the boy Samuel was ministering to the Lord under Eli. The word of the God was rare in those days; visions were not widespread.
