Listening for God

            I love this story of Samuel. He was literally an answer to his mother’s prayers, and precisely because he was so clearly a gift from God his mother dedicated him to the Lord just as she had promised. He was still a child when his parents brought him to the Temple. He had just been weaned. They left him there in the care of a priest named Eli, so that he might serve the Lord for the rest of his life.

We don’t know how Samuel felt about all this. Scripture doesn’t tell us whether he simply accepted what was happening or cried out and fought it with all his meager strength.

There was a time in my own life – I was in the fourth or fifth grade at the time – when I was sent to live with my grandmother. I’ll never forget the hurt and confusion of that time. Mornings were the worst when my dad and brothers would show up to take me to school. Seeing them in the car I was reminded that they had a life together that I was no longer part of. I was overwhelmed with the sense of being an outsider.

I began to have nightmares of an old-lady coming out of the darkness and taking hold of me. It was always just the upper half of the lady which added to the terror of it. I’d wake up screaming. It happened often enough that one of my brothers began teasing me about it. That’s what brothers do, of course, and the mere mention of the “old lady” would bring all the terror of my dream. 

I’m sure my parents and grandmother knew what that dream was all about. It’s almost embarrassing how long it took me to finally put the pieces together. And the reason why I only saw the upper half? That’s exactly the part of my grandmother that was visible to me as we sat together, night after night, at a card table in her living room doing my homework.

Samuel must have felt some of that same trauma. Maybe he had been thoroughly prepared for that moment. Maybe there were other children there at the temple who had been similarly dedicated. But no matter what the circumstances, it would have been painful for him to be torn from his home and village and left with a man he had never seen before in a place as eerily mysterious as a tribal temple.

Yet there is no suggestion that Samuel ever complained. There is just this touching account in the second chapter of his mother preparing a little robe for him and bringing it to him each year.

Her life went on. She had three more sons and two daughters. But Samuel’s life would never be the same. He grew up away from his family and isolated from everything we would consider “normal” there in the temple. He grew up, we are told, in the presence of the Lord.

            I’m sure you’ve heard at least some of the talk about Tim Tebow this season. Has anyone in Pittsburgh not heard of him? Even though he won the Heisman trophy and led his college team to the national championship, no one expected him to do particularly well in the NFL. He had a bad throwing motion. He was too prone to run the ball. But this year, in his second season, the Broncos started off losing their first four games and his coaches figured they had nothing to lose. They put him in, and he helped win four of the next five games. With him at the helm the Broncos squeaked into the playoffs, and we all know what he did to our beloved Steelers last week.

There is something of Samuel in Tebow’s story. He grew up the child of missionaries. If being a preacher’s kid is strange, being a missionary’s child would be even stranger. Like Samuel, he grew up in an environment totally dedicated to the service of God. That changes a person, and its impact on Tebow is seen in the degree to which his faith is a fully integrated part of who he is. Falling to a knee and thanking God isn’t about making a show of his faith. It’s simply who he is; as natural to him as brushing our teeth might be for us.

I don’t agree with everything Tim Tebow says or does, but I love a guy who is willing to say “this is who I am” in the face of all the ridicule and criticism that he’s received. And frankly, it is kind of refreshing to hear someone say “football is just a game and being a better player doesn’t mean you’re a better person or especially favored by God.”

Samuel might have said something like that if he was around today. Growing up in God’s presence can do that to you. It gives you a different perspective; a different sense of what really matters and what doesn’t matter at all. 

Go ahead, give whatever you are doing your best shot. That’s what Tebow does. You can see the intensity he brings to each game. Give your best to your job and to your family. Give your best to whatever life has laid before you.

Just keep it all in perspective. Know that while winning is great, and making good money is wonderful, that there are still more important things out there like how you treat your kids, or that family across the street that’s struggling with cancer, or those people just across the river who can’t afford to heat their homes this winter. Begin walking with God and you start experiencing life through a different lens: justice and mercy and compassion begin to mean a whole lot more because these are the qualities that reflect the very heart of God.

Jewish tradition has it that Samuel was twelve when he had this encounter with God. Up to this point, we are told, he didn’t know the Lord and the word had not yet been revealed to him. That’s why he didn’t recognize God’s voice when God first spoke. “Samuel!” God called, “Samuel!” But Samuel assumed that it was the priest – the old, almost blind priest who had been raising him.   

            What is so striking here is that while Samuel didn’t know God, God clearly knew him. God knew his name which to the Hebrew meant that God knew his very essence. It is Samuel’s name that God uses as he calls out to him.

            What do we say in infant baptism? That long before we know God, and long before we are able to respond, God is reaching out to us in the sacrament. God is already at work in our lives, providing for us, making us a part of his covenant family, and we aren’t even aware of it at the time.

That’s the God we meet here in this text. Samuel believed in God but he didn’t know him. God, however, clearly knew Samuel. And that same God knows each of us. God knows your name. He knows who you are. He knows what’s happened in your life. He knows your joys and your struggles and what’s going on in your life right now. 

It is the same God that we meet in our second lesson; the God we encounter in the person of Jesus. “Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!” Jesus says. “How do you know who I am?” Nathanael asks. “I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you,” Jesus answers. 

God sees us, God knows us, God is at work in our lives before we are even conscious of him.

It is a healing thing for me to go back in my mind to that time when I was left with my grandmother – to go back and to realize that I wasn’t alone. God was with me there in all the hurt and the confusion. He knew what was happening. He never turned away. That’s the promise of baptism – that we belong to him; that his love for us is for all eternity.

“Come and see.” That’s all Philip said. Nathanael couldn’t quite bring himself to believe that anything good could possibly come out of a back-water town like Nazareth. Philip didn’t try to change his mind through some carefully reasoned argument. He simply invited his friend to come and meet this Jesus for himself. Walk with him for a while, and just see if he doesn’t make all the difference.

That’s the invitation that is coming to us here. Come and see. Following Jesus isn’t about some set of rules. It is about a relationship; a relationship that can change your life. It is joining Samuel in making that choice to listen to what God is saying to us. It is joining Nathanael in getting up from wherever we’ve been living, and making the choice to walk with Jesus for a while. 

Come and see. You can’t be a spectator on this one. If you want to really know Jesus and experience for yourself the difference that he can make, you have to get up and walk beside him. You have to make that choice to follow.