God is With You

God is With You
For the past few weeks, we’ve been exploring the blessing that has closed our services together for the past couple of years. God created you, God loves you, God is with you and God blesses you. Next week, we’ll be blessed to have Rev. John & Barbara Meyers with us to explore our faith visually. Our first week, we looked at the beginning—God created you and we saw creation from the beginning and creation within the waters of our baptism when we became a new creation and were commissioned into the ministry of making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. Last week, we explored God loves you and heard the story of Jonah and how God loves us right where we are, but loves us enough not to leave us there. This week we look at God is with you.
Now this one seems, just like some of the others, seems to be pretty self explanatory…God is with you. God is with you always…There are times when it just doesn’t seem like God is there…Like God is around…Like is with us. The movie A Walk to Remember is based on the novel by Nicholas Sparks about the relationship between Jamie & Landon—Jamie is the daughter of the preacher in town & Landon is the bad boy who Jamie sees something good in. After a rocky start, the two begin dating and fall in love, and is not without bumps in the road. Jamie has leukemia and gets very sick, but her faith never shakes. Landon’s faith was minimal before, but questions God as Jamie helps him to understand the faith that she has in God and helps him come to know the God that she loves so much. This scene comes at the beginning of Jamie & Landon’s relationship where they both realize that they are in love…(Clip)…Love is like the wind—I can’t see it, but I know it’s always there…That’s what God is like—we may not be able to recognize God’s presence, but God is always there…
In the passage from 1 Samuel, we get the call story of Samuel—Samuel is the son of Hannah & Elkanah…Samuel was so prayed for by Hannah as she didn’t have children. She prayed to God for a child and then became pregnant with Samuel. In thanks, once Samuel was weaned, he was sent to the temple and given back to God in service…Samuel studies and learns under Eli, whose eyesight is going bad and he’s just getting older…So, as a young boy—probably between 10-13 at this point, Samuel is laying in bed, when he hears a voice. “Samuel, Samuel” and of course the only logical explanation is that Eli needs him, so Samuel rushes to Eli and discovers that Eli is still sleeping and didn’t call for him…So he goes back to bed and a second time he hears his name called and he goes to Eli and discovers that Eli didn’t call for him so he goes back to bed…And a third time, Samuel hears his name being called and rushes again to Eli, but this time Eli tells him that the next time he hears his name, he should say, “Speak for your servant is listening” because God is speaking to him…
Can you imagine how scared Samuel must have been? The passage tells us that Samuel had never heard the word of the Lord and did not know the Lord…And yet, here God is speaking to Samuel…For those who know God, to hear God speaking is quite frightening! Maybe you’ve had an experience like Samuel where you’ve heard the voice of God or felt the presence of God so strongly that you were convinced that it had to be something else—the person in the next room calling or some other logical explanation. Sometimes the only logical explanation is that God is speaking…And maybe you haven’t had an experience like Samuel where you’ve heard the voice of God, but you have felt God’s presence strongly or you could tell that there was something different about a particular circumstance…maybe the hairs on the back of your neck stood up or you got the chills for no apparent reason. God is with you…
Now the 4th time came around and Samuel heard the voice calling his name again. And here’s the choice that Samuel had to make—he had to decide whether he would listen to Eli and say, “Speak for your servant is listening” or he could roll over and put a pillow over his head and pretend like he couldn’t hear…Both are honest reactions and I think a lot of people would be content with rolling over and putting a pillow over their head and pretending like they can’t hear or can’t feel the presence of God. Maybe you’ve done it yourself…I can tell you for sure that I have! There are times when I haven’t wanted to hear or feel God…There are times when I’ve been angry with God and didn’t want to feel God anywhere near me…There have been times that I’ve been ashamed in front of God and although I knew God had forgiven me, I was embarrassed and like Adam & Eve, I hid from God…There have been times when I am so convinced that I am right about something that even God can’t convince me otherwise or that I am so focused on something that even God can’t draw me out…And I roll over and put the pillow over my head and pretend like I can’t hear or feel God…Have you felt that way before?
Well Samuel has that same choice…roll over or listen…and Samuel chooses to listen. He chooses to listen to this God that he doesn’t even really know, but has just heard calling him by name…And he hears his name a 4th time, “Samuel, Samuel…” and he says, “Speak for your servant is listening.” Can you put yourself in the emotions of that room? Maybe it feels like a time in your life or maybe you can imagine the fear that Samuel must be feeling…Are his hands shaking? Is his breathing faster? Is he lying down afraid to move, or sitting straight up trying to take everything in? How would you feel?
We don’t get any of what Samuel’s emotions must have been in that moment, just what we imagine or put in from our own experiences…but we get the message of God to Samuel…And it’s not a happy message, but it’s a message against Eli and it’s a message that God really isn’t happy…If Samuel was okay with hearing God’s voice, I can’t imagine he’s very okay with hearing a negative message about his teacher & mentor. Well, he’s so not okay with it that he doesn’t want to tell Eli about it…Now, Eli knows what happened because he was partly involved the night before…Eli knows that Samuel heard from God and that God had a message from Samuel and the next morning, Samuel doesn’t want to tell him what God had spoken.
Sometimes it’s like that for us too…maybe God has spoken something so powerful or frightening that we just can’t tell anyone…We’ve had an experience with God that others just won’t understand and so we don’t tell anyone…Maybe we think others will think we’re crazy or we’re not even sure if we should believe it ourselves…So we keep it to ourselves and don’t share…Samuel would have been content to do it that way, but Eli convinces him to tell everything that God said…
It can’t be easy for Eli to hear the message that Samuel has—that Eli hadn’t been doing what God wanted and God wasn’t happy with Eli…It had to be painful for Eli to hear that…Eli who had been listening and serving God for his entire life—sometimes faithfully and sometimes not, was just told by this young boy—a child that God told him that Eli wasn’t doing his job…It must have been very painful for Eli to hear this and recognize his own shortcomings…To see where he had fallen short…And just like Samuel, Eli had a choice in what to do as well…He could pretend like Samuel couldn’t possibly have heard that kind of a message or tell Samuel that he was crazy or even told Samuel that he was wrong or that he was listening to something other than God…I’ve been in that position too—Where I’ve been Eli and have been held accountable and I didn’t want to hear it…and I’ve been Samuel having to tell an Eli that they’re not doing what God called them to do and to be and things have to change…It’s not an easy position for either to be in…And Eli has a choice—he can lash out at Samuel and tell him he’s wrong and go about doing things the way that he’s always done them…or he can listen to Samuel and what God has to say and pass the mantle…If you were Eli, what would you do? What have you done?
Eli says to Samuel, “It is the Lord, let him do what seems good to him.” And we don’t hear from Eli much after that…But we know that Samuel listened to everything God said after that…
Now we have much to learn and experience through this story of Eli & Samuel…Much that we can incorporate into our own lives and our own faith development as much as we can point out where we have been like Eli or Samuel…And although we have much to learn, there may be some of you who have been stuck thinking, “I want an experience like Samuel had.” I want to hear God’s voice…I want to feel God’s presence…I want that! How do I get that?
Well, there are no magic words to say or a particular place to be in…There’s nothing that you can set up to make sure that this is the time that you hear God’s voice…But you can set up the space to hear…You can silence yourself enough to hear God’s voice…Because God’s voice isn’t always audible or able to be heard above all of the noise of our lives and all of the noise of our minds…Sometimes we just don’t want to heard God, because we’re afraid of what God might say to us…I heard a song lyric recently that said, “ I don’t want to be the girl that has to fill the silence…The quiet scares me cuz it screams the truth.” How quiet are you making your life in order to hear God? In the morning, before I have my cup of coffee, I have my morning devotions. There are times when it comes quite easily and I can hear and feel God strongly…and there are times when I really don’t want to, but I pretend like I do because I feel like I should…I come away those times and think, “Well, God just wasn’t talking this morning.” But the truth is, God was talking, I just didn’t want to listen…God is with you…God is with you always…Are you listening for God? Are you looking for God’s presence? If you look, you’ll hear and you’ll see…God is with you always…Sometimes the message that God has for us is not easy or one that we necessarily want to hear…Sometimes it’s difficult, sometimes it’s painful, but it’s always told and shared in love…God’s love which is perfect and can see beyond our own understanding and our own comprehension. God is speaking—are you listening? God is with you—are you looking? Don’t be afraid of what you might see or what you might hear…God is with you…God created you…God loves you…God is with you…God blesses you…