Hear Ye! Hear Ye!

"Hear Ye!  Hear Ye!"
Mark 9:2-8

My guess is that people are more visually oriented than they are hearing oriented.  We depend on our eyes more for establishing what is real and what is not.  Seeing is believing.  Hearing alone is not trustworthy.  It’s not what you say, it’s what you do.  At least, that’s how we behave.

Just hearing takes too much imagination.  Using our imaginations is a lot of work.  That’s why we don’t do it.  We’d rather see a visual representation rather than have to just listen and use our imagination.  I can tell you about a YouTube video that I saw, and fill you in on all the details of the video and why it was so funny.  But chances are, you are going to look it up and watch it yourself, because, as I just said, seeing is believing.

More people go to movie theaters to watch movies than read books.  Along with that, more people watch television than listen to the radio.  Children aged 2-11 watch over 24 hours of TV per week.  Adults aged 35-49 watch more than 33 hours of TV per week, and that time increases the older we get.  The average American watches more than five hours of television every day.

That’s why I gave up television.  I was getting sucked into the vortex of binge watching when I got home from work.  I asked myself, “Self, what are doing with your life?  You’re wasting your life watching people pretend to be somebody else.”  So I quit.  Cold turkey.  About 7 years ago.  Some people ask me if I miss TV during basketball season.  Except for a few times Brad and Deb have me over to watch a game, for the most part I listen to the KU games on internet radio, and have to use my imagination; I kind of like that.

So I quit TV and started reading.  The average person reads recreationally 19 minutes a day.  I’ve been reading about 50 books a year for the past few years.  So, significantly more than the average.  My daughter read 100 books last year.  Some of those she listened to in the car while driving here and there in San Diego—it takes a lot longer to get around out there than driving here.  But even listening to books is so much of a different experience than the visual bombardment that happens when you watch so much TV.  As I said, imagination is ignited when listening—something that doesn’t happen when using your eyes and watching something.

I’m not making any kind of moral judgement about this.  Too much.  I only bring this up to further my idea that we are much more visual people rather than an audio or hearing people.  This is especially so when the truth is trying to be established.  In a court of law, what usually carries more weight is what people actually saw—an eye witness—rather than an ear witness.  We equate more power and authority to the visual image, the display, rather than the spoken word.  We haggle over words, but not with pictures.

For those of you old enough, do you remember what Uri Gregarian, the first Russian cosmonaut said when he got back to earth.  “I went up to the heavens and I saw no God; there is no God up there.”  Seeing is believing.  Or, not seeing is proof for doubt.

Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!”  Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them anymore, but only Jesus.

Here is a classic instance of what I’m talking about.  The three disciples, Peter, James, and John hear a Voice.  They all hear it.  The Voice makes a simple, brief, yet direct statement.  The disciples immediately did what we would do—they looked around for verification of what they were hearing.  Just hearing wasn’t enough.  They had to see.  They looked.  But saw no one.

Even if they could have or would have seen the one speaking, it wouldn’t have mattered.  What mattered was what they heard:  “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!”  They heard a Voice (presumably the Voice of God) telling them to listen.  God didn’t say, “This is my Son, the Beloved; look at him!”  “This is my Son, the Beloved; watch what he does.”  God wasn’t instructing the terrified trio of disciples to look at Jesus and see all that he had done, was doing, and would do.  The word was listen.  Use your ears.  With God’s Son, it wasn’t what the disciples were going to see as much as what Jesus said was going to be important.  His words.  His speech.  His language.  God was signaling, at least to these three disciples, what Jesus was going to say was more important than what he was going to do.  That is, whereas most people would come to watch the show—see the miracles Jesus would perform—what Jesus would teach, was much more important.  Listen.  Hear.  Pay attention to what is said.

Jesus, on certain occasions, expressed his frustration that people wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t take him at his word, wouldn’t pay attention to what he was saying.  Jesus was frustrated that people constantly pressed him for something visual—a miracle.  As if his words weren’t miraculous enough in themselves.

And therein lies our problem.  Our God is an auditory God who speaks and expects us to listen.  Our God is one who creates worlds by speaking:  “Then God said, ‘Let there be light, and there was light.’”  Our God is one who speaks commands and expects us to hear them and by hearing, obey.  The decisive action of God is to speak, while ours is to listen.  The prophet Isaiah hammered away at that point again and again:

Hear, O heavens, and listen, O earth;
for the LORD has spoken.  (1:2)

Hear the word of the Lord,
you rulers of Sodom!
Listen to the teaching of our God,
you people of Gomorrah!  (1:10)

And those are just in the first 10 verses in the first chapter.

Even in God’s commandments, there is a warning about creating too much visual representations that could become rival objects of worship.  God warned Moses, in one of the 10 Commandments, “You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath...” (Exodus 20:4).  Do you get that?  God doesn’t want anything visual made that depicts God or what God has made.  That is dangerous according to this second commandment.

But it is equally just as dangerous to hear God and not listen; to listen, but not pay attention, or to pay attention and not obey.  The emphasis throughout the Bible, in God’s communication with people is on listening, not seeing.

When God said, “Listen...” to the three disciples out of the cloud, on that mount with Jesus, God was using a very special word.  It is a word that doesn’t just mean, “Hear what I have to say.”  To listen as God instructed them to listen meant, “revelation.”  Something is not just being spoken; something is being revealed.  If the disciples listened, if we listen to God’s Beloved, something important is being revealed to us.  It may be some aspect of God’s will for us.  Or, it might be a revelation of the person and personality of God.  But if we aren’t listening, if we aren’t paying attention, God’s revelation will pass us by.

Let me use the act of preaching a sermon as a kind of model for maybe what God’s expectations are, in this command that we listen.  Whether we say this assumption out loud or only to ourselves, we preachers idealize those who listen to us.  We see the people in the pews as hungry and thirsty for the word of God, who can’t help but be affected by the gospel, who have one question that pushes all other questions aside:  How can I best be a Christian?

We preachers assume that you who listen to us each Sunday (because there’s really nothing to look at that is worthwhile) go out of the sanctuary affected by what you hear, and challenged to assess and mold your daily lives accordingly.  We preachers make the assumption that all the people who make it to church on a given Sunday have come motivated by some deep spiritual desire to hear a foundation-shaking, eye-opening word from the Lord.  We make these assumptions because it would be hard if not impossible to stand up here Sunday after Sunday assuming the opposite—that you come for no reason at all.

The rub comes from an assumption, spoken or unspoken, from the pew side of the sanctuary.  Those to whom preachers speak are, as a rule, persons who often hear sermons, attend worship and find themselves at home in the church.  Almost too comfortably at home.  Fred Craddock, in a book about preaching, wrote, “Even for casual listeners there is a fairly high degree of predictability in the sermon, and surrounding the whole occasion is the dead air of familiarity:  we have been here before, and here we go again” (Craddock, Overhearing The Gospel, page 25).

One woman wrote in to Reader’s Digest about her great aunt who had become increasingly deaf.  A specialist suggested an operation to improve her hearing.  The great aunt promptly vetoed that idea.  “I’m 94 years old,” she said, “and I’ve heard enough!”

Preachers don’t want to imagine that that’s what the people in the pew are saying to themselves each Sunday, no matter how old they are.  “I’ve heard preaching all my life, and I’ve  heard enough!”

Just the sheer mathematics of sermon listening is enough to dull your ability to listen.  By June 30th of this year I will have been preaching in this sanctuary for 8 and a half years.  If you had been here every Sunday during that time period, you would have heard me preach about 406 times.  406 sermons you would have heard!  (They are all on the blog site, by the way, in case you want to go back and reread some of those gems!) And I’m just one in a long run of preachers whom you have had the pleasure of listening to!

But sadly, that just may be the greatest factor that hinders listening, especially the revelation kind of listening that God commanded the disciples to do.  The greatest obstacle to the ability to give the kind of attention to Jesus Christ that God desired is assumed familiarity:  we’ve been here before, I’ve heard it all before, here we go again.

I’ve drawn out this image for you so that we can understand that that’s what Jesus faced in his preaching and teaching—in trying to get people to listen to him.  The apostle Paul, preaching to the Gentiles and the non-religious was presenting something to people that was a first time experience.  They’d never heard such a word before.  They felt conviction when hearing the gospel, and they also found the power through God’s spoken word to do something about that conviction and change their ways.  But Jesus’ listeners were up to their ears in scripture, people who were in the pew for almost every sabbath service and religious celebration.

When you are that kind of creature of repetition and custom, it’s easy to assume that there is “nothing new under the sun” in a word from God.  But that’s a dangerous assumption.  I would dare venture the statement that those who say to God, “Here we go again,” have not, in fact, listened as much as they assume to be the case.  We have all learned to survive by partial deafness to the real condition of ourselves and our world that God desires us to hear.  Ultimately, that is a deafness to God.

We who are instructed by God to listen to Jesus have found creative ways to dynamite, bulldoze, and pave smooth the hilly terrain of God’s words.  We forget, or try to forget, that the point of listening to the Voice of God at all is to place we hearers in a position of risk and momentous decision.  To listen to God through Jesus is to become a person plagued with a sense of uncertainty about our condition before God.  That plaguing uncertainty is intended to motivate those who listen to redefine themselves according to the will and intentions of the One who speaks.

Listening to the Son of God is intended to create an appetite for more.  It is to percolate a ripple effect of inquiring, struggling, and seeking after God.  It is the hope of the listener of God that by truly listening, the distance they feel between themselves and God will be overcome.  But so often, we may silently conspire with ourselves to make sure no one—especially ourselves—feels guilty for listening to God so poorly.

As in Jesus’ parable of the sower, it is the soil on the path, so often traveled and so hardened by repetitious traffic, that it is no longer receptive to the seed.  But no one wants to be told they are that kind of soil—unresponsive, and in reality, unlistening.

Time and time again, God must gather himself together in a cloud overhead, and realign our attention:  “This is my Son, the Beloved; LISTEN to him!”