A Guide For The Interior Regions

"A Guide For The Interior Regions"

1 Samuel 3:1-10

    "In those days, when the boy Samuel was serving the LORD under the direction of Eli, there were very few messages from the LORD, and visions from him were quite rare."

    I'm not exactly sure when my Christian life began.  I have some particular memories of when my interest was aroused.  I've told you about my experience as a young elementary student at an Episcopalian elementary school.  How we would march to worship, singing, "Onward Christian Soldiers."  How I would sit in awe in that sanctuary gazing at the high, and ornately beamed ceiling, the awesome and inspiring stained glass windows, especially the huge round one at the back of that cross-shaped sanctuary.  I could barely see over the back of the pew in front of me when we were instructed by the black-robed priest, Father Val Spinosa (who I thought was God) to pray.  As a kid in the pews I thought I was in the throne room of God.

    I think my spiritual sensitivity was enhanced by loving teachers like Mrs. MacCracken who demonstrated the pastoral side of the faith.  If that Episcopalian sanctuary introduced me to the awe and magnificence of God in my early life, Mrs. MacCracken introduced me to the loving and caring characteristics of the faith, just because of the way she was and how she dealt with me.

    And then there was a time in my early adolescence when I thought I heard the Voice of God.  I've told you about that as well.  Quietly sitting in the sanctuary on a Sunday morning, listening to the sermon, I heard the Voice.  At the time, I knew who I had heard from, but I didn't know what it all meant.  I did something very uncharacteristic for me at that age.  I started reading.  Reading the Bible.  Reading Hurlbutt's Storybook of the Bible.  And a little later, I wandered into a Bible Book Store and by accident or design, picked up the two volumes of William Barclay's commentary on the Gospel of John.  I devoured them at the expense of all my homework and other responsibilities a young teenager was supposed to fulfill.

    I needed to know about that Voice.  I needed someone to tell me about that Voice that had so gripped me in a fleeting moment on a Sunday morning.  I needed someone to somehow make sense of it for me, as well as they could for a 7th grade kid.  I thought I had more troublesome things to worry about, like girls.  But that Voice became the bold headlines of my mornings, and the object of my foggy pondering as I would drift to sleep each night.

    Ministers were not entirely helpful.  Instead of telling me about the Voice, they talked about church.  And more than that, they gave me some minor responsibilities in the church.  But I didn't want to know about an institution and how it operated, as if that would put me in touch with the Voice.  I needed someone to give me direction to the One whose Voice I heard.

    I recently read an article about George Fox who was the founder of the Society of Friends, or who we know as the Quakers.  George Fox had what he called his religious awakening when he was a young man.  He also went on a similar search for someone to tell him what had happened to him, and explain some things about his transformation.

    Fox kept a journal in which he wrote about all of his experiences with the people to whom he turned for answers.  One entry in his journal read, "I heard of a priest living in Tamworth, who was accounted an experienced man, and I went seven miles to him; but I found him like an empty, hollow cask."

    What George Fox discovered in his search to be put in touch with God, was that many pastors have mastered technique and skill and built a reputation on those.  Pastors learn how certain skills can carry them through the work of the church.  But when a genuinely searching person shows up, wrestling with angels, grappling with their sin, following the remnants of that Voice, feeling like their souls are on the line, most pastors are not prepared to be that kind of guide.

    Instead, the searching person creates fear in many pastors.  Such innocent and honest searching just might expose some undetected shallowness in the minister that "technique" has been able to mask.  Maybe ministers will be discovered to be no deeper than the platitudes they utter in worship.  We are good at devising quips, and falling into painless roles so that we can function smoothly and successfully.  But none of this can be sustained in an acutely personal spiritual encounter.  That is, when a George Fox comes in your door.  Or a young adolescent who says he has heard the Voice.

    That's why I like this story about Eli the priest and his young charge, Samuel.  At infancy, Samuel had been dedicated to God by his parents.  That didn't mean what it does today.  It didn't mean his parents just brought him to church one day and had the priest lay hands on the infant and say a nice prayer.  The parents gave their son Samuel to the priest.  Gave him up.  Turned this young boy over.  The sanctuary adopted Samuel.  Eli was in charge of the child (1 Samuel 2:11).

    Samuel grew up in the temple.  We might hear someone say, "I grew up in the church."  They never knew a time when they weren't in the church or apart from it.  It has always been there for them, and they had always been there when the doors were open.  For Samuel, all that was literally true.  And like Samuel, they may have never felt like they had a choice in the matter.  So Samuel knew about the work of religion.  He knew about worship.  He knew what was expected of him, religiously speaking.  He was learning from this seasoned old priest, Levi, the ins and outs of religion.

    But then Samuel heard the Voice.  Calling his name.  Samuel was awakened from his sleep by God.  Never having heard that Voice, never really knowing what to listen for, since "there were very few messages from the LORD, and visions from him were quite rare," Samuel mistook the Voice of God for that of Levi's.  Thinking he was being called by the priest, Samuel went as he thought he was being bidden.  After sending the boy back three times, it finally occurred to Eli what was happening, and whose Voice it was who was calling.

    Patiently, caring and perceptive, Eli instructed Samuel in how he was to respond the next time he heard the Voice.  Eli went so far as to give Samuel the very words he was to use in responding to God.  In this dramatic scene, young Samuel is completely dependent upon the spiritual guidance of Eli.  Samuel is uncertain and must be guided in how to answer God, how to listen to God, and how to carry on conversation with the Voice of the Calling One.

    I think I got misguided, as George Fox did.  I got caught up in trying to study my way into the presence of God, and although I gained a wealth of knowledge and some wisdom, I ended up knowing about the Voice, but not knowing the Voice.  Instead of responding like Samuel, guided by Eli ("Speak Lord, your servant is listening") I would go out and buy another commentary.

   As a pastor I quickly learned that when people brought their problems, they wanted a psychologist, not a spiritual guide.  They also didn't know how to listen, but only wanted a quick fix answer, or a book to read that would give them information.  And since that's the way I was, I was only so happy to accommodate them.

    It took a long time for me to realize I should be an Eli, not a Sigmund Freud.  I was a priest and a pastor, not a psychologist.  It was my task to get people to listen to what God had to say, rather than what the latest personality profile said.  It was my responsibility to lead people in worship, not in some form of an encounter group.  There is a lot of spoken and unspoken pressure to be the one, and not the other.  But there is a greater need to be guided in the things of God.  I wish I had had an Eli early on.

    Everyone needs a guide for the interior regions of faith.  There are spiritual dimensions to psychological problems that all too often go unexamined.  Few know how, or are comfortable with prayer.  If God spoke, how many would know the Voice, or how to respond, or where to go to find out?

    The truth is, God is always doing something--always trying to get our attention.  Responding to God is not a matter of sheer guesswork.  Teaching people how to pray, helping believers identify the presence of grace in events and feelings, affirming the presence of God at the very heart of life, searching for light through a dark passage in the pilgrimage of belief, and guiding people to a vision of themselves through the glasses of the biblical and spiritual, rather than just the psychological or sociological--all these are the tasks of the pastor.  That is why the work of spiritual direction is so essential--because we need to deal with the obvious, with the Voice of God, when we would rather deal with almost anything else.

    Being a spiritual guide, as Eli was a guide, means noticing the familiar and naming the particular.  What Eli was familiar with was God, and when that particular Voice spoke, he was able to identify it and guide Samuel in how to pay attention to it.  It's the difference between being aware that birds are everywhere, and naming each particular bird.  In the same way, we can easily say, "God is everywhere," but it is a harder thing to be able to recognize where God is in particular, especially in each individual life.

    The apostle Paul wrote in his first letter to the Corinthian church:

For though you have countless guides in Christ, you do not have many fathers.  For I became your father in Christ Jesus through the gospel.  I urge you, then, be imitators of me.  (4:15-16)

    What Paul is saying here is something that continues to be true.  The more public, preacher, motivational aspects of ministry have always been more attractive--not only as a role for ministers, but a role that people in the pew fall in behind too easily.  It is easier to tell people what to do, from a distance, than to be with them in a discerning, prayerful companionship as they work themselves through it.  This has been aggravated by the mass marketing of spiritual self-helps.  People looking for guidance get paperback best-sellers, digest articles, listen to television talk show guests or watch youtube.

    But the very nature of the life of faith requires personal, and ongoing conversation between those who have heard the Voice and are searching, with those who are mature in the faith and are familiar with ways of helping people identify the Voice and look for grace in their lives.  May you all find an Eli to lead along those interior regions.