January 17, 2021
/The Second Sunday after the Epiphany
1 Samuel 3:1-20 | John 1: 43-51
The Rev. Bradley Varnell
Holy God, your Word is life. Grant us to hear your word, that we may live. In your name we pray, Amen.
Samuel, a teenager at the most by this time in the story, is told by God what God plans to do to Eli and his sons because of their sin, blasphemy, and wickedness. God will bring an end to Eli and to his sons. They will no longer provide spiritual leadership in Israel. Samuel lays in the temple until morning, unable to sleep after hearing the shocking, sad news that the man who has for all intents and purposes raised him, who has taught him to minister to the Lord, who has enabled him to understand that the Lord was speaking to him will die. The burden of this truth weighs on him. Yet when Eli demands a report, Samuel doesn’t sugar coat things, he doesn’t hedge what God said, he doesn’t nuance it. “Samuel told him everything, and hid nothing from him.” Samuel shares God’s plan to bring the House of Eli to an end. Eli, to his credit, doesn’t hem and haw. He doesn’t fight, he doesn’t argue. He accepts that the Lord is sovereign, that the Lord is good. And the actions of the Lord, even when difficult, even when they reveal our failures and shortcomings, are nonetheless, good.
Samuel and Eli do not run away from the truth of God. Samuel speaks it and Eli hears it. There’s no hint of moral superiority or self-righteousness on the part of Samuel, nor is there any sense that Eli wishes to argue with God’s judgement. There is a radical, shocking willingness by both men to stand before the truth and with the truth in naked vulnerability.
The story of Samuel and Eli is one we would all do well to sit with for the next few days. It is a story of truth telling and a story of what is required to tell and to hear the truth. God comes to Samuel, but it is only with the help of Eli that he can answer God. God speaks judgement against Eli, yet this is only known through the voice of Samuel. The truth of God which both men encounter is only encountered amid their relationship with each other. Samuel needs Eli to hear the truth and Eli needs Samuel to hear the truth. Neither will know the word of God, neither will hear God speak, without the other.
The people of God have traditionally been in the business of the truth. “The truth will set you free,” after all. But in the last several years it has seemed to me that the relationship necessary for truth hearing and truth telling have frayed. Unlike Samuel and Eli, it seems that we live in a culture where we are more and more unwilling to hear uncomfortable truths and speak uncomfortable truths. One would hope that the church would be an exception to this, but I’m not sure that’s the case.
See, if we can take our story today as a guide, hearing God’s truth doesn’t come from an unbiased, unmediated third party. Unfortunately, God isn’t simply gonna relay a private message to you and I. God, rather annoyingly, is going to use other people. People like Samuel. Samuel was young, he didn’t know what the voice of God might sound like, he’s not the kind of person you would expect God to appear to. Yet…that’s exactly what happens. God by passes the elderly priest, and goes to the young man who can’t tell the difference between the voice of God and a call from down the hall. Sometimes we will be like Samuel. Called by God to speak a hard word to someone. And sometimes we will be like Eli, called to hear a hard truth from someone.
It seems that in the last little bit we have all become increasingly unwilling to hear hard truths and speak hard truths. We are so blinded by the rightness of our ‘side’, that the other can have absolutely nothing to say to us. We hear something that’s hard and our immediate response is to either dismiss it, nuance it, argue against it, or simply say we’re the exception. Instead of speaking the truth to those we know and exist in relationship with, we cut people out, or post snide memes and comments on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, assuming that that is sufficient to tell the truth.
But Samuel and Eli show us another way. Samuel and Eli speak and hear the truth in the context of relationships of care and accountability. They know each other. They care for one-another. Though it may be difficult, nevertheless, Samuel speaks the truth to Eli, and though he may want with everything in him to escape the judgement of God, Eli doesn’t hide from the truth.
Christians have been bound by our baptism to Jesus Christ, who is the truth. We have committed ourselves to living in the light of truth, and we can only do that if we live lives of humility, lives which are open to hearing and speaking the truth. The last few months have revealed a lot of truths, in my opinion. Truths about America’s racism, truths about the way in which our legal and justice systems continued to oppress black and brown folks, truths about the economic inequality that make much of our lives possible, truths about how deeply divided we are, perhaps to our very core, as a nation. We could all squirm from these truths, keep them to ourselves, or ignore them all together, but what Christ has called us to, what we see in the story of Eli and Samuel, is that we are to accept the truths we hear, as uncomfortable as they are. We are to share those truths. We are live in the confidence that God speaks in and through the most surprising voices, and we are to trust that God who speaks through these voices is Good. Change in Israel only comes when someone is able to speak a hard truth and when someone is able to hear it. May it be so for us. Amen.