For my church's midweek Lent services this year, the pastor has asked members of the congregation to do the preaching on a series of assigned themes and passages. It's been a wonderful opportunity to hear voices that I don't usually get to hear, especially loud and clear and up front. Yesterday was my turn. I was very loud and up front--hopefully I was also clear.
"Open Our Ears"
Texts: Isaiah 50:4-5, Psalm 40:1-8, Matthew 13:10-17
By the time we get to today’s
Gospel reading, Jesus and his disciples have had a busy day—he starts off by
getting in trouble with the religious leaders for breaking the Sabbath, follows
that up with some healings, tells a bunch of parables, offends his family who
have come to see him by announcing that anyone who does the will of God is his
family, and then tells another story—the Parable of the Sower. He’s thoroughly
confused everyone around him. And finally his exhausted and exasperated
disciples ask, “WHY do you always only teach in stories?” And Jesus answers
them.
It’s easy to criticize the
bewildered crowds for not understanding his stories. We see ourselves as the
disciples, the ones who Jesus says have “been given insight into God’s
kingdom.” We like to imagine that we “know how it works” and when we hear Jesus
say that “Not everybody has this gift,… it hasn’t been given to them” we maybe feel
sorry for everyone else, and maybe even a little smug, imagining ourselves as
the ones with the “ready hearts” who have all kinds of insight. Or maybe that’s
just me. Which is why, incidentally, I’m using the Message’s translation—it’s
so very different from all the other translations I’ve used my whole life that
the stories get my attention again and I actually listen to them. Which is important!
But anyway, as I was reading the
other passages for this evening, I found it harder and harder to blame the
people for having trouble listening to Jesus. You never know what could happen
when God opens your ears. For the psalmist, God opening ears brings delight. In
the Message, in fact, it says,
“So I answered, “I’m
coming.
I read in your letter what you wrote about me,
And I’m coming to the party
you’re throwing for me.”
That’s when God’s Word entered my life,
became part of my very being.”
It sounds great. BUT—when I was
reading Isaiah, I accidentally read the next verse when I was first preparing
for this, and then I couldn’t get it out of my head. Here’s what happens to the
speaker in Isaiah, in the verse right after the passage we read in which God
opens his ears and he listens:
The
Master, God, opened my
ears,
and I didn’t go back to sleep,
didn’t pull the covers back over my
head.
I followed orders,
stood there and took it while they
beat me,
held steady while they pulled out my
beard,
Didn’t dodge their insults,
faced them as they spit in my face.
Jesus’s audience was probably aware
that listening to God—really listening—waking
up, getting out of bed instead of pulling the covers up over your head to hide
from the truth, and facing whatever is out there—can be risky—sometimes painful,
and even dangerous.
And this is why God is described
in all these passages as the one who opens ears—because it’s very unlikely that
we’re going to do it on our own. “Being religious” and “acting
pious,” like the Psalm says, seems like a safer alternative. But the psalmist already
said, “Doing something for you, bringing something to you—that’s not what
you’re after. that’s not what you’re asking for.” More than anything else, God
wants us to listen—to hard things, to joyful things.
And God has an amazing tool to
help us to listen—stories. In the Message version of this passage, Jesus
explains that he tells stories because, “Whenever someone has a ready heart for
this, the insights and understandings flow freely. But if there is no
readiness, any trace of receptivity soon disappears. That’s why I tell stories:
to create readiness, to nudge the people toward receptive insight.” When I sent
this version of the text to a friend, she replied, “Wow, that sounds a lot less
condescending that I remember!” And it explains why not only did Jesus tell
stories, but often afterwards he would explain those stories to his
disciplines, who then wrote down the stories and their explanations for us,
later. The stories, and the explanations, are a gift to us from a God who loves
us and wants us to understand.
When God met us, we didn’t get a
book of theology. We got a Person who told stories, and who lived a story for
people to wrestle with and retell to each other. A painful, awkward, confusing
story full of things we don’t understand and things that sometimes make us
uncomfortable. All we have to know Jesus are the stories he told and the
stories other people told about him, and the ponderings of other humans trying
to make sense of those stories.
Even now, the only way to hear
Jesus, and through Jesus, God, is to listen for the voice speaking within stories,
giving us clues about how God is moving in the world today, and how God wants us to move in the world. This is true for the big stories
on the news AND the little stories we tell each other, that seem so minor but
can mean so much. When we listen to stories, we can hear the subtle ways the
Kingdom of God is growing up through the cracks in the sidewalk—for example, as
Pastor and I were able to do when we visited RefugeeOne’s offices late last fall to deliver the coats from the coat drive and hear the people who work there tell stories of how their own
families had once been refugees and now they were able to turn around and give
that help to others. Or when I was at the food pantry booth during Hometown
Holidays and met a man who’d been helped by the food pantry in the past and now
was giving back, both to the food pantry and to other vulnerable lives he
encountered. Small stories about struggling families who have been loved with
full pantries and warm homes don’t seem like much, but God is speaking love all
through them.
But, it can also be hard to
listen to some stories—the families who don’t get fed, the refugee families who
never make it to a haven someplace like Chicago, the many people who are
marginalized or abused by those in positions of power—and it’s easy to dismiss
them, tell ourselves we know what’s really
going on, and close our ears to the pain of the storyteller.
And again, this is true for the
small stories and small, secret hurts, too. I used to follow a lot of parenting
pages on facebook, but I quit most of them because so often when a mom told her
story about how she fed or birthed or disciplined her child, an army of moms
would appear and tell her she was wrong wrong wrong and asking if she’d tried
this or that (and she almost always had!) and it was obvious that very few
people listened to her and heard how tired and anxious she had been, how
difficult it was to get through the day trying to mother the way these moms
wanted her to. No one loved her the way she needed to be loved or understood
the struggles in her story. Instead almost everyone tried to rewrite it into
the story they thought it ought to be—a story a little more like their own
story.
But when someone is telling their
story, the most important thing in that moment is to let God open your ears to hear the story rather than rushing to
cover it up with, “Well, they must have done something wrong” or “They’ve got to be exaggerating,” or whatever.
And the good news is that God
does open our ears so that we can understand those stories and respond to them
with love! Jesus has done it over and over—for the disciples, sometimes that
even meant taking them aside after telling the story and explaining it for
them.
So if God is still speaking to us
today and teaching us how to live and to love others, then the first place to
look for those messages is in stories. If we want to carry out God’s love to
the people around us, we have to listen to their stories too. God speaks to us
through their stories, and that’s when God and God’s word enters our lives and
we hear the things God wants us to hear. It’s through their stories that we’ll
be able to know them and love them and bring God’s love to them. We don’t write
other peoples’ stories—we listen to them. Listening—really listening instead of
prejudging the storyteller or glossing over the ugly parts with our own
assumptions—is loving. And when we do we may even hear God speaking through the
story, telling us how much he loves the storyteller, and us, helping us love them
better too. And that’s when God’s word enters our life, and their life, and we can
delight in God and each other.
