It has happened to almost all parents at one time or another. You wake up out of a “sound” sleep, to a baby crying, or a young child calling your name. You groggily get out of bed and rush into the other room, only to find the child fast asleep. Either your baby was crying or calling out while asleep, or you dreamed that you heard the call. That must have been what it felt like for Samuel in this morning’s Old Testament reading. But what Samuel heard was neither Eli sleep-talking nor a dream. Samuel heard the very real voice of God, calling him to something new, exciting and scary.
In the story of this call from God to a young boy, we hear an interesting tale. You see, Samuel lived his entire life up to that point with Eli, the Chief Priest of the Temple at Shiloh. Samuel’s mother, Hannah was unable to have children. Her husband Elkanah’s other wife had numerous children. And she incessantly made fun of Hannah. So, one year when Elkanah and his family made their yearly pilgrimage to the Temple at Shiloh, Hannah prayed with great emotion and fervor for God to give her a baby boy. Eli, the old priest saw her and tried to kick her out of the Temple because, in her rocking and wordlessly moving her mouth while praying, he thought she was drunk. She assured him that she was sober, just emotionally torn up. Hannah told Eli about her prayer and her promise to dedicate her son to God’s service; and the old priest told her that God would grant her prayer. That is exactly what happened and Samuel was born. And unlike many people who make promises to God under duress and then forget the promises, Hannah kept her word God and dedicated Samuel to serving God. So as soon as he was weaned, baby Samuel went to live in the Temple.
We take up the story this morning when Eli was old and almost completely blind. Samuel had lived with him as a son, and that is important to the story because Eli had two biological sons, Hophni and Phinehas. These two were priests of the Temple under their father and they turned out to be perhaps the worst priests ever. Anything the people brought to the Temple as an offering to God, Hophni and Phineas would steal for themselves. They also had inappropriate relationships with some of the women in their congregation. In other words, Eli’s sons used their positions of trust to increase their wealth and to get what they wanted. And maybe just as bad, Eli did nothing to stop Hophni or Phinehas from their sinful ways.
With all of that as background, the story begins with Samuel sleeping in the room with the Ark of the Covenant – a sign to the readers that God was physically present in the room. The author of 1 Samuel tells us that Samuel didn’t yet know God – he had not yet spoken with God. Then there was that strange night ….
Samuel awoke to hear someone calling his name. “Samuel! Samuel!” The young boy got up from his bed and went in to see what Eli wanted. When Samuel said to Eli, “Here I am, for you called me,” Eli groggily responded, “I did not call you, my son. Go lie back down.” It reminds me of the sleeping aid commercial a few years ago, where the man has insomnia. He tosses and turns and finally turns on the light. His wife is lying next to him, asleep and he whispers, “Honey. Honey, are you awake?” She opens her eyes and in an exasperated tone says, “I am now!” That’s the way I imagine Eli would have been the first – and especially the second time Samuel woke him. “Eli, Eli, are you awake?” “I AM NOW! Go back to bed, kid!”
But the third time that Samuel went in to see if his defacto father had called him, even the blind old priest finally saw what was going on. Eli, the priest who was so blind that he didn’t recognize that Hannah was praying rather than drunkenly ranting; Eli, the priest who was so blind that he couldn’t see what his own sons were doing to the people of God; the priest who was so blind that, once he learned how his sons were stealing from God, could not see a way to stop them; this same Eli finally had vision enough to recognize God’s call to Samuel. Eli is proof positive that God can use any of us to do a good thing.
Eli told Samuel to answer God and to listen to what God had to say to him. And Samuel did. That night, a young boy became a prophet for God. Samuel became one who listened to God and then warned people about what God had told him. On this first occasion of Samuel hearing God’s call, it must have been very exciting for him, but also very scary. You see, God told Samuel that God was going to cut off Eli and his household from the family of God; that because of the evil and blasphemous actions of Eli’s sons, and because Eli had not stopped them. Nothing would be able to bring reconciliation between God and Eli again. And Samuel had to lie back down and consider all of that until the morning, when Eli asked what happened. Samuel then had to accurately relay all of the horrible news he had been given by God, to the only father he had ever known.
That’s the thing about calls from God. They rarely come when or how we expect them; even less often if we try to make them happen. God calls us in all kinds of ways, at all kinds of times – but it is always on God’s time, not ours. And the other thing about calls from God is that they don’t necessarily tell us what we want to hear. Instead, they tell us what we need to hear.
God calls us because God has a job or a message that is particularly suited to us and our abilities (even when we don’t recognize those abilities in ourselves). God calls when God knows that we are ready – even if we have no idea that we are. And God calls with instructions that may seem counter-intuitive, if not downright ridiculous to us. But if we test those calls against someone like Eli; and if we faithfully listen and answer God’s call, the result will always be the same – a vision of something amazing.
In this morning’s Gospel, after Jesus calls Nathanial, Jesus tells him something that we would do well to remember. “‘You will see greater things than these.’ … ‘Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.’” In other words, Jesus was saying, don’t be blown away by the simple things like the ability to see you when I was not physically with you; don’t think that it is spectacular that God knows where you are and what you are doing; rather, if you listen for, and answer God’s call – becoming a faithful disciple, you’ll be truly amazed by the wonders that God does, in your life and the lives of those around you.
Last week I talked about the fact that we are all children of God, adopted into the household of God through our baptism by water and the spirit. If that is true – that we are all children of the same God, inheritors of the Kingdom – then we all have the same rights, duties and responsibilities as did Jesus and the early Disciples. It is our duty to listen for God’s call and to respond faithfully – even when the call is for something scary, like telling your father that God is no longer with him (like Samuel); or serving God in a brand new way, as Nathaniel did.
The same God who the Psalmist says numbered the hairs on our heads, and who mysteriously knit us together in our mothers’ wombs knows our hearts and our minds. That God will not let us go off in the wrong direction if we are listening and trying to be faithful. Each of us will be given our own Eli – a “sometimes blind” old priest, or someone else with more battle scars than we have – to advise us on our call. We are all called. Our job is to listen, and to check to ensure that the call came from God, rather than a dream, and then to move to faithfully answer the call … whatever it is.
In the name of one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen.
[Epiphany 2B Sermon 011721, 1 Samuel 3:1-10(11-20); Psalm 139:1-5, 12-17, 1 Corinthians 6:12-20; John 1:43-51]
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