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Is Anybody Really Listening?
The Rev. Canon George M. Maxwell, Jr.
The Cathedral of St. Philip
Atlanta, Georgia
22 February 2009
Last Sunday after the Epiphany –Year B
A friend of mine tells a funny story about picking up his kids from childcare. Apparently, his daughter wanted something to eat. From the car seat in the back, he heard: “Daddy, I want a cookie.” “Yes, dear,” he responded, “we’ll get a snack when we get home.” She asked again in a slightly more insistent voice, but with the same result. Finally, frustrated, she said, “Daddy, do you have your listening ears on? I want a cookie right now!”
Even children, it seems, know the difference between hearing and listening.
In the Gospel reading for today, Jesus takes Peter and James and John to the top of the mountain. He is transfigured before them. His clothes burst into a dazzling white as he takes up a conversation with Moses and Elijah. As mountain top experiences go, it doesn’t get any better than this.
Proving that he is an Episcopalian at heart, Peter suggests that they build three shrines, one for each of the three great prophets. He is having a powerful experience of God and he knows just what to do. He wants to capture it in a liturgy!
But, that’s not what God has in mind. A cloud overshadows them all and a voice says, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!”
Listen to him!
Peter thinks he already knows what to do. But, God wants him to listen first.
Listening, really listening, is hard work. I think we might have two ears and one mouth because it’s twice as hard to listen as to talk.
Listening is more than just being quiet. It requires that we put aside our own thoughts – what we expect to hear, what we think about what is being said, what we are going to say in response! And, it requires that we pay attention not only to what is being said, but also to the emotion that lies underneath the words.
Just think about the last time you turned to your spouse to express your frustration with something that had happened to you, and they responded by telling you how to fix the problem. The conversation quickly changed from being about you to being about your spouse. Suddenly, you were not longer talking about your pain and frustration, but their insight and creativity.
I saw a humorous example of this recently in a commercial. A woman comes home tired after a long day at work to find her husband preoccupied with a basketball game that he is watching on TV. She says she has had a hard day and asks if she can vent. He quickly agrees and races to the refrigerator to grab two canned drinks, thinking that she was talking about the new vented design of these cans which is supposed to make drinking from them easier. It only took a moment, and the conversation went from being about her frustration to being about his pleasure.
I have heard it said that listening is the first duty of love. I think that’s because listening leaves the conversation where it started. Rather than taking over the conversation, we have to take on the speaker’s perspective. It’s a radical act of acceptance. We have to stop what we’re doing and stand in their shoes, see through their eyes, and hear through their ears.
Listen to him!
God tells us to listen to Jesus, because when we act before we listen, we tend to change the focus of the conversation. We tend to forget that we are made in the image of God. We tend to set about remaking God in our image. We tend to assume, for example, that God feels the same anger we feel, and wants to punish the same people that we want to punish.
We can, I think, see this change of focus even in the story of Elijah. He was a great man of God who stood alone against the enemies of God. You remember the ritual contest that he devised for the prophets of Ba’al, the Canaanite fertility god favored by the wife of the King. Elijah challenged four hundred and fifty of them to build an altar to their god and he built one for God. The real God, he claimed, would be the one whose altar was consumed by fire. Just to prove his point, he even poured water all over his altar.
Elijah won the competition, of course. His altar was consumed by fire.
But, the story didn’t end there. Elijah wasn’t satisfied with victory. He had to destroy his enemies. They had to be eliminated. Elijah turned the crowd on the prophets of Ba’al and they met a sudden end.
I’m confident that Elijah thought that is how God wanted the story to end. I’m confident that he believed that God saw what he saw, felt what he felt and wanted what he wanted. I’m confident that he believed that God was a god of vengeance.
When we listen to Jesus, though, we get a different message.
When we listen to Jesus, we notice that he says: “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.”
When we listen to Jesus, we notice that he says, “The Son of man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.”
When we listen to Jesus, we notice that he says: “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.”
When we listen to Jesus, we have to trans-figure the god that we have created. We have to take on the perspective of the God of service, not a god of sacrifice. We have to take on the perspective of the God of hope, not a god of fear. We have to take on the perspective of the God of forgiveness, not a god of vengeance.
So, what difference does all of this make? How else might the story have ended?
There is a legend that when the Germans ordered Jews in occupied Denmark to identify themselves by wearing armbands with yellow stars during World War II, King Christian X responded by saying that one Dane was exactly the same as the next Dane. He himself was the first one to wear the Star of David. When non-Jewish Danes saw what he had done, they too put on the armbands. Soon all of Copenhagen was wearing armbands with yellow stars and the Germans were forced to rescind the order.
Here, the King has not changed the focus of the conversation. He has taken on Christ’s perspective. The King doesn’t hear voices of vengeance and create victims. He listens to the sounds of suffering and saves those being victimized.
Do you have your listening ears on?
Following Christ is not the chasing of mountaintop experiences – though I hope that you will have a few. It’s the patient development of listening skills that enable us to stand in God’s shoes, see through God’s eyes and hear through God’s ears. It’s a practice that reminds us that we are created in the image of God, and stops us from trying to create a god in our own image.
The Word, you see, is not something to be heard, but someone to be listened to.
I have to tell you, though, I can’t completely give up on the hope that, if we get the liturgy right, we can have our cookie right now!
Comments? Contact The Rev. George Maxwell at: gmaxwell@stphilipscathedral.org