A Listening Heart

This sermon was preached as part of St. Michael’s yearlong “It’s Your Call” campaign on 1 Kings 3:5-15 at St. Michael’s Episcopal Church, Raleigh, N.C. on October 26, 2012.  You can also listen to the sermon by clicking on this link:
http://kiwi6.com/file/s622fz40o7

               Every now and then I have dream that I signed up for classes but never attended them.  In my dream, the semester is nearing an end and I am panicking.  I always wake up from these dreams tense.  I tell Cindy that I had an “anxiety” dream.  Today we normally view dreams psychologically.  They represent something bubbling up from our subconscious, something that is going on in our lives with our family or work.  In the ancient world, though people thought God spoke through dreams.  In today’s lesson from 1 Kings, God asks Solomon what God should give the King.  Solomon doesn’t ask to hit the $300 million power ball, which I would have, instead he asks for a “listening heart.”  Solomon asks for the gift that actually is essential for all of God’s people.  Only if we have listening hearts, only if we listen to God can we live into God’s dream for our lives.

The New Revised Standard Version and many other English translations of this passage translate Solomon’s request for a “listening heart” as an “understanding mind.”  The Hebrew, however, literally says a “listening heart.”  The Hebrews thought the heart was the seat of the intellect, which is undoubtedly part of the reason for the NRSV’s translation, but, for the Hebrews, the heart was also the seat of the emotions, impulses, concern and much more.  The heart for the Hebrews had both faculties of the intellect and the emotion that we attribute separately to the mind and the heart.

Solomon asked that God would give him a “listening” heart.  Solomon knew that it was important to be open, to be attentive.  He wanted to be a good ruler of his people.

Solomon knew that a good leader must be a good listener.  A leader who fails to listen will soon lose touch with her or his people.  Listening is essential not only for leaders but for any relationship personal or professional.  My wife and I love our family doctor, who I recently saw for my sinusitis, in large part because she is an excellent listener.  Despite the pressures of modern medicine to see more and more patients each day, she takes as much time as is needed to listen to us and to develop a treatment plan with us.  Listening is also essential in our relationship with God.

All too often we are more ready to talk to God than to listen to God.  We tell God what we want without asking and listening for God’s will, God’s dream for our lives.  To live into God’s dream for our lives, to live into God’s call, requires us first of all to listen to God.

This year we are focused on discerning and living into God’s call.  Every calling comes from God.  This summer I did a lot of reading about call.  I didn’t know much about it before.  Often books and articles on this subject, I learned, focus on the individual.  Your spiritual gifts, your talents, and your passions are the means to discerning your call in life.  It is true our spiritual gifts, talents and passions are important in discerning our call.  Nonetheless, we begin discerning our call not with ourselves, but with God, because God is the one who gives us our call in our very being when God creates us.  Our spiritual gifts, talents, and passions are all God given.  We begin discerning our call, our purpose at any point in our lives, by first listening to God.

Indeed, I think at the heart of the entire life of faith is listening to God.  Listening to God is essential because it is only in listening that we can know that our lives are in alignment with God.   It is only in listening to God that we can know whether we are obeying God’s will.  The root of the English word “obey” comes from the Latin word which means “to hear.”  We cannot obey God; we cannot hear our call; we cannot live into God’s dream for our lives unless we first listen to God.

God speaks to us in many ways.  We hear God’s voice through the scriptures.  We hear God’s voice, as it says in the Acts of the Apostles, in “the breaking of bread and the prayers.”  We hear God’s voice in hymns and, occasionally, in sermons.  We can hear God in a still small voice while walking in the woods, or holding a newborn, through a kind word from a stranger, or in a news story about a disaster that calls us to action. 

While God speaks to us individually in many ways, in the Christian tradition listening to God is something we always do together.  It is the work of the Body of Christ, the work of our fellowship.  When I was discerning whether I was called to the priesthood, I talked to many people at St. Andrew’s, Haw River, my home church, to people at Grace Episcopal Church, Elizabeth, New Jersey, where I was a volunteer in mission, and friends and spiritual advisors.  I then entered into the discernment process and talked with Bishop Estill and the Commission on Ministry.  A call to ordination is always discerned within the context of the church.

The same is true for other calls in the church.  We discern our different calls within in the body of Christ, because our calls are all in one way or another for the building up of the body of Christ, as Paul says in his letter to the Ephesians.  We also listen for God’s voice with other Christians to make sure that it is God’s voice that we are hearing and not some other voice.  Spiritual directors, clergy, small groups, Bible studies, or sage spiritual friends are all excellent sounding boards.  Each of us though with Solomon must seek a “listening heart.”

With a listening heart, we can live into God’s dream to walk in the way of justice, righteousness, and peace.  We can live into God’s dream for a creation renewed by the love of God that we see in Jesus Christ.

With a listening heart, we can use our God given gifts, talents and passions to proclaim the love of God to our family, friends, and neighbors.

With a listening heart, we can find the richness of God’s dream for our lives, a richness that goes beyond our wildest imaginings.  Solomon asked only for a listening heart, but God gave him a wise and discerning heart and riches and honor all his life.  The life of faith is not always filled with earthly riches and honor, but it is always filled with the incomparable riches of the kingdom of God.