Godly Positioning System

I love our story from First Samuel today. It’s playful with it’s repetition of God calling to Samuel four times, and once they realize it’s God calling out to Samuel, you have to love the response, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” Now I love this story, but I really can’t relate. I mean, I’ve tried really hard at times, and yet, I have yet to hear God’s voice. I’ve prayed hard, listened hard, and pleaded even at times, still… nothing.

This is just my personal experience and it’s not to say that no one has ever heard God’s voice or that it is somehow not possible because I know it is. I have some very trusted friends who have heard God speak to them as clearly as I am speaking to you, but I can simply attest that I have not shared that experience.

But then I thought about it again, and I realized that one, limiting God’s communication with me down to hearing words with my ears is pretty ableist since many do not have the ability to hear, and two, there are many other ways to communicate with God.

And when I think about it like that, I know I have communicated with God and God has communicated with me. It might not be with words, but there are things I have done, and places I have gone, things that I have experienced with my other senses that have revealed God’s message to me.

Heck, I wouldn’t be standing in front of this camera today as a pastor without God communicating to me on some level that this is what I was being called to do. I don’t have some miraculous conversion experience like Martin Luther almost getting struck by lightning, or John Wesley’s heart being strangely warmed while he read the book of Romans, but over time the GPS of my life that was trying to get my attention so many times eventually recalculated my route enough times to get me here. I’m still missing turn after turn, but I trust that my GPS, or Godly positioning system as I like to think of it will just keep on recalculating until I reach my ultimate destination.

And I think the same can be said of us collectively. I won’t say that everything we are collectively going through is all part of God’s plan, but I do trust that God ultimately knows the route to get us out of this mess. And what an extraordinary mess we find ourselves in. With the combination of the pandemic, a tumultuous election, and violence raging as a result, I think it’s time we tried a different road, because I don’t like the one we're on.

Well finding the right exit or taking that next turn can be hard when we’re so distracted by all the commotion around us. So maybe it’s time to stop the car for a moment and find a rest stop. Pause, take a look at the map for a moment without moving, talk to our fellow passengers for their opinion about where to go from here, and then proceed with a calmer and clearer head.

We are in such a moment. We are approaching a fork in the road, but we have some time to think about our decision before we get there. We’re in a liminal space right now. A space between where we were and where we are going. This is not quite a decision moment, but a discernment moment between an overstimulating year and presidential administration and now we discern what our response to that overwhelming stimulus will be.

Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, philosopher, author and Holocaust survivor Viktor E. Frankl said, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

Dear people, we are in that powerful space where we can choose our response to the stimulus in and around us and our response is an opportunity for growth and freedom as Frankl says. The time to choose our response will come, but it is not here quite yet, so with this liminal moment, let’s take a moment to discern.

Discernment is kind of a churchy word, but it essentially just means perceiving for God’s guidance. This is a spiritual practice and today we will even be hosting some discernment conversations after worship where our hope is that many of you will stick around to reflect with one another and in doing so, strive to discern where God might be guiding and leading us into the next chapter of our life together as Holy Trinity.

This weekend and into Monday, we celebrate the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. so I’d be remiss if I didn’t share just a bit of what he said directly about discernment in a sermon he titled, “Discerning the Signs of History” In this sermon King cites numerous examples from world history demonstrating that "evil carries the seed of its own destruction.” And I found so much hope in King’s words when I look around and consider the evil swirling in our own world today. Towards the end of his sermon King speaks directly to the evil of slavery and segregation. He says:

“You know, we know about another evil don’t we? It started in 1619 right here in this nation our foreparents were brought here to slave from the soil of Africa. For more than Two Hundred Forty years Africa was raped and plundered, her native kingdoms disorganized, her people and rulers demoralized. We lived with that system right here for 244 years and then for a period it looked like we were going to get out with the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. But we were only halfway out.

It looked like we were doomed to stay in slavery and segregation for ever. But evil carries the seed of its own destruction. God spoke through nine men in 1954, on May 17. They examined the legal body of segregation and pronounced it constitutionally dead and ever since then things have been changing. We can go to places all over the South that we could not go last year. Why? Because evil carries the seed of its own destruction. And I am convinced that segregation is just as dead as a doornail and the only thing I am uncertain about is how costly the segregationalist will make the funeral.

The bottom line is King makes clear that the old order is passing away. And getting back to the driving metaphor he stated it plainly in this sermon when he said, “Ultimately there is a checkpoint in the Universe, there is at the end of the road of evil a sign which says, “Dead end street You won’t get through here.” If you see evil riding high, do not worry, one day it will be cut down.”

I find hope in Dr. King's words. While we can trust that the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice, it does not mean we can just sit back and wait for it to bend on its own. We are active participants in the bending of the arc with God. We are living through some radically evil times, but with our GPS’s on we will find a way out of this with God’s directions.

There is no doubt that times will continue to be difficult, but through discerning the history that King lived though we can see that he too live in some radically evil times in our nation’s history and yet he was still convinced that what man-centered human life has torn down, God centered human life can build up.

God centered human life, that’s what builds up the body of Christ and the kin-dom of God around us. All this time at home has even given us a chance to discern for where the body of Christ is present among us in our homes away from this communion table. But at the same time it also seems that our collective GPS is off and we’re off on some other part of the map, when all along there is a recenter button, and we recenter through the patient, intentional process of discernment. In this moment between stimulus and response we can perceive God calling out to us like God did to Samuel and in this powerful moment we too can say, “Speak Lord for your servant is listening!”

The road noise and commotion around us might be pretty distracting and we might miss our exit or our turn, but we can still trust that the moral arc of the universe will bend us back towards justice because each of our Godly positioning systems has a route re-calculator that gets to work whenever we get off track. Amen.