Farewell Sermon

Farewell Sermon
Evensong, St Mary's Richmond
20th January 2013

1 Samuel 3.1-20; John 1.29-42

The Old Testament reading, tonight, reminds us that God can speak to anyone. Do you really believe that? God may call or stir the heart of whomsoever God pleases. The youngest person, the most unlikely, unpromising person, the outsider. Or, perhaps, just the reverse. God may call the person everyone expects - the one who has been trained or who has special insight or vision. With the story of Samuel, we have both. God speaks through a combination of a young, inexperienced boy who works in the temple and an elderly priest who has served God for many years.

Have you noticed how children sometimes get a bee in their bonnets about something? And then they go on and on about it...but often there's a kernal of truth, something that needs to be attended to. Here's a story about just that.

When David Shiffler was three years old, he and his family went on a camping trip to the new Mexico desert. He and his dad had been watching The Land Before Time, a cartoon adventure in which a group of children meet some real dinosaurs. So David was really keen to hunt for dinosaur eggs. He went digging with a toy trowel and found a green stone which he confidently told his father was a dinosaur egg. His father took the stone back home and put it in the garage with the rest of the day's kit. After David had badgered him about it for weeks, Don Shiffler finally gave in and sent the stone to palaeontologists in Colorado who told the family that, yes, the stone was a dinosaur egg. Not only, that, it was in fact the oldest meat-eating dinosaur's egg ever found in North America, twice as old as the earliest previously known specimen. The egg found by three year old David convinced scientists that these particalur dinosaurs, called therapods, had lived in the Jurassic age, something that had not been suspected. 

Like Samuel, the boy David had a persistant hunch that somethiong was important but he needed the adults to help him work out what it was.

Enthusiasm often comes from the young. Andrew, Jesus' disciple (presumably in his late teens or early twenties) rushes off to find his brother straight away when Jesus calls him. 'The Messiah himself has spoken to me! Come and see!' The enthusiasm of youth with its willingness to act! Wisdom comes with age (well somtimes!) The elderly Eli can discern the mark of God in what Samuel is experiencing. He has seen this kind of thing before. Samuel is not dreaming or hearing voices; God is disturbing his conscience until he stops running to Eli and listens.

God can and does speak to us all. Not very often, perhaps. Not as often as we would like, or when we would like, but God can speak to and through anyone who will listen. Anyone who will stop long enough to be attentive. And then, when God does speak, it may be that we need the help of someone else to interpret the message - the help of a wise friend or someone who has studied the ways of God, someone who knows the scriptures as Eli did. Or someone who thinks and prays a lot.

How does God speak? Well, in many and diverse ways.

Maybe through an idea or a hunch that won't leave us alone until we attend to it. Samuel got up three times to investigate where this strange voice came from.

Maybe God speaks through a trusted friend's advice or urging. 'Come on, come and see Jesus,' Andrew urges Simon Peter. Together they went, stayed the evening, and their lives were changed for ever.

Maybe God speaks through our sense of history or tradition, our sense of what is right and wrong within that. A profound knowledge of his tradition was probably what helped Eli to interpret God's word to him and his household through the message that Samuel delivered, and to understand that things had gone wrong and needed to change. 'He is the Lord, He will do whatever seems best to Him,' says Eli. It must have taken a great deal of humility and courage for Eli to take on board Samuel's unplalatable message and utter those words. Sometimes God challenges us in uncomfortable ways to face up to things we'd rather avoid.

Maybe God speaks to us through our knowledge of Scripture. Samuel probably knew what was already written about the House of Eli. God's call prompted him to warn Eli to take what was written in scripture seriously.

Or maybe God does speak to us directly, just occasionally. Perhaps when we are very far away from God or in great distress. James Ryle is a well-known evangelist whose life was transformed when he was in prison. Here is the story of how God spoke to him.

At the age of seven, James Ryle was put in an orphanage. His natural father was in prison, his step father was an alchoholic and his mother couldn't cope. It was a grim place, and, not long after his arrival, two boys ran away. James says, 'I can still hear the sounds of their protests as they were beaten for having run away. As I lay in my bed, I pulled the covers over my head and whispered a simple prayer to the God I did not know. 'I promise,' I said, 'I'll never run away.'' As the years went by, James got tougher and more  independent and, by the time he was fourteen, he had had enough of the orphanage. With two friends, he jumped the fence and ran away. As they ran across the fields, something happened which James really wasn't expecting. In his own words, 'The voice of the Lord spoke in my ear, stopping me momentarily in my tracks. 'You promised.' That's all I heard but it was enough. I was dumbstruck. My first thought was, 'I cannot believe that you would bring that up at a time like this.' That was the first time James heard God's voice. He carried on running. But years later, when he was in prison and heard the voice of God again, he remembered that day - the day he realised that God does speak to people.

There is nothing we can do to make God speak to us. We can only expect and hope that God might. We can hold ourselves open to hear and to act on what we hear. Or see. Elizabeth Barrett Browning  wrote,

'Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God,
And only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit around and pluck blackberries.'

I think the blackberries are a reference to Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale where the Pardoner says, in a throw away line, he cares not if men's souls 'go ablackberrying in hell.'

Samuel, Eli, Andrew and Simon Peter did not disregard an approach by God. They were ready to stop in their tracks, take off their shoes and listen when God spoke to them. They were willing, not only to honour God's presence, but to have their lives shaped and changed by what they heard and saw.

As an archdeacon you go round a lot of churches. I was at two this morning. An ecumenical gathering in Scorton to mark the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity and a Communion service at Brompton where the youngest member was about eight. I enjoyed watching her put her heart and soul into reading all the words of the hymns and singing enthusiastically. Those two churches were full of people to had trudged or driven through the snow, as you have tonight, beacuse they love worshipping God, or they need to worship, or they want to want to worship.

What makes our churches come alive and stay alive? What makes them indispensible to the communities in which they are set? Well, at the heart of every faith-filled church and at the heart of every Christian life is that direct sense of relationship with God. Some of us chatter away to God. Some of us find God speaks into our hearts and minds when we are still. Some of us think of God as our Father. Some of us talk to Jesus. Some of us  have that sense of God's Spirir searching our spirits and hearts. Probably, we all do most of these things some of the time.

We do what Samuel did and stop for a moment to attend, 'Speak Lord, for your servant hears.' Direct relationship with God.

For the sake of our churches, we ought also to do what Samuel did next and share what we discover with each other. Recapture the enthusiasm, even the excitement, of youth. Talk about what God seems to be saying to us. Often it is only through talking about an encounter with God to someone else that we begin to discover its real significance. An encounter with God, a prompting by God's Spirirt may be something for us and us alone but, often, it's more of a gift for others. 'So Samuel told everything and did not keep anything back.'

There may be some changes ahead for the Archdeaconry of Richmond and for our Diocese. Big changes if we join up with the Archdeaconry of Craven and the Dioceses of Bradford and Wakefield. Small changes happen all the time as people come and go, parishes join together, new kinds of church and new kinds of worship emerge. Whatever the future holds, keep in your sights the desire to have that sense of direct relationship with God. You can always recognise a person who listens and talks with God. You can always tell a church where lots of the members are engaged in doing this. It is the means by which God's Spirit renews the church and changes the world.

And now, to Him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we can ask or conceive by the power that is at work among us, to Him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus, throughout all ages. Amen.