Just Keep Listening
It doesn’t always happen this way, but on Saturday night, after watching some football and reading through my sermon for Sunday all over again, something just didn’t feel right.
I had prepared what I thought would be a pretty good sermon. I had been working on it all week. But as I began to prepare for bed, it just wasn’t settling in.
There is an inner voice – a stirring of the Spirit – that I’ve come to know through the years. It keeps me grappling with what I’m going to preach, sometimes even while I’m in the midst of preaching it. But on this particular night, to borrow the words of Star Wars, I sensed a great disturbance in the Force.
And so… I prayed. I went to my study and began to do what I knew to do: I listened.
Between that moment of listening, waking up a couple of times during the night, and my morning run on Sunday, I arrived at the 8:45 contemporary service carrying two possible sermons. There was the sermon I had been writing all week. And there was the sermon I had a hunch I needed to preach – the one that had emerged through an evening and morning of listening.
The Gospel was read. I stepped up to preach. And I chose the latter. But what I could not have anticipated was how deeply that sermon would find resonance in the rest of the service.
To the average person sitting in the pew, it likely seemed as though we had coordinated the morning perfectly. Themes. Words. Even the call to action. But, in truth, we hadn’t done any of that, really.
Unbeknownst to me, words, phrases, and ideas I used in the new sermon began showing up in a song Charles and the band had been writing and rehearsing all week. And, it was a new song, one I had never heard before.
As I sat there afterward, no longer the preacher but simply a worshiper among worshipers, I listened… and I smiled… because somehow, by the Spirit’s grace and kindly connecting, we had arrived in the same place. Not really because we had planned it. Not because God had handed each of us a script. But because, perhaps, we had all been doing the Christian work of listening.
Friends, what I experienced Saturday night and Sunday morning is not unique to me. It is not the happenstance of being a vocational priest. No, I believe the Spirit of God is still speaking – in real time, in real lives, in the midst of real decisions and relationships and journeys. Sometimes it comes as a thought we cannot quite shake. Sometimes as a holy hunch. Sometimes through another person. Sometimes we recognize it only when something someone else says suddenly resonates with what has already been stirring within us.
Yes, the spiritual practice of listening never happens entirely in a vacuum. We listen, but others are listening too. We pray, but others are praying too. We pay attention, and then we bring what we hear into community, where it can be tested, challenged, deepened, and sometimes wonderfully confirmed.
Maybe that is one of the ways the living God continues creating among us and how we get to join as co-creators in our own lives.
My prayer for you this week is simple: just keep listening.
Listen for the holy hunches. Pay attention to what keeps stirring. Share them with people you trust. Listen for the echoes in the lives of others. And every once in a while, you may discover that something has been emerging among you that none of you could have created alone.
Let it be. Let it be. Let it be. Amen.