Sermon:  “Listening to Jesus”

Jesus says, " For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice."  So listening to Jesus, we might say, is our calling as Christians.  Listen to my voice, Jesus says – my truth.  Listen to God’s teachings in scripture.  Listen to my parables and lessons to my disciples.  Listen to the whisper of my healing love.  Listen to the Holy Spirit and you will get the words you need to speak under pressure, when you most need to hear them – that was in last week’s text, Mark 13.  It all sounded like Good News to me, “Listening to Jesus,” something encouraging and helpful.  But the problem was – as I started polling some of you about what “listening to Jesus” might mean to you – you didn’t think it sounded very appealing.

When I starting asking, “What does listening to Jesus mean to you?” I was hearing things like:  “getting good advice,” “moral direction and wisdom,” and “hearing things I probably really need to hear.” Some of you were even said things like, “sounds boring” or “depends on whether what he had to say anything to do with my life” or “I hope he keeps it short and sweet.”  The most interesting thing to watch, though, was your body language.  Many of you would sigh or shrug or look kind of defeated – as if you expected that in meeting Jesus, at least one of you would be disappointed. 

I had to wonder why more of us didn’t expect that still, small voice of Christ to speak words of love – words of Good News like those Jesus heard from God at his baptism, that he passes on to us, “You are my beloved child; in you, I am well-pleased.”  It made me realize how hard it is to keep the Good News of God’s love for us fresh in our minds and hearts.  It’s as hard for me as it is for you.  I may have told you before about the time my husband got tired of me complaining about what I looked like in the mirror, and he pasted this quote at the top of the full-length mirror in our bedroom:  “You are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you.  Signed, God, through the prophet Isaiah, chapter 43 verse 4.”  You see we can know we’re listening to Jesus, the true voice of God, because it is a voice of love and power strong enough to cast out other voices that may haunt us more than help us – stern and judging voices, voices from a legalistic and moralistic religious past.  The voice of Jesus is full of love.  And that’s something to be thankful for.

I actually began thinking about this Thanksgiving Sunday early last summer when I was reading a great new book about the Pilgrims.  It’s called Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War, by Nathaniel Philbrick[1]   They did a lot of listening to the voice of Jesus – so much so that they felt called to go off in a little sailing ship to work on building his Father’s Kingdom in the new world.  Our recent UCC motto, “God is still speaking,” is a reference back to a line from the Pilgrims’ pastor there in Leyden, Holland, John Robinson, who sent them on their way saying, “the Lord has more truth and light yet to break forth out of his Holy Word."  In other words, he was reminding them of a basic principle of the Congregationalist Reformers – that is, that it was their calling, as disciples of Christ and members of His church, to be sure that they were listening to Jesus very carefully – because Christ, not the king or his bishops, was the true head of the church.  That seditious idea is what turned King James against them.  To proclaim “Christ the King” was no more popular with him than it had been with Caesar years before.  James considered Separatists a dangerous religious cult, so he chased us out of England in the early 1600s.  His King James Bible was actually translated to confront some teachings he considered the most radical – such as this Congregationalist idea that ordinary Christians could listen to Jesus directly, and actually interpret and follow his teachings themselves. 

So we have a lot to be proud of today – 389 years and one day after the signing of the Mayflower Compact.  We Congregationalists are the church of the Pilgrims – and since it is our calling to listen to Jesus and to help others listen with us, we might consider Thanksgiving our highest holy day.  We might – but in fairness to our Catholic brothers and sisters – we have to admit that “listening to Jesus” doesn’t always work perfectly.  We can be proud of the Boston Tea Party – the brainstorm of one local church committee – but we also have to remember when things went terribly wrong, as in the Salem Witch Trials.

So how do we go about listening to Jesus?  How can we be sure the voice we hear is a holy one, and not just the chatter of our busy minds, or worse – the voice of temptation like the one Jesus heard when he went out into the wilderness to find God?  It’s like the old joke about the tourist in New York City who asked a local, “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?”  You know the answer, choir?  Say it with me now – “Practice, practice, practice!”  We need regular practice of our faith, to be open to the spirit of Christ.  And that’s what we’ve been up to for these last couple of years, as we began a visioning process together, trying to discern the direction Christ is calling our church. 

In the last year, as we tried out our new vision statement – “Make Jesus your mentor: Pray, Share, Welcome” – we have been focusing on the “prayer” part, that part of our church life that is the most spiritual.  And for those of you who are our most practical or scientific types, we thank you for going with us on this journey.  Some of us come to weekly Men’s Fellowship or women’s study, and some go on retreat. Some of us took part in a Faith Journey Group or Bible study or Spiritual Renewal class.  Some of us read “The Shack” or “The Noticer” in a book study.  Some of us made personal prayer, or prayer in meetings, a higher priority.  Fellowship Committee and CE added a small worship component to some of our favorite events – like tonight’s Advent wreath workshop.

So listening to Jesus doesn’t have to be just something extremely mystical or weird – like those interesting characters on the subway who’ll tell you they’re the voice of God.  Listening to Jesus can be as simple as simply changing our perception just enough to pick up on the voice of our God’s voice still speaking to us.  I love hearing your stories. 

Sometimes they’re really amazing or miraculous – a groom will tell me that he heard a voice from the heavens tell him “this girl is the one” on a first date, or one guy I knew who was an ER nurse was just heading into the grocery store when he heard a voice deep inside his head say, “walk that way.”  And when he did, he happened to see someone down on the ground, where they’d NEVER have been seen otherwise, and he was able to give CPR and save a life.  Or one time, I knew a town official who was sitting in a Christmas Eve Midnight Mass when he had an epiphany, completely out of the blue – a vision of a vacant building where the town could open a homeless shelter. 

But listening to Jesus is not always that spectacular.  We might just use a traditional faith practice like attending church or silent, listening prayer.  For instance, some us have practiced what Rev. Dave Buchan calls “African Bible study” and what others know as Lectio Divina.  That’s when a scripture is read aloud several times, and we just listen to it for words or phrases that seem to jump out at us, catch our attention.  And then we take the time to think about that word or phrase in silence long enough to let God speak to our heart about how it connects to our own lives and what we might do about it.  There’s one of those exercises posted on our website, in a Spiritual Renewal Class lesson.

Other times the voice of Jesus comes a just a “gut” feeling to do something a little different – volunteer for something new, or voice a new idea to a committee.  And the good thing about speaking words that come to us in a group setting is that the group is there to check our own perception – so listening to Jesus might be as simple as listening to others on a committee.  Who would have expected a miracle in a church meeting?!  Stewardship, I know, experienced this recently when we brought an early idea for our spring campaign to the Church Council – and after a good discussion, people spoke the truth in love and we discerned it was NOT the best direction to take.  So listening to Jesus sometimes means just listening respectfully to one another.

And some of us have heard the voice of Jesus in a random remark or kind word from a child or a stranger.  I experienced that this past week as I sat down at a charity breakfast and met someone new.  She just happened to say something that I don’t think she considered very profound, but it jumped out to me because I had heard others say something almost exactly like it maybe two times earlier in the week.  Sometimes I think Jesus has to repeat those important messages to be sure we’re listening!  But thanks be to God the Holy Spirit still keeps on trying to get the Good News through to our busy minds and stubborn hearts.  God is still speaking, Amen.

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John 18:33-37

Then Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him, "Are you the King of the Jews?" Jesus answered, "Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?" Pilate replied, "I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?" Jesus answered, "My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here." Pilate asked him, "So you are a king?" Jesus answered, "You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice."