Careful Listening
Today’s Readings: AM Psalm 1, 2, 3; Job 4:1,5:1-11,17-21,26-27; Acts 9:19b-31; John 6:52-59
When a seminarian finishes his or her studies one of the cruelest realities, she may need to face is how incredibly inept she is. All those things her congregation will expect her to be proficient at are untested tools in her bag of tricks waiting to be used, like undeveloped muscles at the beginning of Spring training. The hope and prayer is that seminarians enter ministry with strong, basic skills and that these will at least be the foundation of what we need to get started.
One thing I did know is that of all the skill sets clergy need one at the top of the list is listening. And an important part of listening is to whom we listen. As the parent of a teenager, I know this is one of my biggest worries - who is he listening to? Who are the people in his life that influence him the most? Of course, I’d like to think he’s listening to his dad and I first, but my gut instinct is that we compete with lots of other voices.
As an associate rector in a large congregation, I know I need to listen to my members, but in addition, I also need to be listening to God. I can’t say from my experience that this is always easy. Listening to God can be hard, because much like my teenager, we have lots of competing voices in our lives – our friends and family, cultural trends, social media, – the list can be endless.
In today’s gospel reading from John, Jesus is listening to the crowd and hears their complaints. In response he challenges them to listen to something that will be very hard to accept much less understand. He’s asking his listeners, as well as all of us, to seek something that we cannot see or touch but can only be imagined – to have faith and trust in this unearned gift we are offered. Jesus wants us to realize that the living bread he offers comes only as a gift from God, as grace. We can’t earn it or work for it.
This is hard, isn’t it? We’re conditioned by everything around us to believe that we must work for everything; that anything worth having must be earned. But when it comes to God just the opposite is true. Like so much of what Jesus teaches, this idea is counter to what our culture teaches.
So, like the rich young ruler, we hunger for this life-giving bread, and we want to know how to get it. We are, as one writer put it, “Bundles of seemingly insatiable need, running from here to there in an attempt to fill our emptiness.” Jesus says loud and clear, 54Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day.” Does this mean we wait for our hearts to be warmed by God’s grace? In Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, he tells the church “We can plant, and we can water but we don’t make the plants grow – God does that.” Perhaps what Paul is saying is that we can’t control or conjure up God’s grace, but we can prepare the ground with ideas, experience or an open heart, that will provide good ground for the seeds of God’s grace to grow and bear fruit.
Saint Stephen’s is entering into the fall program season. There is an abundance of wealth to be had in the form of classes and opportunities to serve. Listening, really listening, always requires taking a breath to focus, listening, not only with our ears,
but also, with our hearts. We have, in our midst, the incarnate God, Jesus Christ. He is offering us the bread that will sustain us through all challenges. Our challenge is to discern, to listen carefully to where God is calling us and then to be ready with ground prepared to be fruitful.
Faithfully,
Sally+
Questions for Reflection: Discernment for where and how God is calling us comes from the Spirit and is fueled by the bread Jesus offers. What prevents you from listening to the Spirit? What are the distractions that you can quiet or eliminate?