Sermon for Epiphany 2B
preaced at College Communion (Christ Church) and Wesley Memorial Church (Oxford)
January 14th 2024
Readings: 1 Samuel 3: 1-10 and John 1. 43-end
Before moving for my curacy in 2011 we lived in Horspath, just beyond the ring road behind the Mini factory. The village had two central buildings on either side of the road. On one side was the Church of St Giles and on the other side was the village shop and Post Office run by Vipin and Jayshree Patel.
As I was moving I heard rumours that the post office had been closed because Mr Patel, formerly a pillar of the community, had been accused of putting his hands in the till.
I confess I didn’t do anything about this. It seemed odd and unlikely, but we were moving away, and who knew what was true.
I now know the truth, as do we all. I also now know that although many in the village were kind to Mr and Mrs Patel, others bullied and vilified them. They even had a cross placed outside their shop and home, with a wreath on it and RIP Vipin Patel. They were prosecuted and acquitted in 2021 but, like so many others, have still not received a penny and so can’t retire despite being elderly and unwell.
We’ve been hearing stories like theirs all week, particularly since ITV aired the brilliant Mr Bates v. the Post Office. If you haven’t seen it I commend it to you. If you’ve been living under a rock this week, over 900 sub-postmasters were charged with false accounting, fraud and theft, and many lost their livelihoods, their standing in the community, and some even their lives.
For years these poor people have been trying to make themselves heard but no-one seemed to be listening. Not the Horizon helpline they called endlessly. Not the Post Office corporation who pursued them through the courts. Not the politicians they appealed to.
And it took a drama to finally wake us all up to what’s been happening. And we’ve woken up to a huge injustice, probably the worst corporate scandal of our era. And it’s caused national outrage. It’s been a national epiphany in a way. I think of an epiphany as a lightbulb, or ‘aha’, moment.
We are in the church season of Epiphany, where we consider the manifestation of God in the person of Jesus. We hear how, in numerous ‘aha’ moments in the bible, ordinary people have their lives transformed and changed by encountering Jesus.
And our Bible readings today look at three aha moments. Three people who have an epiphany, an awakening moment of one kind or other.
In our OT reading we have Eli and Samuel; and in the Gospel we have Nathaniel.
The story of Eli and Samuel might be a familiar one to you.
Samuel was the longed for son of Hannah, the woman who went to the temple every day to cry out to God for a child. She cried so hard the priest Eli thought she was drunk (you can read Hannah’s story here) .
A child eventually came (Samuel), and when he was a young boy he was given to the Lord as promised by his mother, and lived under Eli’s protection to work in the temple. His job seemed to be to guard the holiest space ‘the ark of the Lord’ as this is where he was sleeping in our reading.
Samuel was literally asleep when he was woken up by word of God. Not once but four times!
The first three he didn’t understand who was speaking. He assumes it’s Eli. Perhaps he was the only person to ever spoke to the boy. Perhaps Eli regularly called out for help in the night – he was elderly and so maybe he did. Samuel certainly doesn’t think it’s God, and frankly why should he, he’s never heard God before.
It’s a great story.
Samuel gets up and runs to Eli’s room ‘here I am’, and each time he’s sent away. This happens three times and on the last time Eli works it out.
Eli tells him to go back and say to God:
Speak Lord, your servant is listening
1 Samuel 19
There’s a difference between hearing and listening isn’t there.
Samuel heard a voice, but he wasn’t actually listening.
I’m often blamed by my sons for not listening. I’m distracted by many things, and they talk a lot. Often I’m hearing words and do the hmm hmm thing, where I can then zone in when a question is asked. If challenged I can usually parrot the last thing they said, but if honest haven’t really been listening, and they can tell!
Listening is hard, but we know what it’s like to be heard, and what it’s like not to be heard.
The producer of the ITV programme on the PO said she thought it had hit such a nerve with people as it ‘stands for all the ways everybody feels unheard’.
Samuel hadn’t yet learned to listen to God.
Samuel did not yet know the Lord, and the word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him.
1 Samuel 3.7
Listening is something we learn to do, it’s not easy. It takes practice. And the same applies when we listen to others, and to God. True listening is a skill and it takes practice and we often need guidance. Taken me years and still not always very good at it.
Many use contemplative exercises to learn to listen. We need to guild up slowly, and can often benefit from the wisdom of our elders for this.
One thing is true though. It is impossible to truly listen whilst doing something else at the same time. Maybe this is why God speaks to Samuel whilst he’s lying in bed at night.
The old man Eli also needed an epiphany, an awakening, and this came through the prophetic words of his young prodigy Samuel.
Eli spent all his days in the temple taking care of the life and work of the sacred space. But despite this it seems that this didn’t bring him close to God.
The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread
1 Samuel 3.1
This seems rather an understatement as in the passage beforehand it seems that Eli’s sons had been doing just the thing our poor Sub Post-Masters had been wrongly accused of.
They were ‘scoundrels’ and thieves. They had been waiting for people to offer meat for sacrifice and then they would steal the meat for themselves. And they did this in full knowledge of their father who made a feeble effort to bring them into line but wasn’t able to stop them. (1 Samuel 2.25)
The message that Samuel was given in the night was a difficult one for Eli to hear.
I am about to punish the house of Eli, from beginning to end… because his sons were blaspheming God and he did not restrain them.
1 Samuel 3.13
It was a hard message, and all credit to Eli that he enabled Samuel to speak up with this message, telling him not to hide anything from him.
Prophetic truth-tellers are not often popular, but they are doing the work of God.
Perhaps Alan Bates is a prophetic voice in this recent Post Office situation. He spoke the simple truth even though that was unpopular, and he brought an injustice into the light. That’s surely the work of God.
Prophets wake us up. And if we’re honest, sometimes we’d prefer to stay asleep. I confess there are many issues I can’t quite wake up to.
In our Gospel reading we see another character who experiences an awakening to the truth. Nathaniel.
Jesus is gathering his disciples and he’s already recruited Andrew, Peter and Philip, and Philip goes to tell Nathaniel what they’ve experienced.
But Nathaniel’s first reactions reveal how he’s kept from seeing truth, even when it’s right there, in the person of Jesus.
Can anything good come from Nazareth?
John 1.46
Nathaniel can’t believe the messiah could come from a backwater, small town place so far from the centre of things. His prejudice almost keeps him from seeing Jesus. Nathaniel might have been prevented from seeing Jesus, but Jesus saw Nathaniel:
I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you
John 1.48
Despite all these very human failings, God comes close to Samuel, Eli and Nathaniel and reveals himself to each one of them, in different ways. Each of them is called to serve. Each of them has an awakening.
Jesus sees and hears us, and each one of us is called in some way. Perhaps we are all invited to wake up in some way. The challenge is that sometimes we might prefer to stay asleep, as once we wake up we often then have to do something, change in some way, love people we find it hard to love, confront an injustice we might prefer to ignore.
I wonder who we relate to most in these characters from scripture, or who we are most challenged by?
Is it Samuel who is physically and spiritually woken up as he learns how to listen to God and, despite being young, begins his prophetic ministry? Do we feel we are asleep to God? Perhaps we feel we wouldn’t have a clue what God sounded like if he called our name? Might God be gently challenging us to wake up to hear his voice lovingly calling us into his service. Perhaps he has something unique for us to do or say if only we’d listen.
Or perhaps we feel more akin to Eli, tired in faith and going through the motions. Perhaps God is waking us to the fact we have something to offer that we can share with others. Perhaps, like Eli, we could be guides to those young in faith. Or perhaps we can see God speaking in the lives of others even if we’re not sure we can hear him ourselves in our own lives.
Or, like Eli, do we need to wake up to a particular injustice that’s happening under our very noses and in our own neighbourhoods.
I wish I had done more in Horspath, gone round to speak to the Patels, and asked more questions.
Or might we be like Nathaniel, not noticing Jesus right there with us because we think he couldn’t possibly be in somewhere as backwater as with us in our little lives.
Because that’s exactly where Jesus is. With each one of us, calling us by name, into a life that’s awake. Awake to God, to others, to ourselves.
It’s a challenging life, but one that is far better than being asleep. And it begins with us saying these simple words:
speak Lord, your servant is listening
1 Samuel 3.19
Amen
Consider the Lilies - Clare Hayns 