Scriptures: Psalm 42
If the sermon topic for today seems like it might be a little too “heavy”, if it sounds to you like it might be pretty much of a “downer”…I have to say it sounds that way to me too. As I was beginning this sermon, I was thinking that I would really rather be talking today about something more cheerful that wouldn’t ask too much of me as a preacher or you as a listener.
I kept going though, for a couple of reasons. For one thing, I committed myself to this topic back at the beginning of the summer when I was thinking about sermon topics for July and August, and imagining that my sermon topics would fit under the broad umbrella of “dimensions of faith”. There was to be one on “experiences of God” (though I didn’t know at the time what I was going to say about that), and then the logical question that occurred to me to talk about after that was: But what about those times when we don’t have any experiences of God. What about when God is silent? That’s how this topic came about. More importantly I am convinced that this is an important topic to deal with even if I’m not particularly in the mood to deal with it. In fact sometimes things we would rather not talk about are precisely those things we need to talk about.
The silence of God. The scriptures acknowledge the silence of God. I have to say that I think the Hebrew scriptures are better at this than the New Testament. The Psalms as we know are pretty honest about a number of human feelings and sometimes will express lyrical praises to God in one breath and then in the next breath call for the annihilation of one’s enemies, or at least wonder why the “bad guys” seem to be having such a good time. “Praise God,” the Psalm sometimes says, but then it will also say, “Smite them!” If nothing else this has the virtue of honesty, and the Psalms are honest too that sometimes they feel as though God is just not communicating very well. “Do not be silent, O God of my praise.” (Psalm 109) “O God, do not keep silence; do not hold your peace or be still.” (Psalm 83) “You have seen, O Lord; do not be silent. Do not stay far from me.” (Psalm 35) Here as elsewhere in the Hebrew scriptures especially it is admitted that God’s people do not always feel God’s guiding presence, but sometimes God’s absence, do not always hear the word God speaks but sometimes are all too aware of the word God doesn’t speak.
Now some of these honest feelings that find their way into the Psalms are a little embarrassing for people of faith. We don’t really want to embrace jealousy and vengeance as legitimate parts of our faith. They may be parts of our human experience from time to time, and it’s good to be honest about that, but mostly for the purpose of doing our best to get rid of them. Is the silence of God like that? Is that experience a little embarrassing and something we are working or praying to get rid of? I think the answer to that must be at least partly yes. The New Testament tries to at least clean up the language a little and doesn’t speak so directly of God’ silence, with the important exception of the last days and hours of Jesus’ life when he himself expressed his experience of the silence of God. But mostly the New Testament—and the Hebrew scriptures for that matter—are filled with examples of where God is not absent but very much present to people of faith, where God is not silent but alive with a word for the people of God. So when Jesus feels God’s absence, when we feel God’s absence, is this a lapse in his faith and ours? Or is it part of the very fabric of his faith, and ours?
I went looking for a middle hymn for this morning that would sort of go along with the sermon. A hymn that might relate to the theme of God’s silence. I couldn’t find any. Now I might have missed something, but after all you wouldn’t expect too many hymns about God’s silence, would you? The hymn I chose instead (Great Is Your Faithfulness) is one that I like and that sings of what we expect to sing in our hymns. We praise God for all the ways she makes herself known, not for the ways she withholds herself. We praise God for the creation, for gifts of the spirit, for calling us to justice or forgiveness. We pray God for comfort or guidance or vision or companionship along our journeys. We sing of God’s glory or goodness or faithfulness or love. We do not sing of God’s silence. Nor I suspect when we speak of our faith would we typically speak of our experience of God being silent. We would speak, maybe, of how God saw us through a difficult time, helped us to become a new person, put songs in our hearts or dreams in our spirits, perhaps spoke to us in a still small voice or even spoke through the sounds of sheer silence. But we probably would not speak, at least not when we want to give testimony to our faith we would not speak of those times when there was no message in the silence, but only silence, those times when the silence is an empty silence.
And yet we know these times, don’t we? People of faith know these times. Not all of us maybe. I don’t know about all of us, and I’m not saying it’s necessary for people of faith to know about the silence of God. I don’t know about all of us, but I know about some of us, and I know that some people of faith are familiar with the experience of God’s silence. And that’s one of the things I do want to say as clearly as I can this morning. It is people of faith who experience the silence of God. It is not those without faith who know about God’s silence. It is those with faith. And it is not the unbelieving, unfaithful parts of ourselves that have this experience. It is indeed woven fully into the pattern of our believing.
Having said this, I do have to acknowledge that there are some times when the reasons for God’s presumed silence is not that God is in fact silent but rather that we have chosen, consciously or unconsciously, not to listen. There is such a thing as selective hearing loss. Some people seem to have trouble hearing things that they don’t especially want to hear. And maybe sometimes when people think they’re not hearing a word from the Lord, it’s because the Lord has a word for them they don’t really care to hear. Sometimes we may prefer God to be silent rather than hear what God has to say.
And maybe sometimes we listen in the wrong places. Maybe we expect the Bible to have a word for us from God, when it’s really the person next to us who is carrying that word. Or, vice versa. Maybe some of us humanistic type people think that the word of God is going to come to us, if it comes to us at all, through other people, and maybe just at the moment there is a word for us in the scriptures! Sometimes, we have to admit, the so-called silence of God may be just our own stuff getting in the way.
But sometimes it’s not just our own stuff. Sometimes it’s not just a matter of our own lapses in hearing or faith. Sometimes God really is silent. Sometimes, that is, we really do experience God as silent. Sometimes we really do wish for a word, a clear, unmistakable word from God…and it is not there. Sometimes we pray and not only do we not get what we ask for, but we do not receive an answer of any kind (because of course prayers can be answered without requests being granted); all we receive is silence. I said last week that my experiences of God most often are quiet ones, where I am able to sense somehow through the still, small voice or even through the silence a voice that tells me where I am to be, who I am to be with, what tasks I am called to, and who I am. But sometimes, even though we may deeply desire and fervently pray for such a voice, it is just not there. Again maybe not everyone has had that experience or would describe it quite that way, but at least some people of faith know this experience. And it’s important for us to be honest about this. In fact it’s important to do more than just be honest about it. It’s important to know that it is not just a result of our selective hearing loss, our stubbornness, or the failure of our fervor. It is not because of our fault or our sin.
I took a book with me to read on the airplane going to and from Kansas City earlier this summer. It was called “Listening for God”, written by Renita Weems. Renita Weems is a Biblical scholar, professor, ordained Methodist clergy person, author, and sought after speaker for conferences and retreats. In the book she describes her own pain at feeling somehow separated from God, not because of some major crisis in her life but just because God did not seem to be vividly present to her and was not speaking to her in any direct way. The pain she describes was not only because of feeling a certain dryness in her spirit, not just the pain of feeling God’s silence, but also the pain of feeling guilty about it.
Besides feeling like this was probably somehow her fault, she writes about how she felt like a fraud very often, giving lectures about Biblical faith, regularly standing up to preach on Sunday morning, talking to spiritually hungry people, trying to defend the faith to secular listeners and colleagues, writing about spiritual themes here, there, and everywhere, all the while not herself feeling that close connection to God that she somehow felt ought to be there. So she not only felt like a failure in her spiritual life, but also felt like she was being dishonest about it, like she was engaged in some kind of cover-up, which compounds the original sin.
As she describes it, what got her through this and to the point of writing a book about it was not that she eventually made it through her time of testing and finally recovered her faith and rediscovered the clear voice and abiding presence of God in her life. Instead it was the dawning realization that God’s silence was not something she was responsible for, not something to be embarrassed about, not something to feel guilty about, but rather was—and is and always will be—part of the journey, and indeed that faith is in large part, as she says, “learning how to live in the meantime between the last time we heard from God and the next time”—and I will say in parentheses that the meantime may be quite a long time. “In those days,” it says in 1 Samuel, “the word of the Lord was rare.” It may be in our day too. In any day the word of the Lord may be rare, and our sense of God’s silence may remind us of that, that the word of the Lord is not just easy, not just everywhere and anywhere, not easily or quickly found…so that when we do on occasion encounter a word of the Lord, it is known as something rare and precious, like a pearl of great price, maybe something worth spending a lifetime looking for.
So it’s not just that the silence of God is a part of the journey for many people of faith. It’s not something just to be endured, until we get to a better place in our spiritual lives. And it’s not just a “downer” as I suggested it was at the outset.
Besides what I’ve already said, I have a couple other positive things to say about the silence of God. One is that we would experience no sense of God’s silence if we had no sense of being spoken to from a holy place or being. We do not miss what we have never known. And sometimes allowing ourselves to experience God’s silence, not to try to bring about that sense artificially, but to allow ourselves to experience it fully when it is there, is to sharpen our awareness of what it is we have somehow known and what it is that we are seeking. And perhaps it is that sharpened awareness that not only brings us together for worship, bringing our different kinds of seeking together, but that in the end brings us to God. Paradoxically it may be our experiences of the silence of God that bring us closer to God.
And then one final thought. I have participated in a number of workshops on anti-racism. Almost all of them included a listening exercise where we paired off and took turns speaking to each other about something, maybe an early experience of racism or how racism affects us. Whatever the question, the instructions are that each person will have one minute to speak on whatever the topic is, and the other person is just to listen. And that means not only not to speak, but to listen, and to listen in such a way as not to interfere with what the other person is saying, or to influence it in any way. So when the other person is speaking the one listening is not supposed to give feedback in the form of body language, facial expressions, nodding, or anything. If you are in the habit of nodding when someone else is talking, and you can’t help it, then you are supposed to nod at everything—not just the things you find interesting. The point is to be completely attentive but to let the other person have their own voice, not to be saying in subtle ways, “I don’t agree with that.” “Oh, good point.” “Are you sure about that?”
Once when this exercise was being introduced the facilitator said she had been thinking about this and thought it was a little bit like praying when God doesn’t answer right away. You pray, and it’s not that God is not listening or is not interested, but God doesn’t answer, because God wants you to find your own voice. That seemed to me to be a really worthwhile theological insight, that God’s silence may be one way God has of helping us to find our own voices, and this is one of God’s heartfelt desires for us. Too often the voice of God, or what some people have tried to pass off as the voice of God, has been used to silence our human voices. “This is what God says. Don’t speak. Don’t think. Just listen and obey.”
But truly God has a different desire: not that we lose our voices, but that we find them. And maybe God has to be silent sometimes to give us space to do that. And sometimes silences, even in human conversation, are times that we need to move to some deeper level of communication, to move from chatter to conversation to communication. Sometimes we need silence to move us from where words come easy to where they don’t. There is more than one way in which even the silence of God can be a blessing. People of faith do know some of the ways in which God is painfully silent in times of need. May we also, by God’s grace, know some of the blessings of that holy silence. Amen.
Jim Bundy
August 19, 2001