Scripture: Psalm 46
I don’t know if I really have to explain to you where I get my sermon topics. I get the feeling that most of the time most of you are willing to pretty much go along with whatever I come up with. “Oh…he’s preaching on silence this morning. OK. Not sure why, but if that’s what he wants to preach on, that’s what he wants to preach on. I can go with it…for a while anyway.” I have the feeling that most of you are willing to indulge me regarding the sermon topic every week—no real need to explain myself.
But I like to, when I can. I find it helps me say what I want to say if you have some idea of why I want to say it, and in fact sometimes telling you why I want to talk about something, telling you why I think it’s important is a substantial part of what I want to say. In any case, I do have an explanation of where the topic “silence” came from this week…sort of. It’s pretty minimal. It’s just that the word or the topic of silence recently started appearing to me with mysterious frequency in things I was reading or in prominent places, magazine covers, book titles, and the like. Sort of like wherever I turned for a couple of days there was the word or something about silence. You could say this was a matter of random coincidence, or of some mystical divine communication telling what to preach on, or of something subconscious within me causing me to notice things that I otherwise might not have paid much attention to. Whatever the case may be, I decided to go with it. Besides, it did feel like it was an appropriate theme for the season of Lent, and I will try to say why I think it is before I’m done this morning. It is also a kind of ongoing theme in my own spiritual life. It is important to who I am. So, this morning…a few words on silence.
I guess the first thing it occurs to me to say about silence is that it’s a minority voice in Christianity. I guess it would be a minority voice, silence by its nature not being likely to make a lot of noise or to speak up for itself or call a lot of attention to itself. It’s sort of a strange way to put it, that silence is a minority voice in Christianity, but maybe you understand what I mean. I do think silence is a minority voice, and I think it’s too bad that it’s quite as much of a minority voice as it is.
There are, of course, a few groups within Christianity for whom the practice of silence is central to their faith. The main branch of Quakers, for instance, understands silence to be the most basic form of worship. That is what people do when they worship, though speaking is allowed at Quaker meeting when people are moved to do so. But Quakers are a small minority within the Christian family, and I think there are many Quakers now who don’t consider themselves to be Christians. I think that may be the official stance of the Charlottesville Friends Meeting. So, that particular minority within the Christian family may not be so firmly within the Christian family as it once was, and the minority within the Christian family may be even smaller than it used to be. There are people who lead a monastic, cloistered life, mostly within the Catholic tradition and some of them live in complete silence. The number of people who do that is again very small. And there are scattered individuals in places like Sojourners who as a personal matter find silence to be a key, if not the key spiritual practice in their own worship life, the deepest most authentic way to worship for them. I think it is fair to say that they are in a distinct minority as well.
A second thing it occurs to me to say is that often what passes for silence isn’t—not really. Our moments of silence we build in to our worship services for instance, moments that are few enough certainly in a sixty or seventy or eighty minute worship service, but moments that are more than many churches have, churches that I am familiar with. My own experience on those rare occasions when I get to worship at other churches is that very often when the bulletin says silent prayer or time of silence, it’s not really serious about it. I generally have hardly had time to roll my head and relax my cheeks and get physically ready for prayer before the silent part of prayer is over with. I have generally tried to work at extending that time of silent prayer in other churches I have been at. On more than one occasion in the past people have come up to me after worship and said the silent prayer had gone on so long they thought maybe I had fallen asleep. People, Christians, Christians engaged in prayer are often just not real comfortable with silence.
At Sojourners things are a little bit different from other places I have been. There are a fair number of people here who are more comfortable with silence than the average, who would probably like more of it rather than less, and who at least are willing to have a few moments of silence, as opposed to a fleeting moment of silence, a couple of times during the service, at the beginning to allow us to try to put aside whatever busyness in our minds and spirits we may have brought with us to worship that morning as well as to put aside whatever busyness there may have been in the various announcements of the day, and toward the end when we keep silence to gather up the different prayer concerns we have heard from each other and let them settle in to us and offer them up to God in some way as best we can. But of course our times of silence, even if they may be a little bit more extended than might be typical of many Christian worship services, our times of silence are not really silence either, not in the way I want to think of it this morning.
We live in a noisy culture. I’m not going to spend a lot of time arguing that that’s the case. I think you’ll probably agree. People are talking at us all the time, to say nothing of the other kinds of noises that may be around us in our environment. Of course a lot of the time when people talk at us, it requires our cooperation. We need to let them. But we do. We get in the car and turn on the radio or a cd. We come in the house and immediately turn on the radio, tv, or sound system. Or maybe sit down at the computer which may not contribute so very much to the noise outside of us, but definitely does contribute to the noise that’s inside us. We are all filled up with chatter we carry on with the person on the radio or the chatter we carry on with ourselves, all the things we have to do or want to do that we try to keep track of, worries, songs we’re singing to ourselves, all sorts of stuff. We may not always think of it this way, but our inner life is pretty noisy too. And our religion mostly doesn’t encourage us to turn off the noise. In a lot of ways even our religion is all about noise, if I can put it that way for today—I don’t mean it negatively, necessarily. Expressing your faith. It’s about singing our hymns of praise, telling God the things we need to tell God that we want to make sure God pays attention to, which we often call prayer. It’s about telling the good news: “go tell it on the mountain”. It’s about spreading the message, whether the message is an evangelical one or a progressive one. It’s about speaking up in some way or another. As a small example, there are stories in the gospels where Jesus heals someone and then tells them not to say anything about it. Almost always when one of those passages comes up in a Bible study people wonder why Jesus would do that. Aren’t people supposed to spread the gospel, tell the good news, tell the story, tell their story anyway? I’m not saying all this describes Sojourners, or that any of what I’ve been talking about is necessarily bad. It’s just that there sometimes seems, from where I sit, to be not much room left for silence, not much attention paid to our need for silence. And if that’s true, it’s too bad.
The Psalm says: “Be still, and know that I am God.” I think that is both a wise statement and good advice. A wise statement in offering the thought that being still is, if not the only way to know God, a pretty fundamental way of knowing God. If you want to know God, child of God, you don’t need to settle all the debates that may be carried on about whether God exists or what God is like. You don’t need, and in fact will not likely be successful in talking yourself into knowing God. You don’t need to talk God up, sing God up, struggle to find just the right words with which to talk about God or talk to God. If you want to know God, the best way, or at least a very good way, is just to be still.
Being still is not just silence in the sense of not saying anything out loud. It is also about a sense of calm, but I want to speak of silence today in a way that includes that sense of calm. Silence, as I’m thinking of it, is not just a matter of keeping our mouths shut. It is a matter of stilling all those voices in our heads that are saying things like, “don’t forget now, you’ve got this and this and this to do” or “you know you really should’ve done this and that and that.” Silence is a matter of letting go of all the to-do lists and the should-have-done lists we are constantly making for ourselves and that insist on talking to us if we let them. Silence is a matter of letting go of the to do lists we make for God, the lists of things we would like God to do, want to tell God should be on her to-do list, the things God should be doing if he were paying a little better attention, letting go of all the things we have on our mind that we want to tell God. Silence is a matter of letting go of the expectation that God will be saying something to us, saying yes or no to our requests, answering some question, guiding some decision that is confronting us. Silence is also a matter of letting God be silent, letting go of our need to have God speak.
If we want to know God, it is wise to let go of our talking, including the “silent” talking that goes on inside us, and to let go as well of any expectation or anxiety about God talking to us, and just be still. That is not such an easy thing to do, in my opinion. If you can arrive at that kind of silence in the few minutes or seconds we allow for so-called silence during Sunday morning worship here at Sojourners, you are way better at the practice of silence than I am. If you can arrive at a state of the spirit that approaches anything like true silence in the 10 or 15 minutes we sometimes allow for it in special services during Advent or Lent, you are way better at the practice of silence than I am. I started to hang around Quakers and learned to appreciate Quakerism as a young adult. I attended a Quaker college and went to silent meeting many weeks for four years, and have attended meeting on other occasions over the years. Only rarely after spending roughly an hour worshiping mostly in silence have I felt that I at any time during that hour came close to the kind of stillness my spirit was seeking.
Silence I think is difficult and rare for us. Our environment is not conducive to it. We are not taught to value it. We by and large have not developed the habit of silence. I would say of myself that I am just not very good at it, and I suspect that may be true of quite a few others as well. Even when you’re trying hard to get there, It’s an elusive thing, and mostly the harder you try, the more elusive it becomes. Say you’re in a worship service where the point is to keep silence. Just when you’ve managed to let go of much of what had been going on in your head, new thoughts start to creep in.—My feet are cold. What time is it? Can I peek at my watch without being too obvious about it? How much longer do we have to sit here? Do I even have time to work on getting to a point of stillness? How do you concentrate on letting go of your thoughts without having more thoughts?—Maybe I’m the only one who ties myself up in knots like this. Maybe not.
Silence, real silence, is elusive for us. Nevertheless, if I want to know God, I know, I believe, it is where my soul needs to be. It needs to be in a place free of words and agendas where we can just be, just be in the nameless, holy presence, just be in a place of mystery and wonder and awe. It is a good place to be, worth trying to get there, even if our trying gets in the way sometimes, even if it’s not so easy and maybe we never really do quite make it. It is a place where, by the grace of God, we may come to know God. It is also a place where we may learn to wait upon God, understanding God’s sometime silence toward us not as abandonment but as another way of being present to us. May we hear the call to silence in this sense this Lent. May we be still and know that God is. May we be still and know that God is and that we are and that all is holy. Amen.
Jim Bundy
February 17, 2008