But what I remember most was the silence. The element of silence was immense. The second night, the clouds blew off and a fierce, cold moon rose. The stars pressed close and bright as animal eyes at a fire’s edge. Falling stars flew like sparks across the sky’s blackness. We watched it for a spell, and then we crawled into our small canvas tent. It smelled, from all the wetness, like a root cellar. We lay there and listened. The silence was so vast it had a life all its own. It was not the absence of sound. It was the presence of something very old, very still, very watchful.
We lay like that a long time, in utter stillness, utter quiet. And then a sound pierced the silence. It didn’t shatter it: it pierced it, as cleanly as a needle pierces cloth. Even today, nearly forty years on, I hear that sound.
Wolves. Wolves howling. It was the most beautiful, most terrifying sound I’ve ever known. I wanted it to stop. I wanted it to go on forever. It seemed at once too close and too far. I held my dad and strained my ears to hear, even though the sound was dreadful. Even though it sought me.
In the making of him, the element of silence was immense.
Years passed. I grew, became a man, married, had a son of my own, Adam. When Adam was two, my wife and I took him camping in Oregon, along the coast. We arrived at the campsite early and set up our small tent. Just before evening, the other campsites filled up—mostly with large RVs, “condos on wheels,” my wife calls them, long, wide, lumbering monoliths with pull-out canopies and pop-out kitchens and satellite dishes on the roofs.
We bedded early. About ten o’clock at night, a sound awoke us. Many sounds, actually. There had been, earlier, a fragile and tentative silence, but this shattered that. It was a party, just warming up, not to reach its full swing until well after midnight. Country-and-western music rioted from a portable stereo. Several drunken revelers sang along, bellowing in slurred, tuneless voices. Some of the people were crashing into tables and chairs and coolers, square-dancing, I think. So many bottles were clinking it sounded like a wind chime of bones and glass and hubcaps clapping together in a hurricane.
Absurd.
We lay there, sleepless. I thought of Kanaskis and that clear, cold night after hard rain. I thought of lying in a tent about this size. I thought of the silence. I thought of the wolves.
I wondered if they ever come near campgrounds anymore.
And if they do, who’s listening?
Samuel had to learn to hear. Samuel was the son of Hannah, God’s gift to her after she begged him for a child to end her barrenness. Her barrenness was such sorrow that it made her incoherent, and the priest Eli thought she’d come to the sanctuary drunk. A broken heart can do that. Hannah promised God that if he gave her a son, she would give him back to him. He would be a priest.
God honored her request, and Hannah honored her promise. When Samuel was still a young boy, only just weaned, Hannah took him to the house of the Lord in Shiloh, consecrated him, and left him—though once a year she returned, bearing the gift of a hand-stitched robe, tailored to fit the child’s small body.
Samuel “grew up in the presence of the LORD,” grew “in stature and in favor with the LORD,” and “ministered before the LORD” (1 Sam. 2:21, 26; 3:1). We read all that and then stumble over this: “Now Samuel did not yet know the LORD: The word of the LORD had not yet been revealed to him” (3:7, emphasis mine). Thus, with Scripture’s classic understatement, we encounter an ancient problem that plagues us still, that is as old as the garden and as contemporary as this morning’s news: we can be very busy for God and still not know him.
Absurd.
But God means to remedy that, for Samuel and for us. And so one night, God speaks to Samuel. He speaks into the silence in a way that pierces it. In a way that subverts the absurdity. It is a clear voice, unmistakable, inescapable, personal, imperative. It is a voice that demands a response.
“Samuel! Samuel!”
But Samuel thinks it’s Eli. Three times he makes this mistake.
Which is understandable. Samuel has been under the tutelage of Eli, apprenticed to Israel’s most seasoned priest. Eli would have taught him priestly ways: the rigors of ceremonial washings, the intricacies of food laws, the precise articulation of ritual prayers, the study of Torah. He would have initiated him into all the guild secrets: shown him how to slit the throats of goats and bulls, boil and roast their flesh, carve the fat and the meat of sacrifice. He would have shown him how to mix various concoctions of incense and anointing oil, and which to use for what. Eli would have groomed him well for priesthood.
With one flaw: he didn’t teach him to know God. He didn’t tutor him in listening to the Voice. He didn’t instruct him to know God’s word. Amid all that Eli had imparted to Samuel, these things were absent.
Absurd.
Three times God calls Samuel, and three times he mistakes the voice for Eli’s. On the third round—by this time, the story is taking on an almost slapstick edge—Eli figures out what’s happening. It’s the Lord. This is a surprise, the Lord’s coming to the house of the Lord. Eli tells Samuel the next time he hears the voice to respond, “Speak, LORD, for your servant is listening” (1 Sam. 3:9).
Samuel lies down. God calls a fourth time. Samuel responds as Eli said. And God speaks, and speaks, and speaks. Thus begins Samuel’s intimacy with the Lord. All his finely wrought religious training is transposed into face-to-face encounter. All his theological studies are finally rendered as worship and prayer.
And so: “The LORD was with Samuel as he grew up, and [the Lord] let none of his words fall to the ground. . . . And Samuel’s word came to all Israel ” (1 Sam. 3:19; 4:1, emphasis mine).
The logic of this is straightforward: God protects, preserves, and empowers Samuel’s words because Samuel hears, receives, and obeys God’s word.
All our authority is derived.
Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.
What worries me here is myself. I speak a lot, from many platforms. When I’m not speaking, often I’m writing, writing words that have reasonably wide distribution. I’d delight if none of my words fell to the ground—if none were useless, excessive, dispensable, easily dismissed. And I’d delight if my words came to all Israel, all the people of God.
But that’s God’s business. He might use the means of cyber technology, savvy marketing, good publicity. But either God, God alone, keeps our words from falling and scatters them wide, or else there is nothing in them worth keeping and scattering in the first place. Our concern, our responsibility, is simply to hear and heed God. It is always and everywhere to say, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”
The only authority we have is derived.
There is a rare genetic condition called synesthesia—literally, the fusing of sensations. The technical description of synesthesia is “an involuntary physical experience of a cross-modal association”— which means a synesthete’s senses are cross-wired by no choice of his own. He experiences sound as color, motion, texture, or smell. The aural—the capacity to hear—is interconnected with the tactile, the kinetic, the visual, the olfactory, so that sound evokes other sensations. The chittering of a bird becomes a pinwheel of light. The nighttime hum of the refrigerator feels like a warm hand pressed lightly on the belly. A child’s cry is a window splintering (well, that might be the real thing). The whir of fan blades wafts up like the fragrance of fresh-cut grass. Sound for a synesthete is tangible. It is more “real,” more concrete, than for most people. One person out of every twenty-five thousand, according to one estimate, has some form, mild or acute, of synesthesia.4
I wonder if there’s a spiritual equivalent of that condition, and how many people have it. The apostle John apparently did. “On the Lord’s day,” he writes (that is, on the Christian Sabbath), “I was in the Spirit, and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet. . . . I turned around to see the voice that was speaking to me” (Rev. 1:10, 12, emphasis mine).
I turned around to see the voice. The voice has an extra weight of tangibility
for John. It has such substance, such presence, he doesn’t just hear it: he sees it.
He has spiritual synesthesia.
That account contrasts with a Jacob and Esau story in Genesis. Isaac, father of the two brothers, is now old, decrepitly old. And he’s blind. He relies on senses other than sight to guide him. The day arrives for Esau to receive his father’s blessing—the crowning gift bestowed on Esau in honor of his firstborn status. As part of the blessing ceremony, Esau first goes out to hunt for wild game to bring to his father. But while he’s gone, the mother, Rebekah, who favors Jacob, dresses Jacob in Esau’s clothing. She covers his hands and neck with animal skins to mimic Esau’s hairiness. She helps him prepare a meat dish, just the way Isaac likes it. And she sends Jacob into Isaac’s chambers, pretending to be Esau.
He’s an orchid thief, this boy, a raider of the lost ark. He’s come to steal Esau’s greatest treasure: the father’s blessing.
Isaac, old, blind Isaac, is suspicious. Something’s amiss, he senses. An exchange ensues between father and son.
“Who are you?” he asks.
“Esau,” Jacob says, his lie as smooth as his skin.
Isaac expresses surprise at how quickly he’s brought back game. Jacob lies again, says God gave him favor in the hunt. Isaac’s suspicions are only roused further: “Then Isaac said to Jacob, ‘Come near so I can touch you, my son, to know whether you really are my son Esau or not’” (Gen. 27:21). Jacob steps close to his father, who touches him and says, “The voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau. . . . Are you really my son Esau?” (27:22, 24, emphasis mine).
Jacob lies again. He says he is Esau.
Isaac lies there in his perpetual night, puzzled and wondering. He leans, I think, upward on his withered arms, juts his face toward a voice he cannot see. Jacob stands there breathless, rigid with fear, wondering as well: How will this end? What will my father do to me when he forces the truth from me?
What saves him is an aroma. Jacob brings food to Isaac. He bends to kiss the old man, and his father catches the scent of his clothes. They are Esau’s clothes. Isaac smells on them grasslands and forests. He smells dust and smoke and roots, the pungent mix of sweat and wind and blood. He smells, in the weave of the tunic, the insides of wild animals. He catches the aroma of a man who lives by sheer strength and sharpness of instinct. “Ah, the smell of my son / is like the smell of a field / that the LORD has blessed,” Isaac declares and blesses him on the spot (Gen. 27:27).
Isaac doesn’t trust the voice. He doesn’t believe what he hears. He wants further proof and then lets touch and smell trump his sense of hearing. He gives to his other faculties—his nose, his hands—an authority that he denies his ears. If he can feel the thing, sniff the thing, he’ll believe it, even against the evidence of the voice.
The voice has little weight compared with everything else. The voice, by his reckoning, is flimsy. It requires further substantiation to verify its authenticity, and other things can quickly overrule it.
Isaac lacks spiritual synesthesia.
I want it. I want God’s voice to be to me as it was to John, a thing so real and solid and inescapable I can virtually see it. I want to live by faith, not by sight. And faith comes by hearing. I want to have ears so tuned to the Voice that when God speaks there is no ignoring it.
Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.
You’re wondering what this all has to do with Sabbath. Simply this: we best cultivate the capacity to hear in times of stillness and quietness. In the making of the man, the element of silence was immense. There are two contextual details we know about the apostle John that day he turned to see the Voice. One, he was in exile on Patmos. He was, in other words, under an enforced silence and aloneness, a season of inactivity. Two, it was Sunday, the Lord’s Day. It was his Sabbath.5
These conditions—the silence, the aloneness, the stillness, the Sabbath—might be beside the point. Then again, they might just be the point. It’s possible that they are mentioned because they form the necessary backdrop for true listening. The tent at night in the wilderness, the place where the Voice comes close, becomes clear enough to pierce.
Sabbath is a time to listen. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel claims that Sabbath is a token of eternity, an outpost of heaven. It is time uniquely poised for God’s presence. If ever we might expect to see a voice, this day ranks highest. A predominant Jewish legend is that God imparted the Torah, the Old Testament law, on the Sabbath: for on this day, the conviction went, Israel listened best, was most attentive to the Voice, and so was least likely to miss the day of God’s visitation.6
I don’t think God is more likely to speak on the Sabbath or the Lord’s Day than on any other day. As Paul says, to some one day is sacred, to others all days are alike: what matters is that each is convinced in his own mind (see Rom. 14:5). And Hebrews warns and exhorts, “Today, if you hear his voice, / do not harden your hearts” (Heb. 3:7–8, 15; 4:7, emphasis mine). Today is, well, today. Right here, right now.
And yet we’re called to sanctify Sabbath, literally to betroth it, to think of it as our bride. We’re called to take time each week— whether Sunday or another day—and to treat it with an extra measure of reverence, to live in it with a higher degree of attentiveness.
We’re called to listen. The book of Hebrews commands us, three times, to listen to the voice that speaks today. One of these commands is in the context of Sabbath rest—indeed, the eschatological Sabbath rest, the Sabbath that fulfills and transcends all others. Hebrews 4—a passage we’ll explore more fully in the final chapter— speaks of the Israelites’ refusal to fully enter the rest of God. The people under Moses didn’t just fail to keep Sabbath; they failed to trust God, to rest in him, to believe in the Lord of the Sabbath. They refused to believe that God would protect them and provide for them. For their unbelief—in other words, not for their acts, but for their hard hearts that led to those acts—God punished them by keeping them in the desert forty years. Finally, under Joshua, the next generation of Israel entered the land and entered God’s rest.
But the rest wasn’t complete. It was only partial. It was preliminary to a greater rest, another Sabbath day God is preparing: “There remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God” (Heb. 4:9). This day is the reality to which all previous Sabbath days stand as shadows. “Let us, therefore, make every effort to enter that rest” (4:11).
And what effort is required? In a word, to listen, to listen in faith. Today, if you hear his voice. The generation under Moses was punished for disobedience and unbelief. But at root, those sins are a failure to hear and heed the Voice of the One who speaks. It is no accident that the lengthy passage in Hebrews about Sabbath rest and hearing God’s voice is immediately followed by this:
For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart. Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account. (Hebrews 4:12–13)
And that in turn is followed by this:
Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has gone through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin. Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need. (Hebrews 4:14–16)
God is always speaking. “There is no speech or language / where [his] voice is not heard” (Ps. 19:3). But we’re not always listening. We don’t make the effort and so fail to go boldly into his throne room to receive what we need: a word that can pierce, and cut, and heal.
Here’s the paradox: If we don’t listen, we never enter his rest. Yet if we don’t enter his rest, we never listen
.
Practice a deeper listening during Sabbath. Most other days, by necessity as much as by choice, we live amid a clatter of noise. I am a man of unclean lips and live among a people of unclean lips. Certainly, our lips are busy. But Sabbath is when we stop. We slow down. We play, we rest, we dream, we wonder. We cease from that which is necessary and turn to that which gives life. And in the hush that descends, we listen.
Are you listening?
SABBATH LITURGY:
Listening
Deepest truth sometimes hides in plain sight. It reveals itself only to babes and evades the wise and the learned. One hiding place for such truth is children’s books, and one of my favorites is Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who.
Horton is an elephant whose heart is larger than his brain. But he has enormous ears, and one day he catches, thin and faint, a tiny voice. He traces it to a single spore on the head of a single dandelion gone to seed. On that single spore, so small no eye can behold it, perches an entire world, inhabited by Whos. One Who has come to believe that a world exists outside his own. His cry is an attempt to reach that world beyond.
No one can hear that Who crying, except Horton. He hears, and his heart is broken and ignited by that tiny voice. His life’s mission crystallizes: to do all he can, even if it costs him his own life, to rescue the Whos, even if most don’t know and don’t care. The story’s drama unfolds in two parts: the little Whos’ nearly vain attempt to convince the other Whos that there is something out there, someone listening, and that survival depends on making contact; and Horton’s nearly vain attempt to convince those in his world—especially a band of malicious monkeys—that there is something down there, someone calling, and that they need rescuing.
A preposterous story.
Yet vaguely familiar.
But in some ways, our situation is the exact opposite. With Horton and that little Who, the microscopic world attempts to make contact with the vast world outside. In our case, this is reversed: the larger world, the world of the divine and the eternal, breaks in on our minuscule one, the world of the human and the temporal. “The heavens declare the glory of God,” Psalm 19 says. “Day after day they pour forth speech” (vv. 1–2).
The Rest of God Page 19