Risen in Thought

God is speaking. Can you hear it? When I was 13, I got my first walkman. For those of you too young to know what I’m talking about, it was essentially a giant ipod that could store up to one whole album at a time. The album that was on constant rotation at the time was 90125 by prog rockers Yes. I had to be careful not to turn the music up too loud, lest I miss the dulcet tones of my parents calling me. The first few times I listened to the opening song, “Owner of a Lonely Heart”, there was this sound that came right before the vocals kicked in. It was a kind of a squeal. The problem was that it sounded exactly like my mother’s call, “woohoo!”

I knew the sound of my mother’s voice – probably better than any other sound in the world. But here was this random sound scrap from an 80’s rock song that imitated what I thought I knew.

What about the voice of God? Friends, God is speaking. Can you hear it?

If God is really God, then surely there are times when God’s voice splits the clouds, sets a bush on fire, brings light into being. And yet, most of the time, God’s voice comes through others. In a world of cacophony and chaos, that’s not easy to do. And there are far too many who claim that they speak in God’s name when all they really do is use God’s name. So how do we develop that capacity to tell the difference? How can we cut through the noise to know when it really is God speaking to us?

There’s an app that I have learned to love. It’s called SoundHound, and it’s a song recognition program. If a tune comes on the radio or in the restaurant that I don’t know, all I do is touch a button and, within seconds, it gives me an answer. The way it works is that it has access to a massive database of songs. It essentially takes a fingerprint of the song sample you give it, and then matches it up with its massive database. The problem comes when there is too much other noise – either the song is too quiet, or the crowd is too loud. As precise as this technology might be, it doesn’t know how to focus on what’s important.

We do have that advantage over programming, that we can filter out what is unimportant. The trick is learning what it is that is necessary and what is frivolous. In our Scripture lessons today, we have these images of the shepherd and sheep. We have the shepherd of Psalm 23, who calls the sheep by name so that they follow him faithfully into the greenest pastures and the stillest waters. In the gospel of John, Jesus uses a similar image to talk about the faithful as sheep who recognize the sound of the guard who leads them out. When they hear a stranger’s voice, he says, they will know to flee. In other words, the sheep know without a doubt whose voice they can trust.

Now: putting aside for a moment the indignity of being compared to sheep, how does this sit with us? How confident are we that we can recognize God’s voice when it calls us out to feast and be satisfied?

I love playing trivia, because I apparently don’t know how to focus on what’s important. We had a trivia team that played together regularly, and each one of us had our areas of expertise. One of mine was song recognition. I could pick out the song, artist, and year within moments almost every single time. But there was one spectacular fail I still remember. The first few notes started, a guitar distorted with a waa-waa pedal, followed by a cymbal crash. That was it. No vocals, nothing. I was stumped, so I gave it my best guess: the theme song to “Three’s Company.” The answer? Marvin Gaye, “Let’s Get It On.” So close!

I had probably heard the song before, but not enough to recognize it. If we compare the brain to something like SoundHound, I simply didn’t have the database in place. The more often we have heard a song, the more often we are likely to recognize it. Even if it’s a song we don’t know by an artist we love, we are better suited to hear it correctly.

So how do we measure up when looking at God’s back catalog? Have we heard enough of what God has already done so that we can recognize it when God’s voice rings through again?

The goal here is competency. If we think of it like a language, whether that’s a foreign language or the insider language of a particular industry, you might eventually get to fluency; but long before that point, you’ll get to where you’re comfortable, even competent. And that’s the point here: we should be aiming for that place where we are confident, but not overconfident, in our ability to recognize God at work in our lives.

There are three phrases I want to suggest to help us filter through the noise. I am lifting these wholesale from Richard Hays, New Testament scholar at Duke University. And they are: community, cross, and new creation.

• Community: God does not call us to gated lives, but to live in the world. We care about the fate of others. This is why we are horrified by the kidnapping of Nigerian girls. We are enriched by our interactions with others, even (and especially) if they don’t agree with us about everything. We can recognize God’s voice because it speaks to us of God’s desire for us to live connected to others, not to live in isolation. Community.
• Cross: God’s relationship with humanity becomes most visible in the form of the cross. It was and is the embodiment of selfless love. There are those who will try to emphasize God’s judgment or wrath over God’s grace and mercy, and the cross is the clearest indicator that it is compassion and sacrificial love that reign supreme. Cross.
• New Creation: Being in relationship with God means that we are changed. Our lives are visibly different because of our encounters with the risen Christ, transformed more and more into God’s likeness and wonder. New Creation.

These three – community, cross, and new creation – are a great way to think about how it is that we recognize God’s voice in the middle of the noisy chaos that envelops us. And the way we build our database, our vocabulary of God-speak? If you’ve been with us some this year, you know what I’m about to say: prayer.

You see, here’s the thing: what Jesus tells us in the lesson from John is something that ought to give us great courage. And that is that Jesus is not the guard in the story, but the gate. Jesus is the very thing that gives us the protection we desire. What I hope this means is that we can have the courage to take a chance, to learn this new language, to step out into this new adventure, confident in the fact that Christ will keep us safe from what it is that truly harms us.

God is already speaking, calling out to us. Can we hear it?