by Rev. Kevin J. McLemore

1 Samuel 3:1-20

Now the boy Samuel was ministering to the Lord under Eli. The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread. At that time Eli, whose eyesight had begun to grow dim so that he could not see, was lying down in his room; the lamp of God had not yet gone out, and Samuel was lying down in the temple of the Lord, where the ark of God was. Then the Lord called, “Samuel! Samuel!” and he said, “Here I am!” and ran to Eli, and said, “Here I am, for you called me.” But he said, “I did not call; lie down again.” So he went and lay down. The Lord called again, “Samuel!” Samuel got up and went to Eli, and said, “Here I am, for you called me.” But he said, “I did not call, my son; lie down again.” Now Samuel did not yet know the Lord, and the word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him. The Lord called Samuel again, a third time. And he got up and went to Eli, and said, “Here I am, for you called me.” Then Eli perceived that the Lord was calling the boy. Therefore Eli said to Samuel, “Go, lie down; and if he calls you, you shall say, ‘Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.’” So Samuel went and lay down in his place. Now the Lord came and stood there, calling as before, “Samuel! Samuel!” And Samuel said, “Speak, for your servant is listening.”

Then the Lord said to Samuel, “See, I am about to do something in Israel that will make both ears of anyone who hears of it tingle. On that day I will fulfill against Eli all that I have spoken concerning his house, from beginning to end. For I have told him that I am about to punish his house forever, for the iniquity that he knew, because his sons were blaspheming God, and he did not restrain them. Therefore I swear to the house of Eli that the iniquity of Eli’s house shall not be expiated by sacrifice or offering forever.” Samuel lay there until morning; then he opened the doors of the house of the Lord. Samuel was afraid to tell the vision to Eli. But Eli called Samuel and said, “Samuel, my son.” He said, “Here I am.” Eli said, “What was it that he told you? Do not hide it from me. May God do so to you and more also, if you hide anything from me of all that he told you.” So Samuel told him everything and hid nothing from him. Then he said, “It is the Lord; let him do what seems good to him.”

As many of you know, Douglas I spent the latter part of last year on a cruise ship that set sail from Galveston, Texas on December 26. We were there with Douglas’ brother and sister, their spouses and their children to celebrate the 50^th wedding anniversary of Douglas’ parents, and it was a great event, celebrating their 50 years together, and frankly, a time for us personally to compress after a very busy year. I don’t know if you’ve ever been on a cruise, but one of the great things about it is the various meal options you have—you can choose to eat at the large extravagant buffet they lay out for you in one part of the ship, or you can choose to eat more formally, in a more upscale setting, in a fine dining restaurant atmosphere. We usually chose the latter, especially for dinner, and because of that we usually got the same waiters for every meal, and who, amazingly, sometimes knew our names, or eating preferences. So, on the last night of our seven day cruise, one of the assistant waiters, a young Brazilian man, opened up a bit more to the people at our table, and began telling us some of his personal story, and frankly, a bit about his life as an employee of the cruise line. “It’s like slave labor,” he said to our table, which was a surprise to hear for most of us, though I think the reason that he felt comfortable sharing that with us because he was about finish up his six month contract, a contract that had him working at least 12-16 hours a day, 7 days a week, for six months at a time. I mean, there is a multitude of reasons these cruise ships are registered and flagged in places like Panama and Nassau, and not the United States, but one reason is that those countries tend to have very loose labor laws.

As our Brazilian waiter continued to share with us, you could feel the unease and nervousness of the other waiters as they were flurrying around him, watching him spill the beans, so to speak, he having nothing left to loose, because he was not going to re-up his contract again. Instead, he was going back to college, and finish up civil engineering degree in Brazil—but what was more interesting than even our waiter’s story was our own reactions to that story, the reactions of those being served by him and his colleagues. Something shifted at our table, something changed, and I think a few of us, maybe me included, just wanted him to go, to shut up, because what he was saying was prompting us have to think about the shadow side of all this, this cheap vacation, with all of it’s all you can eat buffets, and the people serving us, making our food for us, making up our beds, reminding us that someone’s desperation lead them to spend 6 months, 12 months, working with little or no days off, sometimes years away from their family in order to feed that family, or pay for that education, or whatever. Now, don’t get me wrong—I get that these cruise jobs are considered good jobs in developing countries, comparatively speaking—remember what I said last week about my servant Amat—we paid her $50 a month in 1970’s US dollars, and she actually was considered a fairly well-off woman in her home village—she was one of the better paid servants in Rumbai, Indonesia. But frankly, this waiter’s story was not a story we really wanted to listen to, a reality we wanted to face, and, it was reminding us that our desire for a cheap vacation, and all you can buffets, had a price we weren’t paying—he was, and someone else was, and in that moment, we were listening to the price it extracted from other people, in the one little story of this Brazilian guy who had lost almost thirty pounds since he had begun his one and only contract as a waiter on a cruise ship.

And so he finally moved on, on to finish his last night as a cruise ship waiter, and we were left with the story we had just listened to, though we quickly moved on to dessert, and I was reminded once again that some stories are just difficult to listen to, especially when you see how your choices have affected the life of a relative stranger. But listening is always a difficult thing, always something we humans struggle with, and I think the story we have before us today, the one where Samuel has a hard time listening, in this case, to the divine voice, is symptomatic of our deep desire not to have to listen to the difficult truths. I’ll get to the difficult truth Samuel seemed to have been avoiding, might have been avoiding in a second, but I just want remind us of the rhythm of this story, and some of the background for this text. You have the priest Eli who is in charge of the sacred place of Shiloh, whose sons have run amuck and brought shame to his name and household—and because Eli will not chasten them, will not restrain them, an oracle has been spoken by an unnamed “man of God” to his face, in the chapter right before the one we just heard read aloud. This oracle from God says that Eli’s house will be cut off forever, and he and his sons will not be able to continue their priestly duties, duties, the ones they had done since the days of Moses. And thus a word had been spoken already, a difficult word had been spoken, and then here comes our story, our story of God calling out to Samuel, deep in the night.

Now, essentially Samuel is an apprentice, learning the priestly craft, and I can’t help but think that he knew, had at least heard of this oracle, this word of judgment against Eli and his family—it did not seem to be a secret to anyone, at least not according to our text, and I wonder if the night we have before us, the one where God calls out to Samuel, and he, Samuel, thinks it must be Eli instead, I wonder if Samuel knows, at least unconsciously, that this is God speaking and not Eli’s voice and the reason why he keeps hoping, keeps pretending even, that it is Eli’s voice, is because he knows, deep down in his bones, that if God is going to speak to him at this moment, this time of turmoil in Eli’s ministry at Shiloh, that it was likely not to be good news for Eli, this beloved father figure in his life. Maybe Samuel just didn’t want to listen to God because of what God was likely to say—after all, this is Eli, his second father, and to have to hear this terrible judgment about someone you love, that is hard, especially for a boy, at a stage in his life where things are always black and white, good or evil, and not the shades of grey that often become more of a reality as you grow up, and become an adult. And to that point: it says something about Eli, this priest, that despite his inability or unwillingness to get ahold of his raucous boys, that he could recognize that God was speaking to Samuel, that Yahweh was likely speaking to him, and thus he gave Samuel the words to reply, the words Samuel needed for him to begin to listen to this still speaking God, maybe even the emotional permission to listen to those difficult words likely said against him and his household. He sends Samuel back to his room with those words, the words that say Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening, knowing perhaps that when Samuel does open himself to listen, what he is likely to hear will be difficult to listen to, words that will condemn his mentor to the dustbin of Israel’s history.

But, to a much larger point, God’s word to us, God speaking to us may not just come through that voice that greets us deep in the night—in fact, it may come to us through very human means, as it did through Samuel to Eli, or, maybe, just maybe, from some Brazilian waiter to some folks celebrating a 50^th wedding anniversary, in the middle of the Caribbean. In truth, most of the time God’s word does come that way to us, through some other means than some divine audible voice, as in Samuel’s case—in fact, I think the most difficult truths come to us that way, the ones we don’t want to listen to, because God seems to want to put a human face to what we don’t want to face, that God knows that it far easier to reach us through the human than through the divine—I mean, the human face, the human voice, is more familiar than the divine face, the divine face, which is really what the incarnation is all about, this attempt to meet us through what is most familiar to us, the incarnation being about the embodiment of who God is in this Jesus of Nazareth, those many thousands of years ago.

Think about it for a second: the moment the African American Civil Rights movement, and really, all civil rights movements, became successful at effecting change, was when a human face was put on what was then considered “the Negro problem.” I can remember my beloved Mississippi grandmother denying to me, to anyone who would listen that there was never a problem before Martin Luther King, Jr., came in and stirred up “the Negroes.” But when the world listened to the stories of African Americans and others from the South and elsewhere about people’s real experience of racism, and when they saw those images in Birmingham, and on that bridge in Montgomery…well, it was not as easy to dismiss the “problem” had a face, and a story, and a voice that was telling a most difficult, uncomfortable truth. The way that my grandmother and others of her generation could be in denial about the injustices foisted on African Americans in this country was to purposefully not listen to the stories of those black women and men around them, and if they dared to speak, so often that voice, that person was dismissed as not being worth being listened to in the first place.

But the truth of the matter is that God usually speaks through human beings, and there probably is a reason that God had to use a “man of God” earlier in 1 Samuel and now Samuel himself, rather than speak directly to Eli, as God did with Samuel: the reality is that Eli wasn’t open to listening to that difficult truth until the truth had a human face, and a human story with which to connect it. Perhaps Samuel is that human face, and he can see what damage he has done to the temple at Shiloh, and to the reputation of Yahweh, because he has not kept a tighter rein on his out-of-control sons. Perhaps for me that human face is that young Brazilian waiter, telling me and us the ugly truth at the bottom two layers of the ship I was cruising along in the deep blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Again, like Samuel, like Eli, like my lovely, gentle grandmother, I didn’t want to listen, not to that story, a story that might make it uncomfortable for me, if I have a conscience, to book my next cruise.

But listen we must, in the end, if we want actually hear what God might be yet saying in this world to us. Don’t get me wrong—usually, I am not looking forward to it, because so often God uses that difficult truth to hold up a mirror to me, to others, about how my choices, have brought about my own situation or the situations of others, even strangers. And I want to be clear here—I don’t have easier answers on how to always respond to what God is saying through the human stories and faces that speak God’s truth. You know, last week, the radio show This American Life told the story of a man named Mike Daisey, a self-proclaimed Apple Computers geek, who was prompted to explore the labor practices of Apple’s suppliers when someone else found some pictures left on his cell phone of the factory the new phone he had just been built in—the person who was testing the camera in the Chinese factory had forgotten to delete the test pictures. From there, he goes to the factory and talks to some of the 430,000 employees of the Foxxcon factory in China, the company that manufactures the toys he loves so much. Mike Daisey wanted to hear those stories of those workers, some as young as 13 years old, their stories of working 12-16 hours a day, sometimes weeks without a break if a new product was coming, like perhaps the new Ipad 3 coming out soon, of people losing the use of their hands, because the chemical being used to clean the glass on the iPhone caused neurological problems, and evaporated just a few seconds faster than alcohol, something needed to keep the rapid pace of production. It is a hard and wonderful report, and I think remarkably even handed, because it fact checks much of Daisey’s story and brings in other points of view, those not as disturbed by these working conditions. I had recorded that episode of This American Life on my Apple iPod, and sent myself a reminder note to listen to it for this sermon on my Apple iPhone but I kept putting off listening to it, because, I think I knew I didn’t want to listen to that story, to that difficult truth.

Listen, I’m not trying to lay some liberal guilt trip on you or even me about every product we buy—frankly, most of the products we buy come out of foreign factories with far worse working conditions than those found in the Foxxcon factories—but I do want us to listen, to do as Samuel did, when Eli prompted him to listen to a word he knew would hurt him, hurt both of them, even when he knew that God was about to say to his beloved Samuel was a word of judgment against him, against Eli himself. I want us to listen to the difficult stories, to the words of our Brazilian waiter, or the 13 year old Foxxcon employee, or that Samuel in our life who holds up the mirror to us, and says, “this is who you really are, and this is who I am in light of who you are.” I’m not telling you never to go on a cruise, or to boycott Apple—there is probably not a cell phone on the market right now that isn’t manufactured by Foxxconn or a company just like it or even worse, but I am saying the very least we owe to each other as human beings, as God’s fellow children, is to listen to each other, to remind ourselves that there is sometimes a human cost associated with a product we want, a tab that we will never pay, and for which some stranger on the other side of the globe may have to pick up the tab for us. Look, I’m still probably going to buy the next new generation of iPhone but I invite us to do at least this: to give a damn about the stranger who is making that iPhone on the other side of the world, and to do what we can to make their lives better on this side of the globe. Believe me, I would rather not listen to those difficult truths—you can see my avoidance of those truths in cruise story and my avoidance of listening to the This American Life episode. But it is what we owe each other, as human beings, to listen to each other, and it is what God asks us to do, to listen to God’s voice through them, even if what is said is a difficult thing to hear. I mean, we are asked to care about others, to love others, strangers, even, because God has first cared for us, and them, and all of us. Amen.