Having Trouble Sleeping Through The Night
Sermon
Sermons on the First Readings
Series III, Cycle B
Having trouble sleeping through the night? You're not alone. Samuel did, too. Sometimes you hear a haunting phrase that sticks with you years later. I heard one like that from Gardner Taylor, that great African-American preacher who once held forth in the pulpit of Concord Baptist Church in Brooklyn. I don't even remember the sermon, which is all right -- we're not supposed to remember sermons anymore than we should remember meals; we're supposed to be fed and challenged by them at the moment. I don't remember what Gardner Taylor was preaching that night. All I remember was this single phrase. I can still see him standing there as he said it: "I am for anything that can help a person get through the night."
Believe it or not, some people have trouble getting through the night. Do you know anyone like that? Perhaps you are one, fidgeting and turning. Have you seen the commercial for one of the sleep aids that shows the husband flicking on the light and saying, "Honey, honey? Are you awake?" And the woman replies, "I am now!" Young Samuel keeps tossing and turning then getting up and running to old Eli saying, "Are you awake?" All Eli can say is, "I am now! Go back to sleep, child, you're hearing things!"
So the preacher stands in the pulpit and says, "I am for anything that can help a person get through the night."
For some people, the problem is dreams. We dream about this and that night after night, sometimes waking up in a cold sweat. Some of the dreams are terrifying. Some are about things you'd never dream of actually doing. Other times, you are frustrated because you can't remember all the details -- like the cartoon about a minister on a psychiatrist's couch saying, "I have a recurring dream in which I have all the members of my church board pleading for mercy; but when I wake up, I can never remember how!"
Is that what Samuel was doing that night, dreaming? Dreaming about the way things could be because religion in his time had taken a turn for the worse? After all, says the biblical writer, "The word of the Lord was rare in those days" (v. 1). Maybe Samuel was the only one who could dream because visions were not widespread. People had lost their way and their connection with God.
Some say dreams are like visions, and as such become a source of creativity, an answer to present problems and difficulties. Apparently, this was the case for Isaac Merritt Singer who invented the sewing machine. As the story goes, his creditors had given him one or two more weeks to complete his invention or they would pull their financial support. So he went to sleep that night with great anxiety and dreamed of being out in a jungle captured by natives who were cannibals. The boiling pot was ready. His hands were tied. As the natives came toward him with the faces of his creditors, they held up their spears ready to finish him off when suddenly he saw holes in the points of their spears, and just in time awakened with the answer to his problem of how to finish building the sewing machine!
Sometimes dreams are a source of great creativity. That's what the people in the Bible believed. Look at Joseph interpreting dreams in Pharaoh's court and Jacob wrestling with the angel at the Jabbok River and Ezekiel watching the dead, dry bones of Israel spring back to life. What about the carpenter, Joseph, dreaming of the danger of Herod then fleeing to safety in Egypt? Think of Peter, a Jew's Jew, in Acts 10 dreaming of eating Gentile food and then heading for Cornelius' house. Maybe the prophet Joel (2:28) is right about "the old dreaming dreams and the young ones seeing visions." Out of all this dream talk and wrestling in the middle of the night come some of the great theological themes of the Christian faith. Doctrines like sin, justification, and sanctification don't just drop out of the sky. They have emerged from the life-blood experience of the Israelites and the early Christians with their God, often in the middle of the night -- out of the visions and dreams of the Israelite people. Some of the best theology comes out of the sleepless nights of restless dreamers. "Woe is me," says Isaiah in his vision, "I am a man of unclean lips."
Sometimes our dreams can be frightening as we come face-to-face with our shadow selves. We toss and turn in the night, groping for God. Sometimes it's like a bad dream that seems all too real. In the 1880s, a seven-year-old boy cried himself to sleep every night terrified of the fact that if he died he might go to hell. His solicitous mother, out of patience that the fearful teachings of the age brought such apparitions to his mind, was trying in vain to comfort him. Fifty years later that boy, Harry Emerson Fosdick, stood as the preacher before the congregation of Riverside Church in New York City. Even great preachers toss and turn in the night.
Samuel woke up in a cold sweat and ran to Eli thinking Eli had called. Precious Samuel was born to Hannah, Hannah's gift to God. If God would just give her a child, when he reached a tender age she would give him up for the Lord's service. Like a scene from Bertolucci's movie, The Last Emperor, where the child is taken from his mother's arms to be the new emperor of China, so Hannah in tears gave up her only begotten child to the old priest Eli and his evil sons. Samuel served as a temple gopher, a page of sorts in a time when the word of the Lord was rare in the land. Like another boy child, David, called to take on a different kind of evil in his time, so little Samuel had no idea what he was getting himself into, that is, until he came to this ancient nocturnal bar mitzvah.
"Here I am, Lord," he said running to old Eli who grumbles, "Go back to sleep, child, you're hearing things," which is very much what the church says to all dreamers, isn't it? "Go back to sleep, Moses, you're dreaming. Go back to sleep, Gandhi, you're dreaming. Go back to sleep, Martin Luther King Jr., you're dreaming. Go back to sleep, Mother Teresa, you're hearing things!"
Maybe the dreamers of our world really do hear God speaking to them. Rabbi Burt Visotsky, in the Bill Moyers' PBS discussion on Genesis, at one point says, "You know, I'm actually surprised to be surrounded by people who so readily hear voices. I'm a praying Jew, so I talk to God all the time, but I don't usually hear answers. It's a much more subtle process. God may tell Abraham to get up and go and change everything in his life. But nobody ever says that to me. If I hear God at all, it's somewhere between the lines of a page I've been studying for hours when I am studying the Torah, and what I hear is maybe, 'Burt, turn the page.' "
Young Samuel, waking up in a cold sweat that night says, "Here I am, Lord. Here I am!" But he didn't know who was calling or why because he didn't really know who he was as a child of God. When God first calls us in the middle of the night, the most you can know is who you are as a broken human being, and admitting that to yourself is the first step toward wholeness, health, and peace in your life, in other words, Shalom. Some people toss and turn and finally cry out, "Okay I give up. Here I am, I am in trouble, I am hurting, I am even hurting other people. Yes, I admit it. Here I am." What do you mean when you say, "Here I am" in the middle of the night? People say it in different ways. "Here I am envious of others who have more than I do, who are smarter and faster and get more attention." Some of us are envious, some of us are selfish. Listen to Shel Silverstein's "Prayer of the Selfish Child":
Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord my soul to keep,
And if I die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my toys to break,
So none of the other kids can use 'em ... Amen.1
Here is a mother who can't understand what went wrong with her teenage child. She feels guilt deep down never able to realize that she has done all she can and that most if not all of it was never her fault. But in the middle of the night, she hears her name called and says, "Here I am."
What I am trying to say is that you and I have to face up to ourselves and this self-revelation often occurs in the middle of the night as it did for Samuel. Until we do that we will never really hear God calling our names and leading us into new ministries and new lives. We will never hear God's redeeming and cleansing word of grace. Samuel didn't hear it the first time or the second time or the third. Maybe he was having a hard time hearing it because no one else was hearing it in those days. Eli certainly wasn't because "the Word of the Lord was rare in the land."
Maybe it's hard for us to say "Here I am" that openly because we aren't really ready for God to come into our bedrooms and our dreams peeking into our innermost selves. How ready are you for God to peer into the hidden corners of your life? I know a family that has a rule that if one of them sees someone driving up to the house unannounced that family member is legally bound by the rules of the house to yell "Firedrill!" and everyone jumps in cleaning the house, scurrying around frantically to pick everything up. The rule is everything gets thrown into one room and when that door is closed it gets locked, and no one, not even God, can go into that room! Those are the rules of the house. We all have a room like that in our lives, and when God comes calling we scurry around cleaning up and throwing everything into that one little room, lock the door, and throw away the key. Oh sure, Lord, we scrub up and come to church on Sundays, but don't ever call on us in the middle of the night or in our businesses, our marriages, or our friendships. Please, Lord, we're not ready for that. Here are Adam and Eve hiding in the bushes and trees of the garden. Here we are hiding our secret sins in a room that not even God can enter, or so we think. We say casually, "Here I am, Lord. Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening." But are we really all that ready for God to come in? Not that room, Lord. Any room but that one!
Of course, we lay our lives on the line when we answer God's call the way Samuel did by doing it in community. Notice that Samuel isn't hiding in his room by himself sitting around talking to God. No, he's saying "Here I am," in community because he speaks to Eli every time. He's laying out all his guilt and grief and sin. He's holding nothing back. "Just as I am, without one plea." Here he comes laying himself finally before the altar of God. Ultimately, he opens that one locked door and even lets God in there. Only when he was able to say "Here I am," openly and honestly both in community and by himself and "Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening," did the scripture follow with "... and Samuel grew and the Lord was with him."
Jesus said "Here I am" over and over again. At the temptation, he said, "Here I am, torn with ambition." At the tomb of Lazarus, he said, "Here I am, broken and weeping." At the Mount of Olives, he said, "Here I am, wanting this cup to pass from me." Even his last night, tossing and turning unable to sleep, he prays for God's guidance. Even on the cross during the worst nightmare of all -- he was torn, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" But at the very end he was at one with the Father, at peace. Picture him there praying the old Jewish prayer that a child would say the last thing before dropping off to sleep, "Into thy hands I commit my spirit." "Here I am, Lord. I am yours completely and fully."
Having trouble sleeping through the night? Quit playing games with yourself, others, and God. Take the first step toward wholeness and peace. Say, "Here I am, Lord. I am yours now and for the rest of my life." Having trouble sleeping through the night? Perhaps God is calling you to new life, but I wouldn't know about a thing like that. Why? Because a thing like that is between you and God. Amen.
____________
1. Shel Silverstein, A Light in the Attic (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), p. 15.
Believe it or not, some people have trouble getting through the night. Do you know anyone like that? Perhaps you are one, fidgeting and turning. Have you seen the commercial for one of the sleep aids that shows the husband flicking on the light and saying, "Honey, honey? Are you awake?" And the woman replies, "I am now!" Young Samuel keeps tossing and turning then getting up and running to old Eli saying, "Are you awake?" All Eli can say is, "I am now! Go back to sleep, child, you're hearing things!"
So the preacher stands in the pulpit and says, "I am for anything that can help a person get through the night."
For some people, the problem is dreams. We dream about this and that night after night, sometimes waking up in a cold sweat. Some of the dreams are terrifying. Some are about things you'd never dream of actually doing. Other times, you are frustrated because you can't remember all the details -- like the cartoon about a minister on a psychiatrist's couch saying, "I have a recurring dream in which I have all the members of my church board pleading for mercy; but when I wake up, I can never remember how!"
Is that what Samuel was doing that night, dreaming? Dreaming about the way things could be because religion in his time had taken a turn for the worse? After all, says the biblical writer, "The word of the Lord was rare in those days" (v. 1). Maybe Samuel was the only one who could dream because visions were not widespread. People had lost their way and their connection with God.
Some say dreams are like visions, and as such become a source of creativity, an answer to present problems and difficulties. Apparently, this was the case for Isaac Merritt Singer who invented the sewing machine. As the story goes, his creditors had given him one or two more weeks to complete his invention or they would pull their financial support. So he went to sleep that night with great anxiety and dreamed of being out in a jungle captured by natives who were cannibals. The boiling pot was ready. His hands were tied. As the natives came toward him with the faces of his creditors, they held up their spears ready to finish him off when suddenly he saw holes in the points of their spears, and just in time awakened with the answer to his problem of how to finish building the sewing machine!
Sometimes dreams are a source of great creativity. That's what the people in the Bible believed. Look at Joseph interpreting dreams in Pharaoh's court and Jacob wrestling with the angel at the Jabbok River and Ezekiel watching the dead, dry bones of Israel spring back to life. What about the carpenter, Joseph, dreaming of the danger of Herod then fleeing to safety in Egypt? Think of Peter, a Jew's Jew, in Acts 10 dreaming of eating Gentile food and then heading for Cornelius' house. Maybe the prophet Joel (2:28) is right about "the old dreaming dreams and the young ones seeing visions." Out of all this dream talk and wrestling in the middle of the night come some of the great theological themes of the Christian faith. Doctrines like sin, justification, and sanctification don't just drop out of the sky. They have emerged from the life-blood experience of the Israelites and the early Christians with their God, often in the middle of the night -- out of the visions and dreams of the Israelite people. Some of the best theology comes out of the sleepless nights of restless dreamers. "Woe is me," says Isaiah in his vision, "I am a man of unclean lips."
Sometimes our dreams can be frightening as we come face-to-face with our shadow selves. We toss and turn in the night, groping for God. Sometimes it's like a bad dream that seems all too real. In the 1880s, a seven-year-old boy cried himself to sleep every night terrified of the fact that if he died he might go to hell. His solicitous mother, out of patience that the fearful teachings of the age brought such apparitions to his mind, was trying in vain to comfort him. Fifty years later that boy, Harry Emerson Fosdick, stood as the preacher before the congregation of Riverside Church in New York City. Even great preachers toss and turn in the night.
Samuel woke up in a cold sweat and ran to Eli thinking Eli had called. Precious Samuel was born to Hannah, Hannah's gift to God. If God would just give her a child, when he reached a tender age she would give him up for the Lord's service. Like a scene from Bertolucci's movie, The Last Emperor, where the child is taken from his mother's arms to be the new emperor of China, so Hannah in tears gave up her only begotten child to the old priest Eli and his evil sons. Samuel served as a temple gopher, a page of sorts in a time when the word of the Lord was rare in the land. Like another boy child, David, called to take on a different kind of evil in his time, so little Samuel had no idea what he was getting himself into, that is, until he came to this ancient nocturnal bar mitzvah.
"Here I am, Lord," he said running to old Eli who grumbles, "Go back to sleep, child, you're hearing things," which is very much what the church says to all dreamers, isn't it? "Go back to sleep, Moses, you're dreaming. Go back to sleep, Gandhi, you're dreaming. Go back to sleep, Martin Luther King Jr., you're dreaming. Go back to sleep, Mother Teresa, you're hearing things!"
Maybe the dreamers of our world really do hear God speaking to them. Rabbi Burt Visotsky, in the Bill Moyers' PBS discussion on Genesis, at one point says, "You know, I'm actually surprised to be surrounded by people who so readily hear voices. I'm a praying Jew, so I talk to God all the time, but I don't usually hear answers. It's a much more subtle process. God may tell Abraham to get up and go and change everything in his life. But nobody ever says that to me. If I hear God at all, it's somewhere between the lines of a page I've been studying for hours when I am studying the Torah, and what I hear is maybe, 'Burt, turn the page.' "
Young Samuel, waking up in a cold sweat that night says, "Here I am, Lord. Here I am!" But he didn't know who was calling or why because he didn't really know who he was as a child of God. When God first calls us in the middle of the night, the most you can know is who you are as a broken human being, and admitting that to yourself is the first step toward wholeness, health, and peace in your life, in other words, Shalom. Some people toss and turn and finally cry out, "Okay I give up. Here I am, I am in trouble, I am hurting, I am even hurting other people. Yes, I admit it. Here I am." What do you mean when you say, "Here I am" in the middle of the night? People say it in different ways. "Here I am envious of others who have more than I do, who are smarter and faster and get more attention." Some of us are envious, some of us are selfish. Listen to Shel Silverstein's "Prayer of the Selfish Child":
Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord my soul to keep,
And if I die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my toys to break,
So none of the other kids can use 'em ... Amen.1
Here is a mother who can't understand what went wrong with her teenage child. She feels guilt deep down never able to realize that she has done all she can and that most if not all of it was never her fault. But in the middle of the night, she hears her name called and says, "Here I am."
What I am trying to say is that you and I have to face up to ourselves and this self-revelation often occurs in the middle of the night as it did for Samuel. Until we do that we will never really hear God calling our names and leading us into new ministries and new lives. We will never hear God's redeeming and cleansing word of grace. Samuel didn't hear it the first time or the second time or the third. Maybe he was having a hard time hearing it because no one else was hearing it in those days. Eli certainly wasn't because "the Word of the Lord was rare in the land."
Maybe it's hard for us to say "Here I am" that openly because we aren't really ready for God to come into our bedrooms and our dreams peeking into our innermost selves. How ready are you for God to peer into the hidden corners of your life? I know a family that has a rule that if one of them sees someone driving up to the house unannounced that family member is legally bound by the rules of the house to yell "Firedrill!" and everyone jumps in cleaning the house, scurrying around frantically to pick everything up. The rule is everything gets thrown into one room and when that door is closed it gets locked, and no one, not even God, can go into that room! Those are the rules of the house. We all have a room like that in our lives, and when God comes calling we scurry around cleaning up and throwing everything into that one little room, lock the door, and throw away the key. Oh sure, Lord, we scrub up and come to church on Sundays, but don't ever call on us in the middle of the night or in our businesses, our marriages, or our friendships. Please, Lord, we're not ready for that. Here are Adam and Eve hiding in the bushes and trees of the garden. Here we are hiding our secret sins in a room that not even God can enter, or so we think. We say casually, "Here I am, Lord. Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening." But are we really all that ready for God to come in? Not that room, Lord. Any room but that one!
Of course, we lay our lives on the line when we answer God's call the way Samuel did by doing it in community. Notice that Samuel isn't hiding in his room by himself sitting around talking to God. No, he's saying "Here I am," in community because he speaks to Eli every time. He's laying out all his guilt and grief and sin. He's holding nothing back. "Just as I am, without one plea." Here he comes laying himself finally before the altar of God. Ultimately, he opens that one locked door and even lets God in there. Only when he was able to say "Here I am," openly and honestly both in community and by himself and "Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening," did the scripture follow with "... and Samuel grew and the Lord was with him."
Jesus said "Here I am" over and over again. At the temptation, he said, "Here I am, torn with ambition." At the tomb of Lazarus, he said, "Here I am, broken and weeping." At the Mount of Olives, he said, "Here I am, wanting this cup to pass from me." Even his last night, tossing and turning unable to sleep, he prays for God's guidance. Even on the cross during the worst nightmare of all -- he was torn, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" But at the very end he was at one with the Father, at peace. Picture him there praying the old Jewish prayer that a child would say the last thing before dropping off to sleep, "Into thy hands I commit my spirit." "Here I am, Lord. I am yours completely and fully."
Having trouble sleeping through the night? Quit playing games with yourself, others, and God. Take the first step toward wholeness and peace. Say, "Here I am, Lord. I am yours now and for the rest of my life." Having trouble sleeping through the night? Perhaps God is calling you to new life, but I wouldn't know about a thing like that. Why? Because a thing like that is between you and God. Amen.
____________
1. Shel Silverstein, A Light in the Attic (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), p. 15.
