Things Change
Sermon
Sermons On The First Readings
Series II, Cycle B
Here's a fact about life: things change.
Now that is hardly a profound observation, but it is a significant shift in thinking that for many of us can only be gained by living a while.
Think back to when you were a child living with your parents. Whatever the circumstances of your home life, you likely had a sense that how things were in your family was more or less how things would always be there. It is a natural mark of immaturity to think that things won't change. In high schools, for example, kids who are not in the cliques often believe they are destined to be outsiders forever. When romantic relationships break up, kids sometimes see that as portending a lifetime of unhappiness, with nothing ever changing or improving for them.
At the extreme end of that shortsighted outlook is the sad fact of teenage suicide, which has been described as a "permanent solution to a temporary problem." The difficulty is that the young person cannot see that whatever is troubling him or her at that moment is something that will pass. Fortunately, most young people don't go to that extreme, but the assumption that things don't really change is pretty pervasive.
That view, however, does not easily let go, and many of us carry it into adulthood. Back when I was in seminary in the early 1970s, there were a couple of students in one of my courses who were smokers, and it was not uncommon for them to light up in class. That was considered acceptable behavior in those days. Now we knew even then that smoking was unhealthy to the smoker, but we didn't have much information about the damage to nonsmokers from secondhand smoke. What I knew, however, was that I didn't like the smell of cigarette smoke wafting in the classroom, and I made a practice whenever possible to not sit near the smokers.
It happened during that semester that our campus newspaper invited comments and suggestions on class life, so I wrote a short letter to the editor suggesting that we institute a no-smoking practice in the classrooms. When other students saw my letter in the newspaper, I got a few comments that ranged from the implication that I was being a prude to the charge that I was being unrealistic because smoking in public was here to stay. I recall thinking, "Yeah, I guess that's something that isn't going to change."
How wrong I was! Our willingness to tolerate others smoking around us has changed drastically today, even becoming the subject of laws in many communities. But back then, I couldn't envision that it ever would change.
Life in the meantime, however, has persuaded me that few human inventions are permanent, and that things in fact do change.
To cite another example, how many of us in my age bracket ever thought that Communism would suddenly collapse? We were raised on air raid drills in our grade schools, and heard time and again about the "Red Menace." We lived through the Cold War. Then, all at once, we learned that the Berlin Wall was coming down, the Soviet Union was breaking up, and the threat of Communist domination of the world was going away. Who would have thought that was possible, at least in our lifetime?
The view that things won't change is the root of a lot of pessimism. If we are married to someone who has certain traits we don't care for, we may conclude far too soon that "they will never change" and despair of having any happiness from the relationship.
Even things we know are going to change eventually sometimes feel like they won't. Perhaps we are caring for a sick loved one, an older person who has little hope of recovery. No matter how much we love that person, being a caregiver can be exhausting, and when we are in the middle of it, the demands on us seem unending.
So we have difficulty imagining that some unwelcome experience will ever be wholly a thing of the past. As it happens, that very difficulty works against faith, for if there is one thing that the Christian faith asserts, it is that God will not let things remain as they are. Sin and evil will not be permitted to shape society forever. The kingdom of God coming in its fullness will change everything. But even before that, God alters attitudes and passions right now. There is a reason that accepting Christ is called "conversion"; to convert means "to change."
This erroneous sense that things do not change is also in the background of today's scripture reading. The incident takes place at the end of the period of the judges, when there was as yet no king over Israel. There really was no nation per se. Rather the Israelites lived in a lose confederation of tribes with no single leader. When enemies attacked or when decisions affecting them all needed to be made, leaders known as "judges" were called forth, but there was no institutionalized national leadership structure or formal way of selecting leaders. There was no office in which the authority to head all the tribes resided.
Unfortunately, the people adopted that same loose attitude toward their responsibilities to the covenant with God. The book of Judges, which describes that period, closes with these words: "In those days there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes" (Judges 21:25). That's where things stood when 1 Samuel begins.
As a result on this free-for-all approach to religion, people weren't hearing much from God -- largely because they weren't interested in listening for him. Our reading from chapter 3 opens by saying, "The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread." In other words, for a long time, people had felt like they were on their own when it came to religion. The person on whom the practice of religion focused in those days was Eli, who was both a judge and the high priest. The temple in Jerusalem would not be built until several years later, so what worship there was took place in the portable tabernacle that had been created while the people of Israel were in the wilderness after leaving Egypt generations earlier. At the time of our reading, that tabernacle was permanently set up in Shiloh. And there Eli lived, in a dwelling adjoining the tabernacle.
Samuel was a boy who had been dedicated by his mother to the service of God, and he was living in the tabernacle itself, likely carrying out cleaning and serving duties. You probably know the story of how during one night, God called Samuel's name, and Samuel ran to Eli, thinking it was he who called. After this happened three times, Eli realized that it was God calling Samuel, and he instructed Samuel how to answer and then listen for God.
Now we read only the first half of this story today, but the balance of the chapter tells what God had to say once Samuel answered. God gave Samuel a very harsh message about Eli and his family. Although Eli himself had been faithful to God, his two sons, who were also priests, had abused their positions, taking sexual liberties with women serving in the tabernacle and demanding from those who came to offer sacrifices forbidden portions of the sacrificial animals for their own dining pleasure. Eli had not stopped them, and now, as Samuel learned from God, God was rejecting Eli and his sons, and they would be punished for their sins.
All of that came true, and as Samuel grew, God continued to speak to and through him. Eventually, Samuel became the new spiritual leader of the people.
The chapter opened by saying the Lord had been silent for a long while, but now through Samuel God opened communication with all the people. And the message Samuel heard that night was that things were about to change even more -- and change dramatically. Eli was out; Samuel was in. Eli had forfeited the blessing of God; God's blessing now fell on Samuel. God had been silent; he would be silent no more. Visions had not been widespread; well hang on to your seats, because they were going to be coming now! The old ways were over; God was breaking into their lives with a new beginning. Things were changing, and how!
You see, this is not only a story about how we should listen for God; it's also a dramatic announcement of surprising change, and it tells us that one of the ways God works is through change.
There is a certain irony in saying that, for one of the testimonies about God in the Bible is that he does not change. For example, speaking through the prophet Malachi, God says, "For I the Lord do not change" (Malachi 3:6). One of the psalmists said:
Long ago you laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands. They will perish, but you endure; they will all wear out like a garment. You change them like clothing, and they pass away; but you are the same, and your years have no end.
-- Psalm 102:25-27
In the New Testament, this same characteristic is extended to Jesus. The author of the book of Hebrews, said, "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever" (Hebrews 13:8). Theologians even have a word for this characteristic of God: immutability. It means "unchangeableness."
We should recognize, however, that the fact of God's immutability in no way hinders him from using change as a tool of his will.
This is hardly to say that every change is the will of God, but it is to say that God is above change and that changing things is one way God operates in the world. Several years ago I saw a banner in a church that displayed a large footprint, and across it were these words: "The sign of the God is that we are led where we did not intend to go." That is a way of saying that God uses change to apply his will in our lives just as he did in the lives of Eli and Samuel.
The lesson for us then is that we should look at the changes that occur in our lives and ask if God might be working with us in them. And if we conclude that he is, then we should ask how we can cooperate with those changes.
We can predict a few of those changes -- we will get older, our kids will grow up, some of the passions of our youth will burn out or become less important -- but for the most part, many of the changes that occur in our lives will come as surprises. In each of those circumstances, we can ask how God might be working, and then listen for what God might want us to hear.
I started by saying that as children and youth, we often have the sense that things do not change. By the time we get to the other end of life, the opposite impression often rules. We have the sense that everything is changing. When the great mystery writer Agatha Christie reached 75, she wrote a book about her life. Speaking about her advancing age, she said: "I am enjoying myself. Though with every year that passes, something has to be crossed off the list of pleasures. Long walks are off, and, alas, bathing in the sea; fillet steaks and apples and raw blackberries (teeth difficulties) and reading fine print."1 She went on to describe how much she still had left to enjoy, but we can see how she was noticing how much things were changing. Another aging person, Henry F. Lyte, expressed the sense of rapid alterations taking place in his life when he wrote the hymn, "Abide With Me." In one verse he wrote, "change and decay in all around I see." (But he went on to write, "O thou who changest not, abide with me.")
In reality, some things do stay the same, or relatively so, for a long time, but eventually most things change in some way. God does not change but he often works through the changes in our lives. We have a perfect example of that in this story of Samuel. God took the initiative and broke the silence. The change God then instituted brought fresh opportunity for people to come back to the covenant, to walk in the ways of righteousness, and to hear God's word for their own lives.
When change intrudes upon our lives, may we be as open to listen for God as was Samuel.
____________
1.ÊFrom Agatha Christie's An Autobiography, quoted in The Reader's Digest, October 1985, p. 97.
Now that is hardly a profound observation, but it is a significant shift in thinking that for many of us can only be gained by living a while.
Think back to when you were a child living with your parents. Whatever the circumstances of your home life, you likely had a sense that how things were in your family was more or less how things would always be there. It is a natural mark of immaturity to think that things won't change. In high schools, for example, kids who are not in the cliques often believe they are destined to be outsiders forever. When romantic relationships break up, kids sometimes see that as portending a lifetime of unhappiness, with nothing ever changing or improving for them.
At the extreme end of that shortsighted outlook is the sad fact of teenage suicide, which has been described as a "permanent solution to a temporary problem." The difficulty is that the young person cannot see that whatever is troubling him or her at that moment is something that will pass. Fortunately, most young people don't go to that extreme, but the assumption that things don't really change is pretty pervasive.
That view, however, does not easily let go, and many of us carry it into adulthood. Back when I was in seminary in the early 1970s, there were a couple of students in one of my courses who were smokers, and it was not uncommon for them to light up in class. That was considered acceptable behavior in those days. Now we knew even then that smoking was unhealthy to the smoker, but we didn't have much information about the damage to nonsmokers from secondhand smoke. What I knew, however, was that I didn't like the smell of cigarette smoke wafting in the classroom, and I made a practice whenever possible to not sit near the smokers.
It happened during that semester that our campus newspaper invited comments and suggestions on class life, so I wrote a short letter to the editor suggesting that we institute a no-smoking practice in the classrooms. When other students saw my letter in the newspaper, I got a few comments that ranged from the implication that I was being a prude to the charge that I was being unrealistic because smoking in public was here to stay. I recall thinking, "Yeah, I guess that's something that isn't going to change."
How wrong I was! Our willingness to tolerate others smoking around us has changed drastically today, even becoming the subject of laws in many communities. But back then, I couldn't envision that it ever would change.
Life in the meantime, however, has persuaded me that few human inventions are permanent, and that things in fact do change.
To cite another example, how many of us in my age bracket ever thought that Communism would suddenly collapse? We were raised on air raid drills in our grade schools, and heard time and again about the "Red Menace." We lived through the Cold War. Then, all at once, we learned that the Berlin Wall was coming down, the Soviet Union was breaking up, and the threat of Communist domination of the world was going away. Who would have thought that was possible, at least in our lifetime?
The view that things won't change is the root of a lot of pessimism. If we are married to someone who has certain traits we don't care for, we may conclude far too soon that "they will never change" and despair of having any happiness from the relationship.
Even things we know are going to change eventually sometimes feel like they won't. Perhaps we are caring for a sick loved one, an older person who has little hope of recovery. No matter how much we love that person, being a caregiver can be exhausting, and when we are in the middle of it, the demands on us seem unending.
So we have difficulty imagining that some unwelcome experience will ever be wholly a thing of the past. As it happens, that very difficulty works against faith, for if there is one thing that the Christian faith asserts, it is that God will not let things remain as they are. Sin and evil will not be permitted to shape society forever. The kingdom of God coming in its fullness will change everything. But even before that, God alters attitudes and passions right now. There is a reason that accepting Christ is called "conversion"; to convert means "to change."
This erroneous sense that things do not change is also in the background of today's scripture reading. The incident takes place at the end of the period of the judges, when there was as yet no king over Israel. There really was no nation per se. Rather the Israelites lived in a lose confederation of tribes with no single leader. When enemies attacked or when decisions affecting them all needed to be made, leaders known as "judges" were called forth, but there was no institutionalized national leadership structure or formal way of selecting leaders. There was no office in which the authority to head all the tribes resided.
Unfortunately, the people adopted that same loose attitude toward their responsibilities to the covenant with God. The book of Judges, which describes that period, closes with these words: "In those days there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes" (Judges 21:25). That's where things stood when 1 Samuel begins.
As a result on this free-for-all approach to religion, people weren't hearing much from God -- largely because they weren't interested in listening for him. Our reading from chapter 3 opens by saying, "The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread." In other words, for a long time, people had felt like they were on their own when it came to religion. The person on whom the practice of religion focused in those days was Eli, who was both a judge and the high priest. The temple in Jerusalem would not be built until several years later, so what worship there was took place in the portable tabernacle that had been created while the people of Israel were in the wilderness after leaving Egypt generations earlier. At the time of our reading, that tabernacle was permanently set up in Shiloh. And there Eli lived, in a dwelling adjoining the tabernacle.
Samuel was a boy who had been dedicated by his mother to the service of God, and he was living in the tabernacle itself, likely carrying out cleaning and serving duties. You probably know the story of how during one night, God called Samuel's name, and Samuel ran to Eli, thinking it was he who called. After this happened three times, Eli realized that it was God calling Samuel, and he instructed Samuel how to answer and then listen for God.
Now we read only the first half of this story today, but the balance of the chapter tells what God had to say once Samuel answered. God gave Samuel a very harsh message about Eli and his family. Although Eli himself had been faithful to God, his two sons, who were also priests, had abused their positions, taking sexual liberties with women serving in the tabernacle and demanding from those who came to offer sacrifices forbidden portions of the sacrificial animals for their own dining pleasure. Eli had not stopped them, and now, as Samuel learned from God, God was rejecting Eli and his sons, and they would be punished for their sins.
All of that came true, and as Samuel grew, God continued to speak to and through him. Eventually, Samuel became the new spiritual leader of the people.
The chapter opened by saying the Lord had been silent for a long while, but now through Samuel God opened communication with all the people. And the message Samuel heard that night was that things were about to change even more -- and change dramatically. Eli was out; Samuel was in. Eli had forfeited the blessing of God; God's blessing now fell on Samuel. God had been silent; he would be silent no more. Visions had not been widespread; well hang on to your seats, because they were going to be coming now! The old ways were over; God was breaking into their lives with a new beginning. Things were changing, and how!
You see, this is not only a story about how we should listen for God; it's also a dramatic announcement of surprising change, and it tells us that one of the ways God works is through change.
There is a certain irony in saying that, for one of the testimonies about God in the Bible is that he does not change. For example, speaking through the prophet Malachi, God says, "For I the Lord do not change" (Malachi 3:6). One of the psalmists said:
Long ago you laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands. They will perish, but you endure; they will all wear out like a garment. You change them like clothing, and they pass away; but you are the same, and your years have no end.
-- Psalm 102:25-27
In the New Testament, this same characteristic is extended to Jesus. The author of the book of Hebrews, said, "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever" (Hebrews 13:8). Theologians even have a word for this characteristic of God: immutability. It means "unchangeableness."
We should recognize, however, that the fact of God's immutability in no way hinders him from using change as a tool of his will.
This is hardly to say that every change is the will of God, but it is to say that God is above change and that changing things is one way God operates in the world. Several years ago I saw a banner in a church that displayed a large footprint, and across it were these words: "The sign of the God is that we are led where we did not intend to go." That is a way of saying that God uses change to apply his will in our lives just as he did in the lives of Eli and Samuel.
The lesson for us then is that we should look at the changes that occur in our lives and ask if God might be working with us in them. And if we conclude that he is, then we should ask how we can cooperate with those changes.
We can predict a few of those changes -- we will get older, our kids will grow up, some of the passions of our youth will burn out or become less important -- but for the most part, many of the changes that occur in our lives will come as surprises. In each of those circumstances, we can ask how God might be working, and then listen for what God might want us to hear.
I started by saying that as children and youth, we often have the sense that things do not change. By the time we get to the other end of life, the opposite impression often rules. We have the sense that everything is changing. When the great mystery writer Agatha Christie reached 75, she wrote a book about her life. Speaking about her advancing age, she said: "I am enjoying myself. Though with every year that passes, something has to be crossed off the list of pleasures. Long walks are off, and, alas, bathing in the sea; fillet steaks and apples and raw blackberries (teeth difficulties) and reading fine print."1 She went on to describe how much she still had left to enjoy, but we can see how she was noticing how much things were changing. Another aging person, Henry F. Lyte, expressed the sense of rapid alterations taking place in his life when he wrote the hymn, "Abide With Me." In one verse he wrote, "change and decay in all around I see." (But he went on to write, "O thou who changest not, abide with me.")
In reality, some things do stay the same, or relatively so, for a long time, but eventually most things change in some way. God does not change but he often works through the changes in our lives. We have a perfect example of that in this story of Samuel. God took the initiative and broke the silence. The change God then instituted brought fresh opportunity for people to come back to the covenant, to walk in the ways of righteousness, and to hear God's word for their own lives.
When change intrudes upon our lives, may we be as open to listen for God as was Samuel.
____________
1.ÊFrom Agatha Christie's An Autobiography, quoted in The Reader's Digest, October 1985, p. 97.
