STOP, LOOK, LISTEN
Author: Fr. Michael Byron
January 16, 2021
How can we come to know what is of absolute, and ultimate,
and lasting importance in the world? Who or what is our supreme treasure –
worthy of sacrificing every other value? Not just my treasure, but ours – all of
us. For many or most of us we discover it by trial and error, by success or disappointment.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. But it doesn’t have to be that way. We aren’t
just thrown in to this world and expected to figure it all out by ourselves,
from scratch.
Everyone who can hear me speaking now is already in a
relationship with God. If it were otherwise we wouldn’t be here. And this God
of ours is one who wishes to be known to us, to love us utterly, and to show us
the way. But it is our choice whether to seek and find and welcome that
relationship, that singular and enduring source of life – what we Christians
call “salvation.”
And how do we do that? It begins by being convinced that
this God of ours is actually out there to be found – or perhaps in here to be
found, and that we are being lovingly pursued by God every day of our lives. But
where? How?
When I was a kid, I often walked to school in the morning,
and even though I wasn’t supposed to, the most efficient path to school
involved me walking along a railroad track for about a quarter mile. It wasn’t
a very busy stretch for trains, but it was a single track that ran through a fairly
narrow ditch. So if I was caught on that stretch when a train came along it was
somewhat risky business. And every so often that’s exactly what happened. I had
no way to know when I’d be confronting a locomotive, either from up ahead or
from behind, so I followed the wisdom that I’d been taught about dealing with
railroad tracks, specifically, “Stop. Look. And Listen.” And I did that all the
while that I walked along that stretch. If I thought I heard a whistle or a low
rumble of a locomotive or saw a light or felt a vibration on the rails, I would
stop, look, and listen. I guess it must have worked okay because I’m still
here.
Which takes us back to the question of where and how to
discover this God whom we know is out there trying to find us. The answer is
the same; Stop, Look, Listen. We have two stories of exactly that in today’s
Scriptures, both in the first reading from 1 Samuel and in the gospel reading
from John. Both begin with a certain lack of clarity about who was calling or
what was being communicated.
For Samuel, the Lord kept trying to wake him up to listen,
but he was confused about it all – and repeatedly went to his mentor, Eli the
priest, who also at first didn’t know who it was. He only knew who it was not,
i.e. he himself. But Eli was an elder, a wisdom figure, one who had spent a
long life discerning how God approaches people – sometimes seemingly unlikely
people in unlikely ways. And so he was able to help young Samuel to invite God
to speak, for he would listen.
In the gospel it was John the Baptist who was the wisdom
figure, and who had spent his life stopping and listening to God, so that when
Jesus walked by he could exclaim, “Behold! Look! The Lamb of God!”
Most people do not resolve the mystery of God’s call in a
momentary flash of insight. We have to stop, and look, and listen – sometimes for
a very long while. Jesus invited Peter and Andrew to come and stay with him in
order to know who he really was. Interestingly, the gospel doesn’t tell us
anything specific about what they saw or heard while they were together with
Jesus. But they were able to stop, to look, to listen, and eventually to come
to the conviction that this was truly God’s Messiah here.
So what about today? To whom or to what do we stop and look
and listen in order to discover what is of lasting importance in our own place
and time? Well, for one, God still provides wisdom figures for us – although they
need to be tested over the course of time. Very many of them are elderly, and
they are the ones who have spent their lives in prayer and selfless service to
others.
This coming Tuesday I’ll be presiding at a funeral at
another Parish for Bob, who was 89 when he died of COVID-19 last week. He was
one of my wisdom figures, not because he had an advanced degree but because he
knew God. He was a metalworker during his career and a tireless pastoral
minister after that, bringing the Eucharist to hospital patients every week
until COVID came around and he was physically unable to. And as one of his
relatives correctly described him, he was the happiest man in the world – always
engaged with and encouraging the well-being of others. Those people still
exist. But we have even more than that. We have our Scriptures and our long
tradition of teaching and the witness of the Saints. And most importantly we
have our living Christian community – we have one another both here at Pax and
in the big Church, enspirited by God with the promise never to leave us, if we
will only stop, look, and listen.
And we have our memory of history – both the history when we
have accomplished astonishing things together in name of Christ, and when we
have been closer to something evil. In a moment we will hear a song from a
contemporary oratorio titled “To Be Certain of the Dawn.” It was written
several years ago to honor the memory of those who were murdered in Nazi
Germany. The music is written by the late Stephen Paulus, and the words are
composed by my friend Michael Dennis Browne. Both were professors at the
University of Minnesota. It was first performed at the Basilica at a moment
when many of us thought that white supremacy and fascism were European things
that were fading into the past. Clearly they are not, as we have seen so
painfully in recent days.
How do we come to know what is of absolute value? Well, sometimes
we sing about them.
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