Cry of the Heart: God's Voice (Psalm 29)

Let me start by reminding you that we are in the midst of a 6-week series of sermons on the Psalms which I am calling, “Cries of the Heart.”  Many of the psalms, I have discovered, express true human emotions, common to all of us.  Often the psalms are less “this is what you should do,” and more “this is how I honestly feel, right or wrong.” 

Too often we come to God, and we think God wants to see only our good side.  But God wants all of who we are.  God wants us to be authentic.  And if we’re experiencing an emotion or a reaction to something and we wish we could respond better or feel differently, we don’t hide that from God.  We present it to God, and ask God for help in dealing with our present situation.

The psalms are the heartfelt expressions of individuals passionately committed to loving God.  The emotions expressed in the psalms are often raw and occasionally shocking, such as the desire to bash the heads of your enemy’s children against the rocks.  But I think passages like that are honest expressions of frustration and despair, and do not carry actual intentions to follow through in action.  They’re just honest expressions of emotion.

Today’s “Cry of the Heart” is, perhaps, not quite so shocking.  It has to do with hearing the Lord’s Voice. 

When I was a child, hearing the Lord’s voice was, in fact, one of the most frightening concepts in the entire Bible.  One of the first Bible stories to really capture my young imagination was the story of Samuel’s call. 

In the first book of Samuel, chapter 3, there is a story about Samuel when he was just a boy.  He had gone to live at the temple with Eli, the old, blind priest.

It was night, and Samuel and Eli were sleeping in separate rooms.  In my imagination these were big rooms, so that the light from a candle would still not be able to reach all the way into the corners, and certainly not into the dark hallway that connected the rooms. 

And, in addition to being dark, it was quiet.  Obviously, there were no helicopters hovering overhead, no car engines could be heard from a distant freeway, no sound of a TV coming from next door.  Just the sound of one’s own breathing, perhaps even one’s heartbeat, and maybe the soft scurrying of unseen critters and creatures. 

And then, in the middle of the darkness and the silence, little Samuel hears a voice.

Samuel…

Immediately Samuel jumps up and runs to Eli.  I mean, it must have been Eli that he heard.  Right? 

“I’m here!  What do you want?”

Eli says, “I didn’t call you.  Go back to bed.”

Hesitantly, Samuel returns.  Maybe it was his imagination. 

But then it happens again.

Samuel…

This time he was sure it was Eli.  He jumps up and runs back to the old priest, but again the priest says, “I didn’t call you.  Go back to bed.”

At this point, Samuel is kind of hoping that Eli was playing a joke on him… except it really wasn’t Eli’s nature to play jokes like that.  And Eli thinks Samuel’s just messing with him.

It happens a third time. 

Samuel…

Samuel runs to Eli, but this time, Eli realizes that Samuel’s not messing with him, that he really is hearing a voice, and that the voice is God’s.

This, to me, was scarier than any ghost tale I ever heard!  Imagine, being alone in a dark room, and hearing God’s voice call your name!  There were nights when I’d crawl into my own bed, in my own room, and pull the covers up over my head and say, “Don’t call me, God; don’t call me, God; don’t call me, God.”  I think if I had actually heard a voice in the night calling my name, I would probably have died of fright.

Other scriptures – like Psalm 29 – didn’t help much.  I don’t specifically remember reading Psalm 29 as a child, but I did like to read my Bible, so I probably came across it at some point.  And listen again to what it says:  “God’s voice thunders… it’s strong… it’s majestic…it knocks trees down, like a tornado… it unleashes fiery flames…it shakes the earth…”

“Um, God… if you could just not speak to me, I think that would be just fine.”

Well, in the many years since I was a young child, I’ve learned a few of things about God’s voice.

One is that, rather than being afraid of hearing God’s voice, many people – as they grow older – lament the fact that, too often, God’s voice is absent.  “Where are you, God?  Why have you left me all alone?”

I remember coming across a sermon by Fred Craddock that helped me make sense of God’s voice, and how God’s voice is heard and how it is not heard.  The sermon was about the Apostle Paul’s encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus.

It’s quite an interesting story, and it’s made even more interesting by the fact that it is told four times in the New Testament; three times, it’s told in the book of Acts, which was written by Luke; and once, in the book of Galatians, Paul mentions it himself.  However, the story is never told the same way twice; each time the story is told, it is told differently.

You are familiar with the story, or at least one version of it.  Paul is walking along the road with some companions, when all of a sudden a blinding light from heaven flashed around him.  To this point in his life, Paul had been a fierce persecutor of Christians; in fact, he was out hunting for “followers of the Way” when this incident occurred.

The light was so bright that Paul fell to the ground; then he heard a voice say to him, “Saul…”  (Saul was the name he was known by before he began preaching the gospel.)  “Saul, why do you persecute me?” 

Paul asked, “Who are you?”

And the voice answered:  “I am Jesus whom you are persecuting.”

This version of the story, from Acts chapter 9, is the one we know best.  The interesting thing here is that it says that the men who were traveling with him heard the voice, but they didn’t see anything.

Paul’s companions heard the voice.

Later in Acts – this is the same book of the Bible, written by the same author – the story is told again.  In chapter 22, the author of Acts quotes Paul as describing the event like this:  “About noon a great light from heaven suddenly shone about me.  I fell to the ground and heard a voice…Those who were with me saw the light, but did not hear the voice of the one who was speaking to me.”

This time, they did not hear the voice.  Only Paul did.

Interesting.

The story appears again in Acts, in chapter 26.  This time everyone falls to the ground: Paul, and his companions.  Apparently, though, only Paul heard the voice.

These are the ways the author of Acts describes this dramatic event.  One would think that an event this important would be described in great detail by Paul himself, since many of the books of the New Testament were written by Paul.  However, Paul only mentions this event once, in the first chapter of Galatians; and all Paul says about it is that “God was pleased to reveal his Son to me…” 

That’s it.  No mention of a blinding light from heaven… No mention of an audible voice. 

Pauls’ own version is much less dramatic.  No wonder we like the other version better.  It makes for a better story, doesn’t it?

All Paul says is that “God was pleased to reveal his Son to me.”  Was there an audible voice that was heard by Paul and his companions…, or at least by Paul himself?  Or did God’s voice actually come to him in a quieter way, through a stirring of his heart and mind? 

Does God ever speak with a loud, thunderous, and (most certainly) male voice to people, or are descriptions of God speaking like that more poetic than historical?

In seminary, my classmates and I were required to take a psychological test to be sure we were fit for the ministry.  These tests began following the events surrounding Jim Jones, and they had questions like, “Have you ever heard the voice of God speaking to you?”

Well, how exactly was one supposed to answer that?  The test was multiple choice: yes, or no.  But the question could not really be answered by such a simple response.

I have heard God’s voice.  It was indeed powerful and profound.  Were I to write it into a screenplay, “based on a true story,” I probably would include a blinding light and a loud voice, because how else could I portray the significance and the impact that God’s voice has had on my life.

But the truth is, I didn’t hear it with my ears.  And I didn’t see anything unusual with my eyes.  And whenever God has spoken to me, I’ve never been sure that it was God speaking until much later, until I spent some time looking back, reflecting, meditating.  Looking back, I realize that God was telling me something in a particular moment; but in that particular moment, I was either unaware, or highly skeptical. 

And so, for me, times of prayer, discernment, and quiet reflection are essential to recognizing the voice of God.

Maybe all this is an answer to my childhood prayer that I never hear the voice of God thundering in the night.  I prayed that prayer, and God said, “OK, I won’t speak to you that way.  In fact, I’ll speak to you in such a way that you won’t even recognize that it is me speaking to you until later, after the event, days or weeks or months later….”

Then again, maybe it’s that way with everyone.  I’m a pastor, and people tell me about their experiences with God, but no one has ever come to me and said, “I heard God speak to me last night, with a deep, loud, thundering voice…and the lights were flashing and the wind was blowing… and he kind of sounded like Graham Chapman…, or maybe James Earl Jones… a great Mufasa coming out of the sky… “Remember who you are…”

If you’ve heard God speak to you that way…I’d like to hear about it.  I may not think you are serious at first, but perhaps you can convince me…

But I suspect that God has called to you in other ways.

I believe that God calls everyone.  God puts a message in the heart of every person: every man, every woman, every child. 

And one of our jobs in the church is to help people hear God’s call.

Because even though God does call and speak, there are so many other sounds that drown out the voice of God.

For me, the silence of a place like Inspiration Point at Loch Leven, or the shady paths at El Dorado Park’s nature center, are places that I go to listen for God’s voice.  Throughout my life, I have been blessed by people who have helped me to hear the message God has placed in my heart, people who have themselves been conduits of God’s voice into my life.

And every time we as a church can provide that for another person, we are doing what we are supposed to be doing.  Every time we can help a person hear God’s voice, God’s call…

Because too often, God’s voice is drowned out or kept silent.  Many people have gifts that go unrecognized.  In the church and in schools, the gifts of boys, especially, go unrecognized, often because they can’t sit still like girls can, and are looked upon as trouble makers. 

For children of color, it can be even worse.  In some communities, black youth are given the message from society that basically says, “You won’t amount to much.”  When a child hears that enough times, he starts to believe it.

“God doesn’t have a purpose for me.  God doesn’t have a use for me. God’s not speaking to me.  I don’t even know why I’m put here on this earth.”

That’s what a lot of young people have come to believe. 

It’s up to us to tell them something different, and to help them hear God’s voice.