season after Pentecost.
1 samuel 3:1-20 and the gospel of mark 2:23-3:6.
for St. Luke’s Lutheran Church of Logan Square, June 3, 2018.
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This summer, we witness God again and always working through unlikely figures in the Bible, in a sermon series at St. Luke’s Lutheran Church of Logan Square, designed by Pastor Brooke and Pastoral Resident Erin, called “Holy Scandal: The Outrageous Stories of the People of God”. I’m thrilled and thankful to be kicking that series off with stories of Samuel and the disciples.
A detail in Samuel’s call story that I hadn’t noticed until preparing this sermon was that “visions were rare in this time”. Thinking of Biblical narratives, in both the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, my mind overlays what are often very mundane, very human, stories with mythic power. There are angels, and archangels, resurrections, and dreams. The landscape of the Bible feels like it’s ripe for visions. So it stopped me to consider the context of Samuel’s call in a world where this is still rare, an experience to a boy who “did not yet know the LORD”.
This wasn’t a call that Samuel was seeking. Yes, he was in service to train as a Nazirite, in order to make a permanent vow to God. And I could imagine, in his place, dreaming, and probably fearing, a direct encounter with God. But I also imagine that I could reason away happenings that were out of the ordinary. I can imagine thinking that, since visions were rare, they couldn’t be happening to me. The Word was rare – so why would God reveal that word to me? Or to an eleven-year-old boy who hadn’t taken his vows yet?
God calls Samuel four times. In the first three instances, Samuel makes the assumption that it is his human teacher calling to him. We don’t know the type of relationship Samuel and Eli had – was Eli a kind teacher? Harsh?, I know it took a lot of guts for Samuel to answer and go three times. If it wasn’t Eli calling the first time, why would he be the second and third times, and how will Eli react to the continued interruption?
But being called by name was so compelling that Samuel risks rebuke. And I wonder if this is why Eli recognized God’s work in the third call, and sends Samuel back to answer God. The first two could simply be human error – there are many times that we think we hear our names, and ask someone nearby, and it’s just an auditory slip, or someone speaking about an unrelated topic. The repetition, however, bears deeper investigation. Is it God calling? Is it what we might call today an auditory hallucination? Both? The Word has been revealed to Eli, and the linkage of the Word and call in our text leads me to infer that Eli knows God’s voice, and can recognize it in another.
“Here I am.”
This is a vulnerable, and risky, statement. It encompasses Samuel’s entire being, his strengths as well as his growing edges, inexperience and knowledge. God calls his full, embodied being.
Samuel is called by name. Right now, the turn into summer reminds me so strongly that we are in Pride Month – a month of born out of a protest, when trans women of color and drag queens and butches refused to lay down for the police yet again, but instead boldly took space at the Stonewall Inn, saying, “here we are”, in our queerness, in our community. By calling Samuel directly, God affirms the value and importance of our naming’s.
And as a queer seminarian, Samuel’s call story is a path-marker I return to in times of doubt. God calls unlikely people, by name, to bear God’s Word, without asking them to change their core. And in doing so, God asks us to risk a radical shift in perspective. I’ve had to do more reckoning with my identity the first year of seminary, claiming being a person of faith, then I’ve ever had to do while coming out as queer and trans. Because following God’s call means letting go of the structures of White capitalism that I’ve been taught since before I was Samuel’s age. It’s offputting. It’s offputting to know that iniquity, that genocide, inhumane and unholy actions are the foundation of what is normed in society. And that God calls us to name these iniquities, as Samuel did for Eli.
Samuel is young. He is young enough to be written off as juvenile, as simply imagining God calling. He doesn’t have the religious or cultural authority of Eli. And yet, it is Samuel who prophesies to Eli. The foretelling that God gives, God gives through an unexpected conduit. God doesn’t wait for Samuel to grow up, to know more, to change – and Samuel trusts in God for these reasons, telling Eli, a man in power, something that Eli doesn’t want to hear. Which could have had severe repercussions for Samuel.
In this story of God’s Kin-dom, Eli doesn’t react how we would expect, or how Samuel fears – he doesn’t dismiss Samuel as too young, doesn’t accuse him of being ‘crazy’ (a word I use carefully, aware of chronic misuse and stigmatization), and doesn’t respond with violence. Eli holds the prophecy of Samuel as one from God, one naming a deep truth and consequence. I think about this reaction, of allowing the prophecy to be truth, in contrast to how I might react in a similar situation. White, capitalist society teaches that visions are even rarer than in Samuel’s time, and should be subdued, so eradicated that we no longer notice threads of prophecy. Teaches that until someone reaches a certain, nonspecific, ‘older’ age, they cannot be leaders, and that their words are worth – less. Teaches that anything that is unexplainable by the scientific method is either yet-to-be-discovered or made-up or a result of mental illness that needs to be ‘cured’.
This year, my faith practice has been accompanied by deep reckoning with internalized ableism. Ableism is a privileging of normed bodies and reactions to the world, at the discrimination and prejudice against folks with disabilities. A dear member of my family recently found out that they have a cyst on their temporal lobe, a congenital condition whose symptoms they have been navigating and downplaying, not even realizing, for their entire life. They also have lived experience with auditory hallucinations, and this cyst might be the cause. And again, as I am tender with the word ‘crazy’, in the ways that it is thrown around and normalizes stigma against mental illness, I am tender with this story. My friend risks when they disclose this cyst, when they disclose auditory hallucinations. They are speaking a Word of truth that those in power find dangerous – their brain doesn’t conform to their rules, but is part of God’s creation. Samuel speaks truth to a man of power who could ruin him. (Beth) speaks truth to a system that could, and does, erase their lived experience.
In God’s Kin-dom, it is the scandalous, those who exist in ways that we don’t perceive as normed, that are called by God. God is neurodiverse. God sends visions and burning bushes. Every time I think I have unlearned my internalized ableism, I am reminded how much I tie personal worth to productivity, to being the ‘right’ kind of person for God to call, forgetting that I am already named and claimed. This conflict is rooted in the society of cure that we live in. Turning on the TV, I am bombarded with stories of miraculous cure and medicine – stories that make it seem like the best outcome for any disability is to be cured or fixed.
We can project this culture of cure backwards to Biblical times. Many of the stories that show us God’s presence involve healing. It is apt to call Jesus a healer. But the healings, witnessed within the larger Gospel narratives, are restorations. When Jesus calls demons out of a man at Gerasa he restores the man into community. When he heals an unnamed hemorrhaging woman, he restores her into community. Jesus doesn’t heal indiscriminately, but instead heals those who seek out healing. This is an important distinction, as our medical system wants cure to be the only agreeable option. Cure isn’t for God’s sake, but for ours.
A book that I’ve been reading alongside this week is “Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure”, by Eli Clare, a disabled, transgender writer. He writes: “Declaring disability a matter of social justice is an important act of resistance – disability residing not in paralysis but in stairs without an accompanying ramp, not in blindness but in the lack of braille and audio books, not in dyslexia but in teaching methods unwilling to flex. In this declaration, disability politics joins other social change movements in the ongoing work of locating the problems of injustice not in individual body-minds but in the world.”
And this resistance ties directly into today’s stories from the Gospel of Mark. We’re encountering two stories where Jesus speaks truth to religious authority, and affirms not only the disciples picking wheat for food on the Sabbath, and heals on the Sabbath as well. Both of these actions are in conflict with the current Sabbath law enforced by the Pharisees. However, much like exceptions to the Ramadan fast of our Muslim siblings for travel and health, the laws of the Sabbath are given so that we might rest and recover. But that rest is often a privilege. Filling the human need for nourishment, sustaining bodies and minds, is more important than the written laws of Sabbath. God wants us to be able to be our full selves, and that is rooted in basic needs being met, including rest, as well as food, shelter, and water.
Jesus embracing wheat-picking and healing gives important context to religious law – religious law is important, but not more important than people being able to live. A lot of burden has been put on the margins to change and adapt better to mainstream culture, instead of culture expanding into an abundant future where everyone thrives. In this same way, Jesus’ interaction with the Pharisees has him experiencing pressure from the dominant group to assimilate to the laws as-they-were, instead of as-they-could-be. The flexibility in Sabbath practice points to a necessary flexibility in institutions – imagine Samuel’s age being no barrier to his prophecy. Picture a mainstream that embraces the lived knowledge and stories of those with congenital differences or mental illness. And what if the Pharisees had redistributed wealth, labor, and caretaking so that all could freely participate in holy Sabbath rest?
God calls us by name. And our named, embodied selves are holy, and challenging, and made good. And it is the scandal of God that our Creator has made the neurodiverse / and queer / and brown / and young / and poor / and oppressed – – their people. God calls us to live out their Kin-dom, to prophesy to sinful power structures, to risk being remade and vulnerable.
Here we are.
Reed Fowler 