Friends
Peace be with you.
In high school, a friend needed to borrow my car for a while to quickly run to her house and pick up some stuff after school. I let her do it, figuring it would be about a half hour or forty five minutes before she got back. After an hour, she still hadn’t returned. I was annoyed but a friend of mine who was waiting with me4 was fuming and, because he was that mad, I got that mad. I’m honestly not trying to make excuses for myself. In general, it takes a lot to get me angry and being late with my car is not going to do it. I think he thought I needed to be more mad or people would always take advantage of my kindness. In any case, we sat in his car for an hour and a half, with him making me more and more mad as the minutes passed until, finally, she drove up. I bounded out of his car and just started yelling obscenities while she got out of mine. I didn’t even let her get a word in. She just stood there crying with her mouth agape, handed me my keys, and got in the car her Mom was driving behind her and the two of them left. It was one of those times in life when I realized, shortly after the car pulled away and my dopamine levels dropped, how big of a mistake I had made.
The first reading from today’s Mass is one of my favorite readings in the entire Bible. I talk about it whenever I encourage someone to think about priesthood or religious life. I think of it when I’m doing spiritual direction with someone who tells me they haven’t felt God’s presence for a while. I think of it when I hear about bad parents or bad priests. It’s such a good reading. Let me fill in some of the context first. In most Bibles, the First Book of Samuel is the ninth book, meaning that it’s still relatively early in the Bible. In some ways, it marks a change for the way God communicates with his people. You have people like Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Abraham, Joshua, and Moses where God speaks directly to the person who is doing the most action. Then, after the Pentaeuch, the first five books of the Bible, God appoints judges who speak on his behalf to others. It’s like he puts a buffer for controversial subjects between himself and the main people acting. These judges are people formally appointed by God to settle disputes and interpret the Law. The judges, however, didn’t last very long and were replaced by the priests. Or, to put it more accurately, a high priest had all the responsibility the judges used to have. And, it appears, by what is written in First Samuel, that God sort of became quiet for a while.
Samuel’s mother is a woman named Hannah. Like many women in the Bible, Hannah had prayed for years to have a child and was couldn't. When she finally does, she follows through on the bargain she had made to give her first born son to God. In other cultures, this would have involved ritual sacrifice. But, in the culture of the Jews, this involved having him go live with the high priest, whose name was Eli. Now, before anyone gets any ideas, neither Fr. Dave nor I are willing to raise your kids for you. It was a different time. Eli had a wife and kids of his own so he should have had a clue on how to raise children. I say “should” because Eli’s children, whose names are Phineas and Hophni, are well known around town as scoundrels. They use their Father’s position, as high priest, to steal money and lord power over people. I think this is partly why God was silent at the time. God is angry and disappointed at the lack of leadership on the part of his priest to be a leader of his own children.
That’s all lead up to the first reading today where Samuel, who is probably just a teenager, gets a call from God has. Three times, God calls to him. Notice that when Samuel approaches Eli after God calls him, he says, “Here, I am.” Remember that when Moses received the Ten Commandments, God revealed his name as “I AM.” So, Samuel is approaching Eli but really, unknowingly, presenting himself to God. And three times, Eli’s response is, “Go back to sleep.” Now, think about one of the main themes of Advent: “Stay Awake!” Jesus ends many of his parables by telling his disciples to “Stay awake.” It’s like Jesus is speaking to his disciples and telling them, unlike Eli, that when they hear his voice they need to stay awake. Eli tells Samuel to go back to sleep, like many of us would do if some annoying kid kept waking us up in the middle of the night asking us if we’d been calling him. Still, Eli finally gets it AFTER the third time. In storytelling, the rule of three says that the person gets it on the third time. Think of the three little pigs surviving the huffs and puffs of the big bad wolf in the third house made of brick or the prince finding Cinderella by first trying the glass slipper on her two ugly, big footed step sisters. Eli fails at the rule of three because it only occurs to him after the third time that this may be God calling Samuel, not just an annoying kid who keeps waking him up. Who would have thought that God would call someone who is sleeping right next to the Ark of the Covenant, the very box that contains the Glory of God and where the people of the Old Testament encountered that God? Notice that, when Samuel is finally told who it is that is calling him and how to respond, it’s the first time we hear how God is calling Samuel. He calls him by name, “Samuel, Samuel” and Samuel responds by not calling God by his name, but by saying “Speak, your servant is listening.” He changes Eli’s directions by not saying God’s name as part of his response.
The part that they leave out next is that God next says that Eli will be killed along with his scoundrel children, Hophni and Phineas, and that Samuel will not only take their place but be a thousand times better. He will be the first in a line of Prophets, the new way God will speak to his people. God even promises that Samuel’s words will be especially power. He said, “not a word will be without effect”.
In my heart, this has always been an invitation for me to think about how God is calling me to use words. I preached a little bit about this at Christmas but let me complete the story about what happened with my friend. I approached her later, calmer and asked what had happened. She told me that, when she got home, her older brother saw her driving my car and he laid into her because what would happen if she got into an accident. He went inside and told her parents who also laid into her for driving my car for the same reason. They forbid her to drive it back and said I’d eventually come looking for it. After an hour of her pleading to drive it back, her Mom eventually relented and said she would follow her to make sure she drove safely. She was already an emotional wreck before she pulled up and I started screaming at her. When she got in the car with her Mom, her Mom said I had every right to be that mad and increased the amount of time she was grounded from one month to two months. I tried to apologize but it was years before we were good again.
Words have consequences and sometimes we can ruin friendships by using them the wrong way. I learned it was important to listen to the whole story before I jumped to conclusions. On the other hand, I think about Eli and how he basically spoiled his kids to the point that they were the town scoundrels. We can’t be pushovers either. We have to listen to God and God’s plan first and foremost and not just what benefits us. “Speak, Lord, your servant is listening” should be our motto in life. In today’s world, I sometimes worry that people prioritize believing something different than others rather than believing the truth. I know the opposite is just as dangerous, believing everything that the majority of people believe. But there just seems to be a need in some people to constantly deny the simplest, most straightforward answer in favor of whatever fits their political perspective or whatever explanation makes them or their group the hero. I wonder if Eli thought that his kids were the good ones and the ones they were beating up and robbing probably deserved it. Have we taken the time to ask God what his plan is in this world? Speak, Lord, your servant is listening. How is God calling us to serve one another in love and stand up for the oppressed? How is God calling us to stand up for the unborn? How is God calling us to stand against all threats to human life like hunger and disease? We must listen to God and not ourselves. Speak, your servants are listening. But are we really?
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