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Meditation

Listening to God's Voice

Gordon Matthews gave the following address during a service this spring commemorating the end of his term as General Secretary of Church and Peace (1989 to 1996) and the installation of his successor Christian Hohmann.

Dear sisters and brothers,
In Deuteronomy 28 we read, "If you fully obey the Lord your God and carefully follow all his commandments I give you today...you will be blessed when you come in and blessed when you go out."

Today we ask God's blessing upon the coming in of Christian Hohmann to Church and Peace and my going out. Today this word from the Bible speaks strongly to me.

I try to obey the voice of God. All of us gathered here today do thus, or so I am assuming. We try to obey God's voice. I cannot assert that I always succeed. Who can claim that? But my failing does not lie in the fact that I consciously disobey God's voice. Rather it lies much more in the fact that I have not even heard God's voice and in order to obey it, I must first hear it.

I would like to tell three stories about the topic "Listening to God's Voice". I won't say much about them but simply let them speak for themselves. The first is from the Old Testament and most certainly well-known to you:

Elijah is on Mt Horeb.
"The Lord said, 'Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by'. Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper."
Elijah hears God's voice and receives a commission from God.

The second story is from the time of the beginning of the Quaker movement. George Fox, the founder of the Quakers, wrote in his journal,
"As I had abandoned all priests, so I also left the preachers and those who were regarded as authorities, for I saw that none of them could speak to my condition. When all my hope in them and in all men was gone, so that I had nothing external to help me, and I knew not what to do, then, oh then, I heard a voice: 'There is one who can speak to thy condition, Jesus Christ'. And when I heard that, my heart leaped with joy."

The third story I heard recently on the radio. A Native American was visiting a white man in the city. The streets were full of noisy traffic, but suddenly the Native American stood still. "What is it?" asked his white friend.

"Don't you hear the grasshopper?"

"Huh, that's impossible. You won't find a grasshopper here in the middle of the street and even if there was one, you couldn't hear it because of all the noise."

The Native American listened...and went to the entrance of a house. Beside it a climbing plant grew. He pushed aside two leaves and there indeed was a grasshopper.

The white man was astonished and said, "How could you hear it? I heard nothing. You Native Americans obviously have better ears than we whites."

"No, I don't believe that", said the native American. "You can hear just as well as we can but you listen to other noises. Look." He took a coin from his pocket and let it fall to the pavement. As it clinked on the ground other passers-by looked around. "You see? That noise wasn't louder than the grasshopper, but everyone heard it. It's just a question of what people think is important, what they focus on."

Where is our focus? Is our focus on God's voice, on this gentle whisper? Does God have any chance of being heard by us? God hears us. Of that I have no doubt. The important question is whether we hear God, whether we listen to his voice.

The Trappist monk Thomas Merton listened for many years to the voice of God. He learned a number of things from this and passed them on to us in his writings. He says: "Christ our Lord did not come to bring peace to our world as a kind of spiritual ease. Rather he gave his disciples a mission and a task: to struggle, in a violent world, to establish his peace not only in their own hearts but in society itself."


Where is our focus? Is our focus on God's voice, on this gentle whisper? Does God have any chance of being heard?


Thomas Merton would surely not object if I give the closing word myself. I quote from an article I wrote for a Quaker journal:
"We need both a deeper spirituality and a more living witness. If our spirituality can reach into the depths of true prayer, then our lives will become a true witness for justice, peace and the integrity of creation, a witness that will be the framework for our prayer. From the depths of true prayer will grow a desire for peace and a longing for justice, since only God can show us the way that leads us out from the chaos of this world, and only God can give us the strength to follow that way."

If you listen to God's voice, you will be blessed when you come in and blessed when you go out. Amen.

Gordon Matthews
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