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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, 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 second story is from the time of the beginning of the Quaker movement. George Fox, the founder of the Quakers, wrote in his journal, 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."
If you listen to God's voice, you will be blessed when you come in and blessed when you go out. Amen. Gordon Matthews |