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Psalm 29 1 Ascribe to the Lord, you gods, 2 Ascribe to the Lord the glory due his Name; 3 The voice of the Lord is upon the waters; 4 The voice of the Lord is a powerful voice; 5 The voice of the Lord breaks the cedar trees; 6 He makes Lebanon skip like a calf, 7 The voice of the Lord splits the flames of fire; 8 The voice of the Lord makes the oak trees writhe 9 And in the temple of the Lord all are crying, “Glory!” 10 The Lord sits enthroned above the flood; 11 The Lord shall give strength to his people; This year, Monday Matters will focus on wisdom conveyed in the treasures of the book of Psalms. We’ll look at the psalms read in church before Monday Matters comes to your screen. |
Have you heard the voice of the Lord?
When people tell me that they heard God talk to them, I have a variety of reactions. I can be skeptical. Are you sure? Have you been working too hard? Need some sleep? I might consider psychiatric referrals. I can be jealous that I’ve never heard the voice they describe. The cynic in me can assume they’re trying to ratify a personal agenda by claiming God told them to do something. Our politics seems to be full of that these days. As Anne Lamott has noted, we can safely assume we’ve created God in our own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people we do.
And sometimes I think: “That is simply amazing that this holy event happened to you.”
Maybe you can tell that all this talk about hearing the voice of God is a spiritual growth opportunity for me. I got to thinking about the voice of the Lord when I reflected on the psalm heard in church yesterday (included above). The psalm speaks about the power of that voice, how it can break cedar trees, split flames of fire, shake the wilderness, make oak trees writhe, strip the forests bare. Yikes. Where do we experience that kind of power in the voice of God? And if it is there for us to experience, is it always as dramatic as this psalm makes it out to be?
I commend to you a column written by David Brooks, printed in the N Y Times on December 19 entitled: The Shock of Faith: It’s nothing like I thought it would be. His evolving relationship with the Holy One was not conveyed with wilderness shattering, tree stripping force. Rather, he describes a gradual, unfolding process, with quiet and unsuspecting moments of epiphany. A subway ride where he looked at fellow passengers, recognizing each had a soul and deducing that there was a higher source of all that soul-ness. He describes revelation that came to him on a mountain hike, when the voice of the Lord was heard through the glory of nature. Not the hurricane force voice of Psalm 29. More like the still small voice, the sound of sheer silence which Elijah heard in his encounter with God on the holy mountain. (Read the story in I Kings 19.)
I was thinking of where the voice of the Lord came in the life of Jesus. On occasion, we read that God’s voice sounded to bystanders like indecipherable thunder, though Jesus got the message. Since yesterday we observed the baptism of Jesus, we begin the season of Epiphany by hearing the voice that came from heaven at the Jordan River, a voice that said: You are my beloved. It’s quite similar to the heavenly voice heard on the last Sunday of this season, when Jesus is transfigured in Stephen Spielberg special effects mountaintop glory. The heavenly voice speaks of Jesus’ belovedness.
Henri Nouwen zoomed in on that voice from heaven when he wrote his beautiful book called Life of the Beloved. It’s written for a secular friend to explain Nouwen’s faith. The book is centered on the voice Jesus heard in baptism. Nouwen claims we can hear that voice as well. He wrote to his friend: “All I want to say to you is “You are the Beloved,” and all I hope is that you can hear these words as spoken to you with all the tenderness and force that love can hold. My only desire is to make these words reverberate in every corner of your being – “You are the Beloved”.
Nouwen recognizes that we are surrounded by competing voices: “It certainly is not easy to hear that voice in a world filled with voices that shout: You are no good, you are ugly; you are worthless; you are despicable, you are nobody—unless you can demonstrate the opposite.”
He reassures his reader: “Every time you listen with great attentiveness to the voice that calls you the Beloved, you will discover within yourself a desire to hear that voice longer and more deeply. It is like discovering a well in the desert. Once you have touched wet ground, you want to dig deeper.”
We may not hear God speaking to us in the voice of James Earl Jones, as much as I would like that. But God’s voice is there for us, as David Brooks found out. We can hear it in the most ordinary places, like a subway car. We can hear it in nature, maybe a morning walk on the beach or in the woods.
Paradoxically, we can hear that voice as we address the suffering of the world. For those of us who swim in the Christian stream, we hear that voice in scripture, in worship, in community, in sacrament. In Epiphany, we are reminded that we find that voice in Jesus himself, the word made flesh, God speaking to us of a love from which we cannot be separated. That voice has power, the power to change our hearts.
Listen this week. Can you hear that voice speaking directly to you, speaking of your belovedness?
-Jay Sidebotham
