Speak Lord, for your servant is listening

Sermon for Epiphany 2

READING: 1 Samuel 3.1–20]

GOSPEL READING: John 1.43–51

“Speak Lord, for your servant is listening” says Samuel, guided by the priest Eli.

The season of Epiphany is a time to remind ourselves that the gift of Christ is for all people.

Today’s readings share the story of how three people Samuel, Philip and Nathaniel respond to the call of God.

I would like us to consider this notion of being called by God.

I wonder:

How does God make his gift of salvation known to us?

How do we know when God is speaking to us?

How do we respond to the call.

Some of our fellow Christians speak of the moment when, in their words, “they became a Christian.”

In the case of the boy Samuel – God was speaking to him directly –but it needed Eli to explain this. Do we sometimes need such guidance to discern?

As an aside the relationship between Samuel and Eli came about because Samuel had been placed in his care by his mother Hannah.

She had conceived Samuel after praying at the temple following many years of infertility (and Hannah would go on to have five more children).

In the case of the call of Philip, it seems there was immediate recognition of the special nature of Jesus, so much so that he rushed to Nathaniel who took a bit more encouraging. “Come and see” says Philip. Nathaniel encounters Jesus and, and at that instant, like a log being split by an axe, the Messianic secret is revealed to him.  We might categorise Philip and Nathaniel as being in “the when I became a Christian” camp.

The reality for many of us is that we are not in the “when I became a Christian” camp.

We should not feel inadequate as a result, for as I shall show, we are in very good company.

For some, our journey of faith has perhaps been there from the start of our lives. or at least as long as we can remember.

For others it has been a more gradual development with stops and starts on the way.

I’d like to share the story of one man’s journey. Born in the early 1920s and brought up just north of Liverpool.

His father not a believer but mother sent her children to the local Methodist Sunday School. At school a friend suggested he joined him for local confirmation classes at the local evangelical church – a clear example of a Philip “Come and See” moment. He tagged along, he admitted later, largely because the group included a pretty girl and like others in the group didn’t take the classes very seriously.

The Confirmation service was actually held down the road at the Anglo Catholic church St. Faith’s.

St Faith’s was in fact only a moderately high church. It made a big impression on him. Encouraged by his elder sister, he later took his first communion at St. Faith’s – without his parents present.

At his funeral many years later the preacher recalled:

“The colour, order and beauty of the Catholic tradition of the Church of England captured his soul as a young man. He received his religion through the eyes quite as much as through the ears. His faith was a faith of all the senses.”

The war, a Military Cross, a return to Oxford University after hostilities had ended and a first class degree. What was he to do next?

A brother-in-law who had trained as a priest at Westcott House now stepped in.

He arranged for the Principal of Westcott, who would shortly become the Bishop of Manchester and was visiting Oxford, to see Robert Runcie. He found Runcie recovering from an all-night party. The conversation went on for some time with Runcie trying hard to remember just why he did want to be ordained. The Principal had a sure touch and ended by saying “I think you would probably do very well for a parish in Manchester.”

Runcie went to Westcott because, in his words, it was the easiest thing to do. “I can always get out of it.” he said.

He, as you will know served as Archbishop of Canterbury from 1980 to 1991.

Graham James, the Bishop of Norwich, preached at his funeral and said this about Runcie:

“Sermons were laboured over, words weighed for both truth and impact. They were to reflect the attractiveness of God. Robert wanted people to be drawn in their humanity to the God in whose image they were made. He always saw God in them as well as the flaws and failures that make human beings seem so frequently ridiculous. It is this incongruity between our status as children of God and our vanity and foolishness that was the source of so much of his humour. That was why he was so patient with a fallen world and a defective church. He could never be a recruit for the single issue fanatic or the moralising majority. His sense of proportion frequently irritated them.”

Like many Archbishops, there are many stories and anecdotes about Robert Runcie. I do recommend you listen to him on Desert Island disks with Sue Lawley, in 1989.

I’ll put the link to this programme in this sermon which you will find on the website later in the week:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p009mf91

Runcie’s whimsical sense of humour manifested to the very end when, shortly before his death, he urged the Church’s leaders to not to take themselves too seriously:

“A sense of the sacred” he said “without a sense of humour becomes leaden” – a mantra that I believe we try to follow at the United Benefice.

What then are we to take from the responses to the call of God by Samuel, by Philip, by Nathaniel and by Robert Runcie?

How can we keep at the forefront of our mind that God calls us too?

That God gives us the power to become his children.

With this knowledge, how can this shape of lives for the next week and beyond?

The Feast of Epiphany recalls the journey of the Magi. It’s is a good time to look back on our own journey of faith. This coming week, if you are in a position to do this, as part of this Epiphany season, can I suggest you take 30 minutes with a pencil and paper, and write down the names of all those who have played a “Come and see” or a “pointed the way” role in your journey of faith.

Pray for them and give thanks.

Consider how your life has changed over the last year.

And the opportunities for your faith to deepen this year. (And here I make a plug for this week’s Bible Study on Wednesday at 1.30pm when we shall be looking at the first seven chapters of 1 Samuel)

And then contemplate in prayer two questions:

“How is my faith in 2021, this call of Jesus going to make a difference to my life?”

And

“How is my faith going to make a difference to my neighbours’ lives?”