2nd Sunday after Epiphany Year B

The Rev. Melanie Lemburg The 2nd Sunday after the Epiphany-Year B January 14, 2024 Last weekend, I gathered at Honey Creek with the Diocese of Georgia’s Commission on Ministry, which is a committee required by The Episcopal Church canons whose purpose is to advise the Bishop of each diocese in matters pertaining to ministry. Last weekend, we were meeting with people who were discerning a call to ordained ministry—both the priesthood and the diaconate. I told my colleagues when we gathered that I love doing this sort of work for the same reason that I love doing pre-marital counseling: they both help me remember my first love. It is enlivening for me to work with a group of other faithful lay and clergy to try to listen to how the Holy Spirit is acting in lives of individuals and in the greater church. Our work is essentially trying to listen for God’s call among us. So I’ve been especially struck this week in our readings by the story of Eli and Samuel. Eli is an interesting character to me. He’s a priest, but it’s not clear if he is an especially good or effective priest. In fact, throughout Eli’s story in the first part of 1 Samuel, he gets more things wrong than he does right. The book opens with an exchange between Hannah, Samuel’s mother, and Eli when she comes to pray at Shiloh where Eli is in service. She is distraught and in her prayers, she begs God for a son, praying with her lips moving but no words coming out. In watching her, Eli determines that she must be drunk, so he confronts her and chastises her. When she stands up to him, he offers her God’s blessing, and not long afterward, she has Samuel, who she dedicates to the service of God. We also learn that Eli’s sons, who are also priests, are scoundrels. They send their servants to take the best meat from what has been sacrifice to God, and thus they hold God (and the people worshipping God) in contempt. Eli gets a warning that his sons are invoking the wrath of God with their behavior, but he seems unwilling or unable to curtail their behavior. After our reading for today, as events in the life of Israel unfold, Israel goes to war with the Philistines. The Philistines kill a great number of Israelites, including both of Eli’s sons, and they steal the Ark of Covenant which holds the stone tablets containing the 10 Commandments and is Israel’s most prized relic at this time. When Eli receives the news that both his sons have been killed and the ark has been stolen, he falls over and breaks his neck and dies. But our story for today, gives us a glimpse of a single shining moment in Eli’s ministry. Samuel is young--tradition tells us probably around 12--and while he has spent his entire life in the service of the Lord, he doesn’t know the Lord. The Lord calls to Samuel, and he thinks it’s Eli, so he goes to see what the old man wants from him. Eli sends him back to bed with both a patience and a gentleness that he did not exhibit with Samuel’s mother Hannah. After three different times of this, Eli finally realizes what is going on, and he teaches Samuel how to respond to the Lord saying, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” Samuel does as Eli instructs, and the Lord tells Samuel that God is about to punish Eli for the sins of his sons. In the morning, Eli presses Samuel to share what God has revealed to him, and he receives the news courageously with a fair amount of equanimity, not offering any anger toward Samuel as messenger. And here’s a spoiler alert: Samuel goes on to become a great prophet in the history of Israel, an important figure in the establishment of the monarchy, featuring in both King Saul and King David’s stories. But even Samuel has to learn how to hear God’s call in his life, and it was the fallible priest Eli who taught him. Well, that’s all great, Melanie, but what does that have to do with me or with us, today? The reason why we do the work of discernment for ordained life as a committee in the diocese is because much of the time, we need community to understand who we truly are, who God is calling us to be. Eli’s story is heartening to me because it shows that we as individuals don’t have to be good or effective in order to help people learn a little bit more about who God has created them to be, and this is the call of what it means to be together in community. We are called to hold up a mirror for each other at times when we see the giftedness of the other, or when we can discern how God may be acting in that person’s life. It’s a task that requires humility, gentleness, a willingness to listen, and great courage to risk ourselves in this endeavor. But each of us is called to do this work for each other, both inside the church and beyond. You know, I’m not sure if I would be a priest, if my mother hadn’t named something that I was already wrestling with inside, giving me a sort of blessing to begin seriously considering it. And this is not a task that is limited to ordained vocations. So this is especially important work that we can offer to the younger people among us. But we have to take the time to listen, to be curious, and to be compassionate about the things that they are passionate about. To do this truly effectively, we have to be open to perspectives different than our own, and we have to be able to reimagine the contours of our own youth alongside the benefits of wisdom and age. This is also work that we are called to both as individuals and also as a whole church. Your invitation this week is to think of a time when someone noticed something in you and named it for you in a way that helped you understand yourself different? This week, be open to looking and listening to ways God might be inviting you to share something that you see (in kindness, gentleness, humility, and courage) about someone you encounter.