{"id":1306,"date":"2012-06-26T18:06:56","date_gmt":"2012-06-26T18:06:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=776"},"modified":"2017-08-26T15:26:28","modified_gmt":"2017-08-26T19:26:28","slug":"by-marilyn-zehr-june-24-2012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/?p=1306","title":{"rendered":"A time for Silence – by Marilyn Zehr – June 24, 2012"},"content":{"rendered":"

See Archived Sermons<\/a><\/p>\n

Listen to this Sermon\u00a0<\/font><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

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Ecclesiastes 3:1-8<\/p>\n

Sermons in print are only a close approximation of the oral event of the sermon. \u00a0 Enjoy.<\/p>\n

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For everything there is a season,<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

a time for Silence, a time to speak \u2013<\/p>\n

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Most times when I compose my thoughts for a sermon, I try to do so out of a still and quiet place of prayer and with a sermon entitled, a time for silence, I figured that it may be more important than usual to find that still and quiet place.<\/p>\n

Has anyone noticed that still and quiet places are hard to come by these days?<\/p>\n

There\u2019s external noise.<\/p>\n

Out my window, I heard my neighbours doing yard work,\u00a0<\/p>\n

I heard the cars go by.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Facebook wanted my attention and the documents open on my computer would have liked me to work on them.<\/p>\n

In the hour before I started to write my sermon\u00a0<\/p>\n

I received a text from my son<\/p>\n

\u00a0an email from a friend,\u00a0<\/p>\n

a phone call from a neighbour\u00a0<\/p>\n

and I called John at work.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The newspaper on my dining room table wanted me to know about\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201chow safe Toronto is,\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cthat babies are born with addictions,\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cthat Honda really should be driven with manual transmission,\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cand that women can\u2019t have it all until more of them are making policy decisions to improve work-life balance for everyone in society.\u201d\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s only the external noise.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

And then there is the internal noise, – processing the various conversations, interactions and responsibilities \u2013 that vie for attention in my mind, heart and life.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

And then I noticed my little dog, curled up beside me, and heard her give a big sigh.\u00a0 Maybe she\u2019s in the still quiet place for which I long or maybe she simply has her own longings.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

A time for Silence and a time to speak.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

As I read this I wondered \u2013 is this text talking about people or God being silent or speaking?\u00a0 At first I presumed people were the subject\/object of this text.<\/p>\n

I presumed that the questions that I bring to this text,<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen is it time to be silent?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen is it time to speak?\u201d\u00a0 were questions for people; maybe first and foremost for me.<\/p>\n

And the more I thought about speech and silence, the more I thought about God\u00a0<\/p>\n

as the first Word \u2013 at creation and again as the Word made flesh in Jesus\u00a0<\/p>\n

and the silence of God in Gethsemane and at the cross<\/p>\n

and the silence of God in the face of tragedies like the Holocaust and currently among Syrian civilians.<\/p>\n

And the speech and silence of God and the speech and silence of people began to blur in my mind.<\/p>\n

Is there something for we mortals to glean from thinking about the speech and silence of God? \u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

God spoke a lot in the Old Testament.\u00a0<\/p>\n

God\u2019s words created seas and deserts, forests and flowers, little dogs and elephants, and tadpoles and blue herons.<\/p>\n

God\u2019s words also created humans from the dust and granted them the most powerful gift of all – speech.\u00a0 God shared some of the Divine nature by sharing speech with us and with that speech God asked Adam to name all those animals.\u00a0 What dominion.\u00a0 With speech we have the power to name.<\/p>\n

And with that speech we have the power to create.\u00a0<\/p>\n

With words, we can create moments of laughter and hope, encouragement and joy.\u00a0 But we have just as much power with speech to assault and destroy \u2013 but let\u2019s get back to God\u2019s speech for a moment.<\/p>\n

As I was saying, God spoke a lot in the Old Testament.<\/p>\n

God spoke regularly to Abraham and to Moses, to the prophets and to the people of Israel.<\/p>\n

In fact one of the core things that God said to the people of Israel \u2013 recited as the Shema regularly in Jewish faith and worship was\u00a0<\/p>\n

Hear O Israel, the Lord Our God, the Lord is One.<\/p>\n

One of God\u2019s first and primary speeches to the people was \u2013 Listen.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t, Speak, it was, Listen.\u00a0 Hear O Israel, the Lord Our God, the Lord is One.<\/p>\n

Gradually the record of God speaking to the people fades away and just when we\u2019re not sure it can be heard anymore,<\/p>\n

the Word becomes flesh and God gives us Jesus.\u00a0 And we hear again from God \u2013 this time in the form of Jesus and we hear his stories and probing questions.\u00a0 We witness his compassionate healing and his powerful naming.\u00a0 Even the wind and the waves listen to Jesus. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

But we also have a biblical record of a God who is sometimes silent.<\/p>\n

When the people of Israel tell Moses to tell God not to speak to them directly anymore, because to hear from God is too frightening, God complies.\u00a0 After this God only speaks through prophets.\u00a0 This is not to imply that the prophets were ever very pleased themselves to hear directly from God.\u00a0 Hearing from God is a frightful thing.<\/p>\n

There are also moments of profound silence in the New Testatment.<\/p>\n

When Jesus prays in Gethsemane, there is no audible response.\u00a0 On the cross, Jesus experiences the ultimate silence of God when he cries out, \u201cmy God, my God, why have you forsaken me.\u201d<\/p>\n

This cry is followed by the silence of death and then the empty tomb.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

But speech is reborn as the disciples hear again from Jesus. \u201cGo, make disciples, teach and proclaim,\u201d\u00a0 and just as words were given to creatures of the dust after the initial creation The Word is given by Jesus to his disciples so that God\u2019s recreating power might be made known.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

And those words carried surprising power for good in those early days, but it didn\u2019t take very long for even those words to become weapons if someone didn\u2019t believe in their one and only intended original meaning or the meaning assigned to them by the church.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Words to talk about God and God\u2019s recreating power have morphed significantly through the centuries and not many words, especially about God, retain their original meaning or reverence.\u00a0 In fact words and their intent in general have become suspect in a noisy word-filled society.\u00a0 There are simply so many of them. And in advertizing and political jargon where they are used more often to attempt to influence and manipulate than to simply speak truth we are right to be suspicious.<\/p>\n

And none of us is immune from this desire to use words for our own purposes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

We speak and we speak and we speak some more.\u00a0 We text, we talk, we email, we post, we rebuttal, we persuade, we contrive, we type, and we talk some more \u2013 constantly expressing ourselves.\u00a0 The Word, has become so many words that both their source and their destination has become confusing.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

On Monday, – a day that I\u2019m typically at home, I was sitting in my living room fairly early in the morning when I noticed a goldfinch fluttering at my window.\u00a0 He chirped and fluttered and pecked at the window as if he really needed to get in
\n.\u00a0 It was confusing.\u00a0 What was more confusing was how persistent he was \u2013 every few minutes he was back, chirping pecking and fluttering as if he needed to get in.\u00a0 Sometimes he sat for a bit on the ledge to regroup \u2013 then he\u2019d fly at the large hallway window, but soon he\u2019d be back at the living room window, chirping and pecking and fluttering.\u00a0 At first, I thought he was trying to get to the orchids that I had sitting just inside the window, so I moved them out of his way, but the behaviour continued.\u00a0 In fact he persisted all through Monday, and as far as I know most of Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday though I only observed his behaviour on those days early in the morning when I was still home.\u00a0 I was starting to really worry about him, so, without assuming I\u2019d actually get an answer I googled \u2013 \u201cwhy a goldfinch seems to be trying to get in my window\u201d and I actually received what appeared to be a plausible explanation.<\/p>\n

Goldfinches are territorial and a goldfinch that sees its reflection in glass will persistently and aggressively try to chase the \u201cother\u201d bird away, not knowing that it is squawking at its own reflection.\u00a0 This dear bird had become confused.\u00a0 It didn\u2019t understand the true source of its disturbance or enemy and so nattered away for days at its own reflection.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

In a world of noisy words, words that we\u2019re not likely to trust anyway, how do we know when the words that we are using are simply a nattering away at our own reflection?<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Maybe we need to perch and regroup for a second and focus on something else \u2013 like the speech and silence of God for a moment.<\/p>\n

Given the brief synopsis of the biblically recorded speech and silence of God that I gave earlier in my sermon to take a new posture and cock our heads and listen for either the speech or silence of God is no easy matter.<\/p>\n

Step one, we need to take our eyes off our own reflection or whatever else has disturbed us.<\/p>\n

Second, we need to be still.<\/p>\n

Third, we\u2019ll need to listen to something other than the sounds all around or inside our own minds.\u00a0<\/p>\n

None of these steps is easy by the way (and probably goes as much against our own nature as it would have gone against the goldfinches\u2019 nature).<\/p>\n

And Fourth \u2013 the hardest of all \u2013<\/p>\n

we\u2019ll need to be prepared to hear something or not from a God who may choose to speak or may choose to remain silent.<\/p>\n

Whether God chooses to speak or chooses to remain silent is frankly up to God. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

However, a couple notes of clarification,<\/p>\n

The silence of God is not necessarily the absence of God.\u00a0 Just as the silence of a loved one is not the same as the absence of a loved one \u2013 and silence can mean so many things \u2013 from anger to rich contentment to passionate love\u00a0 \u2013 silence is powerful.<\/p>\n

The speech of God is powerful in a different way \u2013 if the prophets are our guides the voice of God is a fearful thing and who would believe us if we try to tell someone we have heard from God.\u00a0 A hearing of the voice of God requires discernment, usually communally, so that together we can test the contents and fruits of what we\u2019ve heard.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

But fundamentally before we get to discern either the speech or silence of God we have first to be silent ourselves.\u00a0 And we\u2019re not very good at it.\u00a0 We\u2019ve become unaccustomed to it.\u00a0 From the moment God gifted Adam with breath and speech and the dominion of naming and the risen Christ told his disciples to Go, teach and proclaim we\u2019ve been so busy doing our job that we keep forgetting that our job is first to listen and then to speak.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

And if we think God is being Silent, maybe it\u2019s a silence of not getting a Word in edgewise, or maybe it\u2019s the silence of hope that if the silence is long enough and loud enough we will eventually all share the desire to hear deeply enough that we will all pause at the same time and when God chooses to speak again there will be more than a few persons listening. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

There is a time for Silence\u2026.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n

i <\/sup>Much of this sermon was informed\/influenced by a reading of Barbara Brown Taylor\u2019s Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching, in a small paperback entitled When God is Silent, published in 1998.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

See Archived Sermons Listen to this Sermon\u00a0 \u00a0 Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 Sermons in print are only a close approximation of the oral event of the sermon. \u00a0 Enjoy. \u00a0 For everything there is a season, \u00a0 a time for Silence, a time to speak \u2013 \u00a0 Most times when I compose my thoughts for a sermon, I try to do so out of a still and quiet place of prayer and with a sermon entitled, a time for silence, I figured…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sermons-a-worship-audio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1306"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1306\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3932,"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1306\/revisions\/3932"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tumc.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}