Are you sometimes hard of hearing? And do you ever blame the speaker for not speaking clearly? My wife, Calder, and I have a running joke about who mumbles and who is hard of hearing. She loves to say I sound like I’ve got marbles in my mouth and I’ll answer that she just needs to listen! Sometimes the joke turns seriously devotional and we talk about hearing God.
Do you ever feel, as we do, that God is speaking with marbles in God’s mouth? That the Word of God is but a garbled whisper, that we do indeed see God “…through a glass, darkly” (1 Cor 13:12). Jesus said often, after a parable or challenging teaching, “Let anyone with ears to hear listen!” (Lk 8:8).
How can we hear God? We sing “…how silently the wondrous gift of God is given,” that “…God imparts to human hearts the wonders of God’s heaven.” Where and how is God whispering the gift of the Christ?
Perhaps above all we can hear the silent advent of God by listening to our lives (as Frederick Buechner has so eloquently said), listening to our loves, and listening to what Sarah Bessey calls our “tinies” 0r “littles.”
First, our lives with all their pain and pleasure, all trials and triumphs, are the arena of God’s loving us into life. Paul wrote “… it is God who is at work in you… “ (Phil 2:13). John Wesley spoke of prevenient grace, the love of God which goes before us, before our faith, before our hearing. When we finally hear the still, small voice of God we can be pleasantly stunned to find that God was there all along, loving us, liberating us, living oh so silently right in the middle of our noisy celebrations and loud toys and boisterous hilarity. But in order to hear that voice we need sacramental sonnets of God’s song sung softly, in pianissimo, in tender tones of love. And we’ve got to be silent to hear that song.
Second, those sacramental sonnets are most often embedded in our human relationships. Our families, friends, even our competitors, indeed, according to Jesus even our enemies can become the vocal cords through which God can speak the birth, the life, the presence of God’s Christ. What gift do we hear so silently at Advent, Christmas, at Easter, or on Pentecost? We hear the Word to the Shepherds, “…to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior” (Lk 2:11). And the Savior given so silently to us and to all humankind is the King of love; if the obtuse notion of Jesus’ divinity means anything at all in the flesh and blood of our earthly lives it means that He, Jesus, is love. For “God is love” (1 Jn 4:16). And so it is with our fellow travelers that we can hear that silent gift as we seek to “…live in love, as Christ loved us…” (Eph 5:2).
Third, we can hear God in our “littles.” Sarah Bessey uses the endearing term “tinies” to refer to her children but it can be applied as well to the small sacraments of God’s voice in our lives. Children know the value of little things, like the pine straw in the picture of one of our sons. Parents often spend for a wonderful toy only to find that their children take more delight in the box as a fort, doll house, or hiding place! Calder and I have lovingly filled our home and yard with pictures, music, coffee cups, furniture, rugs, dogs—especially dogs!, lights, open windows, our little travel trailer we call “Li’l Isaac,” our vehicle “Georgie Girl,” and occasionally a visit; these “littles” say to us again and again and again that God comes to us, abides with us, speaks love to and through us.
And, by the powerfully quiet whispers of the Spirit, even hard of hearing folks like us can know that “…where meek souls will receive Him, still the dear Christ enters in.”