When God speaks to us, we need community to help sort it out. When we hear God’s Word for us today, we need others to help us recognize that Word and understand how to respond to it. Samuel didn’t even realize that it was God calling him. Eli had to help Samuel make sense of his experience. God blesses us with community in order to sort these things out, to share what we thought we heard, and to help us understand God’s call for us from a different perspective. I met a family once who was going from church to church trying to find the place where they belonged. Everywhere they went, they had a list of questions that they would ask the pastor. What did the pastor believe about women clergy… what did the pastor believe about abortion… what did the pastor believe about homosexuality…. But they never stayed at any one church because no one ever passed their test. None of the pastors had the exact combination of opinions and beliefs that mirrored their own. No one believed just like they believed, and so they kept searching. But Christian community isn’t meant to just tell us what we already believe. Christian community is meant to root us firmly in the ground of our faith heritage. And Christian community is meant to question us, challenge us, and learn from us. Community is our tool to sort through our moments of confusion and to help each of us clearly hear God’s call upon our lives. Many of you’ve heard me tell about the first time I felt God calling me to ministry. I was a sophomore in high school. Our little church in Longview was always struggling to find enough people and resources and time to do all that we felt called to do. One Sunday the Sunday School Superintendent announced in church that we needed someone to teach the pre-school class. She said that she knew that God was calling someone to take on that job. Someone there that day was hearing God’s call to be a Sunday School teacher. And suddenly I felt like there was a spotlight on me. I felt this powerful sense that I was that person that she was talking about. I was hearing God’s call for me to teach that class. When I timidly approached the Sunday School Superintendent after church and told her that I might be the person to teach the class, clearly she hadn’t expected a teenager to volunteer. But after a moment’s thought, she gratefully accepted my offer to teach, and I found myself ministering for the first time that I ever realized it. If she’d never made that announcement, if she hadn’t seemed to sure that God was calling someone there in that moment, maybe I wouldn’t have felt so convicted and convinced that I had to answer that call. It takes community to help us to recognize God’s call upon our lives. Members of a community may not all agree. But we listen for God, and we listen to one another. We help each other to recognize the movement and call of God in our lives.

God speaks to us in our circumstances. God’s Word is only relevant… if we hear some word that has nothing to do with anything, then it’s not God talking; because God’s Word is always and only about what matters. There are no angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin questions for God. There are only questions about life and meaning and where we are right now. The story of Samuel’s call begins by saying that “the Word of the Lord was rare in those days.” They didn’t hear God speaking to them in their lives and times. God’s Word was contained only in stories and teachings from the past. In Samuel’s day, they’d grown unaccustomed to hearing what God had to say to them in the present tense. God’s Word was just a history lesson. God’s Word was about old news, not about current events. In Samuel’s day they didn’t expect God’s Word to be about them, their lives, and their circumstances. The same can probably be said about us today. When we talk about the Word of God, too often we’re thinking about history and not about current events. Too often we study Scripture with an eye for how to apply ancient lessons, rather than listening for the Word that God is speaking to us right here and now. In United Methodist Churches we honor every Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend by designating this Sunday as Human Relations Day. Human Relations Day is meant to remind us of the right of all God’s children to realize their potential as human beings in relationship with each other. We intend to honor each and every life, and the lessons we may learn from one another. But just like Eli, sometimes it takes the Church a while to catch on. Like Eli, sometimes the Church doesn’t quite believe just whom God may be speaking to and speaking through and speaking on behalf of. Women have been the majority in church pews for centuries. I bet if we took a count this morning, we’d find that there are more women here than men. But in the Methodist part of our United Methodist tradition, we didn’t begin to conceive that God might call women into ordained ministry until 1956. Before that time, Methodist women who heard God’s call to ordained ministry were told by the church, “Go back to sleep. You didn’t hear what you thought you heard.” The Methodist tradition has been richly blessed by the gifts and presence of African American Methodists from the very beginning of the denomination. Yet prior to the Civil War, the Methodist Church remained largely silent on the moral issues of slavery, because it wasn’t politically palatable. Even after the war when the northern and southern branches of the denomination were finally reunited, they established a separate, segregated conference for Black Methodist churches. It wasn’t until 1968 that the denomination was formally integrated, and it wasn’t until the year 2000 that the United Methodist Church formally apologized for our responsibility and culpability in the sin of slavery. Black Methodists were calling for us to repent of our racism for decades, but the church turned a deaf ear. Up until three years ago, when Black Methodists appealed for the Church to own up to and address the sins of racism, the Church told them to go back to sleep; it wasn’t God’s voice they were hearing calling us to repentance, they said. I’ve met hundreds of United Methodists who feel called to the ordained ministry, but who’re afraid they’ll never be able to answer that call because they’re gay, lesbian, or bisexual. I had a friend in seminary who went to his final interview for ordination in the West Virginia Annual Conference, after it had already been announced where he would serve in his first appointment. And he came out to them in that interview, and they said to him, “Go back to sleep. It can’t have been God’s voice you heard calling.” Another friend of mine in seminary went back to her annual conference in Nebraska, and she told them that she still felt passionately her call to be an ordained United Methodist pastor even though she was a lesbian. And just like Eli, the Church leaders she spoke with rolled over and said to her, “Go back to sleep. It was just a dream. It wasn’t God’s voice that you heard.” Sometimes it takes the Church a while to catch on. Sometimes it takes persistence on the part of those whom God is calling, before the Church recognizes the work of God in their lives. Sometimes the Church is slow to recognize that God’s Word isn’t contained in history, or in tradition, or in stories of the past, until God’s Word takes flesh in the lives of people of faith right here and now. It takes the Church a while before we recognize that God calls whomever God chooses, and our human prejudice about gender and race and sexual orientation don’t bind God.

Now is no time for the Church to roll over and go back to sleep. Still today there are political efforts to undue the some of the remedies for racism in this country. Still today people are judged by the color of their skin, and excluded because of the gender of the person whom they love, while the content of their hearts is ignored. Today people are preparing for war, so this is no time for the Church to roll over and go back to sleep, because the voice of God is calling. Martin Luther King, Jr. said that God’s promises would be realized when we saw justice on the streets, in our stores, and on our playgrounds. King looked forward to the day prophesied when the lion would lie down with the lamb, when we would wage peace, when black children and white children would play together, when there would be an end to warfare for the sake of national ideology, when justice would roll down like waters and righteousness like and ever flowing stream. The voice of God is calling. It’s time we woke up and listened for what God has to say to us today. Amen.