For the past few years, almost always we have become a voice-based society. People talk to their cars or cars talk to the driver. If you have a GPS, it will talk to you and tell you how to get to a particular place. If you have a smart phone, you have apps to access Siri, which means in Norwegian “beautiful woman who will lead you to victory.” Siri is the voice controlled program that lets us tell our handheld electronic devices how to talk to us telling us about the weather or what is in the news. The latest game technology is also “voice-powered.” I had read that X-Box 1 and X-Box Kinect have both gathered gamers and go-getter exercisers through voice-activated systems. We can all now play our video games or access our video exercise routines just by using our voices.
My brother-in-law tells me that in the U.S., people have push buttons–push button to open the garage door, push button to start the car, push button to wash clothes. While here in the Philippines, it is voice activated. We just say to the helper to open the gate and he or she runs to open it; we tell the labandera to wash our clothes and the next day, we have it, washed, ironed and hanged; we say we need coffee, and someone brings it to us.
But this is not new. In the creation story, God spoke, and the earth took shape and was inhabited with life. God spoke, and human beings, male and female, were made the grace notes of creation.
In the story of transfiguration, a mountaintop moment, a moment when the Voice was heard again saying that Jesus is the Son of God. It was a Shekinah, a moment when God came to dwell in the flesh of Jesus Christ in front of a few specially selected witnesses. For Peter, this was the moment when he realized that there was no element of doubt remaining in his faith.
The Voice on that mountaintop told the disciples to “listen to him, meaning Jesus.” This brings us to the point I want to share with you: Discipleship is “listening to Jesus.” To move forward in faith is to listen to his voice, the Voice that changes lives, the Voice that transfigures sinners into saints, the Voice that heals the broken-hearted and makes the wounded whole; the Voice that raises the dead to life.
And this listening to the Voice is not passive. Voice-activation living is active engagement moving us forward in obedience and trust. According to one preacher, “It is listening until the day dawns and the morning star rises in our hearts.”
There are many ways through which we can listen to the Voice. We can listen to the Voice when we pray. Many people today think that prayer is a matter of “asking” Jesus to solve our problems, to tweak our lives, answer all our questions and make life easy. But prayer is opening ourselves to the Voice to tell us what we are to do. It is a time to just be quiet and surrender to the mysterious. It can also be the time when we sing our hymns, listen to the scriptures read and interpreted that we can hear the Voice. Also, when we eat of the bread and drink from the cup, we hope to experience the presence of the Voice.
The problem is when we are so caught up with the little things in worship such as the mistakes we see in the Order of Worship, or the way the person lights the candle that we forget to listen to the Voice.
I am not exempted to this. There are times when I want the worship to be perfect as what we had been taught in the seminary. There is nothing wrong with this. However, when I get caught up in making it so perfect, I miss why we come to worship and to listen to the Voice.
On the other hand, we also hear the Voice in the valleys when we see people in need. When the disciples went down the mountain, they saw people waiting for them. That is why we really have to tune in to that Voice in spite of the things that are going on around.
There is a story told of an old man and his grandson who were walking down a business street in a downtown district. As they walked along, the grandfather suddenly stopped, turned his head slightly, and tweaked his ear. After a moment he said to his grandson, “Follow me.”
They slowly moved from where they were standing to a small planter box next to a sidewalk café. The planter was filled with various seasonal plants, but as the old man gently pushed back the flowers, behind them was revealed a small bird’s nest filled with baby chicks, their chirping almost indistinguishable from the din of lunchtime diners and people on the sidewalk.
No one seemed to pay any attention to the old man, his grandson or the little nest, but the grandson was amazed. After watching for a few minutes and then moving away the little boy looked up at his grandfather. “Grandpa, how did you hear the birds? There is so much noise, so much happening, how could you hear?”
Without saying a word, the old man took several coins from his pocket and tossed them on the ground. With the tinkling of the coins on the sidewalk it seemed everything came to a stop. People turned around. Diners stopped eating to look their way. Several almost seemed to want to reach down and pick up the dropped coins. Then as quickly as it had happened — everything went back to the way it was. That’s when the old man spoke, “It’s all in what you are listening for, my child, it’s all in what you are listening for.”
Today, we are still called to a voice-activated faith. We need to listen to the Voice. The voices we hear may not be declaring, “This is my Son,” but they are declaring “these are my sons and daughters.” Some of the voices we hear may say, “I need help.” Or “my child needs medicine.” Or “I need you to say something about the wrong that you see.” Those are all voice-activated calls to a faith that demand a faith response.
Can we keep our ears “tuned” to the most recent decibel of need? The Frances Havergal hymn, written when she was 36, says it beautifully: “Lord, speak to me, that I may speak in living echoes of thy tone; as you have sought, so let me seek your erring children lost and lone.” To be holy is to trust The Voice. It will never take us in the wrong directions, will never lead us astray, and can be trusted with our life.
In George Bernard Shaw’s play on the life of Joan of Arc, there is a scene in which the archbishop and King Charles are interrogating Joan of Arc. The archbishop asks: “How do you know you are right?” Joan answers, “I always know. My voices—”
The king interrupts: “Oh your voices, your voices. Why don’t the voices come to me? I’m the king, not you.”’ Joan responds: “They do come to you; but you do not hear them. You have not sat in the field in the evening listening for them. When the angelus rings you cross yourself and have done with it; but if you prayed from your heart, and listened to the thrilling of the bells in the air after they stop ringing, you would hear the voices as well as I do.” (Bernard Shaw, Saint Joan: A Chronicle Play in Six Scenes and an Epilogue (New York: Brentano’s, 1931), 85-86.)
It’s about time we start “hearing voices.” That is what discipleship is, The Voice-activated life, the life that takes you “from glory to glory.”
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