Text: 1 Samuel 3: 1-11
Earlier this spring, we invited everyone at Immanuel to share with us some of your favorite hymns and songs. And this summer, we are going to highlight one of those pieces each week during our series: Sing! Play! Summer!
As the pace of activities slows down just a bit, we want to go back to those familiar songs that ground us in our faith.
We want to learn some new songs that will help us continue to grow in our faith.
And just as importantly, we want to have some fun and play and relax and let our spirits be re-energized by God and rest and recreation.
One of the pieces of our Sing! Play! Summer! Series is actually a six-week guide to summer fun and faith that we want to offer you and your families. It has some devotions, lists of related activities, new songs to learn, and ideas for making this the best summer ever!
You don’t have to do all six weeks in a row, but you could! Simply go at your own pace, enjoy this summer with your kids or grandkids or niblings or neighbors, and be sure to check out our church website for audio versions of the songs included!
Our very first song of the summer is actually the number one favorite song of the people of Immanuel: Here I Am, Lord!
This is also one of MY favorite songs and so we thought we’d kick off our summer series with the best of the lot 😊
Here I Am, Lord was written by Dan Schutte in 1981 and he based his work on two different call stories in scripture: Isaiah’s call in chapter 6 and Samuel’s call that we just heard a few minutes ago.
In fact, we were originally going to use the Isaiah story… but we are going to save that one for another Sunday coming up very soon!
The verses of the song remind us that the creator of everything in this world: the snow, the rain, the sea, the skies, the stars… this Creator God is not far removed from us, but hears every cry of God’s people. God feels our pain and weeps with love for us.
And God will not leave us in our despair and our sin, God actively works to save us! He provides bread, light, life itself… but… and most importantly… God does so through people like you and me.
Mr. Schutte comes out of the Jesuit tradition in the Catholic church and actually wrote this hymn for a mass for the ordination of Deacons in the church.
As he described the words of the chorus, he wanted to capture that sense that we as God’s people, aren’t always so sure about answering that call.
He writes: “In all those stories, all of those people God was calling to be prophets have expressed in one way or another their humanness or their self-doubt.”
So he adapted the sure-footed response from the mass to the words that perhaps we all find ourselves speaking:
Here I am, Lord. Is it I, Lord?
Are you actually speaking… to me?
The chorus of this hymn takes us to that call that keeps coming again and again to the young boy Samuel in the middle of the night.
Samuel serves in the temple with the priest Eli and that night is charged with the duty of keeping the lamps burning until dawn in the part of the temple where the ark of the covenant was kept.
As we are reminded each winter when the peace light from Bethlehem comes through, it is not easy to keep a lamp burning over night. You worry the oil will go out or the wick will burn through.
So Samuel is sleeping there on his mat in the temple so that he can get up periodically and check on the lamp.
And there in the night… in the dark… God speaks to him.
We don’t know how old Samuel might be in this part of the story, a boy is all the scriptures say, but he has spent his entire life in the temple. His mother Hannah was barren and prayed with all her might for a child. When her prayer was answered she brought the child before God and left him in the care of Eli, the priest and Samuel grew up in the temple, serving the Lord.
But I think too often we focus on how Samuel heard his call and forget the details of what that call was TO.
You see, Eli had two sons: Hophni and Phinehas, and they were the worst pastor’s kids you have ever met.
When people came to offer sacrifices, some of the meat was always given to the priests for their service. But the boys wouldn’t wait until the sacrifice was over… but they would grab a chunk of the choicest meat right off the fire.
Today, it would be like if the pastor’s kid stopped the offering plates as they were being passed, took out the largest bills they could find for themselves, and then allowed everything to proceed. And they did it with threat of violence.
Not only that, but they also sexually harassed the women who served at the temple.
Samuel would have grown up, seeing the actions of these two young men, and likely would have been troubled in his heart by their example.
Maybe he even cried out himself, asking God to do something about it.
Well, God heard the cries of the people and God promised this injustice would end.
And God called Samuel in the night and gave him a vision of what he was supposed to do in response. Of the kind of leader he was supposed to become.
As a junior in college, I was convinced that I was going to be a meteorologist when I grew up. But I was also in leadership with the Religious Life Council at Simpson and had been involved in ministry through my local church. One afternoon, the chaplain called me into his office and invited me and a few other students to an event called, “Exploration.”
It was a conference for young people who felt like they were hearing a call to ministry – a place to explore what that meant for their lives.
I don’t remember much about that gathering, except for one worship service.
Bishop Minerva Carcaño was preaching… in fact, she might not have even been a bishop at that point… and before her message she read aloud for us the call story that Tony just shared with us in our scripture reading.
Bishop Carcaño is Latina and what I simply can’t get out of my mind is her calling out, over and over again through the scripture and her message that name in her gentle dialect:
“Samuel! Samuel!” (heard phonetically as Sam-well!)
Hearing her say that name in such a different dialect helped me to hear the entire passage in a new way. It was like it struck a new chord and snuck into every corner of my mind.
The entire drive home from that event, I thought about all of the people throughout my life who had been calling me into a certain type of ministry:
First it was my pastor, Bruce Ough, who is now a bishop of the church. He called me into his office after I gave the sermon for the youth sunrise service at my church and told me I was going to be a pastor someday.
Then it was my youth leader, Todd Rogers, who kept lifting me up into leadership and preparing me for a pastoral role, whether I wanted to accept it or not.
That voice of God had come through teachers and fellow students who had been gently encouraging me to consider starting down the path of pastoral ministry even as I ran in the other direction.
I realized that like Samuel, I thought I was simply hearing the voice of my pastor or my teacher.
I had never stopped to consider before that weekend that perhaps it wasn’t just a human voice after all….
Perhaps God was speaking to me and inviting me into a particular role in the world!
The reality is, God doesn’t just speak to people being called into professional ministry or to prophets from the Old Testament.
God speaks to all of us.
God is looking around at this world that you live and move and breathe in and God hears the cries of the people around us:
The fear and anger surrounding gun violence and mass shootings.
The reality of climate change and its impact upon our neighbors… especially farmers and those along rivers in the Midwest right now.
The impact not only of mental illness, but also desperation because of the lack of resources to respond.
The sense of isolation and abandonment experienced by LGBT youth who are turned away from their families.
The physical hunger of our neighbors young and old.
The crisis of desperation that leads some women to seek to have an abortion.
The stress upon the lives of our youngest people that impacts their ability to learn in a classroom.
The realities of addiction that lead so many to end up on the streets or in our prisons.
These are the cries that God hears. These are some of the people for whom God, out of great love is weeping.
And these are all places where I have seen and heard that you as people of Immanuel have heard God calling you to do something.
They are the things keeping you up at night…
Nudging at you…
Tugging at your heartstrings…
And friends… when God starts calling, God doesn’t stop!
I see so many of you answering God’s call through your work and your volunteer time.
You show up faithfully in classrooms and work with kids outside of school.
You are present with vulnerable and hurting folks at hospitals and in prisons and in shelters.
You are organizing with others to make an impact upon this world, to put your prayers into action.
You are present and reach out to that person who most needed to hear that they are loved by God.
I’m so proud of the way that you, the people of Immanuel, have already said,
“Here I am! I will go!”
I think it’s the reason that this song is the top of our list for our favorite songs to sing together.
But I also want to say… we all have fear and doubt and uncertainty about responding to God’s call. Every single one of us has asked that question,
Is it I, Lord?
Do you really mean me?
Why do you think I am capable of this?
if you are feeling that nudge, that calling to do something, and you don’t know quite what comes next… I have two things I want you to remember:
First: the advice from Eli to Samuel – Take it to the Lord. Pray and tell God that you are listening and you are ready to hear. Ask what God wants you to do.
But second: you aren’t in this alone. And just like Samuel had Eli, I’d love to sit down and chat with you and listen so that maybe I can help get you connect with other people who are already engaged in this work as you learn what it might means to say yes.
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