The Second Sunday after the Epiphany-The Rev Melanie Lemburg
The Rev. Melanie Lemburg
The 2nd
Sunday after the Epiphany-Year B
January 14, 2024
Last weekend, I gathered at Honey Creek
with the Diocese of Georgia’s Commission on Ministry, which is a committee required
by The Episcopal Church canons whose purpose is to advise the Bishop of each
diocese in matters pertaining to ministry.
Last weekend, we were meeting with people who were discerning a call to
ordained ministry—both the priesthood and the diaconate. I told my colleagues when we gathered that I
love doing this sort of work for the same reason that I love doing pre-marital
counseling: they both help me remember
my first love. It is enlivening for me
to work with a group of other faithful lay and clergy to try to listen to how
the Holy Spirit is acting in lives of individuals and in the greater
church. Our work is essentially trying
to listen for God’s call among us.
So I’ve been especially struck this week
in our readings by the story of Eli and Samuel.
Eli is an interesting character to me.
He’s a priest, but it’s not clear if he is an especially good or effective
priest. In fact, throughout Eli’s story
in the first part of 1 Samuel, he gets more things wrong than he does
right. The book opens with an exchange
between Hannah, Samuel’s mother, and Eli when she comes to pray at Shiloh where
Eli is in service. She is distraught and
in her prayers, she begs God for a son, praying with her lips moving but no
words coming out. In watching her, Eli
determines that she must be drunk, so he confronts her and chastises her. When she stands up to him, he offers her God’s
blessing, and not long afterward, she has Samuel, who she dedicates to the
service of God. We also learn that Eli’s
sons, who are also priests, are scoundrels.
They send their servants to take the best meat from what has been
sacrifice to God, and thus they hold God (and the people worshipping God) in
contempt. Eli gets a warning that his
sons are invoking the wrath of God with their behavior, but he seems unwilling
or unable to curtail their behavior.
After our reading for today, as events
in the life of Israel unfold, Israel goes to war with the Philistines. The Philistines kill a great number of Israelites,
including both of Eli’s sons, and they steal the Ark of Covenant which holds
the stone tablets containing the 10 Commandments and is Israel’s most prized
relic at this time. When Eli receives the
news that both his sons have been killed and the ark has been stolen, he falls
over and breaks his neck and dies.
But our story for today, gives us a
glimpse of a single shining moment in Eli’s ministry. Samuel is young--tradition tells us probably
around 12--and while he has spent his entire life in the service of the Lord,
he doesn’t know the Lord. The Lord calls
to Samuel, and he thinks it’s Eli, so he goes to see what the old man wants
from him. Eli sends him back to bed with
both a patience and a gentleness that he did not exhibit with Samuel’s mother
Hannah. After three different times of
this, Eli finally realizes what is going on, and he teaches Samuel how to
respond to the Lord saying, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” Samuel does as Eli instructs, and the Lord
tells Samuel that God is about to punish Eli for the sins of his sons. In the morning, Eli presses Samuel to share
what God has revealed to him, and he receives the news courageously with a fair
amount of equanimity, not offering any anger toward Samuel as messenger.
And here’s a spoiler alert: Samuel goes on to become a great prophet in the
history of Israel, an important figure in the establishment of the monarchy,
featuring in both King Saul and King David’s stories. But even Samuel has to learn how to hear God’s
call in his life, and it was the fallible priest Eli who taught him.
Well, that’s all great, Melanie, but
what does that have to do with me or with us, today? The reason why we do the work of discernment
for ordained life as a committee in the diocese is because much of the time, we
need community to understand who we truly are, who God is calling us to
be. Eli’s story is heartening to me because
it shows that we as individuals don’t have to be good or effective in order to
help people learn a little bit more about who God has created them to be, and
this is the call of what it means to be together in community. We are called to hold up a mirror for each
other at times when we see the giftedness of the other, or when we can discern
how God may be acting in that person’s life.
It’s a task that requires humility, gentleness, a willingness to listen,
and great courage to risk ourselves in this endeavor. But each of us is called to do this work for
each other, both inside the church and beyond.
You know, I’m not sure if I would be a
priest, if my mother hadn’t named something that I was already wrestling with
inside, giving me a sort of blessing to begin seriously considering it. And this is not a task that is limited to
ordained vocations. So this is
especially important work that we can offer to the younger people among
us. But we have to take the time to
listen, to be curious, and to be compassionate about the things that they are
passionate about. To do this truly
effectively, we have to be open to perspectives different than our own, and we
have to be able to reimagine the contours of our own youth alongside the
benefits of wisdom and age. This is also
work that we are called to both as individuals and also as a whole church.
Your invitation this week is to think of
a time when someone noticed something in you and named it for you in a way that
helped you understand yourself different?
This week, be open to looking and listening to ways God might be
inviting you to share something that you see (in kindness, gentleness, humility,
and courage) about someone you encounter.
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