January 11, 2004                                                                  Rev. Dr. C. DiNovo

When is it God’s voice and when are we just crazy?        Isaiah 43:1-7; Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

This passage about Jesus’ baptism and the dove alighting upon him was the very first passage I ever preached on about 80 or 90 years ago in a course at Emmanuel. We had to give a 3 minute sermon in homiletics and this was the passage assigned to me. I remember it because; I’d forgotten most other things I’ve learned, as many of us do but I remember this image of the dove. What I focused on - which is the same thing I focus on today - was perhaps the most important aspect of this passage and that is the fact that a dove is a pigeon. Now, let me say it again. There’s nothing in this passage that says the dove was white, you know. A dove is the same bird as a pigeon. A pigeon alit on Jesus. That’s what this passage says!

Now, if a pigeon were to alight on us, I wonder if we would see it as the hand of God or the Holy Spirit coming down? And I wonder if everybody in the crowd that day would start listening for the voice of God but those folk did which leads me to the topic: How do you know it’s the voice of God or you’re just crazy?

Well, there are a couple of ways. First of all, what is crazy really?

In 12 step programmes they have a line about crazy. They say in 12 step work that crazy is always doing the things you’ve done and expecting different results. That’s what crazy is. Now, by that definition, one could define whole countries as pretty crazy some days.

In fact, whole nations, I’d say, are the craziest beings around as we speak. For example, whole nations expect that by waging war you can bring about peace. Now, has it ever worked in the history of the world? - momentarily perhaps but never lastingly. It’s never ever worked but we keep on doing it. That’s crazy!

Now, you can be crazy as an individual too of course. You can hear things and see things that aren’t there. That perhaps is crazy or maybe it’s just artistic. How do you know when something calls you, whether that call is from God, that Source of all love and creation in the universe, or whether it’s just you?

A couple of things, first of all, in that story you’ll notice that Isaiah had predicted that moment way before and that that moment didn’t come as a shock to those gathered, that John predicted it moments before. In fact, it was incredibly predictable, that moment. One could say it was almost scientific. I looked up the word science. You know, it means knowledge, simply knowledge. I was thinking, “Wouldn’t it be interesting to preach about a scientific walk to God?” You know, how do we scientifically go about approaching God and listening to God? Why not? It’s totally within the meaning of the word. What scientists do is they work on predictability. No scientist worth their salt would say that something can happen that isn’t predicted. Of course things do but most of the time things are pretty predictable. How do you figure out what is predictable?

Well, you see what’s happened before. You analyze all of that and then you can kind of predict, for the most part, what will happen in the future.

Well, we have an on-going kind of experiment. It’s called the Bible. It was written over thousands of years, it tells about a lot of people’s experiences over many millennia in many situations, in many countries, in many circumstances, many different kind of people and the predictable results of their actions and the almost sometimes predictable results of God’s actions with and upon God’s people. What sort of things has God done before? God’ll probably do ‘em again! So, that’s one way of looking at it, look in the Bible. Has God ever spoken that way before to people? Has God ever suggested those kinds of actions? Then God will probably do that again! If the voice you’re hearing, if the call you’re hearing is congruent with all that history, it could very well be the voice of God.

How do you ascertain that? You never ever do it alone. You do it in a faith community. This prevents you from becoming Jimmy Swaggart, Tammy Faye Baker, or Jim Jones.

How? Because you ask those around you if you’re on track and they give you feedback. They give you feedback. This points out an interesting difference between, for example, organized religion and new age – I’m going to use that term broadly – spirituality. And trust me, everyone here knows that organized religion isn’t very organized, ever, right? But what we do is we uphold a tradition, a history, a predict- stability if you will, this is how we say God has spoken. We stand at the end of a long line of saints, prophets and experiences. We say, “This is what God has behaved like in the past. This is how God acts upon lives. These are what kinds of things God does.” That’s our history and we uphold it. We do not re-invent it from scratch ourselves.

You know, there are a certain type of people who would walk out and try to drive a car without ever having a driving lesson. There are a certain class of people who would expect to get rich and have a career without ever doing anything. They’re called teenagers. We’ve all lived there. We’ve all been one. We know what it feels like to have all the answers but ever since our teen era we’ve become a little stupider and a whole lot more humble. We admit we don’t know everything and we admit we need guidance and lessons so that we might learn. It is the same in the area of spirituality and holiness and faith. We need to learn and to learn we need teachers and we need a community of learning, that’s how it goes. So when we listen for God’s voice, whether in prayer or meditation, we do so not as an end in itself but as a precursor to this broader checking out process and enabling process.

When you see media gurus talk about practices like yoga, meditation, spirituality you get a really strange feeling about what that process is about. You get the feeling that that process is to make us thinner, wealthier, more successful, you know better human beings. No! Organized religion will tell you that’s not what those processes are about at all, in fact, they’re guaranteed to make you poorer, and probably if you’re a member of a church or faith community, fatter, okay, and chances are less successful - less successful, not more successful.

Was Jesus a success in a worldly way? Don’t think so! (He) died young, had a handful of followers, no church to speak of (and was) hated by most. Is that successful in a worldly way? Is that what our spiritual practice enables us to do?

Hopefully what it enables us to do is to change the entire world - to change the entire world - not by ourselves but because we’re then in league with the true voice of God.

Over the holidays we did some funny things. We bought some pretty traditional presents in our family. My in-laws don’t speak English very well and while it’s always wonderful to see them on Christmas Day, it’s also a little trying because they don’t speak English very well and so the kids and I don’t have a lot to say back and forth. This year we solved the dilemma by buying a board game so we could all play a board game, pretty traditional. You know, there was no screen involved, it was funny and it really worked well so Gil was free to talk to them in Portuguese.

The other fairly traditional gift we bought and this was for the whole family was one of those 1,000 piece puzzles, 3D puzzles, and those things are a whole lot of fun. You know it takes a whole community to do them of course and this thing sat out on the dining room table for weeks and bit by bit as people sat down they put together another little piece of it and another little piece of it – Damien did the most – and eventually a shape arose from this thing and eventually this beautiful castle arose from this thing. As I was looking for an analogy for what our role is as members of this faith community searching and listening and hopefully hearing the voice of God in our lives, and I was thinking that there’s no better analogy really than that puzzle. A puzzle piece because a puzzle piece on its own is pretty malformed, it doesn’t look very useful and there’s nothing particularly beautiful about it, it’s got sharp edges you know but if you put it together with others it starts to form an amazing picture.

Who puts it together in this analogy? Of course it’s God. And who’s the piece of course in this analogy? Us. You and I.

Now, wouldn’t it be strange if a puzzle piece suddenly got it into its little head that it was everything and that it stood alone and that it could accomplish great things on its own and that it somehow could answer questions on its own or form a picture on its own or really, at the end of the day, do anything on its own. It would be pretty, pretty strange. And on the other hand, wouldn’t it be strange if that little puzzle piece felt itself worthless, it could do nothing on its own and that it had no place at all, that it really didn’t deserve to exist because it was so malformed.

At the end of our castle that arose on the table, there were a couple of pieces missing – the bunny ate them. You know, you see two things when you look at it. You see this beautiful castle and you see two pieces missing, both critical, and not - critical, and not. Always our role in a faith community.

So, finally, how do you know when you’re being crazy and when it really is the voice of God?

You check it out. You check it out against the history of everyone else’s experience of the voice of God, through generations upon generations upon generations. It’s made easy, it’s called the Bible. And then you go and check it out with all of your friends and family in the faith community. They say, “Do you really think this is the voice of God or not?” Because, you know, that’s what they did when the voice of God said to Jesus, “You are my beloved.” Something that God says to each of us by the way. (There’s) not one person here who, I hope, hasn’t heard that message.

Everyone around that circle on that day of baptism heard that. They might not have heard it booming out from the clouds either. They might have heard it in the still, small, holy and sacred recesses of their own hearts and I bet there was a lot of whispering going on right after the scene. I bet they whispered to each other, “Do you see that He’s the One the way that I see that He’s the One?” “Did you hear what I heard? Do you see what I see?” And I bet they all agreed, “Yes.” Let us pray together:

Dearest God,

We live in anticipation of hearing Your voice on a daily basis in the most ordinary of circumstances.

Almost as ordinary as pigeons, we expect Your presence.

We expect Your presence in small and large things, in small and large ways.

We expect to hear certain things based on the tradition of our faith.

We expect to hear that we are loved and that we have been chosen and that we are critically important and yet ultimately so humbled before You.

We expect to hear that we are called into family for a purpose and our purpose is to change the world, nothing less.

And we expect that all these things will be accomplished because You are the One who brings us together to make something far more beautiful than even we can imagine.

We know what that is called, O Lord.

It is called the New Jerusalem. It is called Heaven on earth.

It is called the Kindom.

We await that day in Your love.

In the name of the One who came to show us in the most ordinary of circumstances, what love looks like.

Amen.

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