Young Prophet, Old Priest

© Amy Marie Epp

October 17, 2021

Seattle Mennonite Church

1 Samuel 3:1-21

In a conversation recently with someone who is around my age (I am 44), we were trying to figure out the age of a younger acquaintance and she said, "Those thirty-somethings are seeming younger all the time."  As a parent I'm often hit with the realization that I'm the old mom - all of my six-year-old's friends' parents are younger than me, having had a geriatric pregnancy at the ripe old age of 38.  So I guess we've reached that age - the age when we call twenty-year-olds kids, when our first comment upon seeing a child is how much they've grown, when we say things like, "I can remember when your parents first brought you to church, young whipper snapper." And we shake our cane and pinch their cheek.

Okay I'm not such a crotchety grandma yet.  But I do have to admit I'm not young any more. Storyteller and comedian Mike Bribiglia has a little rule of thumb about how you know you've reached middle age.  You need to acknowledge that you're middle aged when, if you were double your age and you died, it wouldn't be a tragedy.  It would be sad but people wouldn't say, oh, she was too young.  I have been there for awhile now.

In our story we have an elder - like truly the storyteller wants us to know that Eli is old.  He's so old his sight has gone. The last time we heard that about someone it was Isaac - whose inability to see also extended to his ability to perceive which of his sons was standing before him - even though their bodies and voices and manner were very different from each other.  So blindness in that case also meant he was maybe a little affected in his mental faculties as well.  Here's Eli, who's eyes had grown so weak he was unable to see.  An ancient priest.  And then there's the boy, Samuel.  The bible scholars I consulted put him somewhere around 11 or 12. Truly a whipper snapper.

This is a story of contrasts.  A boy at the beginning of his life - dedicated to the work in the temple by his mother, who had gone before God in grief and longing for a child and received Eli as God's answer to that prayer.  And Eli - a priest, but one whose life and family has kind of gone off the rails. His sons, far from dedicating their lives to serving God, have served themselves. They were, in fact, "despicable men who didn't know the Lord." The previous chapter enumerates the ways they took the temple sacrifices of meat for themselves and treated women in much the same way.  

This story is ostensibly about it's young hero Samuel - the book is after all named for him - Eli plays a pivotal role, at least in this chapter of the book.  One of the things I really love about this story is that right off the bat the author tells us: this is not a time when people were hearing from God.  People are not having dreams and visions like in the stories of their ancestors.  There is no stairway to heaven or burning bush in the lives of these folks.  We even get an aside about Samuel at one point: he didn't yet know God - God hadn't been revealed to him yet. Like us, they are going about their lives, doing the best they can without a Divine hotline to provide clear instructions.  Celebrities, they're just like us.

So when Samuel hears a voice calling to him, of course he doesn't know what's going on.  God had not yet been revealed to him. Now, I take a little bit of issue with God here, who could have said, "Hi there, Samuel, it's me, God." Because, as we have been told, visions were rare and Samuel did not yet know God and also he did not have the advantage of caller ID.  But instead we get this comedy of errors and mistaken identity that has Samuel jumping up from sleep multiple times and Eli shooing him back to bed.

And it would have kept on like that, I guess.  Except that it dawned on Eli - though he too had lived a lifetime as a priest without an encounter with the God he served - that it was indeed God's voice calling Samuel.  I believe it is significant that he shares this insight with Samuel.  He doesn't try to gain some favor for himself, or insert himself into the situation.  Possibly he knows that God may have a word to speak against him and yet he doesn't tell Samuel he's too young to understand or experience this encounter.  He simply tells Samuel how he can make himself open to hearing God's word.

Samuel, for his part, does exactly as Eli instructs.  This is quite a thing to experience as an eleven-year-old - to be called into the work of prophecy.  To have to communicate some pretty bad news and serious consequences to someone who is an older mentor.  Someone who might not want to hear what you have to say.  And Eli again acts admirably.  For sure he would not have been happy about the word that Samuel was passing along to him.  Yet he receives it with grace and with equanimity - God will do as God will do.  (It's almost like he heard Pastor Megan's sermon about God's name).

Young people are acting as prophets all the time if we would only listen to them as well as Eli listened to Samuel. [names of young prophets here? Emma Gonzalez, Amanda Gorman, Greta Thunberg, climate riders and water protectors]

I can very clearly remember the feeling as a child - maybe the age of Rosie and Lulu and Emily - of asking a question or talking seriously about something I cared about and being laughed at by an adult or older person - not in a mean way, but in that way that we can sometimes do as adults.  Isn't that cute, that she thinks that? Or what a silly, funny thing to say.  It stings to be thought of as inconsequential because you're young.  And though I haven't yet made it to the age of beloved elder, I believe there may also be an element of that for those in the generations older than me.

It happens in the church too. We who are middle aged look at those twenty-somethings and think they're getting younger all the time.  We get called boomers by our children - even though I'm just barely on the cusp of gen-X and millennial - I'm an x-ennial.  Who think we're out of it and irrelevant. But it's all relative - almost all of us are in some middle - older than someone and younger than someone - an Eli to someone's Samuel and vice versa - though possibly more one than the other.

So Samuels - the ones who are thought of as young by those who are older - you are called and valued by God.  Your voice and your vision are not the "future of the church" but it's present.  You are prophets who are telling the world the truth and calling us all to look at it boldly.  Listen for God's voice and speak what you hear.  And listen also to the voice of elders, whose insight and experience will help you hear God better.

And Elis - those who are seen as old by those who are younger - allow God to speak through the young.  Let their energy and passion inspire you. Hold God's word lightly and without grasping.  Offer your wisdom and also acknowledge your mistakes.  You are not the church of the past but of the present.

What I love about church - what I have always loved about church, even as a teen who, when I went away to highschool chose to go to church when many of my Mennonite boarding school peers did not - is that the generations mix up with each other.  As a teen who wasn't living at home I liked going to a small community fellowship where there were adults who cared about me and take me seriously and invite me to participate.  

As an early twenty something I went to a church where it took me several weeks to figure out which kids went with which parents because in that congregation people wouldn't necessarily sit next to the people they lived with but elders and parents and kids would sit with the person they felt like sitting with that day.  And the teens all lumped together in the back corner.  There too I was welcomed and given a role: invited to preach before I ever took a seminary class, invited to teach Sunday school and be a youth sponsor.  

In this story about Eli and Samuel, Israel was at an inflection point.  An old era was at its end and God was about to do a new thing.  I love that the text in English says that everyone who heard about it, it made their ears tingle.  In the story of Israel this is when the shift was happening from a time of disparate governance by judges to a centralized monarchy - Samuel will play a key role in calling Israel's first kings.  

We may also be at an inflection point.  I don't necessarily know if you can tell it when it's happening.  We are certainly encountering many things new to us over the past year or two, both in the world around us and in the life of our congregation - and things may look dramatically different - literally - in our church in the next few years as we shift our property.  

So this may be the exact right time to hear this story.  All of us are called to be priest and prophets who are completely open to hearing God's call.  Not that there won't be some mistakes and (hopefully humorous) mis-hearings along the way.  But that we are a community who see each generation as called and having a place in God's new creation.

In closing, I offer this prayer from Brent Strawn, Professor of Old Testament at Candler School of Theology at Emory U. in Atlanta:

Beckoning God, In the stillness of the night you called Samuel into your service. Call us into service with a voice we are able to hear, and give us hearts to come when we are called. Amen.