Called by Name (1 Samuel 3:1-20)

2nd Sunday after Epiphany - B
1 Samuel 3:1-10, (11-20)
January 15, 2012

Called by Name

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

Our children, Peter and Beth, both graduated from a high school in Syracuse, NY, a school of some twelve hundred students or so. There are advantages to going to a large high school. Nottingham High offered extraordinary opportunities in performance arts, for example, and students could choose from among four foreign languages. It had a diverse student body. There was no racial or ethnic majority. About forty percent of the students were white with significant numbers of African, Hispanic, and Asian Americans. There were large numbers of students who did not speak English at home, including Russian, Latino, and Vietnamese immigrants.

A school of that size is a good place to be anonymous. It was like that when Peter started, but three years later, when Beth started there, things had undergone a little shift. There was a new principal, Granger Ward, who had an unusual approach to the job. Imagine Beth’s surprise when she walked through the door on her first day at Nottingham High School and Granger Ward—whom she had never met—greeted her, “Good morning, Miss Caldwell. Welcome to Nottingham High.” Granger Ward had gotten the yearbooks from each of the middle schools and memorized the names and faces of all the incoming students during the summer. He was able to call them by name, every one of them, on the first day of school. Beth knew instantly that just because her new school was big didn’t mean she could remain anonymous. She knew that she mattered.

Our names are important to us. They are one of the very few things we have that no one can ever take from us. The IRS knows us by number; so does the Social Security Administration. But God knows us by name. We tell children when they are baptized that God has called them by name. They don’t usually remember it, but that’s okay. There are lots of decisions that we make for our children and things that we tell them before they have any idea what any of it means and before they will remember it.

We tell our children that we love them long before they could possibly know what the word means. We repeat it until they do understand. When they are confirmed we remind our children that God has called each of them by name. That’s a good thing to do. That God has called us each by name is one of the most important things about us, but it’s also a thing that tends to get lost, crowded out by all the other messages aimed at us. To call us by name is one of the most important gifts that God can and does give to us.

To be called by name is a gift, but it’s more than that as Samuel discovered as one night while he was serving an apprenticeship under the priest Eli in the shrine to Yahweh at Shiloh.

There is a back story to this episode of Samuel’s life and the story as a whole occupies a special place in the broader story of Israel’s covenant life with God. Samuel was a transitional figure. According to the story as told in the Bible, before Samuel Israel was a loose confederacy of tribes with no permanent authority or government. When a crisis happened—and these were often military crises caused by the expansion of any of the small city-kingdoms on its borders—a special military and religious leader called somewhat misleadingly, a “judge” would arise and give leadership through the crisis. When the crisis was over, the work of the judge was completed and Israel reverted to being a collection of tribes.

After Samuel there was a new arrangement: there was a king for all the tribes of Israel.

Like many other important figures in Israel’s history, Samuel’s story begins with fertility issues. His mother Hannah was the first wife of Elkanah. This should have been a place of relative privilege, but Hannah had not been able to conceive. Elkanah’s second wife Peninnah—with her small multitude of children—used Hannah’s misfortune to taunt her and generally make her life miserable. (Remember that the Bible does not really have a “traditional” notion of marriage. Its stories take for granted whatever arrangements happen to be common at the time. In the present case the book of Samuel does not see anything remarkable about Elkanah’s having two wives.)

Hannah was pretty miserable so, when her family went on its annual trip to the regional shrine at Shiloh she made a promise to God: if God would give her a son, she would give him back to God. Sure enough, Hannah conceived and had a son and, when the boy Samuel was very young, she brought him back to the shrine at Shiloh and gave him to God as an apprentice to the priest Eli.

That’s where our story picks up this morning. Samuel is an apprentice priest. Eli, the priest at Shiloh, had sons—named Hophni and Phinehas—who were supposed to be following in their father’s footsteps, but they were not up to the job. They used their position to steal from those who came to worship and to extort sexual favors from the women who served at the shrine. Eli knew about this and tried to stop them, but they simply refused to listen and went on doing whatever they wanted.

The boy Samuel was what Hophni and Phinehas should have been. And Eli was pretty much a father to Samuel, since Samuel only saw his family when they came to Shiloh on their annual trip. As Samuel “kept growing up and was more and more liked by both the Lord and the people”—and, yes, this is language that reminds us of the boy Jesus in Luke’s gospel because Luke used the Samuel story as the pattern for telling the story of Jesus—as Samuel was growing up, Eli was losing his sight.

Visions were rare, the narrator tells us, and Eli was going blind. But “God’s lamp hadn’t gone out yet.” Samuel was awake and God called to him, “Samuel, Samuel!” Samuel thought it was Eli calling so he went to Eli to find out what was needed. “I didn’t call you, my son,” answered Eli. “Go and lie down.”

Samuel heard God’s voice again—“Samuel! Samuel!”—and again rushed to Eli’s beside. “What are you doing? What kind of a game are you playing? Lie down and let me sleep already!” Well, that’s not exactly what it says in the story; I’m filling in the blanks a little.

Anyway, when the voice came a third time—“Samuel! Samuel!”—Eli realized that Samuel was not out to ruin his night’s sleep. It was clear that God was speaking to Samuel, so Eli gave Samuel some guidance about how to answer, if God should speak yet again.

Sure enough, God called Samuel once more: “Samuel! Samuel!” Samuel spoke as Eli had told him, “Speak. Your servant is listening.”

God calls Samuel by name, not once but four times. God summons Samuel by name to be one who speaks God’s message, to be a prophet. To be called by name is a gift, but it is more than that. It is also an intrusion into a well-ordered anonymity. To be summoned by God is to have our plans for melting into the background in a big world set aside. To be called by name is to have the truth that we tell about ourselves placed within God’s parentheses.

Samuel knew this as soon as he said, “Speak. Your servant is listening.” What followed was not his idea of how to live his life. The very first thing that he would have to do was to denounce the man who had been a foster father as well as a master. Eli’s failures had caught up with him. There was bad news for him and Samuel was tapped to deliver it. Yes, God was about do a thing in Israel that would make the ears of anyone who heard it tingle. Ours, too, I think.

For Samuel to be called by name was a wondrous gift and a painful task. He bore them both as well as he could. He could have settled in for a life as the resident priest of the shrine at Shiloh, sacrificing sheep and offering sheaves of wheat on behalf of the members of the covenant community. Not a bad life, all in all, but because of the gift and the task that he bore, it wouldn’t be his life. He became the prophet and priest who led Israel into a new way of living as God’s covenant people. He found an anointed Saul to be king. And when Saul proved to be unable to bear the weight of rule, he staged a ritual coup d’etat, placing David on the throne. Because he bore the gift and the task he became someone who mattered. To be named by God is to live a life of consequence.

Oscar Romero came from a rich Salvadoran family. He was a conservative priest who got along well with his parishioners. He was a theological and political conservative and a safe candidate to be the bishop of San Salvador. He would live comfortably. He would celebrate masses in the beauty and splendor of the cathedral of San Salvador. He would attend the wedding receptions and tea parties of the rich, blessing them with his presence. He would be Rome’s ally in its struggle with the priests of the countryside who preached justice for the poor.

The only thing was that God had called Oscar Arnulfo Romero by name. He bore that gift and task as well as he could. When the government forces started killing his priests, he suffered a change of heart. He was no longer a safe appointment to the diocese of San Salvador. He began to speak for God’s justice. He began to preach good news to the poor. In weekly radio messages he assured the people of the El Salvador that their poverty was the result of systemic injustice, not a punishment sent from God. He gave them hope and courage. The government could not forgive that so they killed him. It wasn’t the life that he planned for himself. That possibility was closed to him. He bore the gift and the task and, because he did, his life mattered.

Martin Luther King, Jr., was part of a growing black middle class. He was a brilliant student and graduated from Morehouse College at the age of nineteen and went on to earn a Bachelor of Divinity from Crozer Theological Seminary and a PhD from Boston University. He could have settled into the prestigious pulpit of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. He could have seen to the needs of his congregation. He could have worked in quiet ways for the betterment of the lives of the African Americans of his community.

It would have been a good life, but God had called Martin by name. That was the gift and the burden that he bore. The nation became his parish. The Lincoln Memorial steps became his pulpit. From there he preached good news to the outcast and the poor. In God’s name he proclaimed an end to discrimination and economic injustice. In God’s name he went even further than that: he connected the dots between racism and poverty and war.

His life was by no means flawless. He plagiarized significant portions of his doctoral dissertation. It is almost certain that he broke his marriage promises more than once. But because God had called him by name, because he bore that gift and task, his life mattered.

And now, here we are. We, too, have lives that we have made as comfortable as we can. We are not fond of strife. We like the quiet and the peace. But God has called us by name. If we listen we, too, will bear that gift and task. Our lives will not be easy. But I promise you this, if we listen, we will matter.

©2012, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.