Lent 2 (Ps 121; Ex 12:1-4a; Mtt 8:23-27)
March 12, 2017 – UBC Digby – J G White

Back in school days, I must have read Jack London’s The Call of the Wild. (1903)  The one scene I remember in the whole saga about Buck the dog, is in chapter 6, at a point when Buck has deeply bonded with his new master, John Thornton.  As strong a love as possible between dog and man existed between Buck and Thornton. Let Jack London tell the scene…

Nothing was too great for Buck to do, when Thornton commanded.  One day… the men and dogs were sitting on the crest of a cliff which fell away, straight down, to naked bedrock three hundred feet below.  John Thornton was sitting near the edge, Buck at his shoulder.  A thoughtless whim seized Thornton, and he drew the attention of Hans and Pete to the experiment he had in mind. “Jump, Buck!” he commanded, sweeping his arm out and over the chasm.  The next instant he was grappling with Buck on the extreme edge, while Hans and Pete were dragging them back into safety.  (p. 83)
Absolute love and trust.  

Life with God, in the will of God, hearing from God, is a life of love and trust.  Confidence in the One we are joined to.  Sure that we are being ‘kept,’ kept safe, kept forever. Only when we know the Master so well are we free from fear and ready to obey any and every command.

We looked back, way back, this morning, to Abram and Sarai, ancient Hebrews, we might call them. They lived in one part of the Middle East.  They were told to go… move on.  By God.  What do they do?  They go.  They just go.  Not even being told where they are going, they go.  They step out in faith.   They were confident in the One who spoke, and in the message.

But many of us falter at the critical step of hearing commands from our Master.  How do I get guidance from Christ?  Do I get guidance from Him?  Is there not much being said, or am I just not hearing or seeing a whole lot that is being said all around me?

Though I think of myself as an optimist, I am also a skeptic.  Skeptical about miracles, signs & wonders, angels and ghosts and near-death experiences.   If you listen closely to what I don’t say, you may notice I don’t often say, “God told me to…” or “Christ healed so-and-so,” or “That turned out the way it was meant to be.”  I tend to experience the voice of God as a subtle, silent, rare thing.  My feeling or sense of the Holy Spirit being present is seldom.

Years ago, in one of my Celtic devotional books, this quotation caught my attention.  It seemed so beautiful.  It seemed so true to me.  It seems so dangerous.  Maybe it’s wrong?

The more a human being advances in the Christian faith, the more they live the presence of God as an absence, the more they accept to die to the idea of becoming aware of God, of fathoming Him.  For they have learned, while advancing, that God is unfathomable. [And from then on the presence of God assumed value in their eyes only against the backdrop of absence.] The mystic, in his long and complicated pilgrimage, experiences alternately the presence and absence of God.  By, by degrees, the absence of God is felt more and more and the mystic understands that this absence is now [normal] the norm.  Thus the mystic is someone who has had a long-term confrontation with God, like Jacob in the struggle that he waged all through the night, someone who does not cease to confront God.  God always precedes us, we see Him only from behind, He walks ahead, He is ahead of us. What the mystic experiences – and every Christian is a mystic because it is not the great illuminations that are the mark of the mystic but the night, an everyday night – is a kind of distancing from God in proportion to advances in the deepening of their faith.  
(Jean Francois Six, Is God Endangered by Believers, 1983)

How shall I know my Saviour so well, as a Friend, if hearing the Master’s voice is so hidden and absent?
Hearing from God, knowing the Master’s voice, is a matter of confidence.  Having faith and trust in our God.  Who this Holy God is, who is also called Love.

Abram and Sarai went as the LORD had told them, with other family members, toward an unknown future.  Abraham is commended for his faith, at various times in scripture.  Faith in who this God was and faithfulness in doing what the divine guidance told them to do.  Later on, you may know, when they finally have a child of their own, Abraham is to take young Isaac out in the wild for a sacrifice. Isaac is to be the human sacrifice!  But at the last moment, God’s angel stops Abraham and points out a nearby animal that can be slaughtered.
Sounds a bit to me like Thornton and his dog, Buck, at the cliff edge.  A dangerous test of training and relationship.

Another Bible story today also could be a test, of sorts.  Jesus stills the storm.  Of course, all the men in the little boat must face the storm on the Sea of Galilee.  Notice, Jesus was sleeping in the boat, while His friends were panicking.  They had nothing to fear: Jesus knew this; the disciples did not.

Dallas Willard said many times that we humans are perfectly safe in this life within the Kingdom of God.  Even if you are being destroyed and killed, you are safe in the arms of God.  Jesus knew this, on the storm-tossed boat, that day.

There is something to be said for being able to rest and to sleep.  Or simply to relax when going through life’s stresses and challenges.  Walking with Christ, living in the Kingdom now, gives a peace over and above the pains and problems and fears of everyday life.  Psalm 127 says,
It is in vain that you rise up early
and go late to rest,
eating the bread of anxious toil;
for he give sleep to his beloved.
We can be at ease, because our God is always alert.  

Today’s Psalm, 121, says, he who watches over… will neither slumber nor sleep.  The LORD watches over you– by day… by night.  Our timeless God is present and alert, always. God will keep you, the Psalm says.  God will keep your life.  God never slumbers, so we can. We can be still, when all around is the rough sea.

This is the Supreme Being we worship here.  This is the One we seek to hear.  To see.  To know.  To befriend.  To obey.  To serve with.  To love.  ‘Hearing from God’ is about this God, who is present, even when all seems lost, even when God seems lost to us.

Years ago, author and pastor Richard Foster was working in a family counselling centre, and was becoming interested in how prayers of healing worked with emotional needs.  
A man came to him who had lived in constant fear and bitterness for twenty-eight years.  He would wake up at night, screaming and in a cold sweat. He lived in constant depression, so much so that his wife said that he had not laughed for many years.

The man told Foster the story of what had happened those many years before that had caused such a deep sadness to hang over him.  He was in Italy during the Second World War and was in charge of a mission of thirty-three men.  They became trapped by enemy gunfire.  With deep sorrow in his eyes, this man related how he had prayed desperately that God would get them out of that mess. It was not to be.  He had to send his men out two by two and watch them get killed.  Finally in the early hours of the morning he was able to escape with six men – four seriously wounded.  He had only a flesh wound.  He said that the experience turned him into an atheist.  Certainly, his heart was filled with rage, bitterness, and guilt.

His counsellor, Foster, said, ‘Don’t you know that Jesus Christ, the Son of God who lives in the eternal now, can enter that old painful memory and heal it so that it will no longer control you?’  He did not know this was possible.  Foster asked if he would mind if he prayed for him – never might that he was an atheist; he would have faith for him.  He nodded his consent.  Sitting beside him with his hand on the man’s shoulder, Richard Foster invited the Lord Jesus to go back those twenty-eight years and walk through that day with this good man.  ‘Please Lord,’ Foster asked, ‘draw out the hurt and the hate and the sorrow and set him free.’  Almost as an afterthought, he asked for peaceful sleep to be one of the evidences of this healing work, for the fellow had not slept well for all those years.  ‘Amen.’

The next week he came up to the counsellor with a sparkle in his eyes and a brightness on his face…  ‘Every night I have slept soundly and each morning I have awakened with a hymn on my mind.  And I am happy… happy for the first time in twenty-eight years.’ …That was many years ago, and the wonderful thing is that although this man… had the normal ups and downs of life since then, the old sorrows… never returned.  (Richard Foster, Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home, 1992, pp. 218-19)

Perfect love casts out fear, says scripture.(1 Jn 4:18)  This testimony of a man about freedom from the past is but one example, and you have your own stories to tell.  You know this already.  God will keep you.  Even when there is silence.  When God seems not even to be there, to exist.  One poet prayed:

In Your presence there is an absence
silencing my greatest fear.
It is with You that I know the essence
of what is life, now that You’re near.

It is in the absence of Your presence
that I rekindle my desire;
and it is when I am without You
That I burn, an inextinguishable fire.

In Your presence there is an absence
of all that preys upon my mind;
for my heart’s desire’s before me,
and I leave all else behind.

It is in the absence of Your presence
that I have learned to be apart.
It is without You that I am with You;
for You are Joy within my heart.

• Janet Rimmer

Then, when the hidden God says, “Go,” we may go, confidently.  Then, when the Cosmic Christ says, “I will go back in your life and be there for you,” we find freedom from our past.  Then, when the Spirit of Truth speaks ever so quietly, we will recognize and understand.  God will keep your life.  

Next Sunday we will explore some factors of God’s still, small voice that help us recognize it as the voice of the Master.