633 sligo avenue, silver spring, md 20910
633 sligo avenue, silver spring, md 20910
Warren (Buck) Buckingham
Second Sunday After the Epiphany
January 15, 2005
1 Samuel 3:1-10
1 Corinthians 6:11b-20
John 1:43-51
Psalm 63:1-8
+ In the name of God, who creates, consecrates, and calls us for good works. Amen.
If you've heard me preach before, you know it's usually the Gospel that has spoken to my heart and soul. Today, though, the reading from the Hebrew Testament has waked something up in me. So let's look a bit at Samuel.
For starters, is there anyone among us who will admit to having God call us by name not once or twice or even three times, but four? And who'll admit to being so dense you thought it was someone in the next room rather than God's own self calling you out? Go ahead and raise your hands please. If you don't, I'm going to be up here alone with my hand in the air and egg on my face.
Before I say anything about my somewhat different but at least equally embarrassingly inept experience of hearing and responding to God's call, I think we should all take a bit of comfort in noting that Samuel had a few advantages over most of us. First, those four callings came back-to-back in a single night. I'd guess that for most of us, the calls come over years or decades if we hear them at all. Next, Samuel had a bit less distracting background noise to contend with four thousand years ago without Blackberrys and cell phones and podCasts and A.D.D. Finally, and not unimportantly, he had Eli to say, "It wasn't me dude. Go listen up again because I think it might be God calling you."
I never had an Eli, but starting nearly 15 years ago I had an amazing EFM mentor and spiritual director named Pat Bleicher enter my life. She doesn't exactly fit the mold of an Old Testament figure like Eli, but she does call herself an Anglican Rabbi and that may be as close as you get these days.
In my own shameful experience, most of the times I thought God was calling me it turned out to be ego. Or pride. Or something worse. When I was working at the White House there were at least four – and maybe even fourteen – times when I blasphemously mistook the siren songs of power, position, and proximity as God's call to me to single-handedly control the American AIDS epidemic.
Rabbi Bleicher was my anti-Eli in those days. She said, "That's not God you're hearing, Buck. That would be the devil." And then, perhaps because she'd been listening to them in her living room for a couple of years, she confidently said, "I believe God's calling you to be a story teller." Story teller. A somewhat more modest calling than "White House-based egomaniac fixing an epidemic affecting hundreds of thousands of people," I expect you might agree.
But Pat is smart and convincing and perceptive and insistent. (Did I mention that she graduated cum laude from law school, speaks Hebrew, and can sound like the voice – or even the wrath – of God when provoked by people's failure to live into the gifts God has given them?) And so the fortieth, not the fourth, time that God spoke through Pat saying, "Buck! Buck! You're a story teller you schmuck," I actually started to say with about as much confidence as the boy Samuel, "Speak, Lord for your servant is listening." And as soon as I did, I started to hear more and more and more stories that spoke of the mighty power of God.
Time passed and I found my heart's home – and a favorite place to tell my stories – right here in this loving community. More time passed, and I found myself called ten thousand miles away to try to do my bit responding to the needs of people with AIDS across east and southern Africa.
At the same time I was preparing to leave for Kenya, I thought I heard God calling me to holy orders. Not for the first time, but this time very clearly to the vocational diaconate I thought. Pat was incredulous but kind enough to suggest that I might want to sound this idea out with a few other people. Shortly before her retirement, and days before I left for Kenya, I had lunch with Bishop Jane Dixon to discuss what I thought I was hearing. If memory serves, she actually laughed out loud, which wasn't particularly reassuring. But then she said, "Buck, why in the world would you want to go through all that mess and trouble? You already have a ministry. You collect and tell stories." And so it dawned on me that having heard it from the world's only Anglican Rabbi and the third woman bishop in the whole history of the Anglican Communion, I'd bloody well trust it for all time.
I share that story of my "condemnation" to the ministry of story telling because I have come to gratefully realize that these two wise women – true servants of God – inoculated me against the sinful belief that I, by myself, could have gone off to Kenya and done anything under my own power that would have made a whit of difference in the lives of Africans with AIDS. It's actually terrifying to think of how horribly I might have screwed things up if I'd imagined that it was me – not God – who was about to do something in Kenya and across Africa that would, as today's Gospel puts it, "make both ears of anyone who hears it tingle."
I could stand here spouting statistics about what the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief has done in just two years. Your sister Tracy Carson who has read and translated those statistics to Congress, and your other sister Annie Brown who came to Kenya with Bob and saw on-the-ground proof, could testify to their truth. But because Rabbi Pat and Bishop Jane told me to, I just need to tell you a little story.
Before I get to the story, though, I have to point out how common it is these days to hear pundits and activists and global bureaucrats proclaim, in a modern twist on Nathanael, "Can anything good come out of (not Nazareth, but) Washington?" To them, and to you, I can only say with the Disciple Philip, "Come and see."
In a partnership that's so unlikely it's probably insane or illegal or both, we've linked American taxpayers, an irresistible and incorrigible orthodox Bishop with flowing robes and beards, and gifted Kenyan, American and Egyptian health workers to create the Hope Center for Infectious Diseases at Coptic Hospital on Ngong Road in the heart of Nairobi.
Among the first patients at the Hope Center was a middle-aged woman who practically had to be carried out of the slums and onto the premises because she was so close to death. There was no hope, and very little health, left in her. Most of her friends had given her up for dead.
But come and see.
Come and see this woman you will never know, but whose life was forfeit before Americans sent help. Because we have medicine, and because she had an amazing will to live, she has doubled her weight. She has regained her strength. She has survived to witness the birth of her granddaughter.
Come and see this woman restored to life. Just as incredibly, come and see her beautiful granddaughter. And here's the heart of the story: see this baby the family named "Hope" in thanksgiving for the Hope Center that you helped make possible. The place that returned their mother to them.
In these two lives, come and see as the Gospel foretells, "Heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending" upon a world so agonizingly desperate for hope. And then my beloved friends, believe that with God – not with itinerant story tellers or even with the power of the United States Treasury, but with GOD – all things, truly all things, are possible.
Alleluia! Alleluia! Amen +