Continuing our series from A Way Other Than Our Own...
Lent is a time set apart for us to recognize that the church is in a time of wilderness and wandering and must reconsider, rethink, and change our mind about many things. This reading by Walter Brueggemann looks at I Samuel 3:10..."Now the Lord came and stood there, calling as before, 'Samuel, Samuel!' And Samuel said, 'Speak, for your servant is listening.'"
God speaks to Samuel in the night..."Night is a time when we cannot see. Night is when we cannot control...Night is when things are unclear and beyond explanation...the old priest was slow to figure it out...something not routine was happening.
"The anthropologists call this 'liminality,' an unsettling feeling at the threshold of something new, when life is gathered into a wholly new configuration.
"...too often the church in our society is thought to be a place of unambiguous answers and sure certitudes, where we come settled and cocksure, and the spirit has no chance to change anything...Then emerges something new from God that comes like a thief in the night.
"The narrative suggests that the holy place must be understood with...nighttime bewilderment. For it is in such moments that we sort out the voices of address, and God works the newness of nurture and vocation, demand and promise and healing."
Dear Spirit, enable us who call ourselves by your name to be at peace and even expectation in this place of liminality; help us humble ourselves and recognize that we DO NOT KNOW very much and that "nighttime bewilderment" is our place of rest as you upend all that we have constructed to secure ourselves in order to lead us to the "something new from God that comes like a thief in the night."
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