Speak for Your Servant is Listening

1 Samuel 3:1-10 Now the boy Samuel was ministering to the LORD under Eli. The word of the LORD was rare in those days; visions were not widespread. At that time Eli, whose eyesight had begun to grow dim so that he could not see, was lying down in his room; the lamp of God had not yet gone out, and Samuel was lying down in the temple of the LORD, where the ark of God was. Then the LORD called, "Samuel! Samuel!" and he said, "Here I am!" and ran to Eli, and said, "Here I am, for you called me." But he said, "I did not call; lie down again." So he went and lay down. The LORD called again, "Samuel!" Samuel got up and went to Eli, and said, "Here I am, for you called me." But he said, "I did not call, my son; lie down again." Now Samuel did not yet know the LORD, and the word of the LORD had not yet been revealed to him. The LORD called Samuel again, a third time. And he got up and went to Eli, and said, "Here I am, for you called me." Then Eli perceived that the LORD was calling the boy. Therefore Eli said to Samuel, "Go, lie down; and if he calls you, you shall say, 'Speak, LORD, for your servant is listening.'" So Samuel went and lay down in his place. Now the LORD came and stood there, calling as before, "Samuel! Samuel!" And Samuel said, "Speak, for your servant is listening."

What is happening in our story today is truly a strange event. Samuel has been raised by his mother, Hannah, a deeply devout woman of God. She has nurtured him and prepared him to be a faithful servant of God. When Samuel was the proper age, she went to the house of the Lord in Shiloh and gave her only son to the priest Eli to be raised by him. And over the years Samuel has been a faithful servant, ministering to the Lord under Eli. So when God calls Samuel three times, and three times Samuel thinks mistakenly that it is Eli the priest calling him it seems to be remarkable that he would not know it was God. Now the Scripture tells us that the word of the Lord was rare in those days, ! but come on! It’s God after all! Wouldn’t you know if God was calling you? Wouldn’t you recognize God’s voice? And after all Samuel had been prepared for this calling, he had been not only a regular attendee at the house of the Lord, but a servant as well! Certainly we would respond to God’s call! I mean if God thundered down, right here and right now, Church! Church! We would stop what we were doing, and say “Speak, Lord for your servant is listening.” Wouldn’t we?

This is the question that I think this story asks us to reflect on today. And to help us process it, I would like to talk about the wind.

I am an avid sailor. I grew up sailing off the New England coast since I was ten years old. And early on I discovered sailboat racing. Sailing gave me the opportunity to not only to be out on the water, enjoying God’s beautiful creativity in the waves, and the silence of the wind, but I could also be with friends and also beat the heck out of my competition.

But winning did not come easy for me in sailing. You see in sailboat racing you have to do something called read the wind. Now maybe for some of you navy pilots or golfers you can see and read the wind. But for me, the wind is this invisible force, that I only really sense is present, when it messes my hair or I have to walk against it or when a cool breeze gives me relief. In other words, I can only experience the wind when it is blowing hard. But I don’t see it!

And this is problematic in sailing. Because you have to know where the wind is to get anywhere! If you don’t know where the wind is, then you tend to end up all over the course. The boat becomes subject to what appears to be random shifts in the wind and also to strong currents that lead you where you do not want to go. There has been many a race where I threw my hands up in despair exclaiming,
“I have no idea what to do!”

Over the years I tried to learn to read the wind. At first I emulated top sailors trying to learn their secrets. I read their books; I crewed for them, but to no avail. I still could not see the wind, let alone read it. Then one day, when there was barely a hint of breeze on the water. I saw it. Coming across the lake, I saw a dark shadow on the water, and as it approached, I could see that the wind was pointed in a different direction than the wind that barely filled our sails. And as I waited with anticipation, I could count the seconds as it approached us. When it hit us, the sails flapped for a moment and then filled, our boat gently tilted and we took off. “Puff” I exclaimed, as we, the only boat in the wind, took off and passed our competitors.

After that, I began to look for the wind. “Over there!” I would cry, and off we would go, headed for the darker water. As time went on, I could also see the wind when the weather was stormy. You see in storms, the wind is very unpredictable and is rarely constant. And you can see all of its vagaries as it breezes over the water. So in sailing, you learn to look for the dangerous winds that can not only fill your sails but knock the boat over.

But try as I might, I could not figure out how to see the wind, on a steady air day. Where there were no large puffs of wind to signal a change in direction.

This all changed when I watched the America’s Cup several years ago. For those of you who don’t know, the America’s Cup is an international competition between the best sailboat racers in the world that is held once every four years or so. It’s never covered on the big network channels, because frankly watching sailboat racing is akin to watching paint dry for most: Even more boring than golf or bowling and the rules more incomprehensible than hockey or cricket.

But there I was, in 1995, watching a New Zealand team compete against the American, Dennis Conner. On board the Kiwi boat was an awesome tactician named Brad Butterworth who was acclaimed for his ability to read the wind. So when I first started to watch the coverage I expected to find Brad sitting alone at an upward key advantage spot, reverently reading the wind, and making the strategic calls downward to the skipper and crew. But that is not what I saw; instead, he stood by the skipper and several other people and engaged in a conversation with them, during the whole race! It seemed that Brad’s giftedness for reading the wind had more to do with his ability to process what he saw with others rather than just giving out prophetic directions.

And after watching Brad, I began to try this. I began to talk with my skipper about the wind. I admitted to him that I could not read it on my own. He admitted that he struggled with this too, and together we began to enter into a dialogue about the wind throughout each leg of the race. And low and behold, we began to see the wind! We began to understand what direction we needed to point our boat. We began to understand how to adjust our sails.

I think that God’s calling in our lives is like the wind. We expect it to be like a giant puff moving across the water, that we can anticipate and measure. So we prepare ourselves. We like Samuel, go to church every Sunday and faithfully serve in various positions in the church. And Sunday after Sunday, we look for a puff. We look for God to fill our souls and move us boldly forward. We expect a mountain top experience like Moses and we look for signs like a burning bush. Or we anticipate God’s blinding grace to bring us to our knees as it did Paul on the road to Damascus.

And more often than not, we think that this will be a deeply private and personal moment that we will know and understand all by ourselves. But while God’s call on Moses and Paul did come in isolation, they both had others to help them understand and discern God’s calling. Moses had Aaron and Paul had Ananais.

And like the wind, I believe that God does act in this way sometimes. God’s calling can be like a blast of wind that literally knocks us over. And it is a marvelous thing to see this happen to someone. They truly are on fire and filled with a passion that is contagious.

But for some of us, perhaps many of us, God seems to work more like the wind on a steady air day. God is like a warm gentle breeze that is more like a whisper than a bold hurricane like noise. Remember Elijah’s call in 1 Kings? He went up to the mountain to hear the Lord, but the Lord was not in the loud wind, nor in the earthquake, but in the sheer silence. The wind on a steady air day, you cannot see, you cannot hear, and yet it presses you forward.


We come to church and worship, we serve, we pray, we stay in the word. In this we are very much like the young Samuel, tending the house of the Lord in Shiloh, very much like the young Samuel prepared by his mother to be a faithful servant to the priest Eli and very much like the young Samuel worshipping God as he has been taught. Our preparation and faithful servant hood allows us to steer the waters, even when they are shallow even when as we are told by the narrator in 1 Samuel, that the word of the Lord is rare. And so with our faithful preparation we are content to rest in the shallow waters, convinced that God is helping us to keep course. Yet as Samuel’s story reveals it is very easy, to get off course and to miss God’s call on our lives.

The problem is even with God helping us keep course, we can still become victim to the shifting winds and currents of our lives. You see, when we aren’t experiencing God’s call in our lives, we can mistake other calls not of God and follow them until we are fatally off course. Our modern world is a deep and swift current that at surface level seems calm and harmless, but at its core is powerful enough to sweep us right off the race course where we become in danger of being sucked under or shipwrecked.

And maybe some of you today are sitting out in the pews wandering what God is doing in your life or wandering when God is going to call you. Maybe you have just started coming or maybe you have been coming for years, but if you had to be brutally honest you would have to admit that either you have never heard God’s call or somewhere along the way you stopped hearing God’s call. You are adrift, some more comfortably than others.

But God realizes our dilemma; he knows how hard it is to read the wind, to hear his call. So he gives us each other where we can share his word, where we can pray for each other, where we can discern that call with each other. For Samuel that was Eli, for the church today, we have small groups and Bible studies, and programs like Alpha. I am not sure why, but Alpha is so often promoted as something people new to faith should attend. Now don’t get me wrong, Alpha is an excellent way, if you are a seeker, to learn about God the Father and Jesus and the Holy Spirit and to begin to be in fellowship with others with questions and with people deeply rooted in faith.

But Alpha is also a wonderful ministry for those of you, who are drifting, who are still in the boat, but sense that you have lost the ability to read the wind. Because in Alpha it is not about someone with all the answers imparting them from on high to you, but a group experience, where you come together and learn to read the wind together. Over the years, I occasionally have returned to Alpha when I feel that I have stopped hearing God’s call in my life. I have also turned to faithful friends who have mentored me, prayed with me and helped me once again learn to set my boat on course and to faithfully hear and follow God’s call.

Maybe the reason Alpha stays a seeker course is that we, who claim our identities as Christians, are so ashamed to admit when we get off course and to be honest about it. That somehow we fear that we will be judged as not being Christian enough or being weak and falling victim to the deep currents of the world.

To address this concern, I have a story to share with you. There was a man, who was born over 300 years ago who was raised in a faithful Christian household. His mother nurtured him and his brothers and sisters with a firm and spirited Christian education. His father was a pastor and taught his children the value of tradition and loyalty to the church. For this young man, all his young life he dreamed of serving God. So in his early thirties, he and his brother set out to a newly discovered and developed foreign land to work with the indigenous population. Despite all of the two men’s hard work, the ministry failed and the two brothers returned home, dejected and dispirited. Still they continued to faithfully attend church and serve the Lord, even though they both had lost a sense of God’s calling in their lives.

The young man and his brother continued to drift for almost a year. Fortunately, a friend had invited them to attend a series of prayer meetings. At these prayer meetings the young man spoke of his struggles and wrestled honestly with his faith. And then one May evening, as the gentle winds blew outside, the young man’s heart was strangely warmed and he exclaimed to all present, “I believe!”

That man went on to be the founder of Methodism. He was no other than John Wesley.

People, we have to get honest with one another. We have to share with each other what is going on in our lives. If we do not, we are just isolated ships, drifting on a sea that will eventually shipwreck us and leave us drowning in the dangerous currents of life.

We need each other. God’s gentle winds are blowing on all of us gathered here today but we can’t read that wind, can’t respond to it, unless we join together in honest conversation and prayer. Like Samuel we need Eli’s to help us discern God’s call and to be able to finally respond to God, “Speak for your servant is listening.” And if you cannot hear God, or don’t recognize that God is calling you, if you are a drift, or if you have gotten off course, you are not in the boat alone. For we gathered here today will not make the journey without you. We have been called to this ship we call the church, as brothers and sisters in Christ and we cannot set sail without you. Come join us for the most wonderful voyage of our lives!