“My sheep hear my voice; I know them, and they follow me.”[1] Every parent in here knows exactly what Jesus is talking about.
Even in a room full of screaming kids, an alert mom or dad can pick out the one scream belonging to his or her little one. At the store or at a party, it’s easy to pick out your kid simply by the sound of his or her unique little tone. “That’s my girl,” I’ve got used to saying when I hear a splat, followed by her crying crescendo, increasing in volume until someone picks her up. Talk to parents of young children; we’ve got used to the noise. Really, it’s more frightening when you don’t hear them. Also, isn’t it true that as you get a little experience as parents, you begin to classify your kids’ crying, like some sort of sophisticated government threat-level system. You know when to let them alone in the middle of the night—“Maybe she’ll go back to sleep;” but you also know when to jump out of bed instantly. It’s amazing when you stop to think about it, about the bond we share with our children through our ears. It’s like some natural auditory communion. Intimate friends and lovers experience this too, but none so deeply as parents and children.
Thus, from my viewpoint, it makes perfect sense that Jesus would talk about his relationship with believers in terms of hearing his voice. It’s a perfectly natural metaphor that speaks to the intimacy we should enjoy with Christ. Between each believer and the Lord there ought to be something akin to that instant recognition a mother has of her child’s voice. There’s a beautiful poem by a poet from Maine, the late Ken Nye, which names this intimacy:
I don’t ever remember wondering if a voice
I faintly heard was my mother’s voice or not.
I always knew.…
The sound of comfort, security and unconditional acceptance,
my mother’s voice was the serenade of my childhood,
the song that began and ended each day.[2]
Such is the communion of loving voices, the mystery uniting Jesus and the soul in love with him. It’s a beautiful thought—hearing the voice of Jesus, knowing it’s him, because he loves us, and we love him.
Of course, this makes biblical sense too. The boy, Samuel, you’ll remember was sleeping in the Temple when the Lord called out to him. It took him a while to figure out it was the Lord, but eventually Samuel said, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” And then God said to the young prophet, “I am about to do something in Israel that will cause the ears of everyone to ring.”[3] Elijah, that other great prophet, running away from the work God had given him to do, found the voice of the Lord, the text says, not in wind, earthquake, or fire, but in a “still small voice.” “Go back,” the Lord said to him.[4] It is the ancient way of God, it seems, to speak intimately to his servants, lovingly even. This is no more beautifully illustrated than in the story about Mary Magdalene, weeping before the empty tomb of Jesus. She thought someone had stolen his body. Even the angels couldn’t comfort her. Then, the story goes on, the risen Jesus approached and spoke to her: “why are you weeping?” he asked. She didn’t yet know it was the Lord; she thought it was just the gardener. It wasn’t until Jesus spoke her name, “Mary,” that she recognized him and was able to go back to the other disciples saying, “I have seen the Lord!”[5]
The intimate word, the voice, the personal communion of beloved speech: it’s a metaphor which teaches us how God calls us, loves us, and guides us. In this passage from John we hear Jesus the Good Shepherd (the “beautiful” Shepherd one could translate it) speak of his divine power. Keeping watch over his sheep, he says, “No one can take them out of my hand.”[6] Just like the Father, the divine Lord, the “great shepherd of the sheep,”[7] will lose none of the sheep that listen to his voice. This is why he’s the “good” Shepherd. He’s not careless about his flock. He loves them. He goes after the strays. He doesn’t tire of the chase. And this is the comfort we can take: that we, the wandering sheep, will not be lost to him if he we hear his voice and love his voice—intimately, like a mother’s voice, like a lover, like the Lord.
But what does this mean for us? It’s simple: we Christians have to put ourselves in a position to hear the Lord. We have to work at listening to God. And this isn’t something we’re very good at. Again, think of it in terms of children. If you turn the television on or put some screen in their hands, they zone out, don’t they? You give it to them; they shut up. It’s quite handy. But then you need to get their attention and you’re like: “Maggie…Maggie…MAGGIE!” And then there are tears and shouting and all over nothing; I was looking for my phone; where is it? Of course, dad’s not addicted to his phone or anything, surely not! Has this happened to you? It’s just the way kids are. Their ears don’t work very well. But maybe my ears don’t work as well as they should either. And, you know, spiritually, we’re just like this too. We too easily get distracted, zoned out by some silly worldly fascination, and we begin to go spiritually deaf. Sometimes, even, we’re so spiritually deaf we begin to think that since we can’t hear God, he must not exist. Every once in a while someone will say to me, “I don’t think I believe in God any more. I just don’t see any sign of his existence. I don’t feel his presence at all.” And my typical response to this is, “Well, have you shut your mouth long enough for God to speak? Have you quieted your soul?” Atheism really isn’t about arguments and evidence. It’s about spiritual blindness and deafness. It’s a disability of the soul.
You see it’s not the case that we’re not able to hear God. It’s that we’re distracted by lesser things. Our spiritual and intellectual attention and our moral imagination are focused upon objects that are at the end of the day empty and fleeting. We’re focused on things which corrupt our spiritual and moral development. I taught a class on the virtues one summer for young people, and I was trying to talk to the kids about obedience. But there was this one kid that kept getting it confused with “obesity.” Every time I asked him to tell me about “obedience,” he’d get confused and call it “obesity.” Now that’s funny and cute, and the kid eventually got it after about three days; but as I thought about it, I wondered what sort of vain and superficial world do we live in when a 12-year-old can recall the word “obesity” far more readily than “obedience.” We’ve created a world for ourselves that is so sadly shallow, we’ve short-circuited the moral and even intellectual potential for ourselves and for our children—so much so that many kids have lost sight of God; many have lost sight of the light in themselves. And how? I remember some years ago I was in a shop on the square of some small town, in one of those tacky shops that sell a bunch of useless stuff; each square has about four such shops; and as I was asking myself, “How many hot pink zebra print items does a person need?” I came across a baby’s onesie—meant for a girl no more than four or five months old—and on it were the words, “Future Trophy Wife.” Now someone thought that cute and funny. Somewhere in this great state of Texas there’s a four-month-old wearing a onesie that says, “Future Trophy Wife.” And we wonder why our children can’t aspire beyond anything more than material and sexual gratification; why they can’t conceive of the good life except in terms of money and material wealth. Peggy Orenstein wrote a wonderful book several years ago called Cinderella Ate My Daughter in which she explores the values being marketed to our daughters. She wrote, “I often wonder what the long-term results…will be…we may actually be cultivating a legion of…spoiled self-centered materialists, superficially charming but without the depth or means for authentic transformation.”[8] Values shape us as human beings. They make us what we are, and if the values we celebrate are shallow, then we will become shallow people. Seek that which is “above,” Paul said.[9] “[W]hatever is true, whatever is honorable…think about these things.”[10] This is our vocation, but we’ve not followed through with it.
And what is worse, as I said, we’ve become spiritually deaf people. What really explains the clergy shortage in the Church? It can’t be celibacy. Protestant churches are suffering severe shortages as well. It must be, partly at least, for the same reason there’s a shortage of nurses, teachers, and other vocations of service. It’s not that God isn’t calling people to give their lives to the priesthood or the religious life or to other sacrificial work, it’s that we’ve become people spiritually hard of hearing. It’s that we’ve let our kids think that being a YouTuber is the highest form of human achievement. We must, if we are to be Christian people, dream bigger, eternally so, and do what we can to hear the voice of the Lord. Before I can say anything worthwhile about vocations, you must be a people who can listen, a people that have quieted and removed the noise of the world, letting go of your sophisticated prejudices and fears. The Lord does indeed still call each one of us. So, the spiritual question I put to you is this: can you hear?
Now what I’ve been talking about this morning is simply prayer. To pray is to listen. To listen is to experience. To experience is to love. And to love is to serve. This is how God chooses you to be his instrument. This is how God gives you the gift of life and eternal life. This is the basic experience of vocation intended for each one of us, leading each one of us into different vocations of service. And God calls us because the world still requires the grace of Jesus. The world is still full of inexplicable violence, suffering, exploitation, and injustice; and we can either sit by and speculate, asking “Why?” like some useless philosopher; or we can passively watch what goes on in the world, outsourcing our moral thinking to whichever cable news channel we prefer; or we can do something. We can serve. We can be agents of goodness and truth. But to do that well, we must listen to the Lord. We must hear what he has to tell us, what he would have us do. We’ve all been through a lot lately. We must hear him, the eternal judge and savior of us all—to his words of forgiveness and peace, these words of our divine lover, our shepherd, our Lord.
“Behold, I stand at the door and knock,” Jesus said to one of the seven churches of Revelation. “If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, [then] I will enter his house and dine with him, and he with me.”[11] Brothers and sisters, hear his voice. Open the door. Receive the Eucharist. Then, go out, “glorifying the Lord by your life.”[12] Amen.
[1] John 10:27
[2] Ken Nye, “My Mother’s Voice,” Searching for the Spring, 70
[3] 1 Samuel 3:1-11
[4] 1 Kings 19:11-15
[5] John 20:11-18
[6] John 10:28
[7] Hebrews 13:20
[8] Peggy Orenstein, Cinderella Ate My Daughter, 104
[9] Colossians 3:1
[10] Philippians 4:8
[11] Revelation 3:20
[12] The Roman Missal
© 2022 Rev. Joshua J. Whitfield
