March 2, 2025, Listen! – Luke 9:28-36 – Mtr. Kathryn Boswell

saintphilipsnorwood ♦ March 2, 2025 ♦ Leave a comment

To listen to the sermon, click the link above. The text is below:

lot of times, the breakdown in a relationship has to do with a lack of listening: a wife feels like her husband doesn’t love her any more because he doesn’t listen to her. Or a child yells at his parents in frustration, “You never listen to me.” We want people to listen to us – especially the people we love – because we want them to pay attention to us, because we want them to know us.

After 50 years of marriage, Carroll knows that I love Corgis and reading out loud and gardening. And he knows that I hate liver and horror movies and making phone calls. He knows all these things and lots more because he listens to me. We never once sat down and rattled off lists of likes and dislikes; we didn’t take compatibility quizzes during our pre-marital counseling; we’ve just spent a lot of the past half century, for the most part, in a posture of listening to each other.

There are a lot of different ways people listen to each other – hearing a tone of voice or noticing how they react to something. If you love someone you listen to what they don’t say as much as what they do say; you listen to what they choose; you pay attention to the places where they are happy, and the things they keep close to them. That’s all part of listening. Because we listen, we pay attention, to the things and people that matter to us.

Today we read the story of the Transfiguration, where God issues a command, on the mountaintop, his voice booming out of the cloud. And the command is this: “This is my Son, my Chosen One. Listen to him.”

It’s a call into relationship: this is my beloved Son: pay attention to him; hear what he says, learn what he cares about. Notice. Listen to him. Get to know him. For Peter and James and John, who walked back down the mountain alongside their friend and teacher, it’s not hard to understand what that meant. But the call is for us as well. What does it mean for us to listen to the Son? How do we answer the Father’s call into relationship? God calls us to listen because he wants to speak to us, and he speaks to us because he wants us to know him.

The most obvious answer is that we listen to Jesus by reading the Bible. If we want to know God; if we want to listen to him; we should open the Bible and read – we all know that. But the Bible can be a little intimidating: it’s a bigger book than most of us feel ready to tackle, for one thing; and so much of it seems hard to understand. So people come at the Bible in different ways.

Some people use the Bible like a magic 8-ball. They read the Bible when they need to find an answer to something important in their lives: to help with a decision they need to make, maybe. They open it at random and look for some word or phrase that they hope will be God’s message to them. Have you ever done that? The most amazing thing about that is that sometimes it works. God is so serious about talking to us that sometimes he will show up even in our superstition. If we are listening, God is always faithful to speak, sometimes even on our own foolish terms.

On the other extreme, there are people who approach the Bible like a research project, so they can pack it into neat, tidy little theological boxes, or else take it apart and cut it up like a frog in high school biology class. I feel like when people come at Scripture like that, a lot of time God will answer by throwing curve balls that shatter our carefully constructed images of who he is, so that we can begin to know him as he really is.

The one thing you can count on is that if you come to the Bible willing to listen, you will definitely find yourself surprised out of some of your comfortable assumptions, just the way your husband or your wife or your best friend keeps on surprising you even after you’ve known them for years and years – as long as you keep paying attention.

But we can also listen for the voice of Jesus from inside, from the deepest parts of ourselves. It’s pretty rare to hear the voice of God booming out of the heavens, even in the Bible. But that doesn’t mean God isn’t speaking to you. If you belong to Christ, his Spirit lives in you, and he is in communication with you all the time. Jesus told us that the Spirit would remind us of the things he taught us, and more than that – that he would teach us all things – that’s a lot, ALL things. It takes practice, learning to listen and recognize his voice in the midst of all the noise of our own thoughts and worries and feelings. But God is the still, small voice in the middle of all that noise, and we can hear him if we learn to listen. Again, it’s not some kind of magic formula – or of looking for signs to tell us what to do – it’s not even a matter of being a “super-spiritual” person – it’s much more like being married. It’s a life-long practice of listening and getting better and better at recognizing his voice.

I think maybe the last place we expect to hear the voice of our Lord is by listening to each other. But he is especially present in his people as a community. He has a lot to say to us through each other. Jesus told us: “if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.” If we’re wise, and if we can manage to be a little bit humble, we won’t only listen for God in our own feelings or thoughts about something, or by listening to the Spirit within us, or even by reading the Bible. If we’re wise, we take seriously what our brothers and sisters say to us as well, because God put us in community for a reason. You can probably recognize my gifts and my strengths (or my weaknesses) better than I can myself – and I can recognize yours. Listening for the voice of God in your brother or sister is one of the most important ways you can submit yourselves to one another. It’s one of the best ways to hear God.

And even that isn’t the definitive report on listening to God, of course. We hear the voice of God when we are in the woods or on a mountaintop or at the seashore. We see him in the eyes of our loving animal friends. God can speak to our hearts through a piece of music, or a painting, or a hand-crafted quilt. He’s the Creator; there’s absolutely nothing and no place in this world where we can’t hear his voice.

Except that we spend so much of our time like the three disciples on the mountaintop, sleepy and befuddled. Sometimes we rush around like Peter trying to do stuff – “It’s a good thing we’re here, Lord, because somebody has to micromanage these things.” Sometimes we’re paralyzed with fear or anxiety. Sometimes we’re just plain tired. And always, always, always, we are surrounded by voices, loud voices, insistent voices, that threaten to drown out the one voice we need to hear.

(start pacing…..)

I am really worried today about Dobby, who swallowed a piece of dental floss, and might need surgery…. I feel like it was my fault that he got the dental floss…. I hope the lentil soup I made for our lunch today came out well…. I wish the electrician would get back to me about an estimate for the church – and when is the guy going to get working on the sacristy roof? It’s so cold today, but such a relief to see some sunshine…. I woke up at three this morning worrying about Dobby, and then I started doomscrolling….THAT’S always a bad idea…. And what is going on with all this craziness in our country; the news just gets scarier and more insane EVERY SINGLE DAY??????

(Listen……Listen….. Listen……)

Hear the voice of the Father today. “This is my Son, my Chosen One. Listen to him.” Only one thing is necessary. Listen to him. Lay down your heavy burdens of anxiety and fear and confusion and endless distractions and being right, and take up the light yoke of listening.

“Beloved,” John wrote, “we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.” If we hear him through his Word; if we learn to recognize his still, small voice within us; if we listen for him in the voices of our brothers and sisters – if we listen – then like husbands and wives grow to look like one another after years of life together, we will also grow to take on the glorious likeness of our Lord. +