One of my favorite stories is about this woman who decides that she’s going to join a convent, she’s very religious and she wants to join a convent.  So she gets to the convent and discovers that it’s one of those convents where they practice silence, the nuns are only allowed to say two words every ten years.  Well this isn’t exactly what she had in mind, but she decides to go through with it.  She stays ten years, and then comes to the Mother Superior and says her two words.  She says, “Bed hard.”  And the Mother Superior acknowledges her two words.  The woman stays another ten years, and again goes to the Mother Superior and says her two words.  This time she says, “Food bad.”  And the Mother Superior again acknowledges her two words.  Well this woman stays another ten years and again comes to the Mother Superior and says her two words.  She says, “I quit.”  And the Mother Superior says, “Well good, you’ve done nothing but complain since you got here.”           

I’m not sure two words every ten years qualifies, but sometimes you can say too much, sometimes you can be too busy with your words, you can create too much noise and drown everything else out.  I remember once going through the pews in the sanctuary in my early years in the ministry, straightening up the pews and picking up the bulletins that were left behind, and I came upon a discarded bulletin, and in the margins was a note obviously written by a child to his mother or father.  And the note in the margin, which must have been written during the sermon, said, “How much longer is he going to go on?”           

It’s a good question sometimes.  It’s a reminder to you, of course, that you have to be careful what kinds of notes you write to each other and leave in the pews.  But it’s also fair warning to preachers and to all of us that we have to be careful with our words, we have to be careful, not to use them so frivolously, not to just go on and on when perhaps we’ve said enough.  I think about this child’s note every once in a while when I’m preparing my sermon and asking myself, “Is what I’m saying necessary?  Is it necessary?  Is it insightful and helpful?”           

I know of another minister who was preaching at an Easter sunrise service, and they reached the dramatic moment when the sun was rising just behind where he was standing.  And he began to talk about the beauty of the sunrise, and his arms were becoming quite active (you don’t know anyone like that, do you?), and the sleeves of his robe were flying all around.  And he was a big man.  And after a few moments this preacher realized to his horror that he’d been talking about the beauty of the sunrise, he’d been describing it in a powerful way, he’d been going on and on, but he had completely blocked their vision of it.  The one thing they had all come out to see, they hadn’t seen really at all, because he’d been going on and on, he’d gotten in the way, his presence, his words, had been in the way.           

I wonder if some of you don’t read Kathleen Norris.  She’s a poet by nature, but what I’ve read of her works are spiritual essays in her bestselling books such as “Dakota” and “The Cloister Walk”.  Before she became a writer, she used to teach art to children, and she had this exercise in her classroom where she told the children that first they would make noise, and then they would make silence.  First, she would raise her hand and let the children make all the noise they wanted to while sitting at their desks, using their voices, their hands and feet, and sometimes other noisemakers.  But when she lowered her hand, the children had to stop making noise.  And she found that the children could become so still that silence actually seemed to become a presence in the classroom.  They were so used to noise and taking orders that they had essentially stopped listening.  But when there was silence, they listened, and their imaginations were liberated, their imaginations went wild.  One little girl said that silence is like we’re waiting for something to happen, it’s like we’re waiting for a voice to speak to us from somewhere.  It’s scary, she said.           

And I guess I’m not thinking so much today of words per se, the noise we can create with words, but the noise we sometimes create with our lives – the busyness, the constant motion, diverting ourselves and entertaining ourselves almost without stop, without rest, without any kind of reflection on what in the world are we doing to ourselves.  It can be scary to stop the noise, to stop the motion, because when we do we might expect to hear something, we might even expect to hear God’s voice giving us some new direction, some new purpose, some new focus, some new work for us to do.           

It’s okay, I heard someone say, it’s okay to climb the ladder of success – as long as the ladder you’re climbing is leaning against the right wall.  You need to be careful that the things you are pursuing with your life are worth pursuing, because you just might reach what you’re after, you just might spend your whole life and get what you wanted, only to discover that what you were after, what you wanted, has no real value at all.  I remember this one man saying to me, someone we would all think of as a very successful person, I remember him saying to me, almost with an accusation in his voice, “Why didn’t anyone tell me, why didn’t anyone tell me, that when I scratched and clawed and climbed my way to the top there would be nothing there, there was nothing there.”           

Someone has described our life by dividing it into two parts.  The first part of life is like a lake, he said, a lake that’s a mile wide but only an inch deep.  Our lives, he says, are like a lake that’s a mile wide and an inch deep.  You remember those days, don’t you? or maybe you’re still going through them.  Your life is so active and busy, you’re kind of on a treadmill, establishing yourself, searching out the right way to go, providing for your family, maybe you’re just a little wild in your choices and the things you do.  I remember when we lived in Manhattan, and I was a lawyer and Brenda was the office manager for a thriving company.  When Monday morning rolled around we were off to the races, sometimes hardly seeing each other all week.  And that was our life five, six, seven days a week.  Actually that sounds a little like our lives right now.  But this writer would say that lives like these are a mile wide but perhaps only an inch deep.           

But then he says, there is the second part of your life.  Things are not quite so active or busy or wild.  The lake is no longer a mile wide, it’s narrow: it’s not a mile wide, it’s narrow.  But it’s deep; it’s deep.  There is a depth to you, a strength in you, there is a significance to you, a complexity, a profundity.  Some people reach this stage of life pretty young, but this kind of depth doesn’t come naturally, it doesn’t just come.  And the question, I suppose, is this: what happens if you get to that second stage of life and there is no depth to who you are?  Not only are you narrow, but you’re shallow.  Hmh?  What then?  I remember I was joking around with someone and he said that I was a shallow person.  And my response was that well yes, I may be shallow, but I am deep for a shallow person.   But what if you come to that point in your life, at any age, where you find that you’re not only narrow, but you’re shallow?  The depths don’t come easily, they don’t come automatically, they must be nurtured and cultivated.           

I love this scene of Elijah desperately seeking for some word from the Lord.  And there was a great wind, so strong that it split the mountains open and broke the rocks into pieces.  But the Lord was not in the wind.  And then there was an earthquake, and Elijah must have felt as if the whole world were shaking, but the Lord was not in the earthquake.  And then there was fire, but the Lord was not in the fire.  But then, and this is the part I love, then there was “the sound of sheer silence.”  And it was out of this silence that Elijah heard these words, he heard this question, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”  What are you doing here?           

And I remember in all the blitz of activity of my early career as a lawyer in Manhattan, there would be those only very rare moments of silence, just little bits and pieces of silence in the middle of all that noise, but out of that silence sometimes I would hear, “What are you doing here, Duane?  What are you doing here?”  What are you doing here?  And it changed everything.           

I won’t usually end a sermon with a funny story, but this has been pretty heavy today, and you’ve probably heard this one anyway.  There was a man who was so engaged in whatever he was doing as he walked along that he failed to notice the cliff that was looming just ahead of him.  In fact, he fell over the edge of the cliff, but he managed to hold onto a branch.  He can’t pull himself up though, not by himself, so he’s just hanging there, for dear life, thinking no one’s around.  But he cries out for help anyway.  “Is anybody out there?” he yells.  “Yes, I’m here,” a voice just sort of booms out of nowhere.  “Who are you?” he asks.  “I’m God,” the voice responds.  “Well then, God,” he says, “get me out of here.”  “I will,” says the voice.  “Just let go, and I’ll catch you.”  Well, the man thinks this over for a minute or two, and then he yells, “Is anybody else out there?”           

What could be more crazy than hanging on to something that will not save you?  And yet we do it all the time.  Among other things, we hang onto the noise and the activity and the lifestyle of constant motion.  But it may be that if we let go – and it’s hard to let go just a little bit, you pretty much have to let go completely or you might as well just go ahead and hang on – but if we let go and be still and wait and listen, we may not hear what we want to hear, but if we listen, if we wait upon the Lord to move in his own time, in his own way, we may just hear that for which our souls truly are longing, we may just hear the voice of God.