One of the perks of being married to Rocky is the five wonderful step-grandchildren…all born after we married.  Ella is child number two of Rocky’s middle daughter Emily.  Some of you know her.    Ella is now about 9 years old but she has always had, let’s call it, a strong will.  One day when she was about 2 ½  Rocky and I met her Mom for breakfast at a little café in Roland Park .  Ella and Ella’s older brother Cullen (about 4 at the time) were with her.  Rocky and Emily needed to talk about something so I (being the perfect grandmother….smile) said I would take Cullen and Ella for a walk.
 Now some of you will be familiar with where we were…on the corner of Roland Ave. and Upland road.  Just behind the café is a fire station.  The three of us are walking along the mostly empty parking lot when Ella breaks into a run…heading straight for Upland Road where fire trucks come barreling out and I’m sure they are not usually expecting 2-3 year old little girls to be running out into the street.  I shout at her to stop.  Her brother shouts out to her.  We both break into a run and she now thinks this is a game so she runs faster.  I convinced she is road kill on my watch.
 We finally caught up to her and I snatched her up into my arms and in my sternest grandmotherly voice tell her how dangerous running away like that was and I ended the mini-lecture with:  “Ella….when I call your name you stop.”  And then Ella looks back and says with a perfectly straight face:  “Well…then I won’t hear my name.”
 I won’t hear my name.  I won’t hear my name if it challenges my agenda….if it calls into question my assumptions….if it spoils the fun I’m having.  As we turn to the story about Samuel I want you to keep this question in the back of your mind:  Is it possible that you/we have heard God calling to us but, for any of those reasons and more we refuse to hear?   God calls in many ways.  And somewhere in God’s call your name is mentioned.
 The story we just heard comes from a critical transition time in the history of Israel….about 300 years after the liberation from the clutches of the Egyptian empire.  For about 250 years they had organized themselves in a kind of loose federation of tribes and, from time to time a charismatic leader would emerge to lead them through times of particular challenge or threat.  These leaders were known as judges and you can remember some of their names from Sunday School:  Gideon, Samson and Deborah being the most famous perhaps.  Eli is the last of these judges and is also a priest. The priestly dynasty was the only continuous and unified power and they were the custodians of all things religious as well. Like so often happens with all institutions and systems in any age, things were becoming moribound and corrupt.  Eli wasn’t a bad sort but his sons, the heirs to his power, were total scoundrels.   The times were changing and new  challenges were emerging and a different kind of leadership might be called for.  This is the setting of the story of the call to Samuel. 
 Samuel is the miracle child of Hannah who, in gratitude for his birth gives him by to God, so to speak, by taking him to live in the Temple with old Eli.  Samuel learns to keep the lamps filled and how to heat the oil in the vats for boiling the sacrificial meats.  He has watched through the years as people have dragged their animals onto the altar for sacrifice and he slept in the blood-stained vestibule outside the inner sanctum of the Temple, close enough to Eli’s room that he could hear the old man when he called out in the night.
 And then there comes the night when he thinks he hears old Eli calling.  Three times he goes in asking Eli what he wants.  And Eli says no, he wasn’t calling.  But the third time Eli senses that more than a restless night may be going on with 12 year old Samuel.  Often the story stops there with the recognition by Samuel that it is God rather than Eli calling to him in his dreams.
 But to stop there misses the guts of the story.  For what Samuel hears requires him to place in jeopardy everything that is familiar and secure. Eli’s household may be corrupt but it is also Samuel’s home and Samuel has just heard that this particular power structure is history.  It takes great courage to recognize the truth.  It takes even greater courage to speak it aloud…especially to those who do not wish to hear it.  Remember the story about the emperor who had no clothes….but no one wanted to point out the obvious because the emperor might get mad and chop their heads off.   In responding to  this insight…this call from God….Samuel grows up.  He is open to truth even when it is painful, open to accepting the consequences of faithful truth telling.  Truth always seems to dismantle things before it builds up but it is on such moments of openness and courage that history often turns. 
 We don’t usually hear the voice of God in audible words in our native language. Perhaps it would be easier but God isn’t a being somewhere out there.  God is far more mysterious and ubiquitous.   More often we encounter God in the intuitive insights that come to us… that itch that needs scratching, that little tug of conscience that won’t go away,  the things that need your attention that keep you awake in the middle of the night but so easy to ignore or deny in the light and busyness of the day….God speaks (if we want to use that anthropomorphic language) in that haunting sense that change is in order but it will require something of us that we are not naturally inclined to give.  God;s call is to each of us by name.  How many of us have learned to tune God out or maybe never cared enough to adjust the frequency to hear clearer.  The Holy currents of newness and possibility are calling to us.  It isn’t that we don’t hear.  We know that something is being asked of us.   It is that we have chosen not to recognize that our name is there…it’s you and me and us together that are being called…by God… to do the truth telling and make the changes that might be more than a little discomforting to our own identities…to our sense of security and   power structures on which we’ve come to depend.  So often times God’s call is ignored and opportunities are passed by.  But here’s the other thing.  God’s call is persistent.  God’s newness will find a way.  Eli could see the writing on the wall but he was in denial.  So it fell to young Samuel to hear and respond.
 In the 1950’s Vernon Johns was the pastor of a Baptist Church in Montgomery Alabama.  He recognized that the hatred and deeply imbedded racism of his culture was contrary to what he knew human community was supposed to be.  In his prayers and studies he felt the unmistakable call to challenge the assumptions and encourage change.  He started preaching powerful challenges to the status quo and staged his own personal protests.   The KKK burned crosses in front of the church, they made threats against John’s family and the members of his African American parish.  The church leadership began to be very nervous.  God was calling them too.  THEIR names were attached to the call from God to challenge the system.  The system may have been corrupt and oppressive but they had learned to live within it and not make waves.  They had made peace  with injustice.  They refused to hear their name called they  and were livid that the old man in the pulpit could rock the boat so hard they feared it would surely sink taking them and their families with it. 
 So the churched fired Vernon Johns and effectively silenced his voice. He answered God’s call and it cost him his job.  God’s truth will usually dismantle before it rebuilds. Each of us has the choice whether to be part of God’s change or part of the problem.  But God’s voice is persistent.  
After the church got rid of Vernon Johns they did what churches often do.  They hired a youngster right out of seminary…someone they could  influence and shape…someone who was still green and would preach generalized spiritual nuggets that would not threaten the applecart.  Someone hungry enough and naïve enough to go along to get along.  His name was Martin Luther King, Jr……a Samuel….someone who would hear his name attached to the call to announce “this corrupt system and ideology is history.”
 Where are we in these stories?  It is so clear, when we look back into past history, to separate out the prophets from the crackpots, the courageous from the impulsive.  But it is harder, when we are caught up in the ebb and flow of life, to pay attention to the those flashes of truth and insight that say, something here isn’t right.  It is harder still when the issues and the conflicts are deeply imbedded within the structures and communities that have nurtured us.  It is important to seek out others who will help with the discernment…who will put the hard questions to us.  One of the reasons we are in community is to do that for each other so that together we can hear when God calls us to speak and to act.  Who dares to speak out when it is easier and safer to keep silent?    God’s way, God’s truth, God’s life is for the world.  But it is also personal.  It calls YOU to make it live… it calls you by name.