Samuel. Samuel! SAMUEL! Groggy from sleep, Samuel thinks that his aged spiritual mentor Eli is rousing him for something, maybe for some help getting up, or for a drink of water, or as a reassurance that all things are OK in the sanctuary.

I know the drill all too well. As a parent, those nighttime callings are frequent in the early years. First the murmurs and the crying, but then it progresses to Mommy. Mommy! MOMMY! The familiar sound makes my weary body slither out of bed and tired feet shuffle into the room to which I have been called. Taking directions at that point has become an automatic response for me. I can get water in my sleep, soothe away the dream demons, and get back to bed -- hopefully before the alarm goes off.

But Samuel had to endure something different. After being awakened for the third time, Eli knew that Samuel was hearing something strange. Something more than a spicy dinner was troubling his late night rest. So Eli instructed Samuel to wait to hear his name again, and when he did, he was to say, ""Speak Lord, your servant is listening.""

These kinds of wakings are much more disturbing. Have you ever been roused by that question that kept recurring dream after dream? Have you struggled repeatedly with a nagging anxiety that something was unfinished in your life? Have you had that feeling that going to bed angry with someone you love was not a good idea?

In our culture, there is a tendency to discount our nightlife as being significant to the workings of our day-life. Dream analysis is left to the new age crowd, and behavior modification has replaced hypnosis and dream journals in the toolboxes of most practicing counselors. Perhaps it's not without reason. Those levels of our brain's power are still mysterious to us. Time and Newsweek have run articles on the fact that our brain's chemistry changes with prayer and meditation -- but there are still things that we cannot explain about the answers we get in those moments. Are they subconscious wanderings, or are they God's Spirit connecting to the frequency of our spirits? Are we, in a sense, hard-wired for religion? Can God's call really reach us when we're tuned in?

The way scripture depicts Samuel's call is to claim that the Lord stood right there next to him just as Kent is standing here by me and that this personal God spoke in an audible voice in understandable language telling Samuel step-by-step what he was supposed to do. And we wonder, "Huh? If it were only that easy!" Well, I don't know from all that if it would be easy, or terrifying, or still written off as the effects of last night's wine the following morning.

God's ways are not our ways. So when we try to describe an experience of God's call on our lives, things get a little tricky. Certain details seem rather unbelievable, or at the very least coincidental. We start the story with, "You'll never believe what happened to me," if we decide to even brave telling the story at all. Only years later do we begin to process what stories were actually important to the direction and outcomes of our lives, and then, we wonder, could we have imagined or made up those particular details?

However, the stories about the dreams and insights that influence people are fascinating to me because I do believe that God finds ways of calling us out of our ordinary lives into being a part of God's plan. In fact, one of the few stories I remember from my long ago days in high school chemistry involves a scientist who had a dream. I couldn't remember the name at first but I remembered the story and consulted the Internet to find Friedrich August Kekule, the man who first mapped out the ability of carbon to form chains and who created the map of benzene, a carbon-based structure that forms in a closed, hexagonal ring. In papers he delivered to the professional audience of his day, he first described a vision of dancing atoms coming together as he rode the cross-town bus, and in his second vision he had a dream of a snake grabbing it's own tail which he later interpreted as an insight into the ring-like molecular structure of benzene. In reading his history, it only gets more interesting. This person who had fully planned to study architecture found his love in chemistry. And this person who spent his life in laboratories, got the insights that propelled his scientific career to the forefront from riding the bus and dozing off in his office. (www.woodrow.org/teachers/chemistry/institutes/1992/Kekule.html)

We find this an odd step out in the way we normally look at things. The general outlook of the American work ethic would tell us not to take naps on the job or trust the impressions we get when riding the bus. We're instructed in the ways of making money, but not told how to follow our dreams. In our day, the prophet Samuel would be called delusional, and nighttime callings would be treated with the use of sleep aids.

But I get the sneaking suspicion that God still calls us in the middle of the night. I get that feeling that God never stopped visiting our dreams and casting visions for us to see. Even if we cannot logically explain that sense of God's call on our life, it's there, even if it's not as plain as day or as clear as the morning sun.

I find the story from John's gospel is a little more believable. Philip is convinced to follow this wandering rabbi named Jesus, and he tries to convince his friend Nathaniel to do the same. Nathaniel, the skeptic, raises an eyebrow with his question, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" "Come and see," answers Philip.

When Nathaniel meets Jesus for the first time, Jesus says, "Here is a real Israelite, nothing false in him." It blew his mind! Jesus knew him, saw him under the fig tree, and made a quick assessment on first impression that stuck him like a knife. This man, he thought, must be the Messiah. And Jesus basically answers, "Well, if you can believe that, you'll see a whole lot more incredible things."

What kind of incredible things do we miss because we don't have the eyes to see or the ears to hear? I imagine that guy from the commercial who runs around with his cell phone asking, "Can you hear me now?" God keeps after us to hear, to see, to believe. God calls us so many more times than we are able to hear, and like the majority of our spiritual ancestors, we humans are reluctant to hear and act on those calls.

Samuel. Samuel! SAMUEL! Nathaniel, will you come? Friedrich, can you picture these atoms? Even when we do have the ability to clearly connect with our call, our first step is often resistance. Samuel did not want to hear that he must give Eli notice of impending doom for his family. Nathaniel didn't want to believe he was called to learn from someone from a hick town like Nazareth. I suspect that Kekule was reluctant to share the nature of his insights with Enlightenment scholars who believed that only pure reason would unlock the keys to the universe.

In my own personal experience, I have never found it easy to follow God's call, no matter how clearly or how dimly it presents itself. It helped me to read that there's even a name for this phenomenon, and psychologist Abraham Maslow has labeled it the "Jonah Complex," Jonah being the patron saint of call denial. According to Maslow, this complex includes, " The evasion of one' s own growth, the setting of low levels of aspiration, the fear of doing what one is capable of doing, voluntary self-crippling, pseudo-stupidity, and mock humility." (Levoy, p. 191) We dare not go where God may lead. When God calls, every excuse becomes valid. Every time we are inclined to maybe hear something -- we drown it out with other noise, or busyness, or whatever.

You may wonder why I would preach about this type of reticence to this congregation. This congregation is full of leaders, important people, scientists of great insight, and dreamers of peace and justice for all people. Nevertheless, any new calling, new dream, or new purpose requires change -- and I've noticed that change can scare even the most liberal, open-minded Presbyterians right down to their toenails.

You as a congregation, and I as your pastor have entered into a covenant to fulfill our mutual call to one another. Right now that call seems to be setting a new sense of joy and hope and direction for this church. But in time, we will have to come to terms with our fears at where that might go. Like Samuel, God may call me to prophesy things to you that have an edge of pain attached. Like Nathaniel, you may wonder, "Can anything good come out of Altoona, PA?" Is she experienced enough, wise enough to help us make good choices? In the future, there may be some choppy waters where now things seem to be all smooth sailing. The resistance to hear where God is setting the course will come. It always does. Jonah didn't want to go to Ninevah, but when he did, the results were astonishing.

So my charge to you today is to pay attention to how, and where, and what God is calling you to be, as an individual and as a church family? On this Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend, it's a good time to be thinking about the dreams we share for the future. Then we need to find the courage to work toward God's plan. It will be easy for us to find comfort in the familiar, to want to stop our spiritual growing when it gets hard, to claim we don't have the resources, or the cash flow, or the enthusiasm to go forward. God will not call us where it is impossible to go, but God does call us to be challenged with new growth. Let us go -- together.

Amen.

SOURCE REFERENCE

Levoy, Gregg. Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life. Three Rivers Press: New York, 1997.