“When Joseph awoke; he did as the angel had commanded him.”
Boys and girls, have you ever done this:
“La la la la la I’m not hearing you!
I am not hearing you! ba ba ba ba ba ?”
Yes, I think we all have done it at some time.
Even if you haven’t done it, without the sounds,
you do block what our parents are saying.
We can hear what we want to hear. Right?
Wouldn’t you say that we block out Mum and Dad
when we don’t want to hear what they say;
like, clean the dishes
or do something you don’t want to do. Right?
If the truth be told boys and girls,
you are not the only ones who do that.
Parents and spouses do it to each other all the time too.
“What? Oh, were you talking to me? Oh, what?”
“For heaven’s sake, I’ve been talking to you
for the last 15 minutes!” they say.
“Oh, really? What? Oh, I didn’t hear you.”
They even do it to their pastor.
Ah ah ah. Just say’n you know.
Occasionally, it happens.
They block him out as well.
“Oh, there he goes again. Off he goes.”
The reality is that we hear what we want to hear.
And even when we do want to hear,
we sometimes find it hard to hear,
hard to be attentive to what we are hearing.
Here is the part, we even do it to God.
We may not even think we are doing it to God.
It goes something like this:
“hailmaryfullofgracethelordiswithyou;
hailmaryfullofgracethelordiswithyou;
hailmaryfullofgrace”
And so and so goes our prayer.
God: “I’m not hearing you. I’m not hearing you.”
It’s well meant but we still block out God.
The only consolation we have is in today’s readings
that this has happened in ancient times;
it has been going on for a long time.
Here is King Ahaz, who was blessed by God to be the King
and he does the same thing.
He does it in a little more pious way.
He says “Oh, I would never ask God to speak to me.
Oh, no. No. No. I wouldn’t do that.”
The Prophet Isaiah hears this and just lets him have it.
He says, “Oh, spare me”, he says.
“You are going to treat God like that?”
He is already talking to you and then Isaiah assures him
he will come and of course, the prediction of Emmanuel.
When Jesus comes along, we hear over and over again
how many disciples and religious people,
especially, the Pharisees, the Sadducees and religious leaders
they block God out by talking at God,
saying all the multitude of prayers nonstop.
So just to keep God away.
Now we can go into motivation all we want
but I’m not sure it is terribly helpful because the net output is the same.
We look to the contrast in today’s gospel,
which is how Joseph acts.
Joseph hears God speak to him through an angel in a dream.
Joseph wakes up and does what he is commanded.
Now that is a contrast point in a person of faith.
Now, lest we not understand now Joseph would have come to this;
he must have been a man of profound prayer
that he would have recognized the voice of God in his dream;
that he would have recognized that this is an angel;
and this was the message; and this is for me;
and therefore, this is what I must do.
Without a history of doing that;
without a history of listening to God’s voice;
without a history of being able to recognize what God’s voice sounds like,
Joseph would not have been able to do that.
Of course, we are meant to act more like Joseph than Ahaz
but we have to be honest with where we are really at;
we are more like Ahaz than we are like Joseph.
We do not really spend a lot of time trying to listen to God.
And then when we do, we want to get on with it;
“Right now, c’mon let’s go, I’m done, I’m ready, no talk!”
That is not the way it works.
Then the question is: How does God speak to us?
And this has been the subject of my retreat
that we have been doing these last Tuesday nights. Right?
And last week, we talked about this very subject:
How do we listen to God’s voice?
First is the very question: Does God talk to us?
The answer is yes; of course, he does.
God is speaking to us all the time.
And you say, “Well, I don’t hear him.”
That is not because God is not speaking.
It is because we are not listening; or we don’t know how to listen.
We have to work harder at listening.
Then the question is: How does God speak to us?
What does that look like?
God speaks through creation, all his created beings
and through the beautiful world he created.
How could you not look up at a beautiful sky, the mountains
and not see God’s beauty?
That is God speaking to us in a beautiful, profound way.
God speaks to us in our thoughts;
he speaks to us in our emotions;
he speaks to us through imagination and
in what we hear today, he speaks to us in our dreams.
We have to be careful though;
we have to figure out what this looks like
and we have to learn the language of God.
And I know you are looking a bit puzzled
but let me just give you an example:
Do dogs talk?
Yes. They do talk.
But do they use words? No. They don’t. Most dogs don’t.
Huskies probably do. They seem to talk.
Dogs do not use words. Right?
But they are communicating.
They are not talking in words, but they are communicating.
I remember I went to a friend’s home.
I said your dog wants to use the bathroom outside.
“How did you know that?”
“Ahem, scratching at the door?”
Like that wasn’t really hard to figure out,
but some people take no time to understand their dog.
Now, look, dogs do communicate.
The tail under; the tail up;
ears up; ears back.
They smile. They laugh.
They are communicating all the time.
If we want to be a good dog owner,
we are going to sort of understand
what canine body language looks like.
If we are going to do that and we are a dog owner,
surely, we want to figure out how God communicates;
and spend some time figuring out what does God’s language look like;
and it is a language that is multi-variant.
There is not just one way.
That’s the fun part of how God communicates.
We can continue to hear God speak and communicate with us.
We have to find time.
We have to carve out time to listen to God.
I understand there are fears.
Like Ahaz, we do not want to hear what God has to say
because that means we then have to do what he says.
And that is the challenge.
We want God to only talk to us on Sunday mornings.
And just only for a short time!
Father. Get on with it. Right?
We just want to keep it nice and short
because I’ve got a lot of things to do
in the other 168 hours in this week.
Do you see how we push God away?
And we put him into a box?
A dog communicates all the time whether we like it or not
and the same way with God.
Where do we start?
That is what Advent is about.
This whole Advent journey is about
learning to listen to God at a deeper level;
to look at our lives and say
“Where is God speaking to us
and we’ve got to do some work here.”
This just doesn’t happen.
We have to do our work of learning to listen to God in our life.
I invite you to come and listen to the prayer series I am doing.
It will teach you some of the methodologies.
One sure way, that we have been doing for thousands of years
and billions of people have done it and have successfully used it,
which is learning to listen to God speak to us through scripture.
Now there are different methodologies
and I used two of them last Tuesday night:
Lectio Divina and scriptural meditation
where you imagine yourself inside the scripture passage;
to use your imagination to allow God to speak to us.
Whatever way it is, like take this scripture passage today,
put yourself into it
and imagine yourself somewhere in one of those passages
and see what is it that God is asking of you.
It is not enough to just come on Sundays, guys.
That is a thing of the past.
We have to learn to listen to God
every moment of our every day
because he is banging at the window of our lives, saying,
“Hey. Listen. I’ve got things to say to you.”
He wants to communicate how much he loves you.
And he wants you to be assured of that.
But he wants you to pass that message to others.
That is the message of Advent.
That is the message of Christmas we are going to celebrate;
that he loves us so much he came among us.
Let’s listen in our hearts to what God is saying to us.
“When Joseph awoke,
he did what he was commanded by the angel.”
