There was a great mountain-shattering wind… but God was not
in the wind.
There was
an earthquake, fearsome-shaking… but God was not in the earthquake.
There was a
fire, a blazing inferno, all-consuming, destroying… but God was not in the
earthquake.
Then,
lastly, finally, there was the sound of… silence. What is that sound exactly?
The Hebrew
says Qol demamah daqah—literally a
voice of small silence. I think I like the Common English Bible’s translation
best: “After the fire, there was a sound. Thin. Quiet.”
Whatever it
is, it is contrasted to the elemental forces named before. It makes sense for
God to come in the wind, the earthquake, or the fire; we’ve seen God come in
all of those forces to Abraham and Jacob and Moses and to Israel in its
wandering. We know God comes with a bang, but what’s more surprising is that God
comes in “thin quiet.”
If you’re
talking you won’t hear it. If you’re not listening closely it will pass you by.
You’ll become convinced that God never speaks, but how could you hear the voice
of God with all this noise in your life?
One of the
reasons I love living in Hallock is the quiet. My brother and his wife are
unnerved by it. When they come up to visit they can’t sleep because they miss
the sounds of traffic, of people walking by, sirens, dogs barking—all the stuff
of night in the city. There aren’t lights shining in their windows or drunks
yelling to one another at closing time. I suspect many of my friends from high
school who grew up in Minneapolis and the suburbs, who’ve rarely stepped foot
in rural America, may feel similarly. I remember the silence when I first came
up here, too. It was strange. You don’t notice it unless you aren’t used to it.
Of course I had plenty of experiences with camping in the northwoods and I spent
summers working at a camp far away from the lights and sounds of the city.
Still, it is easy to go back to the default. It’s easy to forget the quiet.
The reality
of the twenty-first century is that it almost doesn’t matter where you live,
because, even though we live in a place that is quiet, we do our best to fill
it with noise. We turn on TVs, we throw in ear buds, turn on our phones. We
have screen addictions, it’s true, but we also have noise addictions.
I think we
often realize this about ourselves; we know we need the silence. Many of those
out hunting this morning are out there looking for it. They know the power of
silence, of sitting in a place with no agenda to talk, of waiting to experience
nothing in particular and yet everything that comes in the absence of sound.
I’m going to tell you the big open secret that everybody knows: Deer season
isn’t really about shooting deer. And it’s also not really about hanging out at the cabin or drinking either—at least
not at its heart. That’s the excuse that’s made. That’s the thing people tell
themselves to get them out there, because they’re mostly men and it’s easier
for men to point at a picture of a big buck and say, “That’s what it’s all
about” than it is to admit that it’s all good, buck or no buck. The real truth
for many, who may never admit it, is that deer hunting is about living into the
silence. For many, hunting season is that rare time when silence is the
expectation. More to the point, it is shared silence with others, which is even
more powerful.
All of us desperately need those
moments where silence is expected. We need them to center ourselves. If we’re
only ever running from one thing to the next, checking our phones, cheering on
teams, blasting the radio in our cars, listening to people talking, hearing the
news; if we’re only ever turning on the TV when we get home, absorbing sounds
99% of the day; if we can’t wait to fill the silence with more sound, then we
are missing a central piece of our relationship with God because we are
willfully avoiding the place where God meets us.
God meets
us when we let it all go. It’s easier said than done, of course. We are busy. Many of us want silence but
cannot find it on a daily basis. If you currently have young kids (or have had
them in the past) you know that church is probably not where you find it. After all, Elijah had to go up on the
mountain to find it himself; no other temple would truly suffice. We, too, need
to find peace in the craziness, silence in the noise. It isn’t easy. In the
third hour of Natalie yelling, “Daddy!” from her bedroom it’s not enough to
want silence; it’s completely out of my control. But it is important, when
silence is fleeting, to remember it for what it is: The holy space where God’s
self may pass by.
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