“Come unto me all ye that travail and are heavy laden and I will refresh you.”
There’s a danger in the church these days that we may only be talking to ourselves. And if that’s the case, then mostly we would seem to be talking ourselves out of believing that Jesus is our Savior, our Teacher, our Healer, our Hope, our Friend, or anyone at all that we really need in our lives - judging by the numbers, I mean. Whatever we are saying to ourselves doesn’t seem to be doing many of us much good.
What we need is more of Jesus talking to us, I’d say. But how, exactly, does that happen? I can stand up here and tell you that Jesus is talking to you when we read that he says, “Come unto me all ye that travail and are heavy laden and I will refresh you.” But why should you believe me? What makes it self-evident that the words of an ancient rabbi, written in an also ancient book, and repeated in church, are real and living words being spoken to you or to me in the here and now?
But I make this kind of claim all the time. I take it for granted that you, or anyone else, might believe me that the words from the pages of the Gospel come alive when we speak or sing them in church - especially the words of Jesus. And that those words are not simply words from the past that we are speaking in the present, rather that they are words directed to me and to you in the here and now, not only to the people to whom they were first spoken all those ages ago. Even better, (or worse), I often purport to speak for Jesus, myself. If I say Jesus is asking to you to come to him, I want you to believe me. I want you to be able to hear him calling you, even if the voice sounds like mine. But how does this work?
You can’t come to Jesus if you can’t hear him calling you. And you can’t hear him calling, if you don’t know the sound of his voice. And you can’t know the sound of his voice if no one has taught you to listen for it.
We spend a lot of time in church focusing on what has to be said or sung. The leaflet provides a good example of this: it’s carefully organized with texts, and headings, rubrics in italics, the parts you speak in bold print, other people’s words carefully attributed, composers identified, etc, etc. The printed leaflet is a tool for making sure we all say the right things in church. And here at Saint Mark’s we very much hope that anyone coming to visit here for the first time would find it helpful, and won’t be left unable to figure out when to sit or stand or kneel, and what to say when you do, or what someone else is saying or singing. We’re very careful about what we say here, because we think it’s important, and it is.
But how can we hear Jesus? How can we listen for and to Jesus? How can we know the sound of his voice? If we never learn to listen for Jesus, can we ever be doing anything other than talking to ourselves, while reading from an old book?
Listening for Jesus requires a different set of skills than a bunch of people who merely show up on Sunday mornings to say and sing the right things. I can think of three overlapping skills that will help us in learning to listen for the sound of Jesus’ voice.
The first is to spend time in quiet. In many lives, quiet time is a luxury, in others it’s an imposition. The TV, the radio, and now earbuds have made it very easy to leave almost no space in our lives for quiet. But quiet time is immensely important in learning to be attentive to the sound of Jesus’ voice. Remember that in the aftermath of earthquake, wind, and fire, it was in the quiet that the prophet Elijah was able to hear the still, small voice of God. And one of the purposes of the church is to serve as an echo chamber for the voice of God - to so tune the acoustics of our life together that the ancient echoes of that still small voice, and of the voice of our Savior, come rolling down the caverns of the ages in recognizable tones. So, it’s important to have time to be quiet.
Quiet time is often a precursor to, or a condition for prayer, which is the second overlapping skill that helps us to lean to recognize the sound of Jesus’s voice. Most of us need reminders that prayer is meant to be a two-way conversation. Yes, we may speak to God in prayer, but God also speaks to us in prayer, if we allow ourselves time and space and quietness in which to hear God’s voice. The best practices for this kind of prayer are forms of contemplative prayer, but other reflective practices, like walking, can also work. Yes, walking, just walking, with no place particular to go, is one of the best ways I know to make time for prayer in your life. Whether it’s on a long walk, or in a more carefully honed practice of contemplative prayer, or just a few minutes sitting quietly where no one can disturb you and training intentionally to be present to God and whatever God might wish to say to you, prayer that is listening prayer can help us learn to recognize the sound of the voice of Jesus.
The third overlapping skill for learning to hear Jesus is to spend time in the Presence of the Blessed Sacrament. That is to say that the third skill is to spend time in the Presence of the living Christ. The Sacrament - which is the reserved consecrated elements of the Mass, most commonly the Bread which is the Body of our Lord Jesus - the Sacrament is easily misunderstood. For it is far too easy for the church to assert that Christ’s Presence is made real when the right person says the right words in the right way over the right elements of bread and wine. But to believe such a thing is to believe in a kind of magic that doesn’t even have a trick for everyone to see. At least two other things are more or less required if we are to believe that bread and wine can become (and then remain) the Body and Blood of Jesus. The first is the nearness and availability of the Holy Spirit; and the second is the faithfulness of God’s people. Any assertion that Bread and Wine can become the Body and Blood of Jesus is related to these conditions of the nearness of the Spirit and the faithfulness of God’s people.
Yes, it’s true that Jesus is objectively Present in the Blessed Sacrament, but not because of what I do. It’s because of what God does, through the power of the Spirit, when God’s people come together for this purpose. And the Presence of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament is a lot more like a flame than we realize: requiring both the fact of the Spirit, like oxygen, and the faithfulness of the people to attend to it. What purpose could Christ’s Presence possible have in the absence of God’s people? The Real Presence of Jesus in the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar is very much like the sound of a tree falling in a forest.
Time spent with the Blessed Sacrament is time spent in very close proximity to the living Lord. Maybe just a minute or two in the Lady Chapel on your way back from Communion, or the few minutes we spend in that Presence during Benediction, or just time in the church on a Saturday morning before Mass - this is time that allows for the overlap of the other two skills, quiet and prayer, in such a way that it might be impossible to say just which skill you are practicing, since each skill might lead to another, and so on.
These three skills - quiet, prayer, and time with the Blessed Sacrament - are reliable ways to learn to listen for the sound of Christ’s voice speaking to you and to the world.
I’m trying to resist the impulse to explain to you what Jesus means when we hear him say, “Come unto me,” because I don’t think you really need me to explain that to you. I do think you might need help in hearing that it’s Jesus who is saying it, and that his words are meant for you. And the skills we need to hear and know the voice of Jesus are falling out of use in many places, even in the church, these days.
The people who built this church wanted all of us who gather in it to be able to hear the sound of the voice of Jesus when we get here, and they wanted us to know that Jesus is speaking to each and every one of us. That’s why they had these very words carved over the doors, “Come unto me all ye that travail and are heavy laden and I will refresh you.”
But don’t take my word for it. Use the tools of faith to discern for your own whether of not the living Christ is speaking, right now, in the world and in your own life, your own ears, your own heart. Be quiet. Pray. Spend time in the Presence of the Blessed Sacrament. And see if Jesus speaks to you. The sound of his voice may be unique to you in your ears, ion your heart. And you should know it by the nature and timbre of its sound. It should sound like peace. It should sound like forgiveness. It should sound like mercy. It should sound like love. These are important tests to make sure it is really the sound of Christ speaking in your heart.
You can’t come to Jesus if you can’t hear him calling you. And you can’t hear him calling, if you don’t know the sound of his voice. And you can’t know the sound of his voice if no one has taught you to listen for it.
But if you can be quiet; if you pray; if you spend some time in the Presence of the Blessed Sacrament, then you won’t have to take my word for it, you will learn what the still, small voice of God sounds like, as you hear God speak to you of peace, forgiveness, mercy, and love. You may hear the voice of Jesus say many things to you, once you have learned to listen for him. And very likely, you will hear him say this: “Come unto me all ye that travail and are heavy laden and I will refresh you. Take my yoke upon you and learn of me, for I am meek and lowly of heart, and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
9 July 2023
Saint Mark’s, Locust Street, Philadelphia
