I’d stumble out of bed halfway to comatose, searching for my purse, trying to silence it. The baby would wake up wanting a nice long breakfast breastfeed. If I couldn’t find the phone on time, it would go to voicemail and beep impatiently every fifteen minutes until I listened to my message, and I couldn’t figure out how to disable that feature either. Finally, I’d pick up the phone.
“THIS is your SUNDAY morning WORSHIP WAKE-UP CALL!” the good pastor would bellow in my ear. He would tell me what he’d be preaching on in two hours and how I had to show up to receive God’s blessing. I’m glad the calls were pre-recorded, at that point, because my bellowed responses to him were three shades beyond the pale.
I was relieved when that phone got run over– another long story which I will save for a different time. No more preaching, no more blessings, no more texts, no more Sunday morning Worship Wake-up Calls.
And yet, after having this experience, I still sometimes wonder why God speaks to us so softly that He can’t be heard unless we listen in silence.
Why does God speak through nature and silence and dull books, and the hoarse whispers of beggars who don’t look as you’d expect God to look? Couldn’t He just bellow in our ears in a nice Pentecostal Staccato? Isn’t that what we’re always angry that God won’t do? Here we are believing and hoping others will do the same, and He won’t help us preach by occasionally showing up with a great big attention-seeking sign.
We’d like Him to send us a message. Send a text that keeps beeping until we read it. Give us a sign, so that we may believe in You. But no sign is given but the sign of Jonah: a very long time ago, in a country not much like ours, a prophet received a call from God, but there’s no proof of this. He ran in the opposite direction, so God sent a message through a storm, but there’s no proof of this. He was thrown into the sea and a fish swallowed him up, only to vomit him onto a beach three days later, but there’s no proof of this either. He informed the city that God was going to smite it, and the city repented– not because they’d had a great big sign; only the prophet had signs. They repented because they believed the words of the prophet of God. And because of their repentance, God spared them a painful show of His power to prove the prophet was right. The prophet was furious at the lack of a sign. Then God sent the prophet– still the prophet, not the people who repented– a nice big obvious sign, a vine to shade him and a worm to take the vine away, and the prophet failed to get the message. He cursed his very life. And God teased him for missing the point again.
Signs and wonders don’t work. Big loud messages rarely work. Annoying clanging calls at the crack of dawn do not work. They upset us and make us curse our very life.
Preaching works, if the fields are ripe to hear the message. If we don’t listen to the Law and the Prophets, we won’t listen to a sign; not even if a Son of Man should return from the dead. The notices God sends us in our day-to-day life work, if we are willing to hear. If we voluntarily bring ourselves to silence, He will speak to us in that silence. But He will not insist on a wake-up call, because they don’t work.
God doesn’t intervene with a grand show too terribly often, because we would ignore Him. We’d scream obscenity and delete the text.
It’s not that God isn’t all-powerful, after all. It’s just that, in His meekness, He doesn’t show power where that would be useless or make things worse. Instead, he sends prophets. He sends us our neighbor, wearing His icon. He sends us the quiet annoyances of our day-to-day life. He waits in the silence.
This– this, your day-to-day life, the people you meet, your heart’s longing for silence, the baby who won’t sleep and the substance abuser upstairs– this is your Worship Wake-up Call. Hear the Gospel, repent and believe.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In