It was now about the sixth hour, and darkness came over the whole land until the ninth hour, for the sun stopped shining. – Luke 23:44-45a
Early in my ministerial career I was blessed to discover the Abbey of the Genesee , a Trappist monastery in western New York. The monks of the Abbey, in addition to praying for the world and the church, also make available a retreat house for anyone who wants to spend time in silence and solitude, time alone with God. So for the past nearly thirty years, I’ve made an annual trip to the Abbey for a monastic retreat.
All you get at the retreat house is a small room with a bed in it, a desk, a chair, a lamp and a hook on the wall to hang your clothes. They also feed you three meals a day for one low price. There aren’t any daily programs to attend, no special speakers you are obligated to hear. It’s a monastic retreat; silence is what you go there for – silence to listen to God.
And you get this silence in spades. You don’t talk much to the other retreatants, even when you eat together in the meal hall. There may be some classical music playing in the background or, on a few occasions, I’ve heard some old taped lecture by Henri Nouwen or Thomas Merton. But that’s the extent of it. It’s what the monastery offers to a noisy world and they try hard to keep it that way.
I have, over the years, come to love the Abbey. It is, for me, a sanctuary from the clatter of the world. It is a holy, simple place where the typical distractions of most days are absent, and where – because of this pervasive, intentional quietness – I find I can hear God almost as if I have put on my special noise-canceling headphones with the plug end poking right into heaven’s Ipod.
Silence is, of course, not an end in itself. Not for the Christian anyway. The practice of silence – and its first cousin, solitude – is the creation of a physical context for praying. We create quiet places, we carve out silent times, to hear God better. I am quite thankful for religious communities like the monks at Genesee that have helped people like me to cherish the discipline of silence.
The years of retreats to the Abbey have taught me a lot about the practice and spiritual value of silence. I admit that my own temperament probably lends itself to appreciating quietness apart from its historical place in the schedule of spiritual disciplines. We introverts – introverts in the Jungian sense, that is – need time and space apart from other people to process our thoughts and energize ourselves. That reason alone has been enough to keep me going back there over the years.
Still, silence as a created spiritual practice is more than a respite for the inner-directed weary. Silence is, in the big picture of the Christian’s life with God, what you do to get away from the world. In silence you give yourself the chance to hear the still, small voice of God in a heart-to-heart way about things that you could not otherwise hear in your usual distracted, busy, raucous life in the world.
I am, if you can’t tell by now, an energetic proponent of the practice of silence for the Christian. I feel strongly about this for the reasons I’ve already given. But there’s another reason why the lover of God ought to be conscientious about practicing silence. The reason is found in our scripture lesson for today.
Luke 23 tells the story of the crucifixion of Jesus. There is the carrying of the cross by Simon of Cyrene. There is the raising up of three crosses upon Calvary. There are the two criminals who book end Jesus, the one penitent, the other still recalcitrant. There is the nailing of the sign: “This is the King of the Jews.” And finally, spoken are the last words of our Lord – “Into your hands, Father, I commend my spirit” – and his death.
In this moment of commitment and death, the sky turns dark even though it is noon. Luke says it stayed dark for the next three hours. Three hours of darkness in the middle of the day. And in the darkness, the only words that were spoken were by a truthful Roman guard who said, “Surely this man was innocent.”
Most of the people who watched the executions went home in deep sorrow, Luke wrote. The only ones who stayed were Jesus’ closest friends. They watched in silence as their friend, Lord, and Master died slowly for the sins of the world.
Silence reigned that day for three hours. There was nothing to say except the obvious and already stated, “He was innocent.”
Nothing to say. But much to hear. In that silence of the first Good Friday, God spoke to the world and said the most important thing he ever said, before or since. In the three hour silence God revealed the brokenness of his heart for the world he created and which had become rebellious and estranged.
In the silence of those 180 minutes, the Master of the Universe said to his creation, “I love you. The distance between us is more than I can bear. Come home, please.” It was spoken in the silence of a darkened sky and to a world that wept at what it had done to God. Never was a silence so loud and full of meaning.
If we do not make time as matter of course for quiet times with God to pray, to hear, to converse heart-to-heart, to hear God’s directing words as we make our way along this pilgrimage of life, this story of Luke 23 suggests rather strongly that God will create the silence for us and in spite of us. God often has something to say to us of infinite importance and he will be restrained for only so long.
My guess is that some of us already know this to be true. Some of us know all too well the grand silence of grief when a loved one dies and leaves a great big emptiness in our hearts. Some of us have known the silence that followed the end of a job, the loss of a business, the sheriff’s sale of our home. Others have known the silence that follows the failure of a marriage, a runaway teenager, a diagnosis of cancer, an unfair assassination of our character.
Silence of any length is, for some of us, uncomfortable. The sustained silence that follows pain and suffering, therefore, can be downright terrifying. We give ourselves a chance to hear God in the grand silences of tragedy if we have trained the ears of our hearts to hear him in the smaller controlled silences of a disciplined life.
So do not think for a moment that, in silences that are so grand, so dark, so Golgotha-like, that God has withdrawn his presence from you. It may feel very much like God has abandoned a person in the darkest, most silent times of life. And a person would be forgiven if they wondered if indeed he had – Jesus himself asked aloud the same question under the same circumstances: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Still, it may be that you’re just not used to listening in the silences of your own creation, of your own devotional life. In every silence, God speaks to those who would listen. You can take it to be true: the larger the silence and the blacker the darkness, the more important the words of God we will hear.
— Preached on Wednesday, March 24, 2010 at First UMC, Shelby Ohio, as part of the community Lenten series.
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Among the images in the Bible of the reign of God is a feast to which the lovers of God are invited. Isaiah wrote of it. (See above.) The history of Israel is memorialized with various feasts to celebrate the acts of God. Jesus spoke of it in a number of parables (MT 22, for instance). And then there is the great wedding banquet at the end of time in Revelation 19.
Thoughts Along the Way 