Listening - a Sunday talk

English is an easy language to speak, but it’s rather a hard language to speak well. And two words that often get confused by those who are learning to speak English are “listen” and “hear”.  For example, someone may say (as a non-English friend said to me not long ago over the phone), “I am not listening you very well.”  I knew what he meant . . . but of course, to hear and to listen do have quite different meanings, don’t they?  I suppose you can’t really listen without hearing, but you certainly can hear without listening.

I can think of lots of examples of that, but the one that lodged in my mind as I prepared these words was a sketch eons ago from Les Dawson. Les himself and - I think - Hugh Paddick played the part of two elderly ladies, all headscarves and self-righteous rolling of eyes;  and on this occasion there they were, gossiping over the garden fence, except that what you got were two monologues and not any sort of conversation.  Neither was paying a blind bit of notice to anything the other one had said.  The comedy, of course, derived from the accidental meanings and double entendres that happened as the two monologues were connected together.

At other times it can be quite frustrating when you’re trying to explain something and proper attention isn’t being paid.  I recall how in my schooldays, my teachers got rid of their frustration by flicking bits of chalk and occasional board rubbers at recalcitrant boys.  These days of course, they’re no longer allowed to do that, and quite possibly they weren’t supposed to then, either.  And so the frustration remains;  I was giving a talk a couple of weeks back, and the fact that two of the people attending engaged in conversation all the way through all but knocked me off my stride. In a previous church Doreen used to get her knitting out as soon as I started to preach.  I was dismayed at first, but she explained that it helped her to listen.

And maybe that was so, since the one Sunday she forgot her knitting she was fast asleep about five minutes into my address.  The rest of the congregation kindly allowed her to sleep on until the end of the service, when, highly embarrassed, she told us she’d had her little grandson staying, so she’d had hardly a wink of sleep the previous night.

Anyway - last Thursday was Ascension Day, and next Sunday is Pentecost, and in the Bible (in St Luke’s Gospel and his second book, the Acts of the Apostles), this, for the disciples of Jesus, was a time of preparation and prayer.  And that always sets me thinking about the difference between hearing and listening.

The Gospel stories of Jesus don’t always present the disciples in a very good light.  Don’t you find that strange?  Don’t you think they might have tweaked the story so as to look a bit better and brighter than they do?  St Mark’s Gospel was written, we’re told, by Peter’s companion and secretary, who therefore is really telling Peter’s story - yet in it Peter himself comes across as fallible and sometimes foolish.  I’m reassured by that, and I hope you are too;  there’s nothing self-serving in the Gospels - it’s all about Jesus.

But I can’t help but think that it must have been frustrating for Jesus from time to time.  He spoke to great crowds sometimes, other times round supper tables. Folk heard him and were even entertained by him, but often they never really listened.  There were those who didn’t listen because they’d already got their own agenda. People of the party of the Pharisees, or of Herod, or the Temple priests - they weren’t there to be informed or persuaded, certainly not to be changed in any way.  They just wanted to trip him up, to find some creative ways of misusing his own words against him, as indeed they did their best to do on the night before Good Friday, as Jesus stood there on trial for his life.

Meanwhile, for many in the crowds it was all about the thrill of the spectacle, the latest thing.  It almost didn’t matter what he actually said. Maybe some of the time that was true of his own disciples, too.  They already knew what he was going to do.  For why else would you go to Jerusalem, other than to seize the throne and re-establish the ancient kingdom of David?  And if they were the new king’s men then surely they too would get thrones.

So it’s no great surprise to me as I read the Gospels to find the disciples getting it wrong, failing to understand, not  really listening.  Hearing is of course a passive activity;  odd bits of what goes in one ear might lodge within, but no effort gets made to prevent it from all going out through the other.  But listening is an active thing, and it can be hard work.  So there’s a difference between hearing someone - passive - and giving someone a hearing, which means more, doesn’t it?  To give a hearing means you’re involved, you’re giving something.  More to the point, it means (or I think  it does) that you’re exposing yourself to the risk of being challenged, changed even, by what you are hearing.

There are times in the Gospels when we see that happens - to Nicodemus and to Nathaniel;  to Mary and maybe also Martha, out at Bethany;  perhaps to Joseph of Arimathea, certainly to Mary Magdalene.  But there are lots of times when what Jesus says isn’t received, isn’t understood.  Is that surprising, do you think? - that when the Son of God speaks the message of God, which is a message of inclusion and acceptance and of forgiving and healing and reconciling love, it isn’t gladly received by all who hear;  that he preaches, and yet there’s opposition and, more to the point maybe, misunderstanding.  Some of the stories Jesus told address this very point, notably perhaps the parable of the sower, which compares what the preacher does to someone sowing seed on every part of his land. It’s all potentially good seed, but it doesn’t all grow well, and it doesn’t all bear fruit.

And, if you remember, when Jesus spoke about this parable to his disciples, he quoted the scripture about those who look and look, but do not perceive;  those who hear and hear, but fail to understand.  That’s how things are - yet the fact that not all the seed takes is no a reason to stop sowing it - that you still have to do.  Perhaps there’s also a note of challenge to the disciples themselves:  don’t be like that yourselves - work at this, put in the effort to listen and to understand, to be changed, and to grow.

When we read about the earthly ministry of Jesus we often find the disciples not listening, not understanding, failing really to absorb his teaching, but after Easter Day it’s a different world.  One of the features of the Easter stories is that we read a lot about eyes being opened;  we see people not recognising to begin with, but then the scales fall away.  And this isn’t just to do with what they see, but also what they hear.  Like the two disciples on the road to Emmaus - “didn’t our hearts burn within us, as he taught us along the way?”

To mention hearts prompts me to say that surely faith can never just be about being persuaded by intellectual argument or by factual analysis - there needs also to be an emotional investment.  You could say we need not just to listen to the words, but to sing the whole song.  Or that Jesus doesn’t just argue us into faith, he also loves us into faith;  and those aren’t two separate strands to his teaching, it’s all one.  As someone, maybe the great William Barclay, said: “Jesus was himself the message he preached.”  In the precious time between the resurrection and the ascension, the disciples had experienced that to the full;  but now their Lord was gone from them, gone with a blessing and with a promise, but no longer with them in the way he had been.  But he has told them to wait.  To wait in Jerusalem, and to wait in prayer, for the new thing that God would soon be doing among them.  For his wonderful gift of himself, as Holy Spirit.

Wait in prayer.  We tend very often to use a lot of words in our prayer times, but I suspect there wouldn’t have been a lot of words in the prayers of the disciples over that time.  It’s right of course that we should use words in prayer, whether that prayer be praise, or penitence, of petition, for God wants to hear what we have to tell him, or ask him, or even beg of him.  But prayer is (or should be) conversation.  And good conversation can’t happen without listening. Sometimes the listening is far more important than the speaking.  For the disciples of Jesus, this was surely one of those times.

I came across a rather jokey piece a while back in a manazine which ranked voices: which voices were listened to with most attention?  Preachers didn’t come too high on the list, if I remember rightly, but they were some way ahead of politicians, even so.  Stand-up comedians came higher than preachers, but the real winners were satnavs and bingo callers.  Interesting, don’t you think?  Satnavs and bingo callers.

I rarely use the satnav in my car, but when I do I sit fairly lightly to what it tells me.  Clearly that’s not true of everyone, since I know a chap who lives along a narrow lane, and often there are big lorries stuck up there trying to turn round because (quote) “that’s where the satnav brought me.”  For better or for worse, some people are prepared to place themselves completely at the disposal of their satnav when they travel. It’s as if they no longer belong to themselves, but to the disembodied voice on the top of the dashboard.

While that seems daft to me, but it does say something important about real listening, and about prayerful waiting such as the disciples were doing in Jerusalem: it needs to involve a measure of letting go - letting go of our own autonomy, lowering the barriers that normally we raise around our selves.  It’s about taking the risk of faith.  How well founded that faith may be when it comes to satnavs is one thing - but the disciples knew they could trust their Lord.

So they waited, and they waited in listening mode, so that when it happened, whatever it was that was going to happen, they’d be ready.  I’m sure they were also speaking words of prayer, and reading words of scripture, and singing words of praise, but the words weren’t as important as the listening.  And this was real listening, now; self-offering, and purposeful.  No longer were they just passively hearing as they sort of drifted along;  now they were attending, getting themselves tuned in.  They were taking the risk of faith, and opening themselves to the possibility, no, to the certainty of change.

And here’s where to leave it for now, perhaps.  Next week is Pentecost, fifty days after Easter, and the birth day of the Church.  “Be still, and know that I am God,” - the words of the Psalmist.  Sometimes it’s good for us just to take the time to wait;  always, I think, it’s good for us to take the time and make the effort to train ourselves up in the discipline of listening - so that we’re able to listen well to one another, and to those to whose voices we need to attend, because they need us to respond and perhaps then to speak for them;  and to the voice, sometimes the still small voice, of our Lord.