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There is a moment in almost every good story, a critical moment when the outcome hangs in the balance and you know that the next few sentences are going to alter the direction of the tail and you have

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to decide, do you have the courage to keep on reading or are you just going to close the book and go about your day and stay safely within the cocoon of your own self made protection. There

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is one of those moments in this little story about Samuel and Eli, it comes just as the morning dawns above Shiloh and Samuel stretches out his hand to put his hand on the handle of the door of

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the temple. But just before he tugs it open , just before he opens the door there to face Eli and to have to tell him all of the words he has heard in the night before. His

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words initiate that torrent of events that will lead from the temple door to the destruction of the family of Eli, to the rise of salt, to the usurpation of David, to the Empire of Solomon,

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to the split in the kingdom's between Israel and Judah to bloodshed and battles and conquests. All the way to the destruction of Jerusalem and the weeping of exiles by the rivers of Babylon. All of that is

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as yet unsaid as Samuel reaches his hand for the door handle and in that moment I can't help but wonder if Samuel doesn't tremble just a little bit in anticipation of the word he is about to set in

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motion, a word that will not stop echoing down the centuries until it has finally dragged us up a Baron hill outside Jerusalem on good friday and nailed us to across. But I'm ahead of myself. You

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know the story. And if you didn't you heard it read just a few minutes ago, Minutes ago , A fact, By the way, that will not keep me from telling it to you again,

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It begins quietly enough. Samuel on his mat inside the temple and blind old eli in his bedchamber just outside the door. The lamp of God has not yet gone out, says the text. And if

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there's not a poem in that line, then I'm no poet, God present, but somehow not quite yet gone. Then, when the air is finally settled and the rustling of the bed clothes is finally

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stilled. Comes at last the voice just barely above a whisper. Samuel, Samuel must have been eli again for as long as he could remember, for as long as he's been able to understand, or

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here the old priest had been calling him and he had been doing what he would now do all over again. Get up and go see what the old man wanted. Who knew what lowly errand it would

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be this time. Bring me a ladle of water . Help me with these bedclothes against the evening chill . There was nothing to do for it, but just go and see. Here I am, said

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Samuel, for you called me only it wasn't eli calling. Maybe it had been the boy's imagination, or maybe it had been the wind moaning mindlessly in the trees above the temple roof. But it hadn't

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been the priest. So Samuel went back and laid down returning to his interrupted rest until the Voice called again and the little scene was re enacted wasn't until the Voice called a third time that the importance of

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the moment began to dawn, like the sun in the still distant eastern sky. And even then it wasn't the boy who understood but the priest. It had been years too many years since the Voice of

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the Lord had spoken in the temple. So perhaps the old man could be forgiven for not understanding it when God called in the middle of the night, in the place of that absent voice of God,

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rare in those days, says the text. There had been too many other words, too many other voices clamoring and complaining about the behavior of allies, sons, Hoff knee and Phineas men who did not

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have either the faith or the moral fiber of their father. Men who loved power for the abuses. It made possible. L I had heard so many of those words that his ears were now nearly as

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numb as his eyes were blind, but now the light was dawning and the old man understood at last . Go back and lie down. He told the boy. And if he calls you again, say

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speak Lord, for your servant is listening. So Samuel did what he was told and the Voice did call again. But not this time. Just call only know indeed! Says the text. The Lord

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came and stood there. And Samuel feeling God knows what dread depths of terror and awe managed somehow not to forget his instructions, but responded with those ancient words of trust and obedience. Speak Lord for your

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servant is listening. And then at long last the word of the Lord was heard again in the Temple of Eli, but not a comforting word, not a calming quieting word, no words of divine judgment

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about to fall on the old priest and his worthless sons. Words so filled with wrath and power that they would, as God claims himself, make the two years of anyone who heard them tingle. They

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were words Samuel did not want to hear and what he did, and he did not know what to do with them. Once he'd heard them. So he laid back down on his mat behind the closed

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doors of the temple and waited for daylight. And now we come to that heart stopping moment I mentioned a minute ago, daylight finally dawns. And Samuel is just about to swing open the doors of the

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temple, just about to confront Eli. Waiting for the word he knew must have come. Even if it didn't come for him. Surely. Samuel must have hesitated in that moment. Must have wanted with

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all his heart to hold his tongue about. Eli was far too starved for the word. Any word from the Lord. And so he insisted that Samuel tell him every syllable. And Samuel did let it

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all spill out all the promises of wrath and punishment , all the divine settling of affairs that he had heard detailed in the darkness and eli listened listen to it all. Hearing the truth told like a funeral

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bell. Hearing his insight confirmed even as he heard his own heart breaking, It is the Lord was all he could say. This is a story about words above all else. I guess it's a story

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about the word of the Lord which, as the text reminds us at the very beginning of the story , was rare in those days and yet for all its rarity, the word of the Lord is curiously

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abundant in this text. I counted the number of times the word word or its derivatives, occurs in this story. In the 18 verses of this tale , word or one of its derived forms occurs 15

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times. That's almost one perverse and it's twice as much as any other word occurs in this text. It is as though in a story about the scarcity of the word of the Lord. The word is

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literally lying around all over the place waiting for someone anyone to hear. In the end though, this is really a story about obedience Samuel obeys even when obedience is the one thing he would rather not have

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done. But even more surprising and maybe more to the point, eli obeys. Despite everything we might have expected Eli at the stories end when the word has finally been spoken and the judgment pronounced makes no

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attempt to deny its truth or escape its consequences. Exa instead, he simply accepts the awful verdict on everything and everyone he loves seeing at last, the one vision his old blind eyes can see only too

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clearly. It is the Lord, he says yesterday , as we all in this culture by now. No, was the observation of the birthday of the reverend dr martin Luther King Jr observing. Dr King's

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birthday has become in our society an occasion for reflecting on the prophetic power of his speeches on his life , sacrificing witness against the evils of racism in our world. And as the events of this last year

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have shown us accompanied by almost endless video footage from Ferguson Missouri or the streets of new york city racism . The thing for which King gave his life to end is very much alive and well in our midst

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. Those video footage is all show us that our society is going through change, a kind of change that seems somehow unclear. Sometimes even chaotic may be motivated by people whose motives are not always what we

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would like them to be. A mixture perhaps of good or ill wisdom and folly. And not all of us are celebrating the coming of this cataclysmic change , but it's coming steadfastly, it's coming. Every

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time I turned on the tv yesterday I was treated to an excerpt of one of dr King's speech is standing in front of the memorial and in Washington D . C. On the mall or standing in the

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pulpit of the baptist church the night before his assassination . And every time I saw one of those clips I felt this curious sense of apprehension and unsettlement building inside me, not unlike the sense I had when

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I heard those words the first time in the 19 sixties when it seemed like all of the old assumptions were under assault and change was truly in the wind . I can't escape the sense that for me,

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maybe for all of us now, just like then in these days of racial renegotiation, we are not unlike Samuel standing at the door of the temple, with the voice of God still ringing in his ears

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, stretching out his trembling hand to open the door and say the words that will unleash the change that will alter and destroy almost everything. And everyone he has grown to love. There is something about having

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to bear witness to the word you least want to hear. That makes your heart stop and your breath catch in your throat and your fingers tremble as they reach for the door handle and all that makes me

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think about my father. As many of you know , my dad died last month. He was 92 years old. He'd spent more than half his life as a Presbyterian teaching elder. He would have reminded

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me he's a presbyterian minister by George. Dad was a Southern boy born and raised on the north side of Nashville. In a family so poor they did not even notice the coming of the Great Depression.

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His father was a carpenter for the Tennessee Central Railroad and now long defunct railroad bad worked. His father worked in a carpenter shop back in the days when boxcars were made of wood and that would have been

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my father's life too. Except that World War Two and the Gi Bill intervened and made a very different sort of life possible. But in the days in years, I suppose between his graduation from high school

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in 1939 and the day he went off to war in 1940. For dad worked as an apprentice in the old T. C. Railroad shop, repairing the sides of boxcars and stuffing, brake mechanisms and

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wheel wells with oil soaked cotton batting. He learned a few things, he learned how to be a carpenter, a skill that stayed with him all his life, but he also learned that black men in

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the shop did not get the same treatment as white men in the shop, even though they did the same jobs, even though the white men were no better educated and no better off than were their black

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counterparts. And something about that made dad begin to question the assumptions of his beloved Southern society. All that came home to roost in the late 19 sixties when dad, now then pastor of the Central Park

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Endsley Presbyterian Church in Birmingham Alabama had to respond to an invitation. It was a couple of weekends after the assassination of Dr. in 1968 and the call went out from several black pastors in town to all

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of the white pastors and members of their congregations, inviting them to participate in a march in downtown Birmingham on a Saturday morning to show solidarity among the races . Almost nobody in West Birmingham my part of town

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had any intention of going unless it might perhaps have been to stop the march from taking place to stand in the pathway of the change. The march symbolized like George Wallace who stood in the doorway of the

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schoolhouse shouting segregation now segregation tomorrow segregation forever. They condemned dr king as an outside agitator. They had not greeted the news of his assassination with sorrow and to make it worse, Members of the Central Park

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Endsley session were concerned that the whole thing might just antagonize more of their members. All too many of whom were already leaving behind the grit and grime belched from the smokestacks of the U. S. Steel

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Fairfield Works, not a mile from our church. And moving over the mountain, as we used to say, to the posh white suburbs of vast avia hills and mountain brook. Let's not do anything to

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make that situation worse. They said all the same . Dad told the session the same five men who years before had voted to a lot to disallow any black family from worshipping with us. He told him

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he intended to go to the march. He asked the session to join him as a way of showing that racial progress could in fact be made if we all work together. But only one of them promised

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to show. And three of them said, if you go, I'm leaving the church. I don't remember anything else that happened. Nothing else was said about it to my 15 year old Ears. But

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I do know this that for the remaining seven years of my father's ministry there, that event more than anything else colored his relationships with that church. My dad was not a brave man, at least not

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in the sense that he was willing to take controversial stands. He wouldn't even put political bumper stickers on the back of the car. We certainly were not permitted to plant campaign signs in the front yard.

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Dad would never have been comfortable preaching fire to thousands . He was much more the sort of man to hedge his words carefully so as not to upset the 100 or so who hunkered down in that sanctuary week

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after week. And I imagine that his hand probably trembled As he reached for the door handle of our Green 65 Chevy. They're in the parking lot where the march was supposed to begin. I suspect that

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dad knew by opening that door, he was acknowledging the coming of a torrent of events that would likely sweep away many, maybe even most of the things and people he loved and I suspect he knew he

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would have to open the door anyway and he did . I went back to Birmingham Several years ago, four or 5 and drove around the old neighborhood. Finally found the old Central Park Endsley Sanctuary Church,

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now long defunct sanctuary, is now occupied by an african american Pentecostal congregation. I thought of my dad and found myself smiling. Hearing the word of the Lord is a hard thing. It's hard because our

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acculturation and experience have led us to believe that God isn't speaking or isn't speaking to us or maybe we've just heard everything we need to know. We get so used to equating what we feel comfortable with with

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what God wants us to hear, that we forget there's a difference between the two, but every now and then the word of the Lord breaks through and forces us out of the lethargy of our convenient assumptions

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. Every now and then we hear that word, we don't want to hear a word that will alter the very landscape of our reality. And in those moments we have a choice. We can put our

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hands on the door handle and in a moment of what the apostle called pure, pure, pure fear and trembling. We can tug open the door and face the future God has in store or we can

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go back to bed. Here's the thing though the dawn is coming anyway, even if we pull the covers up over our heads in an effort to deny it, the new day is coming anyway and it

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is God's day and God is in it. And the only real question is whether we will be on our feet when it arrives or still trying to go