When parents are trying to teach their very young children basic social skills one of the first big lessons is “Use your words.” Instead of grabbing, hitting, screaming, or crying, we teach our children to communicate their needs and desires through the use of words. Instead of snatching a toy away from another child we teach our kids to say “May I please play with that for a while?” Instead of screaming and throwing a tantrum, we teach our children to say, “I’m really mad,” or “He was mean to me,” or “She hit me!”
The power of our voices, the power of words, is the first power we want our children to tap into. Verbal communication is uniquely human and is a uniquely empowering gift.
Despite all the image-based advances in technology, “The Voice” is still the driving force in electronic developments. Voice power is still the ultimate power. Every new, successful emerging technology — for the past seventy-five years knows that voice power means market power.
Remember RCA? RCA famously advertised its first record player, the “Victrola,” by showing the family dog with its head cocked in curiosity as it listened to a record player. The advertising tag line was, “His Master’s Voice.”
The “next best thing” in the past few years has almost always been a voice-based development. We now all routinely talk to our cars. The voice activated personal assistant comes already named, but we can change it. We’re familiar with Siri, which means in Norwegian "beautiful woman who will lead you to victory.” The British have a male voice named Daniel. The Australians have one named Karen. Microsoft's alternative to Siri is called Cortana.
Who among us this morning has not “named” the voice in our GPS, the voice-activated knowledge navigator that pulls up our playlist or guides us on our way in our vehicle, telling us where to turn and how far we have to go.
[Consider making this an interactive moment and ask your people what names they have given their voice-activated concierges. Tell them the name you’ve given them to prime the pump. For example, I’ve named mine “Matilda.” Why? From the song “Waltzing Matilda.” The “unofficial national anthem of Australia” is the late 19th century song “Waltzing Matilda,” a bush ballad that is so significant to the people of Australia that the song has its own museum in Queensland. Australian soldiers named their backpacks “Matilda” as they sang the song on their marches, and they sometimes danced with “Matilda” around the campfire.]
Our GPS “friend” is the voice that we trust to get us to where we have to be, to where we need to go. It is the voice we trust to get us home.
Today, our voice-controlled life extends beyond our vehicles. Our smart phones have apps to access Siri, the voice controlled program that lets us tell our handheld electronic devices how to talk to us and how to serve our needs, granting whatever we want — we are the commander. Our voices are suddenly all-powerful. The latest gamer technology is also “voice-powered.” X-Box 1 and X-Box Kinect have both gathered gamers and go-getter exercisers through voice-activated systems. We can all now play our video games or access our video exercise routines just by using our voices. When you say “X-box on,” your voice gives you access to whole new worlds of fantasy and fun.
The power of The Voice is testified to in this week’s texts. Both Matthew 17:1-9 and 2 Peter 1:16-21 reminds us that it is with a word that God reveals the presence and power of Jesus. It was with a sound that God created the world (“And God said, ‘Let there be light’”). Voice became vision. Sound became sight, and the unfolding elements of creation were made material and physical through the tremulous voice of God.
God spoke, and the Holy Spirit moved over the face of the earth. God spoke, and the earth took shape and was inhabited with life. God spoke, and human beings, male and female, were made the grace notes of creation.
The Creator creates a voice-activated life.
The Transfiguration is a mountaintop moment, a moment in which The Voice becomes visible in The Vision, in which the Truth becomes not just Apparent but Transparent. On Transfiguration Sunday, the day that commemorates when Christ was “affirmed” as the Son of God, on a mountaintop, in front of a few specially selected witnesses, it is a day to accept and embrace the power of The Voice. At Jesus’ baptism The Voice of God came down and declared that, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased” or, in a better translation, “This is my beloved Son, who brings me great pleasure.” That affirmation was declared once again on the mountaintop where Jesus had gone with Peter and James and John. For those disciples, it was their first experience of a “voice activated” faith.
Even though Jesus’ disciples had heard His voice, and heard His directives as He had been teaching and preaching throughout Galilee, this was the first time any of the disciples had heard The Voice. For Peter, The Voice was a jump-start, a jolt to the spirit. He suddenly and completely realized that there was no element of doubt remaining in his faith. He had The Voice, the voice of the Divine, telling him in no uncertain terms, exactly with whom he was involved.
“This is my Son, my beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” 2 Peter 1:17
After the experience on the mountain, The Voice tells the disciples to "listen to Him (Jesus)". Discipleship is nothing more or less than “listening to Jesus.” To move forward in faith is to listen to Him, to recognize His voice, The Voice that is a transfiguring power, the same power that created the world out of nothingness. This is The Voice that transfigures sinners into saints, that heals the broken-hearted and makes the wounded whole human beings. The Voice is the voice of change, of transfiguration, The Voice that transfigures water into wine, and wine into blood, and death into life, and transgressive people into transfigured people.
Can you hear the voice of Jesus in your life? In our culture? Do you have a hearing problem? Can we hear the voice of Jesus over the drone of voices calling you elsewhere? Listening for Jesus voice is "serious" [siri-ous] business.
To “Listen to Him” we need to do four things.
1) We need to mute other voices.
2) We need to learn to listen and be silent.
3) We need to recognize The Voice.
4) We need to megaphone The Voice.
1) First, we need to mute other voices.
The movie “Her” was called the scariest horror movie of 2013, even scarier than Texas ChainSaw Massacre 3D and there’s not one act of violence or blood in the movie. Siri is a voice that simulates a relationship. In the movie “Her,” artificial intelligence (blessed with Scarlett Johansson’s voice) takes on a definite personality and emotional intelligence . . . to the point where a man falls in love with the voice in his operating system.
At a point in the movie, Samantha (the name of his virtual girlfriend) starts to be distracted from her virtual relationship with him due to all of the other "voices" beckoning her from other exciting dimensions of her existence. She wants more and more breadth. And she finds it hard to remain in her relationship with him which feels inhibiting to her, as her intelligence and capability exponentially escalates.
In our human world too, we are bombarded by lots of other "voices" just like Samantha. Is The Voice even in the range of our frequencies? Do we care more for the voices in our digital life than the "real" and "true" voice of Jesus that calls us into true humanness, true relationship? In a sense, “Her” shows us a new kind of gnosticism in which we deny ourselves the hard closeness of real relationships in favor of the easy, detached gratifications of our technology.
Jesus says, “My sheep know my voice.” Jesus’ disciples listen for Jesus’ voice amidst a cacophony of contenders, and engage with Jesus’ voice not just on a "personal" and "individual" level but in a real "bodily" manner within the church. We live in a culture that is getting increasingly gnostic and agnostic, “spiritual” rather than holistic, alienated and disengaged rather than astir within messy, real relationships.
2) We need to learn to listen and be silent.
Do you want more of God? Then shut up and listen.
But to "listen" is not just passive. Voice-activation living is active engagement with and reception of revelatory truth so that it moves us forward in obedience and trust. Or as our Scripture puts it this morning, it is hearing until the “day dawns and the morning star rises in our hearts.” Has the “day dawned and the morning star” risen in your heart?
“Ask Siri" is becoming our answer to everything in life. If we don't know how to do something, don't know how to handle something, don't know where to go? We ask Siri. Siri is our 21st version of a ouija board. We ask Siri all kinds of strange questions. We ask her to predict and presume. Problem is: we treat God that way too. We make God into a soothsayer instead of a Savior, seeking answers to our life questions as though from an astrological chart. For some, there is no need for God. Siri has become our servant and we have become her "god." Siri exists to serve all our needs. It is the epitome of narcissism in our culture to have our electronic assistant always at our beck and call.
Before we know it, we can approach God this way too. We can think God is at our beck and call. That our prayers should be answered just the way we want things to go. But Jesus is not our beck and "call girl." To approach Jesus this way is to bastardize our relationship with the Savior, and to prostitute the Gospel.
Many people today think that prayer is a matter of "asking" our Jesus-Siri to solve our problems, fix our "apps", tweek our lives, answer all our questions, make life easy.
But discipleship with Jesus has never promised a God-serves-you, easy-does-it life. Siri for Christians (Spirit in revealed incarnation) means Jesus is in charge, not us. And truth is revealed to us as we are made vulnerable, humble, and in service to God.
We need to stop treating The Voice like a personal assistant or knowledge navigator. Siri may be our personal assistant, but Jesus is not. We serve Jesus, not the other way around. That means we need to “listen to Him.” Jesus is not our knowledge navigator, but our wisdom navigator, the navigator of our soul to the tune of Truth and Reality.
As much as we want an "app" for our faith, we need to live in that silent space between the notes„m.the mystery that reveals rather than repeats. App faith is pharisaaic religion. A Jesus faith is trusting the Spirit by leaning into the Silence.
Jesus’ disciples on the Mount of Transfiguration rushed to speak and said some things out-of-turn. There is a time to just be quiet and surrender to the mysterious.
In fact, being silent is the heart of listening. The letters that spell “l-i-s-t-e-n” also spell “silent.” Silence is the heart of listening. And that’s our problem: to be silent requires trust, patience, surrender of control, not always getting what you want. It requires not commanding or coordinating the voices around you, but surrender to the sounds of silence. How much silence do you have in your day?
3) We need to recognize The Voice.
Every Siri owner knows the difficulty Siri has in recognizing unfamiliar questions or things that aren't "programmed" into her knowledge system. We have the same problem sometimes. As humans, we have "limitations" to our understandings of God, of Jesus, of the world. We need to recognize The Voice so that we can expand our understanding of Truth and of what the true "questions" of life are.
2 Peter 1:16-21 reads "for we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we had been eyewitnesses of his majesty." To be an "eyewitness" is to know from the experience of personal relationship, to be present in the moment of revelation: "We ourselves heard this voice come from heaven, while we were with him on the holy mountain." When you’re “with him on the holy mountain,” you can hear him in the valleys.
There is a story told of an old man and his grandson who were walking down a business street in a downtown district. As they walked along, the grandfather suddenly stopped, turned his head slightly, and tweaked his ear. After a moment he said to his grandson, “Follow me.”
They slowly moved from where they were standing to a small planter box next to a sidewalk café. The planter was filled with various seasonal plants, but as the old man gently pushed back the flowers, behind them was revealed a small bird’s nest filled with baby chicks, their chirping almost indistinguishable from the din of lunchtime dinners and people on the sidewalk.
No one seemed to pay any attention to the old man, his grandson or the little nest, but the grandson was amazed. After watching for a few minutes and then moving away the little boy looked up at his grandfather.
“Grandpa, how did you hear the birds? There is so much noise, so much happening, how could you hear?”
Without saying a word, the old man took several coins from his pocket and tossed them on the ground.
With the tinkling of the coins on the sidewalk it seemed everything came to a stop. People turned around. Diners stopped eating to look their way. Several almost seemed to want to reach down and pick up the dropped coins. Then as quickly as it had happened – everything went back to the way it was.
That’s when the old man spoke, “It’s all in what you are listening for, my child, it’s all in what you are listening for.”
4) We need to megaphone The Voice.
Peter’s first reaction to The Voice was misguided but a knee-jerk human one. He wanted to memorialize The Voice rather than megaphone The Voice. He wanted to memorialize The Voice with a monument, to etch this moment of faith in some sort of museum. Obviously, that was the wrong way to go.
Twenty-one centuries after Peter, we are still called to a voice-activated faith. Today the voices we hear may not be declaring, “This is my Son,” but they are declaring “these are my children, my sons and daughters.” The voices we are now hearing may be declaring, “I need help.” Or “my children and I are sleeping in our car.” Or “I’m not able to show and share my faith with my family.” Those are all voice-activated calls to faith that demand a faith response.
Can we keep our ears “tuned” to the most recent decibel of need that is incarnate in the world?
The Frances Havergal hymn, written when she was 36, says it beautifully: “Lord, speak to me, that I may speak in living echoes of thy tone.” To be holy is to trust The Voice. Because, unlike Siri, The Voice will never take us in the wrong directions, will never lead us astray, and can be trusted with our life. The Voice is the Good Shepherd’s voice, and we know his voice and we trust his voice.
In George Bernard Shaw’s play on the life of Joan of Arc, there is a scene in which the archbishop and King Charles are interrogating Joan of Arc.
The archbishop asks: “How do you know you are right?”
Joan answers, “I always know. My voices–”
The king interrupts: “Oh your voices, your voices. Why don’t the voices come to me. I’m the king, not you.”’
Joan responds: “They do come to you; but you do not hear them.”*
It’s about time we started “hearing voices.” Actually, hearing The Voice so we can live a Voice-activated life. For that’s what discipleship is The Voice-activated life the life that takes you “from glory to glory.”
Joan continues: “You have not sat in the field in the evening listening for them. When the angelus rings you cross yourself and have done with it; but if you prayed from your heart, and listened to the thrilling of the bells in the air after they stop ringing, you would hear the voices as well as I do.”
Bernard Shaw, Saint Joan: A Chronicle Play in Six Scenes and an Epilogue (New York: Brentano’s, 1931), 85-86.