True or false. The Church is a place where good people gather to be happy about their goodness. This was one of the questions posed to our youth at a recent youth group meeting. And they answered, TRUE! So tell me you gathering of good people, do you feel happy about your goodness. You see, I believe our youth are a very perceptive and intuitive group of people. They watch us very closely, just as children watch their parents. And they honestly will report their observations. Either by our words or actions, we good little church people are informing them that you must be good and happy about your goodness, to be allowed in the club we call church. I mean this is what many of us really feel isn’t it. You must be morally pure, good, holy, saintly, some might even say perfect for us to let you in the door! And if you’re not happy about who you are; if you are broken in any way, please do not show up. Is this what we really want our youth to think about the Church?

Is that really what we believe it means to lead a good and saintly Christian life? Is it possible for you to think of a Christian, a saint, not as one who has lived a perfect individual life, but as someone who was awakened by God; one who was gently (and sometimes not so gently) rousted into consciousness; one who has heard the truth even when it was painful to hear. What kind of people am I talking about? Well, for starters, the Bible is full of stories of these sort of people and always, always, our first tendency is to make these individuals into the type of heroes that live in our fantasy worlds; perfect beings who never do wrong and always are in the right! Well, when you feel tempted to do this, I want you to actually open your bibles and read the stories! Was Peter perfect, the disciple who is the foundation of the Christian Church, the one who denied knowing Jesus in his hour of need?! Was King David perfect, the one God describes as the man after God’s own heart, the one who takes the wife of another man in his lust and power and then has the man, one of his trusting and loyal soldiers killed so that he can have Bathsheba?! Was Eli and his priestly family in the Old Testament lesson we read today perfect, the one honored by God to fill an important leadership position but who would not discipline his sons who took the people’s animal sacrifices to God and placed them on their own dinner tables. No, not perfect. In fact, as I read the Bible, there is only one human being in there who is described as perfect; and that is Jesus, fully human and fully God, and even he is not what we would expect of God in human form. I mean he came from Nazareth, the backwater of Israel for goodness sake; and by his refusal to take on our earthly expectations of wealth and status and power (those things that constitute perfection in our little fantasy worlds), most of us hesitate in denial, balking to embrace his perfect humanity.

I wonder…what would our lives look like if we stopped our preconceived notions of propriety and moral expectation from dominating our religious experience. For five minutes, let’s outlaw the use of the words good and perfect to see if there is some other way of thinking about what it means to be a Christian. Maybe our youth will think differently about the church if we do this. Instead of good and perfect, think for five minutes as to what it would mean if openness and honesty were allowed to rest atop your spiritual quest. Be open to how God wishes to awaken you to life! In the Old Testament lesson today, a young temple apprentice, maybe something like an acolyte in his day, was awakened repeatedly by the Lord God as he tried to sleep. Samuel mistakenly thought it was Eli who called him; Eli, the old and grizzled high priest, the one who had been given power and stature and status. But it was not Eli who called Samuel. Rather it was the Lord God who called Samuel into the rather uncomfortable position of truthteller, called to declare God’s judgment on his superior’s failure to speak out against injustice (especially when the injustice is caused by those who are closest and dearest to you, those people in your sphere of influence).

Each nation and age has a Samuel and an Eli. A Samuel; one who is awakened by God and compelled to speak God’s word of justice and righteousness even when it is risky to do so. And Eli, the one who has risen to power, who is enjoying and clinging to the status quo despite God’s warning that his hold of power disregards some of the people in his charge of care. As Americans living in the awesome abundance of this rich land, as Christians gathering together the day before the national holiday honoring Martin Luther King, how do we hear this story of Samuel and Eli? What is the truth of who we are as a people; what must we as Christian Americans be awakened to hear? The truth is our national identity is filled with both honor and shame. We are a country proudly built on sacrifice, ingenuity, and constitutional principles on the one hand, and on the other hand, a country built on the backs of hundreds of thousands of slaves, most of them of African descent, a legacy that can only be remembered as the attempted dehumanization of an entire people. Those of us who constitute the empowered majority really stand in Eli’s shoes, choosing how we will respond to the truth of the fullness of our American heritage.

And the Samuel of our era, the man who heard God’s call and risked all to painfully raise our consciousness of our national heritage; that could only be Dr. Martin Luther King. As this man stood in front of the raging powers of our national identity and taught his people to do the same, all of American history seemed to sneer and blurt out, "What possibly do we have to learn from a black man from Atlanta, Georgia." Can anything good come from Nazareth? The disciple Philip’s response to this question concerning Jesus holds true for us today as we examine Dr. King’s legacy: "Can anything good come from Nazareth?" Philip says, "Come and see." Come and see how the curse of racism is resisted by the power of love. Come and see a dream of American diversity that is willing to embrace people who are different from us. Come and see a Christian emphasis on liberation and freedom as the work of God. Come and see one who had the courage to tell the truth even in the face of death. To come and see is not a matter of seeking moral perfection (however we might define it), but simply a matter of being willing to be open to the possibility of God’s dream for you. Eli listened to Samuel’s dream. Will you listen with new ears to the Samuels of our time; to the dreams that must be inspired by God? Dreams like the one born into our consciousness by Martin Luther King. A dream "That one day little black boys and black girls will join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers." A dream that "one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places shall be made plain, and the crooked places shall be made straight and the glory of the Lord will be revealed and all flesh, yours and mine and the flesh of the person least like you, all flesh shall see it together." A dream of the Church not as a place where good people gather to feel happy about their goodness, but rather the Church as a gathering of people open to the loving call of God wherever that might lead them. Are you listening Eli? Amen.