Days of Awe and Wonder

by Marcus J. Borg

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  Lecture at the University of California, San Diego, January 2002.

  Chapter 16

  Listening for the Voice of God

  THIS YEAR DURING THE SEASON of Epiphany, that season of the church year that immediately precedes the season of Lent, I was struck by the fact that Epiphany both begins and ends with stories from the Gospels in which we hear the voice of God. On the first Sunday in Epiphany we hear the story of the baptism of Jesus, with its climax in the voice of God speaking to Jesus: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased” (Mark 1:11).

  And then on the last Sunday in Epiphany, immediately before Ash Wednesday and the beginning of our Lenten journey, we hear the Transfiguration story, in which Jesus and the inner core of his disciples ascend to a high mountain. This time it is the disciples who hear the voice of God. The voice of God says, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him” (9:7). The disciples, in a way, represent us in that passage. “Listen to him.” Listen to Jesus.

  This phenomenon of the divine voice actually has a name in the Jewish tradition. The Hebrew phrase that names this divine voice is bat kol. Let me translate that for you, because it’s very interesting. Translated into English, bat kol literally means “the daughter of a sound.” What kind of metaphor is this? The voice of God, the divine voice, is the daughter of a sound.

  We hear this same voice in the Hebrew Bible in 1 Kings 19, the story of Elijah in a cave when the presence of God passes by him. We are told in the English translations of that story that Elijah hears a “still, small voice” (19:12, KJV)—that’s the bat kol, “the daughter of a sound.” The Hebrew for the voice that Elijah hears translates literally into English as a “sound of thinnest silence.” So the daughter of a sound, the sound of thinnest silence, a still, small voice are all different ways of attempting to express what perhaps lies beyond the boundaries of speech.

  Have you ever heard this voice? My wife was leading a Sunday morning group a couple of weeks ago in which she explained to the group this notion of the bat kol. After explaining it, she asked the group, “Have any of you ever heard this voice?” Several in the group had.

  One woman spoke about a time when she was seven years old, and she heard a voice speak to her as clearly as any voice had ever spoken to her: “You belong to me.” Then she said, “I didn’t hear it with my ears. But I heard it.”

  Another woman reported an evening when she had an extraordinarily strong sense of the presence of Jesus in the room, and she said to Jesus, “Where have you been?” She heard a voice say back to her, “I never left you.” She also said, “I didn’t hear it with my ears. But I heard the voice.”

  It would be very interesting to ask you, “How many of you have heard such a voice?” I’m not going to ask for a show of hands, but it would be interesting to know that. Even if you’ve never heard such a voice, it’s okay, because God also speaks to us in less dramatic ways.

  We sometimes hear the voice of God in our dreams, if we know how to listen for it. We sometimes hear the voice of God in what our Quaker friends refer to as leadings or proddings, colloquially in “nudges and clobbers”: if you don’t get the nudge, you might get a clobber.

  We sometimes hear the voice of God, again, in a less dramatic way in the events of our lives. The contemporary Christian writer Frederick Buechner has a wonderful way of putting this:

  Listen to your life. Listen to what happens to you, because it is through what happens to you that God speaks. It’s in language that’s not always easy to decipher, but it’s there, powerfully, memorably, unforgettably.1

  And so God speaks to us in the events of our lives.

  Now, don’t think that means that everything that happens to us is somehow God trying to get our attention. It doesn’t mean that. It’s more sacramental than that. Rather, in, with, and through the events of our lives, we are being addressed by God. God sometimes speaks to us through scripture, through that meditative devotional use of scripture that many of you are familiar with, perhaps, in a daily practice. God also speaks to us through the liturgical seasons of the church year. Indeed, that’s one of their central purposes.

  So we are back to the seasons of Epiphany and Lent and back to that bat kol—that voice that we hear in the Transfiguration story on the Sunday before the beginning of Lent. In that story, as I’ve already mentioned, the voice of God—the bat kol—speaks to the disciples, to us, and it says, “Listen to him.” That is, listen to Jesus. Immediately after the Transfiguration story in Mark’s Gospel—also in Matthew and Luke—immediately after that voice has said, “Listen to him,” we get the story of Jesus’s final journey from Galilee to Jerusalem.

  The season of Lent is about accompanying Jesus on that journey, listening to Jesus as he journeys from Galilee to Jerusalem. On that journey Jesus speaks about the way—the path of following him. To listen to Jesus means to follow him on that path that leads to Jerusalem.

  Jerusalem, in that story, is both the place of confrontation with a domination system and the place of death and resurrection, the place of endings and beginnings, of endings and new life, the place where what we feared was the place of death becomes the place of new life.

  Listening to Jesus means embarking on that journey, and it is the journey at the very center of the Christian life. Jesus himself says, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Matt. 16:24). To follow Jesus is to follow the path of the cross. Paul says the same thing. Paul says, “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (Gal. 2:19–20).

  To take the cross of Jesus seriously means to die with Christ and to be resurrected with Christ, to be reborn in Christ. Indeed, this is what is meant by that metaphor “to be born again.” Listening to Jesus is about being born again. All of this together means dying to an old way of being and being born into a new way of being.

  Dying to an old identity and being born into a new identity, an identity in God, in the Spirit, in Christ. This is what our Lenten journey is about. Indeed, in a sense, we’re invited to do this every day—to die to that old way of being and be born into a new way of being.

  In some ways, the heart of my sermon is: Why do we need this? Why do we need to die to an old way of being and be born into a new way of being?

  It’s because of something that happens to us very early in life, perhaps as early as infancy, and certainly by the time we are toddlers. It’s something that happens in the preverbal stage of life, and what I’m speaking about here is the birth of self-awareness, the birth of self-consciousness, that awareness that the world is something separate from us.

  If you’re a newborn baby and you have excellent parents, it might take a while before the realization that the world is something separate from you emerges. If you’re hungry, you get fed; if you’re wet, you get changed; if you cry, you get picked up. But at some point, the world ceases to be immediately responsive to your needs, and you become aware that the world is something separate from you. That’s the birth of self-consciousness or, even more simply, the birth of the separated self.

  This is one of the central meanings of the Garden of Eden story, one of the central meanings of the Fall. The Fall isn’t really about disobedience, though it’s there in the story. The Fall is much more about the fact that we begin our lives, each of us individually, with a sense of undifferentiated union with what is. We begin our lives in paradise. But the birth of the separated self suddenly means we live our lives “east of Eden” in a state of separation and estrangement.

  Let me use the best story I know for making this point, which I’m told is in one of the books of Parker Palmer. It’s a story about a three-year-old girl who was the only child in her family. But now her mom is pregnant, and this three-year-old girl is very excited about having a baby in the house. The day comes when the mother-to-be is to deliver, and the mom and dad go off to the hospital. A couple of days l
ater they come home with a new baby brother, and the little girl is just delighted.

  After they’ve been home for a couple of hours, the little girl tells her parents that she wants to be with the baby in the baby’s room, alone, with the door shut. She’s absolutely insistent about the door being shut. Her folks find this unsettling. They know she’s a good little girl, but they’ve also heard about sibling rivalry and all.

  Then they remember that they’ve recently installed an intercom system in preparation for the arrival of the new baby. They realize that they can let their little girl do this, and if they hear the slightest weird thing happening, they can be in there in a flash.

  So they let their little girl go into the room and close the door behind her. They race to the listening post. They hear her footsteps move across the room. They imagine her now standing over the baby’s crib, and then they hear her say to her two-day-old baby brother, “Tell me about God. I’ve almost forgotten.”

  I find that to be a haunting and evocative story, because it suggests that we come from God, and when we are very, very young, we still remember that. We still know that. But the process of growing up, of learning the language of this world, is a process of progressive forgetting, in a sense, even a process of progressive obliterating of that memory. As we learn the language of this world, the categories of this world get imprinted upon our psyches, and our sense of being a separated self grows stronger and stronger. That sense of disconnection continues throughout childhood until, by the end of childhood, we may have lost that sense of connection altogether.

  There’s something about the very process of growing up that wounds us. We all grow up wounded. Our sense of separation increases through our adolescence as we continue to internalize all of the messages that we get from our culture about who we are and what we ought to be like.

  Our sense of being a separated self with an identity conferred primarily by the values of our culture grows and grows. We have a sense of being okay or not okay to the extent that we measure up to these messages, and we often fall further into that world of separation and alienation, of comparison and judgment of self and others. The result is what the contemporary Benedictine teacher Thomas Keating calls “the false self,” the self conferred by culture. Our identity is wrapped up in that false self. Or to refer to Frederick Buechner again:

  Increasingly, we live our lives from the outside in rather than from the inside out, taking our cues from the world, taking our cues from others, taking our cues from culture.

  It is that way of being and that kind of identity that the Lenten journey calls us to die to. Listening to Jesus means undertaking this journey, embarking on that path of dying to the false self, to that identity, to that way of being, and to be born into an identity centered in Spirit, in Christ, in God. It is the process of internal redefinition of the self, so that a real person can be born within us.

  We all know that Lent historically is a season of repentance. I don’t know what your associations with repentance are, but mine from my childhood are pretty negative. Repentance means to feel really, really bad about the horrible person you are, to feel really, really bad because you’ve got impure thoughts—a big issue in adolescence. Repentance for me always kind of meant just feeling really, really sorry for being so disobedient to God.

  The biblical meanings of repentance are much richer and much more important. To begin with, the Greek word for “repentance” that we find in the Gospels in the New Testament, is metanoia. Translating its Greek roots, “to repent” means “to go beyond the mind that you have,” the mind that you have gotten from culture. From all of those messages, the identity you have is one that you’ve gotten from culture. To repent means to go beyond the mind that you have to a mind in Christ.

  The meaning of the Hebrew word for “repentance” is also very rich. It’s shub (“return”), and the home of this word in the Hebrew Bible is the Jewish experience of exile. To repent is to return. That’s the meaning of the word. To return from exile, to return from that state of separation, to begin that journey of return from the separated self to a new self in God.

  To repent is to reconnect with the one from whom we came and in whom we live and move and have our being. We do both—return and go beyond the mind that we have—by hearing the voice of God, which says to us: “Listen to him.” Listen to Jesus. Listen to the way that he teaches, and follow him on this journey of Lent, with its climax in our participation in Good Friday and Easter, with its climax in our dying with Christ and being born again into life in God.

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  Sermon delivered at Calvary Episcopal Church, Memphis, Tennessee, as part of the Lenten Noonday Preaching Series, March 17, 2003.

  Afterword

  FROM SECONDHAND TO FIRSTHAND RELIGION

  by Barbara Brown Taylor

  This eulogy was presented at the memorial service for Marcus J. Borg on March 22, 2015, at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Portland, Oregon.

  And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? If then you are not able to do so small a thing as that, why do you worry about the rest?

  Luke 12:25–26

  WHY DO WE WORRY? What a silly question. We worry because we are able to imagine a future we cannot control. We worry because we are afraid of losing what we love. We know that worrying gets us nowhere, and still we cannot seem to stop. It’s an ontological hazard, like thinning hair and bad knees. The sacred night is bearing down on us all, and there is not a single thing we can do about it. Why do we worry?

  Because we are human, that’s why.

  Depending on where you live and whom you count on for spiritual guidance, you may have gotten the idea that faith and worry are incompatible. If you have the one, then you don’t have the other. I see it on church signs all the time: “Worry Ends When Faith Begins,” or “Worry Is the Devil’s Data Plan—Don’t Buy It.” Maybe that message helps you. Or maybe it just proves that you don’t have faith. Worst case, it can lead you to hide your worry in the presence of the faithful, pretending that you are just as tranquil as they all seem to be. In this way, too many of us become strangers to our own hearts.

  Either Jesus’s disciples did not know how to pretend—or they did know how and he saw right through them—because they were the people sitting right in front of him when he gave his “do not worry” speech. According to Luke, it wasn’t a speech for the many, but for the few. It wasn’t for those out on the edges of the crowd, but for those nearest the center. Jesus knew what was worrying them.

  They didn’t know where their next meal was coming from.

  They didn’t know whether their cloaks would be long enough to cover their feet that night when the dew fell and the bugs came out.

  They didn’t know how long they had to live—or him either.

  They didn’t know. That’s what was worrying them. But instead of telling them to stop it, just stop—or letting them pretend they could stop—Jesus started doing the rabbi thing. He asked them what they did know—about the ravens and the lilies and the grass of the field. He asked them what they knew about God and God’s kingdom. Most pointedly of all, he asked them what they knew about how well their worrying was working out for them. Were they feeling safer than before? Were they sleeping better at night? Had any of them gotten their “more life” rebates back in the mail yet?

  At Piedmont College, this is what we call “engaging critical thinking,” which does students a lot more good than a lecture and a fountain of free advice. Here’s how it goes. A student starts worrying out loud about something he or she has learned in class, something that doesn’t fit with an established belief. The teacher does not interrupt to argue or correct. He just waits until the student has gotten it all out and says, “Yes, I know you believe that. How’s it working out for you? Yes, I know you’re anxious. What kind of results are you getting from that?”

  Jesus was that kind of teacher. Marcus Borg was too. He had compassion on the pretenders—those of us who
led with what we had been taught to say and think about God, because it was how we had always earned our As—but secondhand religion wasn’t of much interest to him. Although he had a great gift for helping us rethink and respeak the faith, in the end it was our hearts he was after. What mattered, he wrote in the book that brought him to the world’s attention, was giving them away. That’s how we make the move from secondhand to firsthand religion—from having heard about Jesus from the hearing of the ear to being in relationship with the living Christ. We do it by giving our hearts away.

  Those were among his best words, written twenty years before the sacred night bore down on him. In those years Marcus poured himself into many books and talks, all seeking to move us from secondhand to firsthand religion—wisdom from a master who made the journey before us and wanted to offer help to those coming after. When the final night came, Marcus had yet another chance to move from the secondhand to the first—for who knows how well our best words will hold up under the reality of our own death?

  Take Jesus’s advice about considering the ravens and the lilies of the field. Does this really help? Ravens live twenty years at best; lilies, five to seven days. I hate to be the one to say it, but Jesus’s assurance of divine care left some things to be desired. Longevity, for one thing. Protection, for another.

  Marcus did not cling to those parts of the promise. When it became clear that longevity was no longer in the cards for him—and that his protection was going to look more like love than armor—he accepted the care that was left to him, both human and divine. By the accounts of those closest to him, during his last three months he experienced what can only be called a good death—and that only with a catch in the throat—but still. What a last, great gift from him, showing us what it looks like to (in his words) “die unto God and hope for the best.”