Hearing Past the Tingle
1 Samuel 3:1-4:1a
January 18, 2008
As part of my cross-cultural training a few years ago before spending a year in Belfast, Northern Ireland, I came across a story that has stuck with me. It is a true story, which makes it all the more fascinating. Some of you may have heard a version, many of you, I suppose have not. I believe most of the facts are right, though surely the essence of the story is accurate.
There was a church denomination, the name of which escapes my memory and is rather unimportant, which decided to help a tribal group in Africa, as many churches frequently do. Surely this church was hoping eventually to bring Christianity as a part of their mission. Now as you well know, the mission focus of some churches is food, of others it is medical supplies and of other it is local empowerment. But the one thing this church decided to send in abundance all the way Africa, was brassieres. This was their chosen mission. To bring modesty to the heathens. So they packed up boxes and boxes of bras, took them to a package delivery company, and off they went—an airplane chock full of varying sizes of underwear.
The tribal group in Africa did receive the bras. We know this because they sent a message back all the way to the United States with urgency. “Please send more bras. We have run out and they are more popular than you could ever imagine. What a useful gift!”
The missionaries were relieved and emboldened that their mission work had met with promising success. So they gathered together more and more bras and sent them again to the same village with global visions of modesty dancing in their heads. And this time they decided they would send a representative of their denomination along as well.
After thousands of miles of journeying the representative finally drew near to his destination. And as he came closer to the village all the women of the village, who knew of his imminent arrival came out of their houses to meet the great benefactor. And as they approached the eyes of the missionary lit up, first with disbelief, then with shock and finally with horror, as an entire village of topless women surrounded him, with bras tied around their waists thanking him profusely for his church’s gift, of pockets.
One of my favorite aspects of this tale is how the cultural assumptions about wisdom are flipped on their heads. It is the African tribe that is ingenious, finding a wonderful use for such a strange and seeming useless device of Western invention. And it is the missionaries that are dumbfounded and perplexed, who found it difficult to understand that their own prudishness was of no real consequence for their supposed beneficiaries.
It is a lesson of cautiousness that instructs us to listen for the real need of people before we try to do something we think is good. It also tells us that all people in this world have something to teach us. We are not to be solely givers in this life, but we are to receive and learn from the knowledge of others who are different from us as well. All people are distinct and all people can be our mentors.
There is a similar lesson to be found in our passage from Samuel today. This is a story which is frequently stopped at verse ten, when Samuel says those immortal words, “Speak for you servant is listening.”
But in pure irony, frequently we stoplistening to the story, right when Samuel begins to listen to God. We stop here, I suppose, because the second half of the story turns from a delightfully comic tale of a boy running around looking for the voices in his head, to a serious tale of dire consequences. We want the boy Samuel to stay an unperceptive boy. We don’t really want to hear the part of this young child bringing a destructive word to the house of Eli.
Sometimes we want children to just to stay children forgetting that many times children can teach just as well as adults. And maybe this is the same reason those bras were sent to people thousands of miles away—because if we are always the givers, the adults, the knowledgeable ones, it is harder for us to see that maybe our own lives and relationships could be improved by learning from the people who are different from us.
Now as there is a tendency in this passage is to overlook the prophetic boy Samuel, there is also an inclination to glaze over an important sentence. It is the one in which the voice of God says “See, I am about to do something in Israel that will make both ears of anyone who hears of it tingle.” The phrase is a bit ambiguous especially when we come to that word “tingle.” What does “tingle” mean?
The word for “tingle” is only used a few times in the Old Testament and in every instance except for one, it refers to shadows, dark times, or destructive prophecies. Tingling is generally not a good feeling! If your ears are tingling it means God’s will is about to be done in a rather frightening way, so watch out! The word of God is coming and it ain’t gonna be pretty.
And indeed, one can suspect that Eli’s ears were tingling when Samuel brought him the message of the Lord. For Samuel’s message is not an uplifting one. Rather he is called to bring the most difficult news to his own father-like figure. Can you imagine how difficult this was for Samuel. To tell a good kind man, to tell a great friend, that because of what he and his family have done, there will be the punishment of God? That there is no possible redemption for Eli?
Surely there was pain and heartache in Eli’s tingling ears. He could try to talk his way out of the dilemma. Because as the story tells us, it is Eli’s sons who are the real problem. Eli could have blamed the child Samuel for not listening correctly. What does this tiny boy know of the will of God? Why would God speak through an immature little child, instead of coming directly to Eli, the big man, the main priest? Eli could have banished Samuel for telling of God’s criticism. But he didn’t. And this is possibly the most remarkable aspect of the story. Because Eli realizes that his sons have been wrong. He realizes that he didn’t do anything to stop their blasphemies. And Eli simply accepts his family’s fate of destruction.
How hard must this be? How difficult is it for us to accept that what we have done is wrong? How much do we want to be right? How stubborn are we at times in refusing to accept the criticisms of other people?
There are expected forms of criticisms, of course. Parents are expected to instruct their kids, employees can expect criticism from their bosses. But when the criticisms, when the judgments come from unexpected places and from people not like us—people of a different background, ethnicity, age, gender, or class—their censures can be especially hard to listen to, and our ears can tingle even more strongly.
And there can certainly be no better case made than the protests against slavery and the desire for Civil Rights made by black Americans through centuries of our country’s history. While I did not grow up during these struggles, I have had many experiences with people who to this day simply dismiss the legitimate opinions and criticisms of people of different races and ethnicities, rather than listening and understanding their concerns.
Surely part of the tingling in our ears that we feel when people call us on our mistakes, is that there is at least some truth behind their statements. We tingle because we have been caught at a failure. We tingle because our perspective may not be right. We tingle because our worldview has just been crack open a little more to allow for new insights from other people.
I hope that some of you have been able to see the new film Gran Torino. And for those of you who haven’t I hope you get a chance because it is marvelous film that deals with some of these very issues. Walt Kowalski, played by Clint Eastwood in the film, is the main character and is a rather crotchety older man still tending to his own psychological wounds and racial barriers constructed in the Korean War. His wife has just recently died. He is ostracized by his family as being out of date and from another age and now his neighborhood is mostly Asian immigrants of a people called the Hmong. In one scene, Walt accepts an invitation to a party hosted by his Hmong neighbors. While there a traditional priest of the Hmong “reads” Walt. And seemingly for the first time in his life someone speaks directly to the truth in Walt’s life. The priest tells him that Walt is lonely, no one wants to speak to him or even make eye contact, he has a haunted history, and he is very unhappy. Walt, a man proud of his American heritage and his life as a hardworking, blue-collar laborer, pauses at this assessment. And then he says “My God, I have more in common these people than with my own family.”
Accepting the judgments of others, especially those people who are different from us is not an easy task. I can only imagine that Walt’s ears were tingling as the truth of his life was stated directly to him, by an immigrant and by a shaman. I’m sure it was a similar feeling to the one Eli had when this young boy Samuel told him of the removal of Eli’s family over the tribes of Israel. But what is commendable in both of these cases is that both Walt and Eli saw the truth of the criticism and they accepted it. They did not deny it. They did not react with vengeance against the message. They did not dismiss those who spoke with judgment to them. And that is so difficult to do when our ears are tingling.
And if we spin our globe today, can we not also see the effects of tingling ears, which unlike Walt’s and Eli’s, are deaf to truths and judgments? Ears which are not open to conversation. Ears that only see one side of the truth. Ears which tingle so hotly that have not heard the cries of the 13 Israelis killed in recent combat. Ears that have been deafened to the sound of more than 1200 Palestinians killed. Tingling ears that want vengeance. Tingling ears that will not listen to the deeper truths speaking from both sides of a conflict. Tingling ears that prevent communication in marriages. Tingling ears that frustrate bipartisanship in politics. Tingling ears that blind us to every truth but our own.
Yet there is a way past the tingling. With patience and with humility we can be like Eli. Because we can choose not to react when our ears tingle, but instead wait for our deafness to pass, so that our ears are clear to hear the judgments that are true. And we can be quiet so that the voices which have been silenced by our tingling can be heard. And we can hear the judgments of other people, other children of God—judgments of our person, judgments of our nation, of our world—and we can try to understand the other side first, instead of initially attempting to impose our own viewpoints on others.
Because to accept the truths of others, even those truths that are hard to hear takes and enormous amount of faith. Faith that we are not the only ones that God speaks through. Faith that even those people who are polar opposites of us, even those people and opinions who make our ears tingle and our heads ache, still have much in common with us, and may very well be the people God uses to instruct us. May you all be granted the blessing of hearing past ears that tingle. Amen.
