Sunday Message
November 14, 2004
Richard L Sheffield
Text: 1 Samuel 3:1-10

If I were going to title this sermon this morning, I'd title it: "Then the Lord said ..." Emphasis on then. "Then the Lord said ..." which means something happened before "then." Which led to "then" and now.

For Samuel what happened before "then" was a restless night, up and down, up and down, up and down – confused, uncertain, willing, but not sure what to do. Eli, Samuel's mentor, wasn't much help. He just kept telling Samuel to keep doing what he always did at night. Go to sleep, Samuel! Whatever it was – adolescent growing pains, being spooked by sleeping in a dark church, last night's stew – whatever it was, it would pass. "Go to sleep, Samuel!" said old Eli, and let me sleep too.

Sometimes that's the easy thing to do, and so we do it. It's easier to keep doing what we've been doing. What we always do. After a while we can do it in our sleep! There's something safe, and secure, and "sensible" in that. Someone has said, "If you keep doing what you've been doing, you'll keep getting what you've been getting." I'm not so sure that's entirely true. But even if it is, I don't believe that is what God calls you and me to do. To just keep doing. To settle securely into a sameness that seems safer than doing something new.

And so sometimes God "calls" us – like God called Samuel. Maybe in the middle of the night, maybe in the middle of your career, maybe in the middle of something you'd rather keep on doing. And he keeps calling, in ways only you can hear at first, until you say like Samuel, "Speak [Lord], for your servant is listening." ¹ Then, maybe only then, as with Samuel, does God say what it is he's calling us to do.

Samuel had a restless night. I'm a little denser. I've had a restless year. Since a year ago last October, when I got a call. Not from heaven. But from Washington D. C. I've already had a couple of folks suggest that was a call from heaven's opposite, but we'll let that go. The call was from the chairperson of the Pastor Nominating Committee of the Presbyterian Congregation in Georgetown. They had called Princeton Seminary to ask for recommendations of people who might be considered to be called as their pastor. A friend recommended me.

Over the last year they listened; I listened; we listened to each other; hopefully we listened together to God; and in September they extended an invitation for me to preach last Sunday morning in Georgetown as their candidate for pastor.

I remember clearly when I decided to say yes. It was before they asked. It was August 31. I was taking a long walk through Georgetown and was walking up around Observatory Circle where the official residence of the Vice President is located. I don't think he had anything to do with it. I don't even know if he was home. But as I walked I felt a deep sense of peace, and belonging. That this was God's call. And that when the committee's call came, as I knew in that moment it would, I would answer God's call to Washington D.C. Samuel kept getting out of bed and running to Eli. I got out my cell phone and called Xavia.

God's call is like that: When you don't expect it. Where you don't expect to go. What you don't expect to do. I suspect that both Eli and Samuel assumed Samuel was just dreaming. For the last week I've felt that way. Like I might wake up and life will just go on the way it has. It won't. It can't. The realty sign in our front yard is very real. On December 31 at midnight, I will have served as your pastor for exactly 20 years – right down to the minute. And one minute later I will become the pastor of the Presbyterian Congregation in Georgetown, D.C.

There's no "waking up." No going back. And no "coming back," either. Some of you have asked about that. Whether I could come back, if asked, for a wedding, or a funeral. It isn't that I wouldn't. It's that I can't. Our Book of Order discourages it. The Maumee Valley Presbytery pretty much forbids it. And I love you too much to do it. Because, you see, God's call is to more than me. God's call is to you. And God is calling you and me to go separate ways, in separate places – even as we both find our way to him.

Twenty years ago, another committee, in a place I'd never heard of, called to ask on God's behalf if we might walk together for a while. And we have, for longer than at any other time in the nearly 175 years that this family of faith has served God in this place that the Sheffield's have all grown to love and call home. And I'm convinced that as he spoke to Samuel, God will speak to us in all this, if we will listen.

In the midst of my conversation with the Georgetown Committee I had questions – and I called an old friend and mentor, The Rev. Dr. Fred Anderson at the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City. Fred and I go back a long way. I worked with him first in Seminary in 1977. When I called I got Fred's voice mail, and left a message.

When he called back I launched into my questions and he stopped me. "Dick, why don't we talk about this tomorrow morning over breakfast." I'm in Lima. Fred's in New York. He said, "I'm in Wa-pa-ko-neeta." I said, "What on earth are you doing in Wapak?!" He was there for the wedding of a former member of his church in New York who now lives in Columbus who asked him to officiate at his marriage to a woman from Wapak at the Methodist church.

God did all that just so Fred and I could talk! God does whatever is necessary, which is not always what we think we need, to get our attention, and to get us to listen, and get us going his way. Even this.

That doesn't mean you and I haven't been going God's way thus far. Just that like that traveler in the poem by Robert Frost our roads have diverged. Frost wrote:

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
and that has made all the difference. ²

Our roads have diverged, but that does not mean, that we will never cross paths again! God made that clear last weekend! As clear as if he had spoken it from a cloud.

Most of you know I like to play on the computer. And many of you know I like to buy things on ebay. For the last few weeks I've been going to ebay which is a kind of computerized auction house, and typing in "Georgetown." Just to see what I'd see. Most of the items up for bid have to do with the Hoyas, which I'm told is the name of the Georgetown University athletic teams.

But then a more interesting item turned up. An envelope with a cancelled stamp. What stamp collectors call a "cover." I'm not a stamp collector, but this one was cancelled with a postmark reading, "Georgetown D.C., 1861." And it said that there was a letter inside. I thought, neat; the envelope is interesting, since Georgetown at that time was not part of Washington proper, but a separate little town on the Potomac. And who knows, it was a very small town, so the letter might have been from a member of the Presbyterian Congregation. Worth a few dollars, I thought, to find out. So I bid.

On Saturday, before I preached in Georgetown on Sunday, I checked my email in their church office. Ebay had sent me an email to let me know I'd won the envelope and its letter. Now I was supposed to pay for it. You're suppose to do that right away, so I sent an email to the seller which said that I was out of town, but I did want the envelope, and would be in touch in a day or two. Sunday afternoon we flew back to Lima.

Sunday night I sent this email to the seller of the envelope: "Payment was made by [credit card] this evening. I look forward to seeing the cover and letter. Am hoping the writer was a member of my new congregation, the Presbyterian Congregation in Georgetown, founded in 1780!" Ebay sellers and buyers often engage in that kind of anonymous chat.

On Monday, though, before I met with the Session here, to tell them I would be moving, when I was still trying to keep things underwraps for a few more hours, to be fair to people I love and don't want to hurt, I got this email: "Dick, Thanks for your order and Note. I wasn't sure until I received this message if you were the Dick Sheffield from Market Street in Lima. I am Karen Jarvis' Brother. Small World Huh! I bet she is sorry you are Leaving Lima!"

I won't speak for Karen, but Karen, of course, is an elder and is the chairperson of our mission committee, and wasn't supposed to know I was leaving Lima! Thankfully Howard thought she already did – and didn't call her. Howard Rust lives in Nevada!

Make of that what you will. What I make of it is that God can even use ebay and email to speak, and to remind us that this "small world" is "his world," and that whatever road he calls us to be on, just as he called Samuel so long ago, all roads lead eventually to him. We only need to listen, and "then ...".

1. 1 Samuel 3:10 NRSV.
2. Online text © 1998-2004 Poetry X. All rights reserved. From Mountain Interval | Henry Holt & Company, 1920.