“Give thy servant a heart with skill to listen.”

I Kings 3:9

 

I congratulate you graduates on the completion of your Seminary training.  I am grateful for the invitation to speak to you on this important occasion.  I invite you, in the consciousness of your divine call to ministry as you stand on the threshold of your active pastorate, to turn your attention to that brief passage from First Kings just read in our hearing.

We find here most of the familiar ingredients of every fairy tale and every morality success story.  Like the fairy godmother, or the friendly genie who comes offering the fulfillment of any three wishes, the Lord appears to Solomon and promises to give him whatever he asks.

The young king, with commendably serious concern for his heavy responsibilities as a ruler, asks for the gift of wisdom, as the old King James version put it, that he may govern well.  Solomon does not ask for the fulfillment of selfish desires for wealth, or glory, or a long life.

In the Bible story, the Lord is so pleased with the young king’s sense of responsibility and selflessness that Solomon is granted not only his request for wisdom to rule well, but also the promise of wealth and honors and length of days.

You graduates will soon be shouldering the practical responsibilities of your divine calling.  What tonight — this your Commencement Night — are your secret dreams for your future ministry?  What are the essential qualities of personality you covet most in your own self-image?  If you had your one wish what would you ask?

Now the old story from I Kings, explaining the secret of Solomon’s success with its fairy tale touches of wishes granted and its Horatio Alger ending where all good things are to come to the favored one, is a tale not so popular today as it once was.  In an age that is increasingly secular and cynical, the Solomon success story has been losing most of its earlier appeal.

But the New English Bible Version puts fresh zip and relevance in that old story — at least for me — by just one simple change in translation.  Where the old Bible story recorded the young king’s prayer:  “Give me wisdom” or “Give me an understanding heart,” the New English Bible Version reads: “Give me a heart with skill to listen.”

Perhaps it is the rarity of good listeners we find nowadays that makes the old story come alive with fresh relevance.  I heard a wife, in despair over the unhappiness in her home say:  “I don’t know what is going to happen to our marriage.  My husband won’t listen to me.  He won’t listen to anyone.”

Many young people today trace their feelings of alienation from the older generation to what they call, “an unwillingness to listen to us,” on the part of their parents, teachers and counselors.

I heard a nurse, in poignant reflection, say of a physician for whom she had worked for many years: “I can remember when his practice grew so large that he was no longer able to listen to his patients when they talked to him.”  Could this happen to a pastor in a rapidly growing congregation?

Perhaps you have become increasingly aware of the rarity of “a heart with skill to listen” as you tried to tell someone something very important to you and he got that far-away look in his eye that told you he was no longer listening.  Or he may have interrupted you to tell you something he was thinking about.  Or, he may have indicated he had already jumped to the wrong conclusion about the point he thought you were going to make.  You found out he wasn’t listening and it turned you off.

“A heart with skill to listen” — what a rarity — what a desperately needed commodity — in families, and churches, and communities, and even in pastorates.

The very phrasing of Solomon’s prayer — “Give me a heart with skill to listen” — raises the question: “What is the organ of listening, anyway – the ear, the mind, the heart?”  When people have perfectly good ears why don’t they listen?

No one knows better than you assembled here in Caldwell Chapel tonight that the Bible deals thoroughly with this question.  The Bible insists that the hearing process consists of more than the successful catching of sound waves on an eardrum.  The Bible speaks of men and women who “having ears, hear not.”  Listening involves attending to the sound, intelligently, sympathetically, and responsively.

In Bible language and psychology the heart of a person is the term used to denote the center of a person’s emotional, mental and volitional being.  The heart is the very self.  Unless the heart be attentive to hear – skilled in listening, absorbed in the business of understanding — no matter how much the ear takes in, listening will not take place.

Indeed the Biblical understanding of human nature is that there are some people incapable of hearing some things, not because they are physically deaf, but because they are mentally distracted, or morally depraved, or spiritually enslaved.  Their ears are tuned to other music, they are hearing other voices, and their feet march to the beat of other drums.

The prophets spoke of a nation “having uncircumcised hearts and uncircumcised ears,” rendering them deaf to the prophetic word, not because they have no ears but because they are enslaved to other lords and serve other gods in their emotional and volitional life.  Their hearts are not skilled to listen to the prophetic word.

When Solomon prays for a heart with skill to listen, to what or to whom does he intend to listen?  To other people?  Certainly.  The reason he requests what he does is in order that he may be equipped to rule his subjects with justice.  He wants a heart with skill to listen to what his people are actually saying and really feeling, not what he thinks they ought to be saying or thinking.

The first example of Solomon’s wisdom given in the Book of Kings portrays a wisdom in dispensing justice which could come only from a heart skilled in listening to others — identifying so completely in imagination with them that he could really hear their thoughts and feel their emotions. This is why Solomon could judge wisely and justly between those two women who claimed the same child as their own.  The real mother was the one willing to give up the child when its life was threatened.

Solomon wanted to be the ideal theocratic king.  He wanted to sit in his place of responsibility and dispense justice, so he asked God to give him wisdom — a wisdom that could flow only from a heart skilled to listen to human hurts and hopes.

But more than the skill to listen to people, Solomon was praying for a heart with skill to listen to God in order that he would know right from wrong.  With the Hebrews the fundamental religious experience was to hear the divine word.  The great difference between Judaism and the mystery religions of the ancient East was just here.  The mystery religions held the supreme religious experience to be the vision of God: with the Hebrew it was hearing the word of God. The most important formula in Israel’s religion begins characteristically, “Here, O Israel.” And the Biblical meaning of hearing the divine word includes both attending to that word, understanding it, and obeying it.  There can be no true hearing of God’s word unless there is evident a respectful response to that word.

But surely the climax in this Solomon story, and the crucial point for us who are here for this momentous commencement occasion, is the recognition that “the heart with skill to listen,” both to human voices and to God, is the gift of God.  “Give thy servant, O Lord,” prays Solomon, “A heart with skill to listen.”  Here is a skill, a facility, a capacity, that men and women cannot acquire by their efforts alone.  It is the gift of God.

The prophets encouraged the people to look forward to that coming day when God would put a new heart in His people, exchange their “heart of stone” for a “heart of flesh,” a day when God would write His word upon the tablets of their hearts, when with a glad obedience they would hear and obey His divine call and invitation to them.

That day for us all, thank God, has come.  Jesus Christ is the Word of God incarnate who can live in our hearts by faith.  He imparts to human hearts the skill to listen compassionately to others with His own compassion, and to obey God with a loving obedience like His will to do the Father’s will.  He gives the strength to respond to both human need and the divine directives.  What God offered to Solomon in answer to Solomon’s prayer, all that and more He offers everyone in Jesus Christ.

Yet it is tragically possible that we, like Solomon, might pray for, long for, a heart with skill to listen to God and humanity and then refuse that gift when it is just within our grasp, even after we have trained for it professionally, psychologically and Biblically.

Kings and queens and priests and priestesses of God that we are, with life before us, and God ready to give us what the human scene needs most of all – our fondest wish – what is it?  What will we ask?

I

INVOCATION:  Almighty and everlasting God, in whom we live and move and have our being, who hast created us for thyself, so that our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee, grant unto us purity of heart and strength of purpose so that no selfish passion may hinder us from knowing Thy will, and no weakness from doing it.  In Thy light may we see life clearly, and in Thy service find perfect freedom.

PRAYER OF INTERCESSION: O Thou Creator and Preserver of all life, who hast breathed the breath of life into our bodies, lighted the light of reason in our minds, and kindled in our hearts a love for Thee and all righteousness, we bring to Thee now in our common prayer the burdens of each who bows with us and of all throughout our world who stand in need of Thy succor and Thy grace.  Give us, we beseech Thee, above all else, more love, that we may be delivered from all blindness and prejudice, and from whatever else would turn our hearts from one another and from Thee.  Give us that love which, like the compassion of Christ, will turn us in sympathetic service to the poor, the suffering and the lonely and despondent.  Give us that love which is unlimited by the false barriers of race and class and nationality that the sins of people have set up.  Give us that love which alone can heal the strife and bitterness of life.  Give us that love born of Thine own love for us, which turns the hard hearts of men, strengthens Thy church, and builds Thy Kingdom.  Give us Love, O God, through Jesus Christ, our Lord.