Stromness Parish Church: May 2012

Monday 28 May 2012

Trinity Sunday

Have you heard? Have you heard the voice of God? Was it like the sound of thunder or a gentle

whisper? Did it fill you with awe and wonder? Or were you just filled with fear and terror?

Did the voice come to you on a mountaintop and from a cloud? Or, did the voice speak to you through a friend, a stranger, a song or a sermon? How did you know it was the voice of God?

Did you see God himself or just feel it was like God who was speaking to you?

Did he speak with a Scots accent or BBC English or perhaps in Hebrew or Greek?

Did he speak clearly and loudly and left you in no doubt it was God, or did you have to listen really hard to make out the words and understand the meanings?

Why do you think he chose to speak with you? Are you special, more holy, more open to

God than anyone else?

Had you been ready to listen to him, or been on a course that taught you how to

listen to the voice of God?

Tell me the secret, tell me how I too can hear the voice of God. Tell me what I have

to do to hear God speak to me.

My child, my precious child, you ask questions that don’t have answers. You want a training course, a manual of instruction, a formula to work out what I am saying to you, a heavenly translator to

make sense of the world you inhabit, yet I have given you all those things?

I have given you the church that you might grow in your faith, knowledge and understanding of who I am. I have given you the Bible that you might hear my voice in its pages each day. I have given

you the possibility to pray and to listen for my voice in our conversations with one another. I gave you the gift of the Holy Spirit to make sense of the world around you. My voice speaks to you in the world and in its beauty. My voice speaks to you in the people who cry out that they are hungry, in the people who need to be cared for, in the sick who want to be made well, in the oppressed who want you to

bring freedom to them, in the lonely who long for friend.

If you cannot hear me speak to you then maybe you are just not listening!