In his poem, In No Strange Land, The 19^th century poet, Frances Thompson wrote about the invisible world of God which surrounds our world, and in particular about the Angels who keep their ancient places hidden, for the most part by human scepticism.  But Thompson warned that the angels are still there whether we believe in them or not and he warns:

‘Tis ye, ‘tis your estranged faces,
That miss the many splendour'd thing.

In this we are reminded that just because we can’t see or sense something, it does not mean that it isn’t there.

I was hearing this week of someone who made a wish list which included a wish that, for one night, all the lights of London might be turned off so that she could see the stars.  Of course, the stars are there whether we can see them or not and so it is with things to do with God.  Take His voice, for example:  few, I suspect, today hear him speaking directly as if He had a human voice.  We tend to talk about signs and wonders – of seeing God expressed in the beauty of nature and in art and music, through the words of the bible, in worship or, more spiritually in the depths of our hearts.  But a direct contact with a vocal God is not the lot of many.  That doesn’t mean, however, that God is not speaking. It may simply be that we have forgotten how to listen.

God’s voice was not very active in the time of the boy Samuel – The Word of the Lord was rare in those days  says the Old Testament Lesson today and it was therefore no surprise that when young Samuel heard God calling to him, he thought it was the priest, Eli. Only when it happened a second time did Eli wake up to the possibility that God was speaking directly to the boy – and so it turned out.  What we heard this morning was the Vocation of Samuel when God called and he began to respond – a vocation that was to be lived out in a life of service to God as the principal prophet of his age.  Another moment of vocation occurred in today’s Gospel in the encounter between Jesus and Nathaniel.  Unlike Samuel, however, Nathaniel has the advantage of not only hearing God speak directly to him in Jesus Christ – he can also see him.

Samuel and Nathaniel have three particular things in common:  the first is the meaning of their names.  Samuel was born to his mother Hannah when she was barren and after she had prayed fervently to God for a child. When her prayer was granted she named him Samuel because, as she said, I asked the Lord for Him. He was thus God’s gift.  Nathaniel also means God has given.  Both of them are gifts from God.

The Second thing they had in common was that God knew them before they knew God.  We always assume that when people respond to God and offer their lives to Him, then they have already had a developing relationship with him.  But, as we heard, Samuel did not yet know the Lord, and the word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him.  Nathaniel, when he was told by Philip that he had met the Chosen One of God, was at best sceptical and at worst scathing. Can anything good (of God) come out of Nazareth?  In both cases, then, it was God who did the choosing and it came, as it usually does, unexpectedly, out of the blue.  Vocation is always a response. God calls – we hear. It isn’t about our choosing God but rather about God choosing us for his own particular purpose.  In both Samuel’s and Nathaniel’s experience that call came within the atmosphere of prayer.  Samuel was with the priest of the Temple, Eli, and was surrounded by holy things and lived at the heart of the nation’s prayer life.

Nathaniel, as Jesus had observed, was a righteous and devout man though it surprised him that Jesus knew this until he spoke of the fig tree where Nathaniel had been standing before Philip called him.

In Jewish spirituality the fig tree occupies a significant place. Under the shade of such trees, devout Jews would stand and meditate on God.  Jesus, seeing him do this, saw into his heart and, as his Father called Samuel, so Jesus called Nathaniel.  What they were called to is the third thing which unites Samuel to Nathaniel:  they were called to be part of God’s plan to share in the salvation of the world – Samuel as the prophet who re-called the nation of Israel to holiness and Nathaniel  to be first a disciple and then an Apostle of Jesus, charged with proclaiming the Good News of the Gospel by which salvation comes to all.

Both, then, were part of God’s carefully thought out plan for the salvation of His people and when he called them it was to a share in fulfilling that plan.  At the moment when they responded to God’s call, however, all that was potential.  They had to grow into the work God had for them to do and an important part of that growth was the growth in personal knowledge of God. A growth which comes through prayer, through the study of scripture and through participating in the work of discipleship – the work of service in God’s name.

But that was THEN. Hindsight and the unfolding story of God’s dealing with his people in Old and New Testaments fills in the detail for us. We know how it worked out for them, even if, in Nathaniel’s case, we have to move into the hearsay witness which places him as an Apostle to the eastern lands beyond Jerusalem – even as far as India.  But what of NOW – and what of us?

In some ways our present age is not unlike the ages in which Samuel and Nathaniel lived.  We are told in today’s Old Testament Lesson that The Word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread.  It was a spiritually dead time.  Things were no better when Jesus came onto the scene and He was God’s decisive action at a time of spiritual deadness.

Today, in many places and in many lives, the things of God are ignored. Even within the Church there is a sense that we are living through a spiritually difficult and dark age. What words we hear are often the words of men, all too often pessimistic, and what vision we have tends to be rather myopic.

Some of the things I am now engaged in as Area Dean – things like rising financial burdens on the churches and a planning for when we have less priests than we have now – could leave us disheartened. Left to human devices the world seems to be careering towards self-destruction and the church towards extinction.  But we should be very cautious when doing down the world and the Church because both are God’s creation and I have every confidence that He will not stand idly by without acting.  So we should be careful about writing the obituary of Christianity. To quote the American author Mark Twain when The New York Journal carried a premature obituary:

 "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated"

When Judaism was close to extinction, God called the prophet Samuel and when it needed to be turned dicisvely away from self-centredness and back towards God’s  heart – he sent Jesus - who called, amongst others,  Nathaniel.

And Jesus Christ goes on calling people to both live out the values of His Kingdom and to witness to those values in the world.  We are part of that provision and as long as we are faithful – as long as we remain attentive and responsive to the Voice of God calling to us then there is a great deal of hope for our world – and even for our Church! 

This is more than vain optimism because I detect a new spirit growing in our society which is seeking those Kingdom values – of love, of justice, of freedom, mercy, liberation and holiness to counteract the downward drag of man’s inhumanity both towards fellow man and towards our fragile planet.  We, as God’s chosen and called ones are being asked to respond in new and more confident ways to these spiritual needs.  If the Word of the Lord is rare and if visions are not widespread then it is up to us to change that by our own witness.  So - Who is God calling today? Each one of us. It is up to us to respond.

As for the future – that is not in our hands but in God’s – yet what I can say about the future can be drawn from the stories of Samuel and Nathaniel.  They were able to respond because deep inside them God had planted a seed – it was His action and it was his doing. He watered and nurtured that seed until the day he was ready to call them. Had he not done so, they would not have responded.  For me, one of the exciting things is that the seeds of God’s future Church – who he will call and use and how they will help shape his church – and therefore his world – has already been decided.  Whatever the future will be has already been planned.

And in this body of Christians as in every other there are those in whom that seed is already growing.  Like Samuel and Nathaniel, they may not know it yet – but God’s day will come when he calls them.

It is up to all of us to nurture and feed those seeds by our example, our witness and our prayers. In our midst, even today, there are people whose vocation will be depending on it. God is depending on it. The future Church is depending on it. Only so will those future Christian shapers of world and church be ready to say, when God calls:

‘Speak, for your servant is listening.’

Amen.