The Reverend Seth Ethan Carey
January 18, 2009
First Congregational Church,
www.firstconge.org
630-469-3096
Introduction to the
Scripture:
This scripture is a story about a young boy named Samuel,
a boy who would grow to become the prophet who would establish the kingdom of
Israel. The scene is set late at night in the Temple, where Samuel and his
master Eli are both sound asleep. God—who has been absent from the stage of
history for some time—is about to tear the veil between our world and Heaven
and call out to this young man Samuel, to give his life purpose and direction.
Unfortunately, Samuel isn’t really listening.
Scripture: 1 Samuel 3:1-10
Now the boy Samuel was ministering to the Lord under Eli. The word of the Lord was rare in those days;
visions were not widespread.
At
that time Eli, whose eyesight had begun to grow dim so that he could not see,
was lying down in his room; the lamp of God had not yet gone out, and Samuel
was lying down in the temple of the Lord, where the ark of God was. Then the Lord called, ‘Samuel! Samuel!’ and he said, ‘Here I am!’ and ran to Eli, and said, ‘Here I am, for you
called me.’ But he said, ‘I did not
call; lie down again.’ So he went and
lay down. The Lord called again,
‘Samuel!’ Samuel got up and went to Eli,
and said, ‘Here I am, for you called me.’
But he said, ‘I did not call, my son; lie down again.’ Now Samuel did not yet know the Lord, and the
word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him. The Lord called Samuel again, a third
time. And he got up and went to Eli, and
said, ‘Here I am, for you called me.’
Then Eli perceived that the Lord was calling the boy. Therefore Eli said to Samuel, ‘Go, lie down;
and if he calls you, you shall say, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is
listening.” ’ So Samuel went and lay
down in his place.
Now
the Lord came and stood there, calling as before, ‘Samuel! Samuel!’
And Samuel said, ‘Speak, for your servant is listening.’
Sermon:
During the worst of the Second World War, no one worshipped there. With that single exception the Jewish faithful have gathered at the Old New Synagogue in Prague for over seven hundred years, untroubled by the rumors that an eldritch creature slumbers in the attic.
The strange tale of this monster begins in the year 1389. On Easter Sunday of that year, the intolerant Christians of Prague slaughtered three-thousand Jewish men, women, and children in a racially-charged massacre. The violent attacks continued periodically for nearly two hundred years until the late 16th century when a lone Rabbi—Rabbi Judah Loew—decided that enough was enough. A practitioner of Jewish Kabalistic magic, Rabbi Loew attempted a dangerous ritual for the sake of his community. After fasting for seven days he molded a great deal of clay into a roughly humanoid composition. He inscribed the forehead of the statue with sacred Hebrew letters and chanted the forbidden seventy-two letter name of God repeatedly, until the inanimate lump of clay and rock breathed its first and rose up on legs of stone. Thus the Golem was born, a creature without a soul to call its own. Thus the Golem took its first steps as a defender of the oppressed, animated by the breath of God, created to serve its masters.
This Golem served its purpose in rescuing helpless civilians and in crushing the opposition with terrible feats of strength. The fairy tale was not to last. Some say that the Golem fell in love with a woman, and upon her rejection went mad with rage. Others insist that the Rabbi was simply unable to control the thing. In either case, the Golem turned on its creator and began to wreak havoc throughout the Jewish quarter. Rabbi Loew ordered the Golem to stand down, but it would no longer obey his commands. It would no longer listen. In the end, he was forced to deactivate the monster by removing one of the sacred letters from its forehead—with some difficulty, I would imagine. The body of the creature remained intact. So Rabbi Loew locked the remains of his creation in the attic of his synagogue, hidden beneath piles and piles of forgotten holy texts, waiting to be summoned once more if the need should arise.
***
It’s not difficult to see the parallels between the legend of the Golem and our own machine creations. While the science of building computers and robots and home appliances employs mechanical principles rather than arcane religious rituals, the aim of both projects is similar—to create machines that will serve their creators. Some machines seem to have a mind of their own.
My brother has a GPS computer in his car—a global positioning satellite—that employs a technology called “Genuine People Personality.” That basically means that it talks with a human voice, and even answers to its own name—in this case, Jason. My brother thinks Jason is up to no good, and I think he might be right.
I was visiting with him in CT a couple of weeks ago, and we got lost driving back from the airport. I suggested he turn on his GPS to get us some directions, but he was oddly hesitant. He said it wasn’t working properly. Then he leaned over and whispered, as though the machine might be listening, “I think it’s trying to kill me.”
Well, as I’ve told you before, my brother likes to make things up, just to mess with people’s heads. I didn’t take his suspicions very seriously, but I figured I’d humor him and ask what led him to such a dramatic conclusion.
“A couple of weeks ago, I had to drive out to some town I’ve never heard of on business,” he began. “The trouble started when Jason instructed me to get on the freeway—going in the wrong direction. Then, when I got out into the country, Jason gave me instructions that led through an abandoned rock quarry. The place was full of rock landslides and old dynamite. Some place called Bone Mill Road.” He paused long enough to let the ominous name sink in. “I tried to get out of there by giving Jason a new destination, and it told me to turn left. That led me to a cliff, and a sheer drop of several thousand feet.”
I thought this was the most ridiculous story that I had ever heard. It was either greatly exaggerated or completely made up, and I told him as much as I powered up Jason and inputted our destination. No sooner than our course had been charted, Jason’s almost human voice echoed out of the machine with sinister intent, “In three hundred yards, turn left onto Wolf Pit Road.” My brother and I just looked at one another, and without a word I shut Jason down and threw the GPS in the backseat, suddenly reminded of the golem being locked in an attic.
***
It sometimes seems inevitable that our own creations will turn against us. Or at the very least, they will fail to obey our commands. As any parent out there can tell you, this is also true of our children. Our children are also our “creations,” in a loose sense of the word. We don’t design or engineer them, but we give them life and try to raise them according to certain principles and values.
Now, you might take offense if I were to compare your child with a toaster, or a GPS, or any other machine. As well you should, because your relationships with your children are very different from your relationships with your coffee makers, MP3 players, automobiles, or laptop computers. We treat our machines as slaves—we give them orders and we expect them to be followed. You treat your children as beings of significance and immeasurable worth, irreplaceable children of God, beautiful human creatures that laugh and cry and feel pain, as well as great joy. Yet, it’s still frustrating, isn’t it, when they don’t listen. It’s still frustrating when they don’t do what you tell them to do. It’s frustrating when they completely ignore you. I don’t have any children of my own, but I’ve worked with many of yours, and I think you know what I’m talking about.
Now I’m not a parent, so I hesitate to give any parenting advice from the pulpit. I think this issue we’re addressing here today—this question of how a creator communicates with her creations—warrants a few words on the subject.
It’s no secret that there is a frequent communication breakdown between us and our children, as well as our machines. We ask things of our children and we input directives into our computers, and sometimes the message doesn’t get across in either case. The child may ignore you, and the computer might experience some kind of interface error. Your child may talk back even, and you might not like that—but at least they’re trying to engage you in a conversation. At least they make some degree of sense, which is more than I can say for a computer. I mean, it’s not as though when you ask your son to take out the garbage, he says, “You have performed an illegal operation. Please contact your System Administrator.”
My point is that unlike machines, we can actually have a conversation with our kids. Unlike machines, we aren’t engaged in a master and slave relationship with them. Again, I’m not a parent, and it could be that I’m just naïve or idealistic. That idealism is my gift to all of you seasoned mothers and fathers out there. I can’t tell you what kind of father I am, only the kind of father I want to be. And I want to be the kind of father who listens to his kids as much as I want them to listen to me. I want to be the kind of father who welcomes dialogue rather than issuing commands. I don’t want my own private golem to control. Ok, I do. But what I really want is to treat my children with dignity.
This subject is especially meaningful for me, because I am going to be a father—someday.
***
So we’ve looked at how we relate to our own creations, and how that relationship changes depending on the nature of those creations. Rabbi Loew treated his Golem like a slave—a soulless automaton—just as we treat our machines. On the other end of the spectrum, we try to relate to our children with mutual love and respect. Let us not forget that we ourselves are the children of God, creations ourselves. So how does God relate to us? Are we the slaves of a divine master, or the children of an infinitely loving God? When God calls, whose voice do we hear? Is it the summons of a ruthless taskmaster, or an invitation to a dialogue with the universe?
In 2 Samuel, we have an odd story about this very thing, a story about God trying to reach out and communicate with a human boy. Although God repeatedly calls out to him, crying “Samuel, Samuel,” Samuel does not listen. He hears the voice alright, but he seems reluctant to acknowledge that the voice comes from God—even though he’s sleeping right next to the Ark of the Covenant. Now to be fair, we’re told at the beginning of this passage that “The word of the Lord was rare in those days,” and “visions were not widespread.” So the voice of God is probably the last thing Samuel ever expected to hear. Still, I wonder if there isn’t something else going on here.
While you and I might think it would be great to have a direct line with God, to hear God’s will made plain in human words, unfiltered by scripture or the clergy, I suspect Samuel saw things a little differently. Remember, we’re dealing with the Old Testament here, and Samuel’s concept of God would have been pretty different from our own. Samuel’s God is a deity of commandments, one who makes harsh demands of prophets. You might recall that when God spoke to the prophet Jonah and told him to preach repentance to the city of Nineveh, Jonah immediately booked passage on a ship and sailed in the opposite direction, hoping to escape his charge.
This fear of God’s word isn’t particular to the Old Testament era. God delivered the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, but many interpreters of the Bible have tried to put us back in chains. Those who emphasize a legalistic God of commandments try to force us into a master & slave relationship with God—God commands us, and we must follow orders or be punished. Even the designation of God’s principles as the “Ten Commandments” is loaded with negative connotation. It goes back to our earlier discussion of machines; in the old days, computers used a mechanism called Command Line Interface, a text-based system that required you to manually input commands into the computer—your very own digital slave.
Even now, I think we still have some trepidation about
hearing God’s will. We might be afraid that we’ll be asked to do things that
force us to step outside of our comfort zone. We might even think of God as an
annoying relative, a distant cousin who only calls when he wants something from
us.
I think Samuel must have suspected that God was speaking to him—but hoped that it wasn’t true. Indeed, after Samuel finally tells God that he is listening, God has nothing but bad news for him, the kind that keeps him lying awake for the rest of that long night.
Still, I think it’s a mistake to think that our Creator only calls when God wants something from us. I think we’re called when God wants something for us. We aren’t golems, machines, or slaves. We’re human beings, children of the most high God. It’s true that God may ask us to do things that are hard. When God calls we would do well to listen; for when we rise to meet God’s challenge, we become greater than we have been. God may have had a difficult task for Samuel that night, but that was the first step to becoming one of the greatest prophets in Israel, the man who would anoint King David and establish a legendary dynasty—hardly what you would call a slave.
The curious thing about slaves is that they always rebel—as well they should. A person can only obey so many orders before he defies his master. God gave us minds to think, and the free will to make our own choices. Perhaps that is the real lesson of the Golem of Prague—that it is wrong to treat any creature as a soulless automaton. Perhaps if Rabbi Loew had treated his Golem with a little more respect, it wouldn’t have run amok. Perhaps the same could be said for Jason, my brother’s GPS computer. And maybe the same could be said for us—if we recognize that we are not the slaves of God, we might be a little more willing to listen to what God has to say.
***
In the winter of 1941, during the German occupation of Prague, it is said that a Nazi Storm Trooper penetrated the hidden attic of the Old New Synagogue in search of the Golem. No one knows what his intentions were. Perhaps he was sent to destroy it, or harness its power for Hitler’s war machine. All anyone knows is that the man never came back.
Could it be that some divine power still resides in the crumbling statue? Could it be that in the recesses of its mind, its charge to protect the Jews from their enemies still echoes in halls of stone?
There was a time when this creature refused to heed the call of its creator. Maybe it’s never too late to start listening. Amen.