The young Australian pastor had just received his first assignment. It was to a remote sheep-ranching settlement deep in the Australian outback. He had arrived during a period of prolonged drought, and was making pastoral calls to his far-flung flock of ranchers, who were trying to keep their flocks of alive in this desolate land.
One rancher took the pastor to an area where most of the sheep lay, weak and sick from thirst. They were bleating and bellowing with the most mournful, pitiful sounds the pastor had ever heard. It was a horrible thing to listen to animals about to die and who had strength enough only to lift their heads and groan.
When the rancher explained that the sheep had had no water for weeks, and that without it they would soon die, the pastor, in his pious way, asked the rancher if he had prayed for rain. "Why," he said, "If you would only lift your prayers to the Lord for rain, this would all be over."
The rancher’s reply was a classic. He looked his new pastor up and down, then pointed to those pitiful animals, and said, "A God who cannot hear that prayer is not worth praying to."
There are, you see, other ways to pray than to flog the gates of heaven with words. There are other ways to pray than to polish phrases and multiply sentences. There are other ways to cry to the Lord besides talk, talk, talk.
Can it be that the special spirituality God has offered to men is that men, more than women, find ways to pray other than with words? Men offer the sacrifice of silence. Both men and women could do so more effectively. Let’s explore together the sacrifice of silence.
I
In our Biblical story, it’s clear that Elkanah was a good man, a solid man. Elkanah was dependable; he knew what he was supposed to do and he did it. We know absolutely nothing about what Elkanah said in his prayers; but we do know that he prayed with his feet. "Now this man used to go up year by year from his town to worship and to sacrifice to the Lord of hosts at Shiloh".
There is something right and worthy about this. Elkanah just did what he knew to do. He went to worship and to sacrifice, year by year.
Prayer, men’s prayer, often begins with this kind of investment in duty. The men I know whose spiritual lives I trust and whose prayers I would covet are the men who simply show up to do what is right and do it without asking a whole lot of questions. Prayer, male style, is sometimes just showing up to do what God wants done, whether you feel like it or not.
Back in the mid-60’s, when I was campus minister at Berea College in eastern Kentucky, I went through a little episode of stress. The Baptist Student Center where I served got some hate calls and suffered some minor vandalism, stemming from our involvement in some civil rights activities. Nothing much, just taking some students to hear Martin Luther King speak; but that was enough to generate a little heat in those days.
In our church there was a man named Hugh Byrd. Mr. Byrd was an FBI agent; why the FBI had any sort of operation in a little eastern Kentucky town I never knew, but there he was -- as strong and silent a man as I have ever known. And, as you might suspect, given the time and the place, about as conservative as they come. Hugh Byrd put the gold in Goldwater and took the fun out of fundamentalism, he was that conservative. And, unless I miss my guess, Mr. Byrd had little stomach for Dr. King or for the civil rights cause.
But one afternoon, not long after these incidents at our Center, I was heading for home, and, as I turned out on to the main street, I spotted Hugh Byrd, slouched down in his car, watching. Just watching. So I parked and went over to find out what this was all about. (I guess I blew his cover!). He said, "Don’ t worry about me, I’ve come to protect life and property, I’ve come to protect the Lord’s work.” It didn’t matter whether Mr. Byrd agreed with us or understood us. He just came to do what he was supposed to do, to protect the Lord’s work.
I think that’s a form of prayer. That’s a man’s kind of prayer. That’s Elkanah at prayer. "Now this man used to go up year by year from his town to worship and to sacrifice". Men pray well when they do what God calls them to do, not necessarily with fire and eloquence, but just with simple faithfulness. The sacrifice of silence.
II
But now the danger of that is that sometimes we keep on doing what we do even when it isn’t working any more. The problem is we don’t always recognize when our prayers become ineffective. Men in their insistence on doing the right thing, the dutiful thing, sometimes miss the clues. We do not let our prayers slow down and become listening.
Prayer is more than words; we’ve established that. But prayer is also more than doing what you think God wants you to do. Prayer is also listening for clues. Prayer is listening for the leadership of the spirit, expressed in the feelings of others.
Elkanah tried hard. He tried very hard to deal with his wife’s feelings, but he just didn’t get it. Let me paint the picture. Here they are, all of them, at Shiloh, offering a peace offering to their God. This offering was to be shared among all the worshippers, and so, after the animal was sacrificed, Elkanah would carve it and would start portioning it out. A share for you, Penninah, my fertile wife: and a share for you, number one son; and a share for you, second son; and a share for you, my lovely daughter; and a share for you, too, my sweet little baby daughter; and as for you, Hannah, number two wife, you don’t have any children, but I’ll tell you what, you can have two pieces of meat. You may not have any babies, but that’s all right, you can have a second lamb chop! There now, don’t you feel better?
Is there any woman in the house who doesn’t understand why the Scripture now says, "Therefore Hannah wept and would not eat"? Is there anyone so obtuse that she cannot feel with Hannah? More to the point, is there any man here who does not feel Elkanah’s frustration? Is there anyone so insulated that he has never found himself trying over and over again the same old strategies to placate the woman in his life, and it just won’t work?
Well, if you think that’s bad, just wait. It gets worse. Elkanah has a real bad case of foot-in-mouth disease; listen to him, "Hannah, why do you weep? Why do you not eat? Why is your heart sad? Am I not more to you than ten sons?" Hey baby, look at what ya got, not what ya don’t got! And of course it does not work; that does not pacify Hannah.
As a praying man, Elkanah only knew to do what he had always done: but he had not learned to listen to how the Lord reveals Himself in the feelings of others. When you hear others’ feelings, you also hear what God is saying: and then you are in prayer. It may not be what we traditionally think of as prayer, but there is nothing more prayerful than to hear God’s voice through the feelings of others. The issue is that many of us, and men in particular, just keep on doing what we keep on doing, and we do not really listen.
My father and my brother told me about the day my mother decided she had had enough of housekeeping and cooking and all that goes with it. My brother and his wife were at our family home, and my mother, getting on in years, was going about the usual routines. She had gone down into the basement to haul up a load of laundry; they heard her climbing back up the stairs, but when she came through the door, she had nothing in her hand. She had set the laundry basket down about halfway up the stairs, and she announced to anyone who would listen, “I don’t want to do this any more."
Well, my father and my brother, being mere males, tried various strategies. My father said, "Well, I can bring up the basket this time." My brother said, "I could do the laundry for you this week." How dumb we men are! My mother said to both of them, "You’re not hearing me. You’re not hearing me. I don’t want to do this at all, not now, not any more, not ever!"
Sometimes we men are just out to lunch when we are expected to hear the feelings of others. And so we are also missing the Lord’s voice. When that happens, our prayer will be ineffective.
It is important for men and for women to pray with faithful action as much as with words. But it is also equally important that our prayer involve listening to the Lord as the Spirit speaks in the feelings of others. That too is the sacrifice of silence.
III
Now as the story proceeds, we find Hannah taking serious steps to accomplish what she wants. Hannah, in her prayers, vows before God that if the Lord will give her a male child, she will dedicate that child to the Lord and to the service of the Temple. Elkanah apparently knows nothing of this promise; Hannah does this entirely on her own.
So when Hannah’s prayers are answered, and the child Samuel is born, then what Elkanah says and does is very interesting. What Elkanah does is to hold everybody accountable and keep everybody straight, including both Hannah and God.
Watch: ”The man Elkanah and all his household went up to offer to the Lord the yearly sacrifice, and to pay his vow." There he goes again, right on schedule: if it’s temple time, it’s temple time. Here we go again. "But Hannah did not go up, for she said to her husband, ’As soon as the child is weaned, I will bring him, that he may appear in the presence of the Lord, and remain there forever.’ Her husband Elkanah said to her, ‘Do what seems best to you, wait until you have weaned him; only – may the Lord establish his word.’"
I hear Elkanah saying, "All right, Hannah, you made this bargain with the Lord. And so you have to keep it; of course you do. I may not like it, but I do understand it. You must be accountable for the promises you make.
But Hannah, I also want the Lord to be accountable. I want God to be accountable to keep His side of the deal. ’Only may the Lord establish His word.’ Hannah, I’m going to Shiloh, as I always do, there to pray and worship and offer sacrifice. But Hannah, when I go there to pray, if you have promised this son of ours to God, then I want to stand on my two feet before the Lord and I want to call Him to account. I want to be sure He will keep His side of the bargain."
Isn’t that astounding? But, you see, men, at their best, offer their prayers with self-esteem. Healthy self-esteem. Not as milquetoasts and doormats, but as men. We have too much of this doormat theology going around. Too much false humility. You know what I mean?! "Oh, I’m nothing, Lord, I’m less than nothing. I’m unworthy to come before you." Doormat theology: it even got into some of our hymns, and I’ve noticed that newer hymnals change the words for the better. We don’t sing, anymore, "Alas, and did my savior bleed and did my sovereign die, did He devote that sacred head for such a worm as I’. No, we now sing, "for sinners such as I” – and while it is not exactly a compliment to be called a sinner, it’s a whole lot better than to be called a worm. We’re not worms; we’re not unworthy. We’re not nothings; we are children of the King, we are the crown of Creation, and our God invites to come and stand up and speak our piece.
So it is not arrogance to come to God with self-esteem and to ask God to be faithful to His word. Men, but women too, with dignity and honest pride, can offer the sacrifice of silence and keep everybody accountable, even God Himself.
Conclusion
You know, I’ve found an interesting thing in my own prayer life lately. It disturbed me at first, but now I think maybe I’m on the right track after all. I will sit down in a corner of my study to think about and pray for various ones of you, and it seems that I can barely get two or three sentences out before I am thinking of things that need to be done for you and with you. In my mind, as I try to pray, my intercession for you gets all blurred together with my agenda with you, the things I could be doing, want to be doing for you.
For a while it bothered me a bit that I could not concentrate simply on saying what I wanted to say, forming all those eloquent and masterful sentences with which to impress the Almighty. But maybe something else is going on. Maybe it just means that I’d better go ahead and pray like a man: being faithful in my work; listening to your hearts; and standing before God to ask Him to be there for you, accountable to you.
That is the sacrifice of silence; that is how men can pray, even beyond words.
