The Quality of Your Hearing

"Let anyone with ears listen!" Or, as an older translation puts it, "Those who have ears to ear, let them hear." Matthew, Mark, and Luke don't always agree about how to tell Jesus' story. But this time they do. This time, Matthew, Mark, and Luke all put the parable that ends this way as the first of the parables of Jesus. Eugene Peterson, the translator of The Message, says about this that "If the divine word is primary, then human hearing is essential: that we hear is required; the way we hear is significant." In the parable, the soil is a metaphor for ears. And so we have an ingenious tool for a self-administered hearing test. What is the quality of my hearing? Are my ears thick with calluses, impenetrable like the packed down dirt road I used to live on down in Ida? Are my ears only superficially attentive like rocky ground in which everything germinates but nothing takes root? Are my ears like an indiscriminate weed patch -- where the noisy and repetitive take up all the space? Where there is no regard for truth, or quality, beauty, or fruitfulness? Or are my ears good soil which readily receive God's word, well-tilled to welcome deep roots, to discriminately choose God's word and reject the lies of the world? Do my ears accept high responsibility for protecting and practicing the gift of hearing in silence, in reverence, and in attentiveness, so that God's word will be heard, understood, and believed?ⁱ

Four students meeting over a coke shared their opinions of the work of a guidance counselor they each had. Jan said that she didn't get much out of the counselor. She didn't care to share her problems with him. Mike was more satisfied. He told his counselor that, because of their talk, he had resolved to study harder. He admitted that he had been half-hearted in his approach to it. Larry found the experience really helpful. He talked to his counselor about several problems, especially his inability to read with any speed or comprehension. He arranged for special help. Pat found the experience tremendous. She mustered up courage to tell her counselor about a family situation that had been bugging her for over a year now. Her mother was an alcoholic, and the physical and emotional disturbance around the house made it impossible for her to do any homework. It was the first time she discussed it with anyone. She promised to keep in touch with him about it.

Two months later, the four friends were discussing this again. Jan told the other three that she had been given absolutely no help. She didn't find the counselor very relevant in the first place. And in the second place, who did he think he was, nosing in everyone's business. Mike said that he had kept his resolution about study for three weeks. He finally broke it, however, when some of his friends began to criticize him for wasting his life at his desk. The counselor is all right but he doesn't understand kids. Larry admitted that he had become so involved in sports and social activities that after a month he had completely given up on the reading improvement course. "You can't be good at everything," he said. "I like the counselor personally, but this school's teaching methods are way out of date." Pat was last to speak. She told about how the counselor went out of his way to give her and her family some very sound advice. Professional help was obtained for her mother. She and her father were advised how to help. Peace and joy were returning to her home, thanks to the help of the counselor.ⁱⁱ

It's striking, isn't it? The different ways these teenagers respond to the counselor are not unlike the differences between how the seeds respond in today's parable. What accounts for the differences? What do you learn about the quality of your own hearing in these stories? What kind of soil are your ears? And why?

The reality is that most of us are not very good listeners. Most of us are more concerned with getting our point across than we are concerned with understanding the point someone else is making. And when we do that, we often ignore the other person completely, or we pretend we're listening. Sometimes we selectively hear only certain parts of the conversation, or we attentively focus on only the words being said but miss the meaning entirely. Why is this? Most of us listen with the intent to reply and not to understand. Rather than listening to the other person, in actuality we listen to ourselves as we prepare in our minds what we are going to say.ⁱⁱⁱ The seeds that are sown cannot take root.

The good soil that received the seed, the soil in which the seed could take root, was unique. It was different. It was well tilled. It was penetrable. It was breakable. Pat could receive the counselor's help for the same reason. She was breakable. She was in enough pain to be open to it. Most of us, when we listen or pretend to listen, are pretty hard hearted. We tend to respond in one of four ways. We evaluate -- we either agree or disagree. We probe. We ask questions from our own frames of reference. We advise -- we give counsel and solutions to problems based on our own experiences. Or we interpret. We try to figure people out. We try to explain their motives and behavior, based on our own motives and behavior.^iv What is the quality of your hearing?

There is yet another way to listen and really hear. Stephen Covey talks about empathic listening in his "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People." Empathic listening is not about just listening with your ears. It's about listening with your eyes and heart, too. Listening for feeling and meaning. How we listen to others probably gives us a clue as to how we listen to God and God's word as well. Truly listening requires of us a little death. Truly listening requires us to die to our own agendas, our own frames of reference, to die to ourselves, in order to truly receive what the other is offering -- whether that other is a person or God.

What accounts for the differences in how we hear? People whose soil has been tilled -- people who have been broken, tend to go in one of two directions -- they get better or they get bitter. They become good soil, open to God and to others, or they protect that wound in their center by becoming hard hearted, like a beaten down path, so nothing or nobody can get in, can take root and grow. "Tears," someone said, "are like rain. They loosen up the soil so we can grow in new directions."

Interestingly, we embrace a faith that holds brokenness at its heart. Our very God became broken like the soil and died so WE could grow in new directions. His blood watered that beaten down path like tears water our hearts. When we come to our Lord's Table, we re-live that same brokenness so that collectively we as His body, the church, the people of God, can grow in new directions too. We do this in a four-fold act that is at the heart of the church's liturgy: we receive the bread, we bless it, we break it, and we share it. Week in and week out when the church celebrates the Holy Supper we're reminded of the brokenness that is at the heart of this faith we share: brokenness that is yours and mine and God's. Brokenness that allows for God and God's word to take root.

It is God's vocation, after all, to use broken things: It takes broken clouds to give rain, broken soil to give grain, broken bread to give strength. It takes a broken God to give resurrection. Let anyone with ears listen! Those who have ears to hear, let them hear.

Pastor Dana Runestad
Holy Cross Evangelical Lutheran Church
Livonia Michigan
Eighth Sunday after Pentecost [PR. 10] 10 July, 2005

ⁱEugene Peterson, Living the Message, "Ears to Hear," Meditation for March 4, San Francisco, Harper Collins, 1996, pp. 70-71.
ⁱⁱMark Link, S.J., He is the Still Point of the Turning World, Chicago, Arugus Communications, 1971, pp. 58-59.
ⁱⁱⁱStephen R. Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People Personal Workbook, New York, NY, Fireside of Simon and Schuster, Inc., 2003, p. 102.
^ivIbid.

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