In a T.V. commercial a few years back, a guy was watching a sports game in his living room. (I realize at this point I have described half of all commercials ever made.) The dilemma is this: he has to get up but does not want to leave the game. No worries, because this ingenious man has equipped his home with televisions in every nook and cranny. In the commercial they are all turned on and tuned to the same sports game as the living room T.V. So as this guy wanders from room to room, he is greeted with the sights and sounds of the game. I think the point of the commercial was that everyone needed to buy a minimum of six televisions, with at least one of them in a kitchen drawer or cabinet.    

The commercial connects because people can relate to the desire to always have the screen on. The background soundtrack to many homes is a running television that nobody is watching except the dog. And the question for us gathered today is this: What is all of this noise distracting us from? Are we afraid of the quiet? Of stillness and rest? What might we hear if we turn down the noise in our lives?

Whether we are afraid of the quiet or not, we are all of us unfamiliar with it. Peace and quiet seems a luxury, a product of a spa date or a secluded vacation, not something accessible in the daily space where we live and move and have our being.

Silence and quiet. It almost sounds quaint in our hurried lives of traffic jams and smart phones and crying kids and boisterous preachers.

I have had to struggle with the psalmist myself. It is always tempting as a preacher to keep hammering a point until you all are either convinced of my enlightened perspective or simply give up and nod along. When faced with a difficult bit of text that exposes the uncomfortable tensions of our lives, it is tempting for us preachers to just raise the level of our voices and do this motion until everyone agrees.

In seminary, one of the hardest things to teach young preachers like myself is the importance of silence in a sermon.

“For God alone my soul waits in silence.”

“Only in God is my being quiet.”

This is how the psalmist starts the poem. And if this is how the psalm ends, with this simple reality of a quiet soul that is at peace, we are all of us out of luck. If it is just about the enduring and unshakable peace of the righteous, then most of us would have to look elsewhere or have to conclude that we just don’t trust God enough to be at peace.  

But the psalmist goes on:

“How long will you assail a person, will you batter your victim, all of you, as you would a leaning wall, a tottering fence?”

Now the psalmist is on to something, now the poem is staring me straight in the heart. Because while I appreciate the idea of having a quiet soul, I am more often than not the shaky fence.

There are some of you this morning who feel assailed and assaulted on all sides. Being at rest in your innermost being is a pipe dream. 

And you would give anything for the quiet rest of God’s peace. But you can’t hear God for the life of you, only a ringing in your ears from the restless noise of life.

Now the psalmist seems to repeat verbatim the refrain from verse 1 again at verse 5: “For God alone my soul waits in silence.” Like the middle verses never happened. Like his being is still unshakably at rest.

Except this time the English gets it wrong. The Hebrew is different this time.

Whereas before it was “Only in God is my being quiet,” now it is “Only in God, be quiet, my being.”

The psalmist has moved from describing a reality to imploring the soul to be quiet. Something has happened to make the poet’s inner being unquiet, restless, noisy, chaotic. Something, someone, some disturbance has knocked the peace out of the psalmist like a punch to the gut.

You know this feeling.

The creditors keep calling, endlessly pursuing loans long outstanding.

The baby will not rest more than 20 minutes, which means you haven’t slept in months.

You can’t sit down for dinner without arguing.

Life is not lived in the first refrain: “My being is quiet.”

Most of us live in the second refrain: “Be quiet, my being.”

Because I am restless more than not.

A quiet soul is a reality that must constantly be reclaimed, a peace that takes effort and intention.

Because for many of us it will take actually turning off the TV or cell phone or shutting our own running mouths long enough to hear anything from God. 

It has been said that God is always speaking, but that we have just forgotten how to listen.    

The psalmist knows that in the midst of chaos and cacophonous noise, the quiet can be a balm.

There is a story about the great prophet Elijah fleeing for his life, scared to death that his enemies will kill him when given the chance. So he hides in a cave on the mountain of God and throws himself a pity party. He is restless, unquiet, and sick of being God’s messenger. 

But he is told to get ready because God is going to pass by him.

And then the noise begins. First a hurricane of wind blows through, tearing the mountains apart. But God is not in the wind. Then the earth starts to shake, but God is not in the earthquake. Then a great fire blaze about Elijah, but God is not in the fire.

Then there is, after the fire, a kind of quiet, a still small voice, according to the King’s English. The word here is the same word at that in our psalm. Ellen Davis translates it as “the sound of a finely-textured silence.”

Like the sound of God inhaling, a stillness that prepares for something else.

The silence here is a kind of pregnant silence.

Next time the Wilshire Winds play, watch in between the sound. Watch their breathing.

In a grainy old video of Coltrane and Davis playing a duet together, you can see that their breaths are full of meaning, pregnant with anticipation. It is the inhale right before the notes, and it is here that silence resides within their music.

There is a kind of silence that is pregnant with meaning.

I was in high school when I was first exposed to the Day of Silence. We were the only school in the city to have an active gay-straight-alliance, and every year the group would encourage people to participate in a Day of Silence. It was a way to protest the assault on the LGBT community by interrupting the polarizing speech on both sides with a reverent silence. I was never brave enough to keep my mouth shut for an entire day and at the time was the kind of Christian who felt obligated to remind people why I was not keeping silent. But whether you participated or not, the silence was palpable and pregnant with meaning.

It seems like every week there is another story about a teen taking his or her life after being assailed and assaulted on all sides. The LGBT community and their friends have used silence to name this assault on people of same-sex orientation. Their silence anticipates a day when our speech is no longer filled with hateful words that leave our ears ringing, but is instead replaced with hopeful speech that quiets the soul.

But it is an election year, so the noise of polarized rhetoric will be at full volume, and peace will be hard to find.

And maybe those students who take a vow of silence are on to something. In a world full of hateful words, a community of silence can be a balm. With the psalmist they can pray to God, “Be quiet, my being.”

There is a community of people in the French Alps who have embraced a lifetime of silence together. They are the Carthusian monks, whom I discovered in the documentary Into Great Silence.

In 1984, the director Philip Gröning wrote to the monastery requesting to film their daily life. They said that they would have to get back to him. After 16 years, they told him that they were ready. It would take Gröning another five years to complete the project.

We watched it during a class in seminary. It is 162 minutes long, which is a lot of silence, and most of us in the class were not ready for the experience. Heads were falling all over the dark room.

When it was time for the post-film discussion, more than one student had a question that went something like this: What is the point of this place? Couldn’t the monks be more productive with their time instead of praying and keeping silent?

It was such a perfect collisions of worlds. A room full of high achievers, constantly moving and producing and working, never stopping except to watch a movie that puts us to sleep. And on the screen is a cloister of monks committed to prayer and silence.

And all we could think of was what a huge waste of time and resources it all was.

We could not see beyond the silence to that which it pointed. We could not imagine a point to life beyond production, beyond achievement, beyond getting things done. We were all uncomfortable with the existence of these monks because they forced us to reckon with our own chaotic lives that we pretended were rightly ordered.

This must have been how Jesus’ followers felt seeing him fall into great silence on the cross, finally out of words and breath, finally quiet and still.

The disciples must have looked at the dead body of their teacher and thought, “What a waste.”

They could not see past the silence to that which it pointed. They could not even pray with the psalmist, “be quiet, my being.”

So they left their now-quiet friend Jesus to the grave and went back to their old lives.

But the silence of Jesus is like the inhaling of Coltrane before the crescendo. It is the sound of a finely textured silence, one that is attuned to the God who often speaks just below a whisper.

And it is within the silence that our hope is born and nurtured. Though the world is chaos and clamor, and even when we are shaking like an old fence, we can still cry with the psalmist, “Only in God, be quiet, my being.”

There is a time for words, and there is a time for silence, the teacher of Ecclesiastes tells us.

So this morning, let us together as a community pray with the psalmist. Here again these words, and in the silence of your breathing, rest:

“Only in God is my being quiet.”

“Only in God, be quiet, my being.”

Amen.