The Voice That is Silenced: Lost Gift and Lost Ministry

This has been an exciting week! Two draft chapters are now in the hands of the senior acquisitions editor of a well-known Christian publishing house and are before his editorial team for review this week. Based on feedback from my readership, I slightly revised the “Breaking Waves” chapter (see older blog posting) and also sent a draft of another meditation that was more accessible to a male readership. Here it is for you to read:

The Voice that is Silenced: Lost Gift and Lost Ministry

A (draft) meditation from my proposed

 You Turn the Tempest Into a Whisper: Meditations on Suffering from the Dead Sea Scrolls

But You, O my God, have placed Your words in my mouth,

as showers of early rain for all who thirst and as a spring of living waters.

The heavens shall not fail to open, nor shall they run dry,

but shall become a stream pouring out … 

I have become like a man who is forsaken … there is no refuge for me …

My tongue You had exalted in my mouth, but no longer.

No more can my tongue give forth its voice for instruction

To give life to the spirits of those who stumble, and to support the weary with a word.

The voice of my lips is silent. 

But as for me … my soul meditates on Your wonders.

In Your steadfast love (chesed) You have not rejected me …

You have put a supplication in the mouth of Your servant

and You have not rebuked my life, nor have You removed my shalom.

(1QHodayot 16: 17-18; 28, 36-37; 17:6-7, 10-11)

A voice is silenced in many ways and for many reasons. One accustomed to speak eloquently and passionately may no longer find the words or may be separated from the ones who loved to hear. The voice of the very young is overlooked and that of the very old no longer considered relevant, faded in the hearing of those who see only the grey hair. The widow sits alone at her breakfast coffee, facing the empty chair of the one who used to cherish her every word and parents are shut down by their teen-aged and grown children who think they know better. A pastor loses his ministry and his voice, counted disqualified by the many he used to lead.

An unnamed teacher from the second century B.C. laments in the Dead Sea Scrolls that his words have been rejected. Several centuries later, another Jewish teacher falls silent before his accusers at his trial, “as a lamb before its shearers is silent.”[1] On the cross, Jesus, too, responded with a lament, crying out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”[2]

Some time ago, the failings of a friend were exposed and held up for public viewing. The shock for our community was profound because his life and words had been as “showers of early rain” during the many years he had journeyed alongside the thirsty and broken ones. We responded in different ways, with sorrow for our friend and his family and the wounds that they now bore. With anger and our own personal feelings of betrayal and questions about the validity of everything he had lived and taught. But we also mourned this new and aching silence, the loss of the gift that had been so precious to us. Would this voice be lost to us forever and or might a God who was all-powerful to redeem this person that he had created also be all-powerful to restore the voice of a leader who had lost his way?

The Teacher of Righteousness in the Dead Sea Scrolls also had a fruitful and productive ministry. His listeners received his words, he writes, just as parched and thirsty ground received the longed-for early rains. This teacher’s love for Hebrew word play is seen in his choice of the same root word for “early rains” as the word for his own role as the “Teacher.” His joy and purpose in life was to help the stumbling and weary ones, and with the prophet Isaiah, he could claim:

The LORD God has given me

the tongue of a teacher,

that I may know how to sustain

the weary with a word.

Morning by morning he wakens—

wakens my ear to listen as those who are taught (Isaiah 50:4)

Taught by God, the teacher taught others. Those who listened used to hear, as it were, God’s voice.  However, something changed and the voice of the teacher fell silent before humanity. He cried out that God no longer exalted the words of his mouth; no longer could the stumbling and weary receive his instruction.

Although we are not told what had happened, an ancient commentary on Habakkuk provides a clue. Here, the Teacher of Righteousness falls under attack by someone called “The Man of the Lie” who rejected and maligned his interpretation of the Torah. During this ordeal, those who should have defended the Teacher also rejected him but they did so by their silence.[3]

The teacher lifts up his voice to God in lament, “I have become like a man who is forsaken.” He grieves the loss of his ministry and the silencing of his lips. However, within the lament, he makes a courageous step, crosses a line, and begins meditating on God’s wonders, his chesed or steadfast love. Then, suddenly as if startled, he bursts out that the very words of supplication and lament that he had been pouring into God’s ears were, in fact, a gift from God himself.

Do we understand the profound implications of this truth? When the teacher directed his lament to the One-Who-Hears, his voice was, indeed, no longer silent. He speaks and he is heard, his voice restored by God and his words remembered and preserved by humanity.

It is wonderfully ironic that the lament of the silenced voice was itself written down and preserved by the teacher’s Community. Then, hidden in the first century A.D. in a cave within a clay jar on the west shores of the Dead Sea until its rediscovery in 1947, this sensitive but powerful voice is heard once again over two thousand years later.

Might we also break the silence and cross the distance today, calling into community even our former leaders who have lost their voices and ministries? My pastor friend used to refresh his hearers with life and freedom-giving messages of God’s truth. When I came to understand that any truth about God and from God can never be invalidated because of a messenger’s shortcomings or failures, then that part of my life shaped by his words was restored to me. The silenced voice was free to speak again.

There is yet another way for a voice to be lost and now I most expose and confess a failing of my own, a tendency of the hidden and smoothly sinister kind. For those of us who teach, there come, at times, those shimmering moments of praise for words aptly spoken and for a healing insight that brings freedom.

Such encouraging words are welcome but I start to replay them in my imagination, remembering and rehearsing the speeches that prompted the praise. I revel in the feel and the weight of the words, treasuring and hoarding each shining one in the vault of my memory. Preoccupied with listening to myself, I stop hearing the One who desires to awaken me “morning by morning” so that he might teach me. Eventually, my voice fades away even in my own ears, rehearsed words met with the uncomprehending faces and the untouched hearts of those trying to hear.

The lethality of the hiddeness of pride is that it evades the sudden and public exposure that could clear the way for cleansing confession, repentance, and restoration.

So I find myself turning once again to God, lamenting and repenting in stuttering and halting words. And God graciously listens and responds, speaking in unexpected ways through my red-haired granddaughter and through my grey-haired mother. He speaks through a recovering drug addict and through my friend who is now experiencing his own re-turning to God. As I listen, God restores my voice but also (and this is just like God!), as he speaks through others, he is re-creating their voices as well.

I am speaking and writing again but with a jagged and unpolished rawness that leaves me feeling vulnerable and exposed. What has formerly been hidden is being held up for public view, a state far from comfortable for me! Yet, even these words – spoken and written – fall into a rhythm between longer seasons of chosen silence that are a refuge, a place of listening to others but also to God who once again awakens me in the morning with his sustaining words.

In the morning, O LORD, you hear my voice;

in the morning I lay my requests before you

and wait in expectation. (Psalm 5:3)

I invite you to respond to me at Dorothy.Peters@twu.ca.