Having to Hear Your Own Voice

Having to Hear Your Own Voice--September 20, 2017

"James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came forward to him and said to him, 'Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.' And he said to them, 'What is it you want me to do for you?' And they said to him, 'Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.' But Jesus said to them, 'You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?' They replied, 'We are able.' Then Jesus said to them, 'The cup that I drink you will drink, and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized, but to sit at my right hand or at my left is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared.' When the ten heard this, they began to be angry with James and John. So Jesus called them and said to them, 'You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you but be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many'." [Mark 10:35-45]

We all imagine that we have the most pleasant and expressive speaking voices... until you have to record the outgoing message on your voicemail or answering machine, and hear the tinny sound of your own voice as it is actually heard to the outside world.

We all like to pretend we are rock stars in the shower... until, by chance, someone else needs to wash their hands in the sink while you are attempting to belt out, "Come On, Eileen" into the showerhead, and discover that the stage of our imagination is a more forgiving place than the acoustics of the bathtub makes you think.

We all think that we are supremely eloquent and thoughtful speakers in public, until we are compelled to listen--or watch--a recording of our own public speaking, and then discover that we pepper our oh-so-profound ramblings with "uh" and "um" and "ahem" and made-up words while we reach for the correct one.

All of that is to say, it is a humbling thing to be made to stop and actually listen to our own voices--not just the quality or timbre of the way we speak, but even the questionable content of what we say.  It is a difficult thing to find the courage to hear your own words in your own voice. 

Sometimes it is particularly hard because we don't realize just how insulated we become from the rest of reality in our own heads.  Just like you don't realize how nasal your voice sounds to other people's ears (because you only hear your own voice through your own head), sometimes I don't realize how I get used to, accustomed to, and comfortable with, my own self-centeredness and fail to see it or hear it anymore... until someone else helps me to recognize what had been audible and visible to everybody else in the world outside the echo chamber between my own ears.

 I read a news story this week about a volunteer firefighter in another state who had publicly posted online that he would rather save a dog that a person of color from a fire, because, in his words, "one dog was more important than a million n-----s" (and there, yes, he used a word that begins with N).  The guy didn't get why that might pose a problem to anybody, and his wife's comment was simply that "everyone is entitled to their own opinions."  You wonder (at least I hope you do) how someone gets such a bent perspective that not only sees other people so hatefully, but how someone can say it in a public posting on the internet without shame.  It was really like he didn't realize how his own voice sounded--like he didn't get the sound of the hatred in his own words and thoughts.  And that's just the thing--until we are compelled to come face to face with our own private hates, our own privately thought greed, our own secret envy, our own quietly believed delusions, we simply don't hear how rotten things just might be inside us. 

Everybody thinks they're a rock star singing in the shower--and nobody can believe it when they hear how off-pitch and squeaky they sound in real life.  Everybody thinks they have got it all figured out and that all of "my" beliefs, positions, and feelings are all perfectly just and perfectly justified--until someone helps me hear how all of that stuff pours out of me when it's outside of the echo chamber between my ears.

This is perhaps the great challenge of our moment in history right now.  We seem to have less and less ability to hear what comes out of our own mouths--and therefore out of our own hearts--at least, to hear it as it comes out to the world around us.  I may not realize how really really cruel, or truly complacent, or privileged and insulated I may sound to someone else...because as long as I keep it inside my heart and just let it animate my actions without saying it out loud, I won't realize how deep the roots of my own self-absorption really is.  We all have learned to ridicule Marie Antoinette for how tone-deaf and insulated her famous line, "Let them eat cake" was in the ears of the French peasants, but aren't very good at hearing the indifference, or the socially-acceptable-hates, or the collectively ignored prejudices, that are stewing in our hearts, and that get blurted out from our own mouths without our realizing it.

And when we do say something that reveals how bent our hearts have become in some way, and someone else says to us, "Do you get how that sounded?" we have a doubly pernicious way of getting defensive and accusing other people of being overly sensitive rather than ever daring to listen to ourselves--to the stuff bubbling up out of our souls--and having to face what is in there.  "The problem must be them..." we think, to let ourselves off the hook.  "Everyone's entitled to their own opinion..." we say, trying to turn un-Christ-like attitudes into a matter of "free speech" (as though Christ is fooled).  "Well, there's a reason that I think the way I do..." we say, reaching for any way to rationalize what we know we cannot defend.  We dig our heels in and clench our fists when someone brings us face to face with what our words and hearts actually sound like outside the echo chamber.  And it's all utterly absurd, like hearing a recording of my own off-key singing and blaming the audio recorder for making me sound bad or taking me out of context.  It would all be laughable if it weren't so terribly sad, and the consequences were not so terribly high.

I think Jesus had to have both great courage and great patience with his followers--his friends and disciples--when moments came along for him to have to confront them with the out-of-touch self-centeredness that came spilling out of their mouths from their hearts from time to time.  This scene from Mark's Gospel is like that--James and John have their own "let them eat cake" moment, and they are totally unaware of how arrogant and self-absorbed they sound.  They cannot see their own privilege, or how insulated they have become from everybody else--even from the other ten disciples of Jesus' inner circle.  James and John have become their own echo chamber, and in that space, it seems perfectly reasonable for them to ask that they get the two top places of honor with Jesus, and they see nothing wrong, nothing unjust, nothing out of place, with their sense of entitlement that they should get it rather than Peter or Andrew or Bartholomew or Mary or Martha or your own 3rd grade Sunday School teacher.  They have no shame about asking Jesus, and that's what so preposterous at first about this scene.  Jesus has to say their own words back to them for them to realize how utterly self-centered their thinking is.  Why would they assume that they are the most important people, or that there are even two spots and Jesus' right and left hand that are up for grabs?  Why would they think that their wants come first, or that they are more important than the others who have given up just as much to follow Jesus, and taken just as big risks?  How can they not see how privileged they are just to get to be a part of Jesus' movement in the first place?  See--grace has a way of spoiling into entitlement if you do not recognize that the things we are given by grace are not our "earnings" but signs of Mercy's extravagant generosity.  James and John don't realize how they sound... because in their minds there is nothing out of order about their assumption that they should be first.  Funny how "Me and My Group First" never sounds odd to us while we are saying it in our own heads... until someone else echoes our words back to us and says, "Wait--what?"

And that's what Jesus does.  He shakes James and John--and for that matter the rest of the disciples who might well have just been thinking the same thoughts but keeping them quiet in their own heads--out of their pampered insulation by holding their words back up to them.  "Really?  You two want to be at my right and my left hand?  Do you know what you are asking?"  They swear they understand what they are asking for, but clearly they still don't get it.  After all, as Mark the Gospel writer points out at the story of the crucifixion, the ones who end up "at Jesus' right hand and at his left" are two thieves who get nailed to crosses with Jesus.  James and John are so deluded into their own visions of glory and greatness and their own sense of self-importance that they cannot possible imagine that the way of Jesus is the way of a cross, not the way of power, prestige, and pomp.

So Jesus not only helps them to hear how magnificently dense they have been, by compelling them to hear the tone-deafness of their own words, but then he helps them--and us--to hear that there is another way... another order of things... another kind of greatness than the self-important nonsense James and John have been fed.  "You know that among the Gentiles, their great ones are tyrants over them... but it is not so among you," he says.  It's indicative--it IS NOT SO.  Not suggestive, imperative, or subjunctive--it's not "It shouldn't be this way for you," or "I wish it weren't that way for you" or "Don't let it be that way for you..." but rather, "IT IS NOT SO." 

The followers of Jesus are called always--always--to be about the good of the other, not simply as much as our own good, but even more than we seek our own.  This is not a choice.  This is not an option. This is not extra credit for the overachievers or the ones trying to polish their halos.  This is not subject to other opinions--in fact, when it comes to the way of Jesus, loving all and serving all is not up for discussion or debate.  Nobody following Jesus gets to say, "I don't think some people... those people... any people are worthy of my care, or time, or serving, and hey, we're all entitled to our own opinions here."  Nope.  Not if we are followers of Jesus. 

If we are unable to see why James and John's approach--the way of the pompously self-important and the cluelessly insulated blowhards of all time--is out of step with the way of Jesus, then maybe we first need Jesus to help us hear how we sound outside of our own echo chambers.  We need voices like Christ's to compel us to hear how our own singing in the shower sounds, so to speak.  We need the gracious voice of Jesus--who, we should be clear, does not kick out James or John, but rather corrects them while holding them in his inner circle out of nothing but sheer mercy--to help us to hear our own voices, and to recognize what is rumbling around in our own hearts that we have gotten used to there.

We need voices like this one: there is a poem of the great Wendell Berry's that does this difficult work of compelling us to hear our own voices and the insulated self-absorption in our own hearts.  I share it with you now as I hear him asking these questions of me as well, almost as if the poet were forcing me to hear my own tinny voice and recognize the hardness of my own heart, too.  He entitles this poem, "Questionnaire"...

How much poison are you willing
to eat for the success of the free
market and global trade? Please
name your preferred poisons.

For the sake of goodness, how much
evil are you willing to do?
Fill in the following blanks
with the names of your favorite
evils and acts of hatred.

What sacrifices are you prepared
to make for culture and civilization?
Please list the monuments, shrines,
and works of art you would
most willingly destroy

In the name of patriotism and
the flag, how much of our beloved
land are you willing to desecrate?
List in the following spaces
the mountains, rivers, towns, farms
you could most readily do without.

State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes,
the energy sources, the kinds of security;
for which you would kill a child.
Name, please, the children whom
you would be willing to kill.

We never want to hear such questions put to us, because we are afraid of hearing the sound of our voices... and the true sounds of our own hearts.

But Lord knows we need to hear... we need to be made to listen to the sounds of our own voices.  And we need to hear the enduring, unrelenting call of Jesus, "It is not so among you...here is another way... we live by serving, and our greatness is in giving ourselves away."

Lord Jesus, draw us out of our own echo chambers, and make us to hear ourselves... so that we can love the way you do.