Silence
“…the Lord is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before him.” (Habakkuk 2:20)
Each week during our worship gathering at Clover Hill, we have a moment of silence after the sermon and before the Lord’s Supper. This time is very intentional. In a world full of noise and busyness, we want to carve out a space where the people of God can sit in stillness and silence in the presence of God.
As we’ve been studying the book of Job, we’ve seen how this initial interaction between Job and his friends included a long span of silence: “…they sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great.”
To help us think about the importance of silence when we gather, I want to share this excerpt from Wendell Berry’s novel “Jayber Crow”. The book’s main character, Jayber, shares this insight:
I liked the naturally occurring silences—the one, for instance, just before the service began and the other, the briefest imaginable, just after the last amen. Occasionally a preacher would come who had a little bias toward silence, and then my attendance would become purposeful. At a certain point in the service the preacher would ask that we ‘observe a moment of silence.’ You could hear a little rustle as the people settled down into that deliberate cessation. And then the quiet that was almost the quiet of the empty church would come over us and unite us as we were not united even in singing, and the little sounds (maybe a bird’s song) from the world outside would come in to us, and we would completely hear it. But always too soon the preacher would become abashed (after all, he was being paid to talk) and start a prayer, and the beautiful moment would end. I would think again how I would like for us all just to go there from time to time and sit in silence. Maybe I am a Quaker of sorts, but I am told that the Quakers sometimes speak at their meetings. I would have preferred no talk, no noise at all.
Church, let’s treasure these times of silence, because “the Lord will fight for you, and you have only to be silent.” (Exodus 14:14)
“For God alone my soul waits in silence…” (Psalm 62:1)