A silent God

The Lord our God is in our midst, a hero who gives victory; he will rejoice over you with gladness, he will be silent in his love he will exult over you with loud singing!

I interpreted the dream as God’s joke and decided that a God with humour was worth serving. Since then I have been wondering about the meaning of this verse. God rejoices over us and God is silent, what does it mean? 

Absence – Silence can be the emptiness of the dark night. Silence can be lonely. Silence reminds me of grieving. Silent are those who died. Crying happens in silence, the heaviest tears are shed when nobody looks. If God is silent we do not experience her. Is she there? Silence seems exactly the opposite of being in our midst! How can I believe in a God who is silent, silent in the face of poverty and ecological disaster, silent in Iraq, silent in Somalia. 

Space – Silent can be the moment when somebody really listens. Silence is when all the noise (the noise of our grief, of our radio and our busy-ness) goes down and we can hear the whisper of Gods Spirit in the wind in the trees. Silence is peace, is rest in our hurried lives. Silent can be the moment when we truly meet somebody who is totally different. 

God is silent in his love and he exults over us with loud singing. It is a Hebrew poem in which the silence rhymes with the loud singing and the love with the exultation. God’s silence is like his singing and shouting or is contrasted with it. Maybe we should balance God’s silence and God’s loud singing, keep together her presence and absence, the love and the exultation. And maybe we should join in. 

Let us be silent with God, silent in love, and silent in listening, silent because we do not need to prove anything, silent because we do not have to defend a just cause. But let us also sing with God, to rejoice with gladness and exult over each other: the fellowship of humankind.

(Deze preek hield ik in de ‘United Reformed Church’ in Lancaster in 2004.)