To Have a Hearing and Listening Heart
Indianapolis First Friends Quaker Meeting
Pastor Bob henry
November 1, 2026
Good morning, Friends, and welcome to Light Reflections. The Scripture I have chosen to support my message for this morning is from I Kings 3:5-15 from the New Revised Standard Version.
At Gibeon the Lord appeared to Solomon in a dream by night, and God said, “Ask what I should give you.” 6 And Solomon said, “You have shown great and steadfast love to your servant my father David because he walked before you in faithfulness, in righteousness, and in uprightness of heart toward you, and you have kept for him this great and steadfast love and have given him a son to sit on his throne today.
And now, O Lord my God, you have made your servant king in place of my father David, although I am only a little child; I do not know how to go out or come in. And your servant is in the midst of the people whom you have chosen, a great people so numerous they cannot be numbered or counted. Give your servant, therefore, an understanding mind to govern your people, able to discern between good and evil, for who can govern this great people of yours?”
It pleased the Lord that Solomon had asked this. God said to him, “Because you have asked this and have not asked for yourself long life or riches or for the life of your enemies but have asked for yourself understanding to discern what is right, I now do according to your word. Indeed, I give you a wise and discerning mind; no one like you has been before you, and no one like you shall arise after you. I give you also what you have not asked, both riches and honor all your life; no other king shall compare with you. If you will walk in my ways, keeping my statutes and my commandments, as your father David walked, then I will lengthen your life.”
Then Solomon awoke; it had been a dream. He came to Jerusalem, where he stood before the ark of the covenant of the Lord. He offered up burnt offerings and offerings of well-being and provided a feast for all his servants.
This morning, my heart is heavy and a bit anxious thinking about what all this coming week may entail. I am sure this is the case for many of you, as well. That is why this morning, I am going to keep this brief so we can spend more time in silent and waiting worship.
A few weeks ago, I began reflecting on the priorities of Quakers in relation to our civic duty of voting in this country. Some of you may have read in our e-newsletter, Friend to Friend, last week some of my initial thoughts.
For this morning to further this exploration, I was drawn to the Wisdom of Solomon in 1 Kings 3, our scripture for this morning and ironically the scripture for this Sunday from the Narrative Lectionary.
When God appears to Solomon in a dream and offers him anything he wishes, Solomon looks out at the vast web of people whose lives are completely intertwined with his own. Feeling the weight of that connection, he asks for just one thing: an understanding heart.
In the original Hebrew, the phrase used is leb shomea, which literally means a hearing heart or a listening heart.
Solomon didn't ask for a detached, intellectual blueprint for governance. He recognized that he couldn't see or hold the whole picture on his own. He was just a child, as he put it, needing to learn how to relate to a vast and diverse community.
For us as Friends, this is the very core of our faith: we sit together in this place, equal before the Divine, believing that the Light speaks through our relationships with one another.
When we look at social justice through this lens, it ceases to be an abstract political theory or a checklist of good deeds. Instead, it becomes deeply relational.
Injustice, at its root, is a severe breakdown of relationship. It happens when we stop listening to each other's pain.
I am reminded of a story from the early days of the American civil rights movement, when white theological students went south to support Black activists. One young student arrived armed with books, theories, and policy arguments, eager to debate and fix the system.
An elder organizer pulled him aside and said,
"Son, you don’t need more arguments. You need to sit on the porch. Go sit on the porch with Mrs. Hamer. Drink her sweet tea. Listen to her tell you what it feels like to lose a livelihood just for trying to vote. Until her story is written on your heart, your theories won't save anyone."
That is what it means to have a hearing heart. It means moving beyond a charitable distance and stepping into true, vulnerable proximity with people.
We see the alternative to this all around us.
Or think of a city council meeting where a new housing development is being debated.
On one side are the statistics, the developer maps, and the economic projections—what we might call the head knowledge.
On the other side are the low-income tenants who face displacement.
When the decision-makers refuse to look those tenants in the eye, when they view them as a line item rather than neighbors, relationship is broken.
A listening heart forces us to close that gap. It insists that we cannot truly advocate for justice from a comfortable distance; we must allow our own comfort to be disrupted by the lived realities of others. And let’s be honest, that often is not easy to do.
When we cultivate a leb shomea, we begin to realize that my well-being is entirely bound up in your well-being.
This is what Archbishop Desmond Tutu would often refer to as Ubuntu – the African idea that a person is a person through other people; your well-being, identity, and humanity cannot exist in isolation from everyone else.
Or as pathfinder, community curator, and futurist, Mia Birdsong said,
“"It is not 'I think therefore I am.' It says rather: I am human because I belong, I participate, and I share."
As I have said on many occasions, we cannot achieve peace or equity in isolation.
It is found in the quiet, messy, beautiful work of holding each other's stories, sharing our burdens, and letting our hearts be changed by what we hear.
In our current season, this relational listening also calls us to consider how we engage with our wider society—particularly in our civic duties. When we vote, how do we do so in the manner of Friends and with a hearing and listening heart?
Voting in the manner of Friends means bringing the mindful silence of the meetinghouse (which I have been talking about for several weeks) into the voting booth.
It means resisting the noise of partisan anger, fear, and division, and instead casting our ballots as an extension of our testimonies of equality, peace, and community.
We do not vote merely out of personal self-interest, wealth, or comfort. Like Solomon looking over his kingdom, we vote with a hearing and listening heart that holds the vulnerability of our neighbors.
· We vote for the child whose school is underfunded,
· for the immigrant seeking safety,
· for the elder choosing between medicine and food,
· and for the creation that groans under our care.
Our vote becomes a corporate prayer, a tangible way to answer that of God in every person by shaping systems that honor their inherent dignity.
This morning and this week, my prayer is that you and I will look upon the world not with the eyes of fear or self-interest, but with the expansive vision of love.
May we carry the quiet weight of Quaker silence into the public square.
Let your ballot be your prayer.
Your relationships be your guide.
And your actions be your testimony.
Let us build a world where justice is not an abstract dream, but a lived reality, woven together through the courage of our connections.
Amen.
Now, as we prepare ourselves to do our civil duty (if we haven’t already done it) this week, may we ponder the following queries as we enter the silence of waiting worship this morning.
· How can we move from simply speaking about justice to deeply sitting on the porch and listening to those who embody the struggle for it?
· How can we prepare our hearts to vote in a manner that reflects the Inner Light, centering the needs of the most vulnerable in our human family?
· How is the Spirit inviting us to deepen our relationships, so that our collective actions and civic engagements flow from a place of genuine, hard-won connection?