Hearing God’s Call
Jeremiah 1:1-10
September 13, 2020
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley
Image from Culture and Quarantine; painted by Nicole MacDonald, Hamtramck, Michigan
A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here https://youtu.be/LV-HTpvuMkU
Jeremiah is one of the longest books of the Bible second only to the Psalms. We also we seem to have more biographical information about the person of Jeremiah than any other prophet. Jeremiah was active during a great crisis in Israel’s history and a time of major geopolitical upheaval in the ancient Near East. I chose to spend time with Jeremiah this fall because of the kinds of upheaval we are experiencing nationally and internationally. I thought it might be fruitful to see how God’s ancient covenant people responded in their time, to apply their learnings to our context. And then I read Walter Brueggemann.
Many of you are already familiar with Walter Brueggemann. Brueggemann who is 87, is widely considered one of the most influential Old Testament scholars of the last several decades.
I was struck by what he said in the introduction to one of his commentaries on Jeremiah – yes, he has written more than one. He wrote this: “The text has the powerful capacity to cause us to rediscern our own situation, to experience our situation in quite new ways, and to participate in our own historical situation with new liberty and fresh passion . . . with faithfulness.”[1]
He goes on “This text does not require ‘interpretation’ or ‘application’ so that it can be brought near our experience and circumstance. Rather, the text is so powerful and compelling, so passionate and uncompromising in its anguish and hope, that it requires we submit our experience to it and thereby re-center our experience on new terms. The text does not need to be applied to our situation. Rather our situation needs to be submitted to the text for a fresh discernment. . . In every generation this text subverts all our old readings of reality and forces us to a new dangerous, obedient reading.”[2]
Dr. Brueggemann is describing the power of Scripture, the power which can prevail even though so much separates us from the historical situation of the Biblical people. Jeremiah’s starting points and ours are very different, in the ways that we understand the world and especially in how we envision God. We may be tempted to soften his anger, to elevate the words of hope over those of judgment, to water down his message. I am saying here, at the beginning of this series, that I will try to avoid that. I will strive, instead to do as Brueggemann suggests, to allow the anguish and the hope of the text to speak for itself. I will appreciate hearing from you from week to week about how that is going.
Context is always important. It is crucial for our understanding of Jeremiah. The first chapter of Jeremiah fixes the beginning of his ministry in the reign of King Josiah. Josiah was king of Judah at the point where Assyria’s power was in decline. He was king when a lost scroll was found in the Temple. He used that scroll, which was probably something like the book of Deuteronomy, to launch political and religious reform. Because Assyria’s power was waning, Josiah was able to exert his influence not only over Judah, but also over the much of the former northern kingdom of Israel which had been taken over by Assyria 100 years earlier. He tore down shrines to Yahweh and to other gods which were scattered across the territory, and centralized worship in Jerusalem. It was one of the most extensive and far-reaching reforms in Israel’s history, although it didn’t last long. Many may have experienced this as a re-assertion of Israel’s former glory.
This is the context in which Jeremiah begins his lifetime of prophecy. Jeremiah’s call follows the pattern of many others. God states a divine purpose. Jeremiah objects that he is too young, too inexperienced to speak on behalf of God. This is what those called by God often do. Moses said that he was unskilled, Isaiah that he was unworthy, Ezekiel that he wouldn’t know what to say. The next step in the pattern is usually that God reaffirms the call and often, there is some mechanism of putting the word of God into the future prophet. Isaiah’s lips are touched with a coal from the heavenly altar, Ezekiel is given a scroll to eat, young Samuel receives advice from Eli the priest. Jeremiah reports that God’s hand touches his mouth to put words in it. A certain degree of humility, of surprise that God would chose you, seems necessary for the prophetic task.
Jeremiah is reluctant and humble, but also courageous. He must accept and own his calling if he is to be of service. Our first hymn suggested some of the varied ways we might hear God’s call, in places of need and moments of joy. We hear God in the words of other people. And, scary thought, sometimes other people hear or fail to hear God in the things we say to them. We might set expectations or limitations without even realizing it. My theology professor Molly Marshall used to tell about Jordan Baptist Church which she served when she was a seminary student. She was the first woman pastor that church ever had. But she was the only pastor the children had ever known. One day, in the preschool room, they were playing church. One of the boys wanted to be the preacher, but the girls knew better. With the confidence of the truth of their own experience they said “You can’t be the preacher. Only girls can be the preacher.”
Context matters. The pages of the Bible and of history are littered with people who doubted their ability or value or worth. And often, those doubts were absorbed from other people.
What is your calling, what is my calling, in our current context? I suggest we have a duty of care, a responsibility to stay well and keep others from catching the virus as much as it depends on us. And a responsibility to each other, to keep one another’s courage up, to strengthen our mutual resilience.
Beyond that, we can seek to open ourselves to the call of God however it might come, not allowing ourselves to be limited by previous expectations. Jeremiah thought he was too young. Some of us may have thought we were too young or too old or too busy or not spiritual enough. A lot of things have changed in the last 6 months. Some of us didn’t serve on church committees because we don’t drive any more or don’t drive at night. Some of us didn’t teach children’s Sunday School because we couldn’t climb the stairs to the classrooms. Some of us couldn’t find the time for anything beyond Sunday morning because we were running here and there every night of the week. Well, a lot of those things aren’t true any more, which means that we might need to tune in to a new reality and carefully consider the opportunities God is putting in front of us.
I am grateful for the leadership of our youth and the presence of children in our worship today. I cannot help but wonder what the effects of this time will be on our young people. They are coming of age through pandemic and the rising movement for black lives and important emerging forms of church. For some, anxiety and animosity seem as suffocating as the smoke over Seattle and Los Angeles. I think about how Jeremiah continued to confront and comfort, to challenge and console his people through one of the most terrifying periods in their history. I pray that God will call out the Jeremiah’s in our time and that you and I will be receptive to the claim that God makes on us.
Some of us may experience a call like Jeremiah’s. It was a costly call. His call was a burden that he could not set down and yet he was obedient to it.[3] But many of us will not experience a call like that.
Our task will not be to be like Jeremiah, but to listen to him. The words God placed in his mouth were about plucking up and pulling down, destroying and overthrowing, and building and planting. These terms are repeated throughout his ministry. Someone has characterized his message as 2/3 doom and 1/3 hope. There were vested interests who resisted the plucking and destroying and others who resisted the building and planting. No wonder Jeremiah is nicknamed the weeping prophet.
I wonder how deeply we can listen to Jeremiah in his time. I wonder whose voices we are listening to right now. Are they politicians? Journalists? There are so many possibilities. Artists and musicians are working on much smaller stages. Musicians are offering concerts online from their homes. This is an art installation in a building under construction near Detroit. There are still some beautiful and healing pieces on social media, but also so much acrimony.
Are we listening to the voices of our elders? To preachers who feel wholly inadequate in empty sanctuaries and Zoom living rooms? Are we listening to angry but peaceful protestors or will we ignore that even as it escalates to riot, the language of the unheard? Are we listening to young people? Two well-known examples are Malala Yousafzai who continues to advocate for the rights of girls and women and for education as one path to peace. And Greta Thunberg who raises her voice to plead with the grown-ups of the world to care for the planet while there is still time. As our first hymn said, “God is calling, can we hear?”
Some of these voices have been speaking for a long time. Jeremiah delivered his message for forty years before its truth was vindicated. I wonder if we might be getting close to a time when we can hear the truth and the urgency of our own need for repentance, for profound change and return to covenantal faithfulness.
Let me conclude as I began, with the words of Walter Brueggemann. He warns us not to misread our context, but to believe in God’s faithful power and love. “If we fail to hear,” he writes, “Like the ancient exiles, we may imagine that our situation is occupied only by despair and alienation, that God’s arm is shortened and there is none to comfort. We shall miss the summons home, the faint beginnings of new laughter in Jerusalem and shall still be submitting to the empire when we could be on our way rejoicing.” [4]
Beloved ones, may we hear God’s call. And in this urgent season, may we respond with humility and courage and obedience. May we be on our way home rejoicing. Amen.
[1] Walter Brueggemann, A Commentary on Jeremiah: Exile and Homecoming, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmanns, 1998). p. 18
[2] Brueggemann, p. 18.
[3] Patrick Miller, New Interpreter’s Bible Volume VI, (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2001) p. 563.
[4] Brueggemann, p. 18-19