I Am With You

C – 4^th Sunday in Ordinary Time: 28 January 2007

JEREMIAH 1: 4 – 10; Psalm 71: 1-6

1 Corinthians 13: 1 – 13; Luke 4: 21 – 30

I Am With You

A Sermon by John C. Bush, Interim Pastor

First Presbyterian Church

Birmingham, Alabama

How do you react when you are facing a task greater than your resources? When you simply are not equipped to take on the job, bear the burden, undergo the stress of the situation you are facing – but there is no way to avoid what must be done? Life presents us all with such circumstances sooner or later.

It’s like the two guys exploring the Australian outback, one in a Ford pickup, the other in a Dodge Ram. Late one afternoon during the rainy season they both arrived at opposite sides of a flood swollen stream which neither of them could cross. The one yelled across to the other: What’s the matter, can’t you fjord it? To which the other responded, “No, and you can’t dodge it either!

Not all the challenges we face are physical impossibilities. Some are taxing in other ways – perhaps requiring a change in the way we had planned to live our lives, or requiring more personal sacrifice, more emotional energy, more strength of purpose or of psyche than we think it possible to muster.

That’s how it was for Jeremiah the Prophet. From this distance, and with the psychological mindset we bring to the people of the Bible, we have great difficulty appreciating the actual emotions of the people we meet in stories like this one. After all, they are not human beings to us – they are “Bible characters.” Or more precisely, in our way of thinking about them they are caricatures whose form and substance – let alone their emotions – are beyond our comprehension. So, I suspect that stress is not a characteristic you ever associated with the Prophet Jeremiah – assuming, that is, that he ever entered you mind at all.

The passage we read today is said to be an account of Jeremiah’s call to ministry. I guess that’s true. It depends, I think, on what you mean by call and what you mean by ministry. If that communicates to you that he was hereby designated by God to do something like what I do – well, no; that isn’t it. Come to think of it, though, most of you probably have no idea what that means because you are not at all sure what I do – other than stand here and babble about something or other for fifteen minutes or so on Sunday.

It is worth asking, as we approach a text like this one, whose story is this? And there is a sense in which we can find something of our own story in stories like this one from the Bible. As a matter of fact, there is at least one sense in which this man Jeremiah was more like you than he was like me. In terms of the religious establishment he was a lay person. We’ll come back to that idea in a minute and think about what it means to be a layperson.

According to the first verse in this book, Jeremiah was a PK. Now, if you don’t know about PKs let me warn you about them. I lived in the house with two of them for nearly twenty years, and believe me society can do some strange thinks to preacher’s kids. Like the day Janet came home in tears because her first grade teacher had reprimanded here about the clothes she had worn to school that day – an outfit her mother had made for her. And you father is a minister! the teacher had said. [Believe me, you are not allowed to say in church what I wanted to say to that teacher!] That kind of thing happened often enough that, when school started one year, she asked her mother if there was some way to keep the people at school from knowing what my profession was.

Jeremiah was the son of priest, born in the town of Anathoth some three miles northeast of Jerusalem. In Jeremiah’s time many priests made their home there and commuted to the city to work at the Temple. We don’t know the details, but it was as a young adult that Jeremiah became seriously interested in religion – but not the form of it he had grown up with. Rather, he was drawn to renewed forms of faith that were relevant to the circumstances he was facing and the stresses of life as he knew them. Does any of this sound familiar?

There were a series of revolts in the empire as various provinces declared their independence. It was in that chaotic situation that Jeremiah found himself called to bear a particular form of personal and prophetic witness for God. And he became one of the most sensitive, literate and introspective writers whose works are preserved for us from this ear. The lyrical quality of his poetry, its emotional power and sensuousness, and its imaginative use of the language are unrivaled in Semitic antiquity.

The gifts Jeremiah brings to his work serve to underscore one of the familiar themes of his period as well as of the Protestant Reformation of the 16^th century – and, indeed, of our time as well: that the work of God is not restricted to priests and pastors, but is shared by each of us. All of us, not just some, have responsibilities for sharing the faith and carrying out the work of God in church and in the society.

The word minister means servant. Every person who seeks to serve God and humankind is a minister. On the other hand, the word layperson – which we often use to denote a non-professional – comes from the Greek word laos, which means the people – and particularly the people of God. Jeremiah’s experience helps us keep clearly in mind that we all have significant – even indispensable – contributions to make in the church and in the society.

The story of Jeremiah and his call to bring the word of God to the people is, among other things, an illustration of how the power of God is discovered in the gifts of people. I do not know how to speak, Jeremiah protested. Similar feelings of inadequacy or lack of preparation are familiar to each of us as well, aren’t they? Every church nominating committee runs into it when they start looking for people to exercise leadership to the church as Elder, Ministry Team Leader or in some special way. I’m too young. I’m too old. I’m not capable. I’m afraid of what people will thin. I’m not mature enough spiritually. I can’t do it.

That is one of the mysteries of God’s ways of doing things. At our baptism God gives us the gift of the Holy Spirit, and as God call us to serve God and other people in particular circumstances God also has a way of empowering us for those tasks. Someone has put it this way: God does not call only the equipped; God equips the called.

Listen again to what Jeremiah heard God say to him: Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you. That word consecrated has become a piece of religious jargon that may scare the daylights out of some of us. What does it mean? Literally, it means to fill the hand. – to give someone a handful of something they need. So, you see, it is much less abstract and threatening than we may have thought. God has filled our hands with opportunities, and the abilities to use those opportunities to good advantage. I think that is worth reflecting upon as you face the arrival of your new pastor on March First, and contemplate the future God is giving this congregation. What is in your hand? What has God given you, to equip you to be part of the renewal of the life and work of First Presbyterian Church in the days and years ahead?

Which leads to the second insight we might draw from the experience of Jeremiah. We can discover what God expects of us as we discover the gifts – the talents, abilities, insights and skills that are God’s signature on our souls.

There are times when each of us is a tongue-tied prophet, but we serve an eloquent God. And that eloquence is nowhere more clear than in the diversity, the wisdom, the strengths and abilities found in the community of faith. No one of us is expected to be able to do everything; each of us has our own individual set of gifts, talents and abilities – and in that diversity of gifts lays the secret of serving God within the community of God’s people.

So when the going gets touch, the challenges taxing, the tasks almost overwhelming remember this word to Jeremiah and draw new strength and inspiration from this spiritual reality: what is that in your hand?

Then the Lord put forth his hand and touched my mouth, and the Lord said to me, ‘Behold, I have put my words in your mouth.’

NOW TO THE GOD OF ALL GRACE

WHO CALLS YOU

TO SHARE GOD’S ETERNAL GLORY

IN UNION WITH CHRIST –

TO GOD BE GLORY AND POWER

NOW AND FOREVER. AMEN.