Who, Me?

Who, Me?

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

January 31, 2016

Scripture: Jeremiah 1:4-10; Luke 4:22-30

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

There’s an odd thing about the great prophets of the Judeo-Christian tradition. It seems that none of them really wanted to be a prophet. When they heard God calling them to be prophets they all tried to get out of it, or at least many of them did. The greatest of them did. We heard one of them doing it just now in our reading from Jeremiah. Jeremiah is one of the greatest Hebrew prophets, even if he is called the gloomy prophet, which indeed he is. He lived and prophesized in Jerusalem during the Babylonian siege of the city in 586 BCE. He has the longest book in the Bible that is named after a prophet, and indeed in the whole Bible only Psalms is longer. We just heard Jeremiah’s account of God’s call to him to be a prophet, that is, to be one to speak words from God to the people and especially to the rulers. Jeremiah tells us that God told him that even before he was born God had “appointed [him] as a prophet to the nations.” Jeremiah’s account of his reaction to that startling news is pretty understated, but I get the sense that he wasn’t exactly thrilled by it. He says “Ah, Sovereign Lord, I do not know how to speak. I am only a child.” He doesn’t tell us how old he was, but he pleads his youth in an attempt to get out of this appointment as a prophet of God. God, of course, will have none of Jeremiah’s excuses. God says “Do not say I am only a child.” God says in effect I made you a prophet, so whether you like it or not, deal with it. You’re a prophet, and a prophet Jeremiah indeed became.

In trying to get out of being a prophet Jeremiah is in good company, A couple of centuries earlier Isaiah had tried to get out of it too. In chapter 6 of Isaiah we read that Isaiah had a visionary experience of being in the throne room of God. He wants none of it. He pleads unworthiness. He says “I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips….” So a seraph, a sort of winged beast that attends God, burns those unclean lips with a live coal to make them clean. Frankly, I’d rather use soap, but the seraph used a live coal on Jeremiah, which I suppose is more dramatic. After that when God asks “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’ Isaiah gives in and says, in effect, oh all right. I’ll go. Send me.

The greatest of the Hebrew prophets is Moses. He tried to get out of it too. In Exodus chapters 3 and 4, when God appears to him out of a burning bush and tells him to go to Pharaoh to bring the Israelites out of Egypt, Moses, like Jeremiah and Isaiah, wants nothing to do with it. Exodus doesn’t quite put it this way, but I imagine his reaction was something like “Yeah. Right. Sure. Me go to Pharaoh? I don’t think so.” He pleads that he isn’t eloquent. God doesn’t care and sends him anyway, with Moses’ brother Aaron along to do the talking. God called Moses to be a prophet, and a prophet Moses became.

The greatest prophet of all is of course Jesus. We don’t have a story of him arguing with God about being a prophet, or much more than a prophet, but Luke does tell us that Jesus was thirty years old when he began his public ministry. I don’t know about you, but I wonder what he was waiting for. Was he hoping he could get out of doing what he knew God had sent him to do? We don’t know, but maybe. If so, he certainly was in tune with his great forerunners Moses, Isaiah, and Jeremiah.

Why do you think that is? Wouldn’t you think that being called directly by God to be God’s voice in the world would be a great honor? Wouldn’t you think that people would be lining up for the job like people line up for Powerball tickets? Why did these great prophets try so hard to get out of the gig of being a prophet? Well, I think it’s because they knew what being a prophet really meant. Moses certainly didn’t have an easy time of it. Pharaoh’s army, probably the strongest military force in the world at the time, chased him and his people through the Red Sea. The people turned against him and against God out in the desert, worshipping the golden calf and all. Moses died without ever entering the Promised Land of Canaan. I don’t know about Isaiah, but Jeremiah had no easy time of it. He was accused of treason. He was arrested. He was thrown into a dry cistern to rot. He got out, but that couldn’t have been much fun. He lived through hell as the Babylonians first besieged, then took Jerusalem. And of course we all know what happened to Jesus. Yes, he rose from the grave; but before that he was arrested, tortured, and hung on a cross to die a horrible, painful death. No, being prophet of God isn’t quite the thing that perhaps we’d like it to be or even think it would be. Prophets suffer. Prophets die. That, I think, is why Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and maybe Jesus all tried to get out of it. They all tried to get out of it, but here’s the thing. God really was calling them to be prophets. God was calling them to speak for God in the world and to do the work of God in the world. Eventually they all realized that they really had been called, and they really had to accept the call. We’d never have heard of them if they had not.

I know perfectly well that most church people don’t much like the idea that God calls God’s people to do difficult and unpopular things. I suppose God may also call people to do some easy and popular things, but I’ve long thought that if you think God is calling you to do something you already want to do and that you find really easy to do you may well be wrong about God calling you to do that thing. We’d all rather focus on God’s love more than on God’s challenge. We’d all like to say with Saint Paul that neither life nor death nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord and leave it at that. I know some of you want to do that. To be honest, I’d like to do it too, but here’s the thing: God’s love comes to us in many ways. It comes as forgiveness, encouragement, comfort, and support. It really does come as all of those wonderful things.

But that’s not all it comes as. It also comes as challenge. It also comes as a call to do things we don’t want to do. To do things other people don’t want us to do. To do things that will make us unpopular. Even to do things that can get us killed. God’s call to Jesus got him killed, after all. God’s call to Martin Luther King got him killed too, and there have been so many others. God calls us to speak for the voiceless. God calls us to love the unlovable. God calls us to welcome the outcast and make friends with the stranger. God calls us to welcome sinners and to rethink what we call sin. God calls us to oppose oppression and resist all forms of violence. None of that is easy. None of that is going to win us any popularity contests, or maybe it will but it’s a contest with only one spectator, namely, God. The world won’t like it one little bit. But if we don’t hear God’s call and respond, we believe only in what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called cheap grace, grace that doesn’t cost either God or us anything at all; and that’s not really grace. After all, God’s grace cost Jesus his life.

Being a prophet isn’t easy. Being a prophet isn’t safe. And maybe you think God isn’t calling you, or calling us, to be prophets. The Bible disagrees. At Numbers 11:29, for example, Moses says “I wish that all the Lord’s people were prophets and that the Lord would put his Spirit on them!” I hear Moses saying that God does indeed call all God’s people to be prophets but that most of us turn a deaf ear to that call. God doesn’t call us all to do the same things. After all, the Bible also speaks of many gifts from the one Spirit. Still, God calls us all, and God knows that answering that call often isn’t easy and isn’t safe.

So God does more than call us. We hear God doing that more in our reading from Jeremiah. When Jeremiah protests that he is only a child God tells him not to be afraid of the people to whom God will send him, saying “I am with you and will rescue you.” Few words to be sure, but divinely powerful ones. “I am with you.” That is God’s promise to us always. That is God’s promise to us when we respond to God’s call. It is the most important promise there ever was or ever could be. God is with us. With that promise we can do anything. We can do anything God calls us to do, just like Jeremiah, Isaiah, Moses, and Jesus did.

God’s calling. Do we hear? If we do, will we respond? See, God really has no choice other than to call ordinary people like us. Who else can God call? All people are ordinary people. Yet some become extraordinary because they have ears to listen for God’s call and the courage to respond to it. So if you’re thinking about all this call stuff Who, Me? Believe me, we’ve all thought that. Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Moses all thought it. I thought it when I heard God’s call to get out of the law and go to seminary. I was sure God had the wrong guy. Maybe you think God’s got the wrong guy or gal in you. Well, God doesn’t. God has you. God has us. Will we listen? Will we respond? Will we say yes? May it be so. Amen.