"Call and Response" - Jeremiah 1: 4 - 10 by The Rev. Dr. Maren Spray
July 17, 2022
Kelley Connelly’s Ordination Service
“Call and Response”
The second reading today comes from the beginning of the book of Jeremiah found in the Old Testament. Now Jeremiah, as a book, is a complex read, written about and to people facing a series of military invasions, and therefore it is written to those who suffer.
The book is named for the main character, the prophet Jeremiah, who is the one who conveys God’s message for friend and enemy alike, to Jerusalem and Judah, and also to Egypt, the Philistines, Moab, Ammon, Edom, Syria, and Babylon, and it is hard work to do this ministry, to speak words of judgment and coming destruction, a message that is both difficult and unwelcome.
There are times Jeremiah wants to quit, but God’s calling upon his life is so strong that he can’t turn away from the work (Jeremiah 20:7-9). He says it is like an intense fire in his heart, trapped in his very bones.
At the beginning of the book of Jeremiah, there is the call, God’s call, to an ordinary human being, and Jeremiah’s response.
This story is a mirror for us as readers; we examine it to see reflected back the ways that we, each of us are called, not just to ordained ministry which is an important piece of our worship together today, but how we are called to live out this Christian life, this faithful life.
Hear now God’s Word to us from Jeremiah 1:4-10 (Common English Bible Translation) - this is Jeremiah speaking:
The Lord’s word came to me:
“Before I created you in the womb I knew you;
before you were born I set you apart;
I made you a prophet to the nations.”
“Ah, Lord God,” I said,
“I don’t know how to speak because I’m only a child.”
The Lord responded,
“Don’t say, ‘I’m only a child.’
Where I send you, you must go;
what I tell you, you must say.
Don’t be afraid of them,
because I’m with you to rescue you,” declares the Lord.
Then the Lord stretched out his hand,
touched my mouth, and said to me,
“I’m putting my words in your mouth.
This very day I appoint you over nations and empires,
to dig up and pull down,
to destroy and demolish,
to build and plant.”
This past Lent I taught a Sunday school class on the seven deadly sins, based on the book “Glittering Vices” by Rebecca DeYoung.
Well, truth be told, we only had enough time to get through five of the seven deadly sins and we did not get to do gluttony or lust, and my people still give me a hard time about not getting to the most interesting vices.
The author opens the book by talking about her first year of graduate school; she writes, “I found myself . . . wondering if I belonged somewhere else. Everyone in my classes seemed so smart, so witty, so well read, so eager and able to ask brilliant and insightful questions. I felt like an impostor.
How did I—obviously so inferior—ever get admitted with these people? How soon would they find out who I really was (or wasn’t) and quietly shoo me out the back door in disgrace?
Partly I struggled with genuinely difficult [school work], and some difficult life circumstances; mostly, however, I struggled with my own sense of inadequacy.
So instead of engaging in class discussions and seeking out opportunities to improve myself, I spent that first year of graduate school pulling back into the shadows, believing I had nothing much to contribute, hoping no one would notice when I wrote or said something stupid.”[1]
And she discovered while reading about the virtue of courage, that there is a name for the thing she was feeling, “pusillanimity,” meaning “smallness of soul.”
Philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas called this particular feeling a vice and those afflicted by this vice shrink back from all that God calls them to be.
Smallness of soul means that when faced with the effort and challenge of stretching to the great things that we are capable of, the things God calls us to, we cringe, we say, “I can’t.”
DeYoung writes, “In short, [those with this vice, smallness of soul,] rely on their own puny powers and focus on their own potential for failure, rather than counting on God’s grace to equip them for great work in God’s kingdom – work beyond anything they might have dreamed of for themselves.”[2]
Smallness of soul - it sounds familiar.
It sounds like Moses standing before the burning bush, standing on holy ground in God’s presence (Exodus 3-4). God says to him that God’s people are suffering and God will send Moses to Pharaoh to bring God’s people out of Egypt.
And Moses says in response, “Who am I to go before a great power like Pharaoh and to bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” Who am I?
God says, “Don’t worry - I will be with you.”
And Moses says, “What if no one believes me?”
And God gives Moses signs that he can do to show the people that God is with him.
And still Moses says, “I’ve never been able to speak well, not yesterday, not the day before, and certainly not now since you’ve been talking to your servant. I have a slow mouth and a thick tongue.”
God responds, “Who gives people the ability to speak? . . . Isn’t it I, the Lord? Now go! I’ll help you speak, and I’ll teach you what you should say.”
And after all this Moses says, “Please, just send someone else.”
Smallness of soul.
It sounds like Jeremiah in the passage we just read. God says to him that before Jeremiah was even born God had chosen him for meaningful and important work in God’s great story of salvation and Jeremiah responds, “I’m too young for this. I don’t know enough. I’m immature, inadequate, just not ready.”
Smallness of soul.
Maybe it sounds like you and me.
Presbyterian pastor Eugene Peterson writes that “we are practiced in pleading inadequacy in order to avoid living at the best that God calls us to. How tired the excuses sound! I am only a youth; I am only a housewife; I am only a layman; I am only a poor preacher; I only have a [high school education]; I don’t have enough time; I don’t have enough training; I don't have enough confidence . . .”[3]
In our hearts we say, like Moses, “Please, just send someone else.”
But neither Moses’s nor Jeremiah’s story ends with God moving on to someone else.
So I think Jeremiah’s story has some important things to teach us, each one of us, about what it means to be called by God.
The first thing to notice is that the call begins not with a job description, but with God’s love for us.
God says, “Before you were born, before I created you, I knew you and loved you. I set you apart.”
We are loved before we even knew it - and so when we hear God calling us to do something, something that seems incredibly hard to us, we respond not to earn God’s love, we respond because we are already loved. We are loved first.
This idea comes up repeatedly in the prayers and poems of theologian and philosopher Soren Kierkegaard – he prays, "You have loved us first, O God, alas! We speak of it in terms of history as if you loved us first but a single time, rather than that, without ceasing, you have loved us first many times and every day and our whole life through.
When we wake up in the morning and turn our soul toward you – you were there first – you have loved us first. If I rise at dawn and at that same second turn my soul toward you in prayer, you are there ahead of me, you have loved me first.
When I withdraw from the distractions of the day and turn my soul toward you, you are there first and thus forever . . ."
God calls Jeremiah, and us, to a life of purpose and meaning, which is about something bigger than ourselves and our own sense of smallness.
God had holy plans for us before we even saw the light of day.
The second thing we learn from Jeremiah is that all our excuses don’t hold up. I’m too young, I’m too old, I’m not smart enough, good enough. I’m afraid of speaking in front of people. I’m afraid of failing, or of embarrassing myself.
God’s response is basically, “Stop saying those things. I will be with you and I will give you what you need.”
In Jeremiah’s story, God says, “Just go. Don’t be afraid because I am with you.” This is so important that it is repeated two more times in Jeremiah’s story: “I am with you.” (Jeremiah 1:19, 15:20).
And then God reaches out and touches Jeremiah’s mouth and gives him the words he needs to say.
God gives him what he needs - and perhaps that is the great gift in this whole process of being called to something by God - we discover in this real and tangible way the presence of God in our lives because we see that we cannot do it on our own, on our own strength, with our own power and abilities.
Something greater is needed, and something greater is given to us: a strength and a hope that is not of our own making.
The last thing to take away is that God says, “Do not be afraid.” God will not let us go. When things get really bad for Jeremiah and he wants to give up, still he says, “The Lord is with me like a mighty warrior” (Jeremiah 20:11).
This is a good time, a good day, to hear God's call to Jeremiah. We are here recognizing together God’s particular calling to someone who is very dear to us. God called and Kelley responded. But God's calling is not just for pastors. Jeremiah’s story is an invitation to hear our own calling.
We are, hopefully, on the back end of this pandemic, settling into this new reality. We have let go of things. We have been limited. We have lost people we love.
Some of us are worn out and some of us are tired of waiting around. This is the time to listen carefully to God’s call on our lives and to take a good look at our feeble excuses, our smallness of soul.
Because God has promised that our excuses don’t matter, God is with us, there is nothing to fear.
I’m going to risk telling a personal story. For years my husband and I felt a calling to provide foster care for children. But it never seemed like the right time to say yes, and we had plenty of reasons to say, “Not now.” I was pregnant, we were moving, our kids were little, on and on.
Then eventually there came a season when it felt like every other story in my facebook feed was a story about a child in an abusive situation, and I would cry out to God, “God, take care of these children, give them a safe place to land.”
And God answered, “You have a spare bedroom. What are you doing with it?”
And so we embarked, with our two kids, on this hard and remarkable journey, and during the past two and half years I have prayed like I have never prayed before, for God to help us, for God to help the children we cared for, for God to call more people into social work, for God to heal families.
It was the first time in a very long time, for me, of feeling that we were doing something in response to God’s leading that we could not have done without God’s help.
What is the calling on your heart? What comes up in your prayers, what moves you to tears, what keeps tugging at you? That might point the way for you and for me.
Eula Hall, an Appalachian activist and healthcare pioneer who described herself as a “hillbilly activist,” was a woman with an eighth-grade education and a burning sense of purpose, and she told about how she came to found the Mud Creek Clinic in southeastern Kentucky to provide health care for the poor. She said, “I looked, and I said to myself, ‘ain't right like this, no medical service here, ain’t right. Somebody needs to act.’ I guess that somebody was me.”
The Bible is peppered with God calling people: prophets and kings and judges, warriors and freedom-bringers, disciples and apostles. These call stories vary a good deal.
Mary called to the heart-breaking work of parenting Jesus.
Paul called to the back-breaking work of planting new churches.
Nicodemus whose calling took a long time and was only beginning to play out as Jesus died on the cross.
A child called to share his food so that others might eat too.
Women, Men and children whose calling wasn’t to the same thing, but to the thing that was needed.
And, to be clear, Christian calling is not just reserved for those asked to do big things. It is the invitation to every Christian to witness to the good news of God by pursuing with grace whatever roles God opens to us.
John Calvin assured us, “No task will be so sordid and base, provided you obey your calling in it, that it will not shine and be reckoned very precious in God’s sight.”
Martin Luther famously said that even changing dirty diapers is done for the glory of God when parenthood is experienced as a calling.
Our achievements, our confidence, our goodness - these things do not qualify us to do the work God calls us to.
We are loved, God will be with us, God will give us what we need. Do not be afraid.
When we hear God call, there is no smallness of soul for us now.
We respond as Isaiah did, “Here I am. Send me.”
Here I am, send me.
It is a whole different kind of answer - an answer with courage, with conviction, filled with energy, intelligence, imagination, and love.
It is the response captured in this “Statement of Being” from an unknown African American Preacher, shared by a classmate when I was in seminary, and it is written in a beautiful black preaching cadence.
The preacher says:
“I’m part of the fellowship of the unashamed.
I have Holy Spirit power.
The die has been cast.
I have stepped over the line.
The decision has been made.
I’m a disciple of His.
I won’t look back, let up, slow down, back away or be still.
My past is redeemed, my present makes sense, my future is secure.
I’m finished and done with low living, sight walking, small planning, smooth knees, colorless dreams, tamed visions, mundane talking, cheap living, and dwarfed goals.
I no longer need pre-eminence, prosperity, position, promotions, plaudits, or popularity.
I don’t have to be right, first, tops, recognized, praised, regarded, or rewarded,
I now live by faith, lean on His presence, walk by patience, live by prayer, and labor by power.
My face is set, my gait is fast, my goal is heaven, my road is narrow, my way is rough, my companions few, my guide reliable, my mission clear.
I cannot be bought, compromised, detoured, lured away, turned back, deluded, or delayed.
I will not flinch in the face of sacrifice, hesitate in the presence of the adversary, negotiate at the table of the enemy, ponder at the pool of popularity, or meander in the maze of mediocrity.
I won’t give up, shut up, let up, until I have stayed up, stored up, prayed up, paid up, preached up for the cause of Christ. I am a disciple of Jesus.
I must go until He comes, give til I drop, preach all I know, and work til He stops me. And when he comes for His own, He will have no problem recognizing me - my banner will be clear!”
To God be the Glory. Amen.
[1] Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung, Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies (Grand Rapids, Mich: Brazos Press, 2009).
[2] DeYoung.
[3] Eugene H. Peterson, Run with the Horses: The Quest for Life at Its Best, 2nd ed., Rev. & expanded (Downers Grove, Ill: IVP Books, 2009).
[4] Peterson.