Jeremiah 1:4-10
“A Mouthful”
August 22, 2010 - Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost

         Harry reached down, pulled a quarter out of my ear, and handed it to me. It was his favorite trick around my cousins, my sister and I. As we spent summer vacations running around my great aunt’s house in Arizona, we were fascinated by and a bit frightened of Harry. He lived in a barely finished attic apartment above the old rambling house. He was deaf as a post, bald as a baseball, wore stained denim overalls, and could spit a glob of tobacco juice farther than any other human being I’ve ever met.

         Though I knew him for several years of my childhood, I never quite discerned just exactly what it was that Harry did. Ostensibly he was my great aunt’s “handyman.” He did do an occasional odd job around the acre or so of property she owned. But for the most part it appeared that he slept and ate, chewed tobacco, and occasionally pulled coins out of children’s ears. That was it.

         I can’t imagine what Harry would have thought if someone had told him he was supposed to have a “purpose driven life.” I think he would have been baffled by the idea he had a calling, just as a specific call and purpose for our lives baffles many of us today.

         Hardly any of us hear it is as clear as Jeremiah in our text for today. The title for the section in your Bible probably reads something like, “The Call of Jeremiah.” God spoke to him, directly. Verse 4 says, “The word of the Lord came to me…” Wouldn’t that be nice?

         You and I mostly just muddle our way through life. We may think about our decisions a little or a lot. Where to go to college. What kind of job to seek. Which person to marry. Whether to buy that house. Which church to attend. We make all these choices and for most of us, most of the time, we don’t hear any voices from heaven telling us what to do.

         It would be real nice if God spoke more often, to more people, giving really clear direction like He gave to Jeremiah in verse 5, “I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.” Wouldn’t it be good to have crystal clarity? Wouldn’t it be good to know exactly what God had planned for us before we were even born? Then we could just get on with it.

         It didn’t help Jeremiah that much. His immediate response to a clear divine directive was to wonder if God got it right. Like Moses and other prophets before him, Jeremiah tried to beg off in verse 6, “Ah, Lord, I do not know how to speak; I am too young.”

         Verse 1 tells us Jeremiah was the son of priest serving in Anathoth. It was just three miles from Jerusalem, but located on a ridge that was in the territory of Benjamin, not Judah. It was a smaller religious site living in the shadow of Solomon’s great Temple in Jerusalem. When Jeremiah followed God’s direction and went to Jerusalem and the surrounding nations to prophesy, he looked and sounded like a country preacher in the big city. He felt hopelessly out of his comfort zone.

         Not just Jeremiah. God has a calling for every one of His people, for everyone of us, but it’s not always clear and simple, and not always easy. Take the woman in our Gospel lesson from Luke 13 today. What was her calling? She was bent over for eighteen long years, waiting for the day Jesus would arrive and place His healing hands on her. Only then did she straighten up and fulfill her calling. Luke 13:13 says she “praised God.”

         God’s response to Jeremiah in verse 8 tells us he not only felt like an inexperienced kid and a bumpkin from the country. He was afraid, and rightly so. As his life unfolds in the book of Jeremiah we see him threatened, put on trial for his life, placed in stocks, forced to run away, publicly humiliated by a phony prophet, imprisoned in a hole in the ground, then finally dragged off to Egypt, the place he warned everyone not to go.

         Knowing your call is no guarantee of smooth sailing. Jeremiah served during the decline and fall of his nation. Verses 2 and 3 place his ministry from 627 B.C. until the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 B.C. He spoke the word of God during the worst forty years of Judah’s history. Unlike politicians and leaders of his time and of our own time, Jeremiah was rarely positive. His counseled everyone to accept defeat and trust in God rather than attempt to restore good fortune.

         It’s hard, but think like Jeremiah. Who knows whether our economy will turn upward anytime soon? Who knows whether the United States will continue to be the most powerful nation in the world? Who knows whether declining church attendance will turn around and Christian faith will regain the ground it’s been losing in our country? Given all that, why should we expect our own callings from God to be particularly easy or smooth?

         Some of us here have a sense of what God has asked us to do in life. You are to teach or to care for those who are sick or to do construction. You are, for now, to be a student or to be a mother or father or to be a friend. You are to lead a Bible study group or to help in the kitchen or to take care of babies in the nursery. Some of us are pretty sure about one or more of those callings.

         Others of us struggle. Even if you’re older, you might wonder if you are doing what God truly called you to do. Like Jeremiah you wrestle with the Lord, posing objections, unsure what He’s really asking. You just want to have work, find a place to live. Whatever your calling might be, it’s not yet clear.

         Your call may be as clear as if God sent you an e-mail message or it may seem like His voice is coming over a one-bar cell phone connection that drops every other word and makes no sense at all. Yet however you’re hearing it, rest assured that three things God said to Jeremiah about his call are true for you.

         The first thing God said to Jeremiah in verse 5 was, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you…” God knew Jeremiah, knew his whole life. Before he was born, God saw Jeremiah sitting in prison. He saw people calling him a liar. He saw the day the king burned the scroll containing Jeremiah’s prophecies. God saw it all. God knew Jeremiah.

         God knew the woman Jesus straightened up. He knew all the years she spent crunched over, looking at the ground, unable to raise her eyes to see the birds or the stars or sunlight in the trees. He knew all that and He loved her.

         God knows you. Before you were conceived God saw your life laid out before Him. God saw your successes and defeats, saw your brilliant accomplishments and your disastrous mistakes. He saw your good deeds and He saw your sins. He knew it all and He loved you. That’s what He said to Jeremiah and that’s what He says to you.

         There is more. God’s second response to Jeremiah addresses his worry about being too young, his unspoken fear of what people will do to him. The promise in verse 8 is, “Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you and will rescue you.” God not only knows us. He is with us. Jeremiah lived by that promise and you and I can live by it.

         God kept and keeps His promise to be with us through His Son. Before He was born Jesus was given the name He was given, “Immanuel,” “God with us.” God knows you and me because in Jesus Christ, God became one of us, became a human being. He knows the facts about our lives, but He also knows how it feels to live those facts. He knows what it is to be loved by a mother and how it feels to be rejected by friends and family. He knows the comfort of a place to sleep and good food and He knows what it’s like to be homeless and hungry. He felt popularity and respect and He also felt shame and torture. God knows our human through Jesus. God came to be with us.

         Jesus came to be with you. That’s why He lived and died and rose again. When you believe and trust in Him, He is with you and you are with Him. It won’t make life simple and easy. That’s not what God did for Jeremiah or for Jesus. But He gives you a reason not to be afraid. He is with you, always with you, He promised.

         But there’s more. When God knows us and is with us, He calls us. In verse 9, Jeremiah wrote down God’s third response to him, “Then the Lord reached out his hand and touched my mouth and said to me, ‘I have put my words in your mouth.’” God gave Jeremiah his call, his ministry, his reason for living. God put His Word in Jeremiah’s mouth.

         God puts His Word into the mouth and life of every person who believes and trusts in Jesus. God put His Word in you. You have something to say for Him. Your life, your self, is God speaking to others about His love and grace in Jesus.

         Hardly anyone is a prophet. Not very many of us are preachers. Some of us are teachers. But we all have God’s Word in our mouths to speak for Him. You speak for Him by caring for an infant so his mother can worship. You speak for Him by giving a child school supplies. You speak for Him by inviting a friend to church. You speak for the Lord by refusing to repeat words of gossip or hurt or anger. You speak for Christ by telling someone else what He’s done for you. God gave Jeremiah a message. He’s given you a message.

         Our text from Hebrews 12 verse 25 this morning has a stern warning in regard to the message God has placed in our mouths. “See to it that you do not refuse him who speaks.” God spoke to us with His living Word, through His Son Jesus. We must not refuse to take that Word into our own mouths and speak it for Him. That’s the call, the call of everyone who believes in Jesus.

         All that doesn’t really answer what you may be asking. What is my calling? What has God got for me to do? What kind of work should I pursue? Am I in the right place? Is there something else God wants from me? We each still have to wrestle with questions like those. I can’t answer them for you.

         What I do know is that our callings from God are not like in a recent Christian film entitled, “What If…” It’s about Ben who planned to marry his hometown girlfriend Wendy and go to seminary. Instead he kisses Wendy goodbye and goes into business. Fifteen years later, he’s a successful investment banker, engaged to glamour girl Cynthia. They’re going to fly off to Paris. Just before they leave, an angel zaps him into a parallel world where he never left Wendy and did go to seminary to become a pastor.

         “What If…” is an evangelical version of “The Family Man,” with Nicolas Cage. Ben gets to see what would have happened if he had chosen differently. Going off into business he had rejected God’s one perfect call for him and had missed forever what God had planned. Only the angel’s “magic” gave him a kind of “do-over” to get back to where he should have been.

         The problem is that God’s will for us, God’s call on each of our lives, is not a perfectly choreographed dance in which we have to make all the right moves and choices or it’s ruined forever. God’s call comes to weak, foolish, sinful, imperfect people like a priest’s kid from Anathoth or to a nerd from Santa Monica or to whatever you are from wherever you are from. If you balk or back out, that’s not the end, just as it was not for Jeremiah. God knows you. He knows the good choices you will make and He knows the bad. His call on your life works in and through it all.

         A better movie would have been the story of what Ben did as a banker when He realized that God still knew him, still was with him, still had placed His Word into his mouth. No, he might never be a pastor, but he might learn how to fulfill the call God knew he would really have.

         God doesn’t give us do-overs on our calls from Him. He gives us start-overs. When we hear God speaking, we begin from right where we are. God doesn’t turn the clock back. He makes the lives we’ve already lived into what He had already planned from the beginning.

         There are things to regret and things that need to be corrected in our lives. That was the point of Jeremiah’s whole message to Judah. They rejected God’s call on their lives and it meant trials and troubles. In verse 10 God tells Jeremiah, “See, today I appoint you over nations and kingdoms to uproot and tear down, to destroy and overthrow…” Judah’s choices were disastrous and they would be torn down and destroyed. Our disastrous choices to live by our own will can lead to destruction in our own lives.

         Ultimately, though, destruction is not the point. Our lives are not ruined forever even when we turn from God. Judah in all its sin and rebellion was not hopeless. The last phrase of Jeremiah’s call and commission says that he was also appointed, “to build and to plant.”

         In general, Jeremiah is a depressing book about the disaster that comes when people disobey God. It begins with warnings in chapter 1 and ends with judgment in chapter 52, with Jerusalem in ruins, the Temple looted and the people carried off into exile. Yet right in the middle, in chapters 30-33, in what has come to be called the “Little Book of Comfort,” God inspires Jeremiah to promise a restoration, a healing, a replanting of fields and a rebuilding of the city. That’s the message at the center of Jeremiah’s call.

         The message at the center of our call as believers in Jesus Christ is that God will rebuild and restore the life of anyone who comes to Him. The Word in our mouths is a word that hurts and tears down as it points out wrong and injustice, but in the end it’s a Word that builds new lives, builds God’s kingdom. That’s what Hebrews said to us in 12:27, There will be the removal and destruction of “what can be shaken… so that what cannot be shaken may remain.” Verse 28 urges us, “Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe.”

         I didn’t tell you the whole story about Harry. As a child it was hard for me to see what that poor, simple man did in life other than spit tobacco gloriously. But our family has a cabin in Arizona. Before I can remember, my great aunt had Harry construct a bedroom addition to that cabin, doubling its size. He had no plans, no drawing, but he put up a structure that has remained, and has brought comfort and joy and rest to our family and guests for fifty years. If nothing else, Harry built the place where I take a retreat to pray and study and fish and be renewed every year. If nothing else, that was his call.

         I don’t know what God is calling you to build. It probably won’t be a physical building, though it could be. I do know that, like He called Jeremiah, God calls you and I to plant and to build. We plant the seeds of God’s Word and love in the minds and hearts of those around us. We build His kingdom with His Word of grace and with acts of kindness. You have something to build for Him that will last forever. May He give you grace to hear and answer that call.

         Amen.

Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2010 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj