What can we say February 2? 4th after the Epiphany

    Jeremiah 1:4-10. What a dazzling text! Hopefully, the preacher will reflect on her own call – perhaps not in the sermon, but in devotion and preparation. You were called… when? How? Circumstances? Was it earlier than even you realized? You may well have agonies and regrets like Jeremiah! Owning your calling liberates you to help people hear their calling. And given Jeremiah’s full story, it’s a long, tough road of sorrows, frustrations, lack of success and constant questioning.

   It’s not an accidental, oh if you get around to it sometime, should you choose to do something for God sort of thing. Jeremiah was called, not in his mother’s womb, but before. It’s not some predestiny. God made him, his parents, all of us, and for the sole purpose of living into the calling. We think responding to the call is some deeply spiritual thing, but it’s really just realizing God is God. Walter Brueggemann points out, on Jeremiah 1, that “the accent falls not on the personal struggle of the man, but on the substantive sovereign word of the Lord.”

   My book, Birth: the Mystery of Being Born, explores life in utero. You once were ridiculously small, mini-microscopic, entirely vulnerable, hardly a chooser. Doesn’t God’s call predate your independent choices, or even hearing? A fetus can detect sound at about 26 weeks! Can it hear God? At 26 weeks, still eggplant-sized, you may well have attended worship, overheard the hymns (if muffled) – and you were nourished on the Eucharist. When I hand a pregnant woman the body of our Lord and say "The body of Christ, the bread of life," it flashes through my mind that the child in there can hear me, albeit in a muffled way. I want to say "The body of Christ, given for y'all." Already worshipping God, part of the Body.

   Typically, like Isaiah, Jonah, Moses, Mary and everybody else, Jeremiah has solid reasons he can’t be used by God. In his case, he’s just too young – a youth, a child, a na’ar, age unspecified. God is never impressed by why we can’t do what God asks. It’s as if God prefers to ask those who have good cause. It’s God. It’s not ability, but availability.

   Easy to say something corny about youth – but hearing younger voices, which the elderly might dismiss as naïve, unrealistic, or exuberant, is the way to life. Greta Thunberg is only the most famous of countless people who are just too young, but who awaken in the elderly who will listen the truths and vocations they abandoned for lousy reasons. Does a youth read the Scripture? Dare you involve a youth in the sermon, asking what God might be asking of the church?

   It’s profound, and God’s way, that the call is to uproot and breakdown, to build and plant. We’d rather God just build and plant. But uprooting and tearing down has to happen first. Marianne Williamson said that if you invite God into your life, you think he’ll show up like an interior decorator to spruce the place up a little – but then you look out your window, and a big wrecking ball is swinging your way. The whole thing has to be torn down to the foundations.

  Jeremiah nixes the fantasies of those who cry that religion and politics don’t mix. Jeremiah’s life and ministry didn’t just happen during the reigns of Josiah and Jehoiakim. He was directed their way, to their policies and the foolish public behavior of God’s people. And what a moment in time! Josiah ushered in soaring dreams and immense success – political, economic, and even religious. But then, tragically he was killed at age 39 (like Martin Luther King, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Flannery O’Connor, Frederic Chopin, Amelia Earhart). What a plunge into darkness was the reign of his successor, Jehoiakim. Faked religion, cruelty to the needy, idolatry and suppression of prophecy. In both settings, Jeremiah proclaimed a message of repentance and hope.

   1 Corinthians 13:1-13. How we fulfill our calling, and our calling itself, are clarified by Paul in this famous chapter. Lovely that it’s read at weddings. But Paul didn’t pause in dictating Corinthians thinking, Gosh, I’ll compose a poem they can read at weddings. Richard Hays: “The first task for the interpreter of 1 Corinthians 13 is to rescue the text from the quagmire of romantic sentimentality in which popular piety has embedded it.”

   This is one of those texts that doesn’t need much explaining. The preacher can repeat this line or that line, and let it linger, speaking with its own explanatory power. It should be framed though in pointing out that Paul was aiming to reform the confused Corinthians regarding who’s special, who’s really a worshipper and who isn’t. It’s ethical. It’s character formation. Paul would groan or laugh at the way we perceive love as a feeling or mood. It’s action. Discipline.

   I like to ponder how church life, even administration, budgets, boards and meetings, are or could be about love; we shot this video a couple of years ago on love in church structure and administration. Jesus said the whole law is summed up in the command to love. So why not take it up any and everywhere?

   As Corinth was famous for its production of bronze vessels, Paul’s remark about the clanging cymbal would be resounded with them. And that they also made the world’s best mirrors (which weren’t so good in ancient times!) adds some depth to his notion of the way we now see through the glass, the mirror, “darkly.” The Greek is en ainigmati – enigmatically! – as in a riddle. We can see and know God, but not with utter clarity. Not falsely or incorrectly or confusedly, but inducing us to strain always to see more clearly. Love is like that, love that is a character always in formation, re-formation. Or do we do something with Harry Potter's Mirror of Erised - which shows us only our heart's desire?

    Love can be daunting. In A River Runs Through It, the pastor, who lost one of his sons, preached that “Each one of us here today will at one time in our lives look upon a loved one who is in need and ask the same question: We are willing to help, Lord, but what, if anything, is needed? For it is true we can seldom help those closest to us. Either we don't know what part of ourselves to give or, more often than not, the part we have to give is not wanted. And so it is those we live with and should know who elude us. But we can still love them - we can love completely without complete understanding.”

   This text can profitably read as a little poetic biography of Jesus. The thought occurred to me years ago that Mary, his mother, just might have heard Corinthians being read aloud in worship when she was an older woman. Did she think of her son, the people he touched, his manner, and his crucifixion when she heard these words?

   Luke 4:21-30. Last week we heard the happier opening to this dramatic moment. And I preached on the full story - kind of getting wound up, if you'd like to check it out. No one threw me off the roof afterwards... Jesus, star young Torah student, reads aloud in worship! It’s confusing why the people get so upset. At first blush, it’s because he says the words are fulfilled now, today, here, in him. We’re never sure we really want God’s Word to happen, really, now, here, in us.

   But it’s more. His rumination on the text implies that his activity will be welcomed among the strangers, the foreigners, implying they, his townspeople, are like the persecutors of the prophets of old. Ouch. Try this in worship. You guys won’t hear, but I could get a homeless person or an immigrant or a queer person or… to open up easily to the Gospel. They hauled Jesus right to the precipice outside the city. Did he remember being tempted by the devil to throw himself off the top of the temple? Here we go again! Did he, as he gazed out over that beautiful Jezreel valley, think of Moses looking over the Promised Land? Martin Luther King had a vision of that promised land on the last night of his life in Memphis – and the next day they threw him over the edge, on that balcony.

     And what moment is more mystifying, or more tender and flat out beautiful, than that Jesus simply turned and walked right through the middle of the angry crowd. They stood aside, like the waters of the sea for the people of Israel to pass! – foreshadowing that remarkable moment when the soldiers ramble up to Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane – but as soon as he says simply “I am he,” they fall to the ground. What is this power Jesus has? Don’t dare attempt to explain it. Just report. Let it hang in the air. The crowd parted. Jesus walked calmly through. What was that? The lingering silence provides the answer.

***

   Check out my book, geared as a Lenten study for your Church peeps, but constructive at any season, reflecting on various pregnant lines in familiar hymns, with lots of stuff from my preaching: Unrevealed Until Its Season.