St. Patrick: Intimacy with God

Epiphany 4, Year C, February 3, 2013 The Episcopal Church of the Ascension

Revelation, Vocation, and Hesitation The Reverend Dr. Howard J. Hess

I. Introduction. One of my most treasured discoveries in seminary is the vitality of the Hebrew Scriptures. Like many of you, through the years I had tired of the stories of war and killing in parts of the Old Testament and was drawn to the beauty and power of the New Testament Gospel message. But what I learned at Yale Divinity School was the timelessness of the story of God’s people, beginning in the Garden and ending in the captivity of Assyria or Babylon. By timeless, I mean the repetitive human cycle of experiencing God’s love and blessings, beginning then to believe that our blessings reflect our own worthiness, buying into the delusion of self-sufficiency, turning away from God, facing calamity, and crying out to God for help. This story would repeat itself time and time again. And right in the middle of all the narratives came the prophets. What a gift the prophets have been, including Jeremiah, the major prophet we hear from today.

II. Jeremiah was called by God in 626 BCE to speak truth to power in the southern kingdom of Judah. Israel had already been obliterated by Assyria, which scattered the ten “lost tribes” throughout its empire. Now the two southern tribes were under attack by Babylon, and God handpicked Jeremiah to preach a powerful message of repentance over a forty-year period. Jeremiah was not enthusiastic about his calling. He was unheeded by those to whom he prophesied, and built his message upon God’s insistence rather than on successful outcomes.

This morning I’d like to focus upon a very particular part of Jeremiah’s life – God’s call to the prophet as described in our first reading. There is a genre in the Bible, a literary form, titled “the call statement.” These statements are threaded throughout scripture; Abraham had one, as did Moses, Isaiah, and the Apostle Paul. Typically, when God calls an individual, the call is to a particular task at a particular point in time. Calls have several elements. First, the commissioning: “Now the word of the Lord came to me saying, ‘before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.’” This commissioning occurred in an epiphany in which God spoke directly to Jeremiah, just as he did to Moses through the burning bush.

God’s commissioning of Jeremiah was electric. He told Jeremiah, “I knew you before you were formed in the womb.” When I first encountered that phrase, meditated upon it, and prayed with it, I was deeply moved. What became clear to me was that God was not only talking to Jeremiah, God was speaking to each of us. God has known us before we were even formed in our mother’s womb. God has known us before we were known by anyone else and before we even began to know ourselves. The Hebrew word for formed in the original text is “yasar.” It is used to refer to the shaping of pottery. God is portrayed as a potter who shaped and formed Jeremiah just as God does each one of us. The Hebrew word for “I knew you” is “yada.” This verb means more than cognitive knowing. It means action of the will and senses. Lastly, the word for “I dedicated you” is “gadas.” This word incorporates God’s intention to consecrate and sanctify Jeremiah. The original Hebrew is much richer and more revealing than the English translation we rely upon. Summing up, the deeper meaning we see in the Hebrew text is that God was not only aware of Jeremiah, but actively shaped and created in Jeremiah an aspect of God’s own being and then blessed that being with the sacred gift of life.

We see next that Jeremiah resisted, claimed to be too young and too inadequate. God reassured him and God emphatically told him not to be afraid. Then God reached out his hand, touched Jeremiah’s mouth and said: “Now I have put my words in your mouth.”

III. This morning I’d like to assert that Jeremiah’s story is our story; his narrative is our narrative. God has called each one of us, just as God called Jeremiah. Throughout the years, at times the church has mistakenly emphasized the call of clergy to ordained ministry and failed to stress that God also calls people to lay ministry. I believe historically this has had more to do with power and institutional kingdom building than it did with the words of God’s Spirit. The early church understood the “priesthood of all believers” and built its life focusing upon close, personal relationships and ministry to the world. Scripture is filled with the affirmation that each and every follower of Jesus Christ has a call and that our individual call reflects our deepest identity and our particular gifts. Our gifts – such as our ability to teach, to administer, to invent, to love, and to create beauty – reflect the particular way God the Father has shaped us and built his own nature into us. You see, we are the children of God, so why shouldn’t we look like God, think like God, and act like God? Of course, often we are afraid to step out in pursuit of God’s call, just like we were afraid when we took various developmental steps. Do you remember when the training wheels were first removed from your bicycle? Do you remember when you asked or were asked for that first dance in middle school (when most boys’ heads came up to their partners’ necks)? Do you remember the day you left home? Do you remember your very first day at your first paid job? Or, if you have children, do you remember when your first child was born? We have fears, but we do our best to step forward into and through those fears, relying upon the presence of God in that space with us.

IV. Respond to the call. My purpose here this morning is a very simple one: to encourage each one of us to listen to God’s call and to step out into that call with as much courage as we can muster; to step into the life of this community wherever our energy is stirred; to reach for support for others to help us remain strong and focused or to become strong. You might ask, “How will I know what my call is?” Some will hear very directly from God and encounter a sign, like the burning bush, but perhaps it won’t be that clear. Here is a good guiding principle: Look for that place where your passions meet the needs of the world. It might not be logical either to you or to others, it might not be the career path you have envisioned for yourself, and you may find yourself thinking, “I could never do that,” but at that place is your call. God created you with that passion.

In preparing this sermon I reflected upon the calls I have received in my life. Sometimes I have said yes, other times I have said no, and still other times, I have said “Maybe, try me later.” But there are several things I am very grateful about. First, God is so much more patient with us than we are with ourselves. God waits, God reiterates, and God uses many different avenues to communicate with us. Second, we often receive our calls progressively in life. My renewed call to ordained ministry came after a call to work with HIV+ persons and persons with AIDS. I was afraid when I begin that work because facing death had been a very tough issue in my family. God knew that about me. So God placed me in a situation where I walked with many, many wonderful people through their deaths as part of a community. Then some years later, I was driving to a hospital in Connecticut where I was completing my Clinical Pastoral Education, or CPE. I prayed as I drove, “God I am ready to learn more about how to be helpful to others at the time of death.” Ten minutes, just ten minutes after my arrival at the hospital, I had the opportunity to do just that in the ER. And God gave me the words that a bereaved family needed to hear. “Do not be afraid,” God says to each of us, “now I have put my words in your mouth.” Amen.