“A Peculiar Call to Jeremiah” 

A Sermon Preached at First Presbyterian Church

 By Dr. James R. Henery 

Sunday, May 18, 2008 

A property manager for a single-family rental facility was showing a unit to a prospective tenant and family.  He was asking the usual questions: “Are you employed?”  The wife answered, “Yes, we are a military family.”  “Children?”  “Yes, ages nine and twelve.”  “Animals?”  “Oh, no – they’re very well-behaved.” 

When you read the beginning of Jeremiah, chapter 1, you get the idea that it’s a question-and-answer sort of employment session between God and Jeremiah.  There’s no reason to believe that Jeremiah was bad or in trouble or any problems at all, except this chapter will describe a very unusual relationship – and Jeremiah’s reaction. 

“The words of Jeremiah, son of Helkiah of the priests who were in Anathoth in the land of Benjamin, to whom the word of the Lord came in the days of King Josiah, son on Amon of Judah, in the thirteenth year of his reign.  It came also in the days of King Jahoakim, son of Josiah of Judah, and until the end of the eleventh year of King Zedekiah, son of Josiah of Judah, until the captivity of Jerusalem in the fifth month.  “And 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, and I appointed you a prophet to the nations.’  And then I said, ‘Ah, Lord God, truly, I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy!’  But the Lord said, ‘Do not say “I am only a boy,” for you shall go to all to whom I send you, and you shall speak whatever I command you.  Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you,’ says the Lord.  Then the Lord put out his hand and touched my mouth, and the Lord said to me, ‘Now I have put words in your mouth.  See, today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up, to pull down, to destroy, to overthrow, to build, and to plant.’” 

A Peculiar Call to Jeremiah. 

In a recent seminary magazine from Ashland (OH) Theological Seminary, a faculty adjunct member wrote an interesting article, titled “Disentangling the Call: How One Articulates the Experience and Understands a Genuine Call from God.”  He begins by citing the Latin phrase from theologian, Rudolph Otto, “Mysterium tremendum et fascinans” – “Fascination with inexpressible mystery.”  He says the problem with a call becomes one of a very disruptive experience for which there was no obvious preparation in the life of the person who was called.  He goes on to define three different types of call: A) cataclysmic/reluctant; B) non-cataclysmic/reluctant; C) non-cataclysmic/non-reluctant.  Operative words here: “cataclysmic” and “reluctant.”

I’m trying to apply those to my short list over the past few weeks about those who experienced a rather disruptive, and yet peculiar, call.  Abraham hears a voice just as he is about to kill his son; Moses sees a burning bush and then hears the call on further inspection; Samuel sleeps and hears and then wants to know what’s going on, and his mentor eventually explains.  Each is an entirely different experience, each leading to a different conclusion, each with its own rather declarative pronunciation of faith and eventual task.  Okay, probably “cataclysmic” seems to be a good description, but none of them seem to come close to this encounter with Jeremiah.  For Jeremiah, this call becomes perhaps the most vocal, argumentative, complaining, assertive prophet that we know personally in the Hebrew scriptures. 

This morning’s scripture is one of a kind – the opening narrative that immediately establishes this call, or that begins with a place in which the call comes.  In Hebrew, that opening phrase, “I formed you,” the Hebrew word is yah-tzar, which means that one has been molded into a form for a particular purpose.  Even a better translation for womb in Hebrew is the word behten, which means “belly.”  In other words, “In the belly, I formed you with a purpose.  Before anybody knew what was going on, you were ready to go.”  So, contrary, in essence, to the theory about “cataclysmic A, B, or C” (which may work for those spectacular events and voices), Jeremiah’s call does not easily fit that norm.  However, his spiritual relationship may be closer to ours and what we experience than perhaps any other scriptural story in either Old or New Testaments.  It seems to be a portrait of how we argue and debate, and what we do and what we don’t do, and how we have this dialogue with God.  It’s a peculiar call. 

Now perhaps Jeremiah was about twenty or twenty-one.  Some scholars put him as young as about eighteen.  He was certainly on his way in a vocation – likely as a Temple priest.  Training and education would have established him with a pedigree.  In other words, he is this weekend’s Ithaca College or next weekend’s Cornell University graduate, ready to do something, ready to move on, ready to get out of the educational environment, looking for a comfortable, secure job. Because his father, Helkiah, already had his position, that’s what the son would be doing.  Then this dialogue: God speaking – “I have known you before you were born, and now you are going to be a prophet” (that’s a dangerous word in the time of Jeremiah – a prophet.  And Jeremiah says, “Sorry; can’t do it.  I’m too young.  I’m just a boy.”  That’s a witty answer for a twenty-one-year-old, and it still may work for some twenty-one-year-olds that you know of in some families.  But it gets better: God says, “It makes no difference!  You’re going to go where I send you, you’re going to say what I want you to say, and you’re going to do what I want you to do.  I will put the words in your mouth if you can’t speak for yourself!”  For the next fifty-two chapters, if we follow Jeremiah through all sorts of dramas, all sorts of imprisonments and isolations – even some espionage, even a trial for treason – he will eventually be kidnapped and taken to Egypt where he will likely die, a rather broken and lonely man.  He was the one that had to warn Jerusalem that their beloved city and country would fall and become the occupied territory of Babylon.  Jeremiah is often referred to as the prophet of doom because he would convince them that their city was going to fall – which happened in 586 B.C., and would not become a liberated Jewish or Israeli territory or city until sixty years ago, in 1948.  All because it was his job – his call – his purpose.  It was a peculiar call. 

I was at Cornell at a women’s hockey game earlier this winter, and I was sitting behind a family with a very young daughter – maybe three or four.  The game didn’t seem to impress the little girl until it was between periods, when the ice-cleaning machine came out.  The little girl was all attention, all eyes.  She was mesmerized.  She just stood there and watched the entire process.  Then it goes off the ice, and I heard her say to her mom, “I know what I want to be when I grow up!”  I could see mom’s eyes light up, and I can imagine what she was thinking: “Oh, she wants to play hockey here!  She wants to go to school at Cornell!  Maybe she wants to be an ice skater!”  Then her daughter proudly and loudly announced, “I’m going to be a zamboni driver!” 

“What are you going to be when you grow up?”  It’s one of those ageless queries that we begin to snag our young children with: “What do you want to do when you grow up?”  We put it to people: children, students, colleagues – I’m still trying to figure out what I’m going to do when I grow up.  The truth of the matter is that all I ever wanted to be was a professional baseball player, and since I wasn’t good enough for that, I thought, “I want to be an umpire!”  Here I am! 

What do you want to be or do or try?  What job or vocation or specialty or direction?  Questions for graduates, are they not?  Fortunately, we live in a country – a society – which allows us, with tolerance or even patience, to choose what we want to do.  Most of our children will grow up with a myriad of possibilities, and they can pick and choose careers.  They will likely change a few times in their lives.  But the mystery – the strangeness – of a divine, spiritual call that suggests it is a religious or spiritual demand upon one to do something specific, and rarely enters the dimension of plausibility for most of us.  A voice that beckons us to hear “I have known you; I have chosen you; I have prepared you; I have called you?”  That’s just a little bit arduous for most of us to accept – just a bit too unreal.  As I said a few weeks ago, for preachers and clergy: okay.  That’s rational.  That’s what you want to know.  That’s what you want to hear:  the divine process. 

But what about everybody else?  What about other occupations?  Questions and doubts are raised in the language right away if you begin to ask somebody in an interview, “Are you called here?”  Then again, I think, “Why not?”  Why isn’t it possible that other careers and vocations and life choices and decisions – why can’t there also be some sort of a call?  If the Hebrew translation is clear, it is about purpose and that takes a lifetime to discern what that is.  But if we have some belief in a transcendent and sovereign God who is capable of action and movement and change, then possibly, each of us, in our own belly might be able to figure out what it is that we are supposed to be doing, because maybe – just maybe – God placed the idea there.  All too often, what stops us from our ultimate or inherent purpose is a lack of drive or attitude or conviction or courage or even prayer.  Sometimes what stops us is sometimes others who voice their own struggles or difficulties with our choices, and they dump on us self-imposed restrictions that sometimes slow us down or detour us into other areas.  What negates our purpose or our direction or our call is the frustration that impedes change or growth or success, and we just give up or quit or, as too often happens, we limp to another, safer, quieter choice. 

A peculiar call.  It’s not so much cataclysmic here, but one of, I think, a beginning, embraceable, even embryonic call.  Jeremiah says to God, “I can’t do it.”  God says, “I have known you before you were even in the womb, and you were given tasks.”  That’s astonishing in any language.  In the belly, you already had a mission, a task, or something to do.  Imagine all of us having the same blueprint.  I think that many of you this morning have seen your lives similarly born out of early academics and vocational desires.  To be what you became was a call.  To do what you have done was a call.  To believe that you have lived and accomplished was a call.  None of it was so much cataclysmic as it was a necessary and affirming spiritual connection that sometime, in some way, we all answered – as did the prophets – with a pivotal, even unsettling, response:  “Here I am.”

Perhaps it is, as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote: “God speaks first, eternally, and we answer when we figure out we’ve been called.  We answer and answer and answer, and one day, God lets us know who we’re dealing with.” 

I began with the Latin – mysterium tremendum et fascinans – “The fascination with inexpressible mystery.”  Perhaps the mystery of the call is truly that all of us are called from birth to do ordinary and extraordinary things and tasks and responsibilities that we sometimes just discover rather blindly and blatantly and benignly along the way – not just jobs and work, but profoundly imperative callings: callings to be caregivers, to be volunteers, to engage ourselves in social and justice and environmentally-oriented activities.  Perhaps even more basically, we are called to be kind people, considerate people, peaceful people, content people.  We’re called to be good people.  Not all of us are called to lead or to do spectacular things, but we are all called to life and service, and, in desperate and catastrophic times, we are called to be involved with people who suffer in places such as Myanmar (Burma) and Darfur and China.  We’re called to a personal connection in hope and prayer our brothers and sisters in other places in this world. 

“Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, and I appointed you to be a prophet to the nations.”  I said, “I’m only a boy,” and the Lord said, “I don’t care.  You’re going to go anyway.  You’re going to do what I say.” 

Imagine citing that conversation today and they would think that we’re crazy.  It’s certainly a peculiar call from the belly that we are known, that we are chosen, that we are birthed into a calling.  Still, Jeremiah argues and whines; he wants out.  I understand that, don’t you?  I want out sometimes, too, and I’m certain some of you want out from what you are doing or the lives in which you live.  I think we all know something about that.I recently received an email from a friend, written by a nanny.  She wrote:

“The mother I worked for was watching a PBS special showing the birth of a baby, and she wanted her three oldest children to watch, thinking it would be a good starting point for answering questions about the facts of life.  The five-year-old, watching the baby coming out of the birth canal, asked her mom, ‘Mom, does that hurt?’  ‘Yes, it does,’ the mom answered, thinking about her own delivery.  The child continued: ‘Wow!  Does it hurt the mother, too?’” 

Scripture and history are full of painful stories about following a call to bring life and meaning to hurting people.  For Christians, it is the message from the Cross – the ultimate response to a call that could mean life and death.  But to realize and accept one’s call becomes the genuine answer to the one who knew us before we knew ourselves.

Amen.