August 26, 2007
Text: Jeremiah
1:4-10
Familiarity Breeds Vocation
According to the old
saying, “familiarity breeds contempt.” It
is to suggest that the better we get to know someone, the more apparent become
their flaws, and the more for granted we begin to take their assets. Some people just don’t wear very well. We have some current experience with that
truth. Think of the mercurial fortunes
of political candidates who launch their campaigns with great excitement and
public anticipation only to see their star power fade the more the public gets
to know them. Perhaps it is the result
of closer scrutiny of their record, or the cumulative weight of statements or
behaviors that calls into question their ability. Or perhaps it is simply a growing discomfort
with their style. Some people, as I say,
just don’t wear very well.
But we have also
known the opposite: plain or even
initially unappealing people who seem to get prettier or more handsome or
simply more winsome the more we get to know them; deep and reflective people we
had initially concluded were simply dull.
How many people wrote off Abraham Lincoln as a course, simplistic,
barely educated country lawyer before electing him President? How many people wrote off Helen Keller as a
mindless human vegetable before discovering a brilliance merely veiled by
communicative disabilities? If it is
true that some people are less than they appear to be, it is just as
emphatically true that many, the better we get to know them, reveal themselves
to be infinitely more than our first impressions foretold.
But conversation
reported in this week’s scripture reading suggests a still deeper and vastly
more hopeful implication of acquaintance.
The better we get to know someone – including ourselves – the clearer we
understand their capabilities and gifts, and therefore the particular shape and
texture of their ministry and witness. Familiarity,
in other words, breeds vocation.
Take Jeremiah, for
example. A young man, he was not merely
a passerby on the street one day at an intersection where God happened to set
up a booth. Jeremiah was no random
recruit; no vocational serendipity. “I
knew you before you were a twinkle in your parents’ eyes. I set you apart before you were even
born. I know you inside and out. I know your gifts and graces, your assets,
your strengths, which is precisely why I have appointed you to be a prophet to
the nations. It isn’t simply because I want
you to. It’s because I know you and what
you are made of.” Familiarity breeds
vocation.
It’s worth noticing
that God knows Jeremiah better than Jeremiah knows himself. “Oh,
my! I can’t do that!” Jeremiah
replied. “Why, I’m only a boy. I wouldn’t
know what to do; I wouldn’t know what to say.
You’ve got the wrong fellow.”
It wasn’t, of course,
the first time that people had thought God blind. When God told Abraham that he and Sarah would
parent a chosen nation, Sarah burst out laughing and Abraham said something to
effect of, “Are you crazy?” When God asked Moses to speak to Pharaoh,
Moses begged off because of disability: “Maybe you haven’t heard, but I
stutter. Send someone else.” When God came to Gideon to command an army,
Gideon said, “Uh, I can’t quite hear
you. We must have a bad connection. You couldn’t be looking for me. My clan is the weakest around, and I am the
smallest in my clan.”
And we have reacted,
on occasion, the same. “Oh, I’m not very good at that.” “Oh, I wouldn’t feel comfortable doing that.” But the fact is, we aren’t always the best
judge of our vocational opportunities, and as all those forebears in the faith
would point out from personal experience, God isn’t all that interested in our
comfort level.
“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…”
“I am with you.”
“I will give you the
words.”
“Do not be afraid.”
Have you ever noticed
how consistently the stress of scripture is against fear? “Do not
let your anxieties deter or silence or paralyze you. What I prepare, I will resource. Do not be afraid.”
It isn’t counsel to
daredevilism. It isn’t that nothing can
hurt us. We aren’t bullet proof. We are, however, held in the securing arms of
the God who made us and knows us intimately.
“Your job,” God tells us, “is to do that for which I purposed you.” Which, of course, is the primary reason we
will be spending the rest of the morning in a process designed to help us
listen carefully for the discernment of our spiritual gifts. God will not ask us to do that which God has
not already equipped us to do. God knew
what Jeremiah was equipped to do – and knows what WE are equipped to do, as well.
“I have given you what you
need. Now, your job is to use what you
have.”
“Today I appoint
you over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy
and to overthrow, to build and to plant.”
It is an interesting
– and perhaps disconcerting – set of verbs.
Some of them point in an uncomfortable – albeit essential –
direction: as in backwards. But we have experience with that kind of
work, as well.
This year, for
example, the fields of our Bee County farm in South Texas looked great. Where the sun and draught of previous years
left parched and burned up sprouts, gentle rains soon after planting this year beckoned
nascent sprigs out into open air, and timely rains throughout the season encouraged
their maturing development all the way to harvest. When we were there in March, the corn and
sorghum plants were already inches high, daubing the otherwise dull gray
landscape with liberal brushstrokes of green.
But it hasn’t always been gently
curving plow lines in the field. When my
father and uncle first took possession of the acres they were thick with brush
and scrub – cactus and mesquite and huisache and sumac – growth that required
the forceful nudge of bulldozers to clear, and the powerful pull of tractors to
uproot and rid of stumps. To get from
there to here required vision, determination, sweat, patience, stamina and
strength. It was ugly, grueling work
that doesn’t take long to appreciate with a casual glance over into neighboring
stretches still left to their brushy devices.
Now, of course, it’s relatively easy
– plowing and planting and spraying and harvesting over smooth and generally
flat land. Cultivating is a very
different proposition from clearing. But
until the clearing is accomplished, very little cultivating can go on.
We forget that, of course. We prefer to think of “clean slates,” “blank
pages,” “fresh canvas,” “new beginnings.” Carpenters and electricians and roofers would
generally rather apply themselves to new construction than remodel old. Who knows what surprises lurk beneath those
boards?
`Preachers aren’t much different. Once upon a time I dreamed of starting a new
church instead of serving an old one.
Who knew what misguided traditions and stultifying habits lurked within
those entrenched congregational systems and stories?
And wasn’t that something of the
allure of our revolutionary forebears?
It was easier to create a new country than to reform an old one.
But as Jeremiah was to learn,
someone better operate a bulldozer if anyone is going to have the opportunity
to sow a seed. “See,” God said to the young prophet, “today
I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to
destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.”
Four verbs of
demolition precede two of construction.
That ratio suggests a reality we will need to keep in mind: demolition is oftentimes the prior and more
substantial work to building something new.
It’s not that such a thing is totally outside of our background. The basic description of our branch of the
historic church is, after all, “protestant” – or “protest-ants” as some in
other parts of the world pronounce it.
Our very understanding of what it means to be the church is born out of
protest. And it was, at least to a large
extent, the church – Congregationalists in particular – that confronted the
practice of slavery in America; the church that served as the incubator of the
Civil Rights movement.
But by and large, we are too nice to
tear much down. It seems impolite –
pushy, presumptuous, untoward – and we are loathe to assert ourselves that
disruptively. What God reminds Jeremiah,
however, is that what already IS must oftentimes be cleared away
before WHAT NEEDS TO BE can find its place. Ministry sometimes takes its first steps
backwards, before it can lead to forward progress – unraveling before re-weaving;
dismantling before rebuilding; uprooting before replanting; calling for silence
before listening for a new and holy Word.
“And I know that you can do it,”
says the Lord, “because I know what you can do – because I…
…know…
…you.”
Where is God’s reign emerging and
appearing, and what is obstructing its way?
What are the gifts that we bring to the ministry emerging, and how are
we being called to use them? God knows.
“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,
and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the
nations. Do not be
afraid…for I am with you. I have put my words in your mouth, and today I appoint you over
nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to
overthrow, to build and to plant.”
“I know you,” says the Lord, “and I
am calling your name.” And suddenly we
can’t shake the tugging notion that we have ministry to do. And the gifts to accomplish it.
Calling. Shhh.
Listen. Do you hear it?