GOD’S DAUNTING GIFT OF VOCATION
Sermon by the Rev. Theodore L. Lewis
All Saints’ Church, Chevy Chase, Maryland, January 31, 2010

Jeremiah 1.4-10
Luke 4.14-30

As the body of Christ we are given a vocation, a call to fulfil the Lord’s purpose for us. Our vocation may not be easy; we may recoil from it. But as we respond to it the Lord will be with us to deliver us, as instanced by Jeremiah, by Jesus himself, and by the church in past ages.

Our first reading this morning is from Jeremiah, his call to his prophetic ministry. It is on page 688 in the pew Bibles, to which please turn. In the interest of full disclosure, this passage has a special meaning for me, going back to the beginning of my ordained ministry. Just out of seminary, I had run through most of my savings. My job, as curate in a church near here, was anything but secure. And I had a wife and small son to support. We were still living over in Virginia, near the seminary, involving additional stress. We found a house near the church but at a considerably higher rent. So I had to approach the vestry about authorizing it—with no assurance of the outcome. At the vestry meeting, in the midst of my trepidation, the key verse from our Jeremiah passage rose in my mind. Al tiru miphenehem, ki iteka ani lehatsileka…. My rendering from the Hebrew heads today’s bulletin: “Do not be filled with fear before them, for I am with you to deliver you, says the Lord.” And I prevailed with the vestry that time, although the Lord was not, and still is not, finished showing me that he is with me to deliver me, even in extremis.

But what about Jeremiah? As we heard and can see in the pew Bibles, his initial response to the Lord’s call was to recoil, to protest his inadequacy: “I am but a youth.” So initially Isaiah and Moses and likewise St. Peter also recoiled from their vocations, out of their sense of inadequacy, of sinfulness To Jeremiah’s protest the Lord replied: “Do not be filled with fear… But to what extent, we may ask, was the Lord really with him, to deliver him? On the face of it, as the world sees such things, his assurance to Jeremiah was not fulfilled very well. For Jeremiah’s vocation, like that of the other prophets, was to see the truth unflinchingly and to proclaim it unreservedly: the truth about the people’s inner condition, the truth about the external consequences for them. The truth was that the people were deeply corrupt, given over to Idolatry and other unfaithfulnesses, oppressing the poor. And what lay in store for them was the destruction of Jerusalem and the nation by the Babylonians and their own exile. These were not things they wanted to hear about, any more than we want to hear about our shortcomings or disasters looming over us. Thus their reaction against Jeremiah was sharp. At no time was he heeded or even listened to—except perhaps by his scribe Baruch. Instead he was reviled, cast into prison, and nearly killed. When Jerusalem fell he was carried off to Egypt with some of the exiles. After that he is heard of no more.

So was the Lord really with him, to deliver him? He himself evidently doubted. For in chapter 20 he speaks openly of his despair.

Cursed be the day on which I was born…,
cursed be the man who brought the news to my father: “A son is born to you”….
Let that man be like the cities which the Lord overthrew without pity…
because he did not kill me in the womb,
so my mother would have been my grave, and her womb forever great.
Why did I come forth from the womb to see toil and sorrow, and spend my days in shame?

But this is not the end of the story. For through all Israel’s many and great vicissitudes his words were preserved; we have them today. And they were preserved because, along with those of the other prophets, they performed a vital function. They enabled Israel to see that the disasters which overtook it were not just random and therefore meaningless. Instead they showed that God was active in the world, that events were meaningful, that Israel’s faith could be sustained. And they show it also for us. Surely this was all that Jeremiah himself would have asked.

And this pattern may be seen also in Jesus, turning now to page 1206 in the pew Bibles. I do not mean to subordinate Jesus to Jeremiah; still Jeremiah affords a lens for viewing Jesus’ ministry. (Nor is the connection unbiblical. When in Matthew’s Gospel Jesus asks the disciples, “Who do men say that the Son of man is?” they reply, “Some say John the Baptist, other say Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”) Our Gospel for today describes how Jesus, following his baptism and temptation, launches his ministry in Galilee, which brings him to his hometown of Nazareth. On the Sabbath in the synagogue he stands to read Isaiah’s great declaration, in effect the charter for his own ministry.

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind,
to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.

Then he sits to teach. He begins, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” Initially the townspeople are impressed. But then they reflect that, coming from one of their own, his gracious words show up their rusticity, their inadequacy. The outcome of this is their demand for a demonstration of the healings and other works that they hear he has performed elsewhere. He responds that they should not expect to be pleased with him, prophets not being honored in their own country. Further, it is not those who think they are entitled who are healed but those whom the Lord has chosen, as with the widow of Zarephath and Naaman the Syrian, who were not even Israelites. But instead of accepting these truths and becoming obedient to them, the townspeople rage. They run Jesus out of town, threatening to kill him or at least inflict bodily harm.

One might suppose that Jesus was naïve in speaking as he did in the synagogue, that he should have known that his words would provoke resentment. But the right view is surely that he did know and went ahead and said them anyway, because they were the truth. And as himself the truth, he even more than Jeremiah was bound to declare it, no matter what the consequences. To be sure, Luke in his account seems to present this episode as something of an aberration, with Jesus’ ministry being favorably received before and after. But as his ministry proceeded, the response of opposition and rejection proved to be not the exception but the rule, culminating in his arrest and crucifixion.

Jesus, unlike Jeremiah and other prophets, did not recoil from his call even initially; as Messiah he could not. Even at Gethsemane he did not shrink but only asked if this cup could be taken from him. Otherwise the pattern is similar: speaking the truth fully, meeting with utter opposition as a result. And the same question arises also with regard to him: was God indeed with him to deliver him? From the world’s standpoint and even from a short-term perspective, the answer would be no. The outcome of his ministry was failure, with his dying on the cross and his disciples themselves abandoning him. But from God’s standpoint and indeed from the standpoint of the ages the answer is yes. For God changed the outcome, raising him from the dead and in so doing changing the world, and us with it.

This same pattern of declaring the truth, experiencing opposition, and being upheld by the Lord, has appeared also in the history of the church. The prime example is to be found in the first centuries, under the Roman Empire. During this time the church, based on God’s love for all in Christ, modeled a society that was alternative to that of the Roman state, based ultimately on subjection and force. So the Roman state out of its inner insecurity perceived it as a threat, seeking by all means to wipe it out. The main instrument of the Roman persecutors was the demand to sacrifice to Caesar as a god. Refusal would mean not only the loss of church buildings and other properties. It would mean also horrible tortures and death for its members, thereby disrupting its outreach and ministries. Would it not be better to conform, at least outwardly, so as to avoid these things? But the church did refuse. It understood that to participate in emperor-worship was to deny Christ and that one could not so deny him and remain a Christian. It understood also that if it conformed in this matter even outwardly, it would be folded into the surrounding culture and eventually disappear; thus we would not be its members today. Those individual Christians to whom it fell to make the refusal became the noble army of martyrs praising the Lord in the Te Deum. And in the end it was the church that prevailed, obliging the state to issue its edict of toleration in the year 311. So it can be seen that the Lord was with these martyrs as he was with Jesus, to deliver them. To my mind they, more than Church Fathers such as Augustine, are the mark of the early church.

So also in the Reformation. It was not easy for Martin Luther, a simple monk, to stand against the papacy, backed as it was by the Holy Roman Emperor and the power of the state. Yet he did stand, because he could do no other. He nearly lost his life. But he opened the way to the recovery of the biblical tradition, which had been overlaid by the practises and beliefs of the Middle Ages.

What then is our vocation today, our vocation being primarily as a church, for only as members of a church are we fully individuals? As a church we are confronted with gross deviations from the gospel of Christ, from the proclamation of him as our unique Savior, deviations in the world and evidently in the larger church as well. But confronting them, by proclaiming the true gospel in the face of them, could be costly. It could involve the loss of property, the dispersal of membership, the suspension of ministries. Should we confront them anyway, trusting in the Lord to be with us and deliver us? That is not a question for me to answer. It is however for me to point you for the answer to the Scriptures, in the light of which only can we work out our salvation. Let us pray.

Gracious Lord, you have set us in the midst of difficult times and given us difficult tasks to perform, from which we are apt recoil. Grant that by patience and comfort of your holy word we may see what you have appointed us to do, and not shy away from it. And grant us to know that in spite of all appearances you are with us to deliver us, and moreover to rejoice that we too, even we, are called by you, so that we may come at the last into your eternal kingdom. This we ask in the name of your dear Son our Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

Faithfully, Fr. Ted