January 31, 2010 - Epiphany 4

God Equips Us for God's Call
Jeremiah 1:4-10
Epiphany 4C – January 31, 2010

About a month or so ago, Andy & I watched the movie Sunshine Cleaning. It's the story of Rose, a single mother, struggling to make ends meet for herself & her young son, Oscar, on what she gets paid as a waitress. Her son's dad, her high school sweetheart, who she's still involved with, even though he just happens to be married to someone else, is a cop. And at a crime scene one day, he overhears how much the people who come in to clean up after all the evidence has been gathered make. It's a lot of money, so he suggests that she look into it, that she leave behind waitressing and get into a new line of work.

Well, not surprisingly, Rose resists. Cleaning up the scenes of crime and/or death doesn't really strike her fancy. It's not something she's ever seen herself doing. It's not something she's ever even imagined wanting to do. Who would? But eventually, out of a desperate need to make more money to provide Oscar with what he needs, Rose stumbles her way into the bio-hazard clean-up business. And while she certainly struggles in the beginning, pretty soon, she realizes she has found her calling! She's got a knack for the business end and a stomach for the actual work itself, but beyond that, she realizes, as she's trying to explain what it is that she does to some old “friends” from high school, she realize that what she does makes a real difference in people's lives. In the face of grief and loss, Rose offers people dignity and compassion and closure in a very practical way.

It's funny how often you hear stories like this. The details may not be quite so unusual, but it's not so unusual to hear people talk about how they fell into a line of work, how it was nothing that they ever really saw themselves doing, that they might even have resisted it, and yet...
Take this story of Jeremiah, for instance. Who knows what he was doing up to this point, but one day, the Word of the Lord comes to him, saying “Guess what, Jeremiah! I've got a job with your name written all over it! I've appointed you to be a prophet to the nations.”

Now Jeremiah's still a young man, “only a boy,” he says, with all of life's hopes and dreams and possibilities stretched out before him, and whatever it is he was thinking of doing with his life, “prophet” wasn't it. It wasn't on his list of career options to explore. “Me, a prophet, God? You must be kidding! I'm too young,” Jeremiah protests. “I don't know how to speak!”

Poor Jeremiah! This call from God comes out of left field for him. He wasn't prepared. He feels inadequate, not up to the task. You can almost hear him pleading with God, objecting - “You go ahead and find somebody else, somebody with more experience, somebody with more wisdom, somebody with more charisma – I'm not the guy you're looking for.”

Jeremiah resists, because God's call seems too big for him; this whole prophet thing isn't exactly in his wheelhouse, if you know what I mean.

You know, this objection to God's call is not unique to Jeremiah. Pretty much every time God shows up out of the blue to call someone to do God's work in the Bible, they resist. Moses, Gideon, Isaiah, Jonah – they all felt like what they had to offer wasn't enough for what the job required. It's part of the pattern – God calls, people resist.

And I was wondering this morning, how many of us can relate? How many of us have felt God calling us to do something that seemed beyo nd us, that we have resisted. Maybe you have said to God, “I'm too young, I don't know what I'm doing.” Or “I'm too old, let somebody else do it.” Or perhaps, “I'm just too busy right now God – don't you see all the stuff I have to do from morning til night?”

Or maybe the issue it's more that you've never sensed that call on your life. Most of us don't have the big, dramatic, obvious moment that Jeremiah did, when God suddenly shows up and speaks to us in unmistakably clear ways to show us God's plan and our path. And the church hasn't always done a good job of helping us to realize that we are all called. If I asked you to tell me about your call story, my guess is that most of you would look at me with confusion, because we tend to talk about God's call only in regards to pastors or priests or nuns, people who serve in a church profession.

But we are all called by God to do God's work. You can be called into teaching or finance or plumbing or medicine, into painting or landscaping or mechanics or engineering or any number of fields. We don't usually talk about any of these things as a call from God. We figure we landed where we did because we had a special interest in it or a skill set that suited us for a particular role. Maybe, like Rose, somebody suggested a path to us & somehow stumbled into a situation that fit like a hand in glove. What we don't usually realize, until after the fact much of the time, is that God was working in and through all of those normal, ordinary things. God is the one who gave you that special interest or skill. Perhaps God was speaking through that friend or family member who pointed out a new way.

Part of what I want us to get from this story about Jeremiah is that God has called us all. God says to Jeremiah, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, and before you were born, I consecrated you” (Jer. 1:5). And that's true for us too. Before we even entered into this world, God knew us. God had a plan for us. And in the waters of baptism, God seals the deal. God claims us for God's very own children, and in the moment of baptism, we are commissioned. We are appointed. We are sent. God says to us, “I have a plan for you. There's something out there that is just for you.” And it's not just about a job or career or even a task you are specially equipped to do. It's more a way of being in the world, a way of looking at the world around us and seeing the possibilities to partner with God, to be co-workers with God at bringing God's kingdom nearer, here & now, in the places we find ourselves every day. It's about loving God and loving our neighbors as ourselves, and then looking for the ways that we can show that love, in our daily lives. God may have plucked Jeremiah up out of his ordinary day-to-day life, and God may do that for some of us here, but for most of us, the big picture is that God calls us right where we are, to make a difference in the lives of people in the world around us – in our families and our friendships, with our neighbors, with our co-workers, with the teller at the bank, the waitress at the restaurant, the cashier at the grocery store. All around us are opportunities to live out the call God has given us.

So, how is God calling you?