4 Epiphany C January 31, 2016
Luther Memorial Church Seattle, WA
The Rev. Julie G. Hutson
Jeremiah 1: 4-10 + Psalm 71: 1-6 + 1 Corinthians 13: 1-13
Luke 4: 21-30
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
I have no other way to begin this sermon with integrity other than to tell you how strange it feels to know it will be four months before I preach again. Before I have the incredible privilege of being with you and letting the Spirit be present in my speaking and your hearing and our receiving the Word together. Earlier this week someone asked me to share with them the story of my call to ordained ministry. That hasn’t happened for awhile, but it used to happen regularly, when I was going through the candidacy process. “Tell us about your sense of call” the candidacy committee would invite. Now I wish I’d had the chance to ask them to tell me about theirs….all of them. Call stories are fascinating. Pastor Hoffman, also serves as the chair of our synod’s candidacy committee, so I know that he’s had the opportunity to hear LOTS of call stories.
In Scripture, a call story takes a usual pattern. God calls a person; that person objects to being called and may even offer reasons they should not be called; God offers assurances; the person moves forward, eventually. As if they had any choice at all. The prophets have call stories, the apostles, Mary, Jonah, Moses…and today we heard the call story of the prophet Jeremiah in our first reading. God calls Jeremiah, before he was even born, and Jeremiah objects that he is but a child. God promises to be with him, and touches Jeremiah’s mouth in the midst of the promise….making Jeremiah a prophet, or the literal Hebrew word meant, a mouthpiece for God.
When we hear call stories, Jeremiah’s or your pastor’s or a seminary student’s, it’s tempting to lump them into the same category as those called to vocation within the church. Those of us who earn our living here. But the reality is that there are approximately 80 called people of God in this building this morning. From the very young to the very old, we have all been called in the waters of our baptism to be God’s mouthpieces in the world. To be prophets. To tell the story.
The truth is, at least as I’ve experienced it, that those of us whose vocation is rooted in the church have an easier time of telling that story – because we’ve been offered a platform – an expected place to witness to the grace and mercy of God. It’s trickier for the rest of you – I know, because it took a long time for me to actually go to seminary. But our day to day lives don’t often offer a chance for us to break open Scriptures…to say that God is active and moving and present among us.
It didn’t always go well when Jesus did that very thing, either. Our Gospel reading from Luke today picks up on the story we heard in last week’s Gospel. Jesus has begun his ministry and he goes to Nazareth, to his hometown. To the very synagogue where he had been faithfully raised. He picks up the scroll, opens it, reads from the prophet Isaiah, sits down, and as Vicar Michael reminded us last Sunday….THEN Jesus drops this bombshell. “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” The text says, though, that it goes well from there….all spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came out of his mouth. I mean, that’s good, right? Jesus doesn’t get into hot water until he starts to talk about the ways God’s grace is known through the outsider, not through the home grown prophet. He tells of how in the midst of the famine in Israel, Elijah was sent to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. And when there were many suffering from leprosy, the only one cleansed was Naaman, who was from Syria. Sidon and Syria were not places where the Hebrew people thought God was at work. Sidon and Syria were filled with outsiders. With the others. When those folks in the synagogue listening to Jesus heard this, they changed their tune….no longer amazed and speaking well of him, they are filled with rage and they drive him out of the town and to the edge of a cliff.
Today, all of these years later, we still live in a world where fear of the other….that they would have our fair share or that they would get what we deserved….drives us to build walls, literal and otherwise. To say to the immigrant and refugee that as long as they stay on their side of the wall, no matter how degrading and dangerous it might be, we can all co-exist. Jesus has something else entirely to say. This pronouncement in the synagogue is Jesus’ first sermon, if you will, but it won’t be the last time he talks about caring for the outcast, the oppressed, the poor, the imprisoned, the orphaned, the widow. And he won’t just talk about it, he will choose tax collectors as treasurers and sinners as his dinner companions. Thanks be to God….he will preach, teach, and live grace rather than judgment.
The danger, the challenge of being called by God to tell the story is that the truth of the Gospel can be hard to hear. Often it happens that it is hardest for those who know us best to hear it from us. Jeremiah must have known this and might have found some comfort in God’s promise to him: “Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you.”
This is also God’s promise to us. That God is with us, God’s beloved children and God’s called prophets, God’s mouthpieces. So when it becomes difficult to speak God’s message, to relay the Gospel truths, God is with us; we need not be afraid.
If we had the time this morning, I would sit with each of you and ask you to tell me your call story. To what has God called you? Because we’ve known each other for seven years, I know many of the answers. Some of you are called to share the Gospel in song and in music. Some of you are called to share the Gospel by raising up children in the faith – your own and those in this community. Some of you are called as mighty prayer warriors….love on its knees before God. Some of you are called as artists, to paint and create and craft beauty which is from God. Some of you are called to teach and to guide. Some of you are called to be ministers of Word and Sacrament. Some of you are called as encouragers….to lift up those whose hearts are breaking or who are discouraged. Some of you are called to build things and some of you are planters other healers.
But if we had time, I would want to hear YOU tell the story. Dear sister or brother, I would ask, tell me about your call.
While I am away I hope that you will share those call stories with one another. When I return, I hope that you will share them with me.
It would be so much easier to answer God’s call and to live into it if we knew that everyone would receive us with favor and speak well of us. But the reality is, that the Gospel message may mean we are driven off of a cliff, or out of our circle of friends, or that we are shunned by our family, or that we are not invited to sit with the cool kids at lunch. But the good news of this call is that we are called by a God of love…of wide, inclusive love for all people and for the whole creation. So when we speak and when we sing and when we pray and when we act, we act in love and we act because we are loved.
Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth.
These familiar words are promises to a community of faith, not to individuals or to couples getting married. Paul writes to the believers at Corinth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Called people of God….beloved community….you are prophets….you have a story to tell….but you are not sent alone. We are bound together in a community of faith…in love that we only know in part now because it is wide and wondrous beyond our imagining. May that love inspire you, enliven you, comfort you, and embolden you…because it is the love of God in Christ Jesus, known to us in the Holy Spirit. And it is love that never ends.
Thanks be to God. Amen.