4th Sunday after the Epiphany - C
Jeremiah 1:4-10
"I have put my words in your mouth..."

A “call” is a fearsome thing. I don’t mean a phone call. I mean the sense that comes upon someone that God has some particular thing that they are to do.

It can certainly be a dangerous thing. Sometimes people claim to be called by God as a justification for committing violent acts or for behaving in a way that is crazier than a green kangaroo (that’s a technical term I learned from Carol).

My sister the university librarian says, “Never trust anyone who says they’re called.” The religion section of the library routinely suffers the highest rates of theft. Apparently a sense of call can easily become a sense of entitlement.

Dangers like these are part of the reason that the United Methodist Church among many others has in place an elaborate (some say labyrinthine) set of checks so that a call is carefully tested.

Many people and certainly most of the people who feature in the “call stories” in the Bible aren’t really happy about being called. It is a gift, certainly, but first it is a burden. Moses, Isaiah, Jonah, and even Jesus resist their call. Moses tells God he can’t talk. Isaiah protests that he is a man of unclean lips. Jonah, when told to travel to the northeast and preach to the Nineveh, hops the first ship headed west! Jesus wrestles with his call in Garden of Gethsemane. A call is a fearsome thing.

So Jeremiah is in good company when he protests that he is too young. (The primary interest of the story is not Jeremiah’s age, but his protest and the promises he wins from God with his protest.) It is a fearsome thing to have God’s words “in your mouth.” It is a fearsome thing to be appointed “over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down…to build and to plant.”

We might thank our lucky stars that we are not “called.” If only it were true! But we are the baptized and we are all called “to resist evil, injustice and oppression.” Yes, it’s a fearsome thing and one that we are all engaged in.

But thank God for Jeremiah and thank God for the baptized! What the world have become without Jeremiah? And what will the world become without us?