Jeremiah 1:4-10
Hebrews 12:18-29
Luke 13:10-17

God be in my words and in my speaking; God be in our hearts and in our understanding. AMEN.

There’s a curious tension among the three lessons appointed for this Sunday. We start with the calling of the prophet Jeremiah, which makes the point that God makes decisions based, not on the criteria that make sense to our limited human minds, but upon the mysterious, indefinable knowledge of God. “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you…” From there, we move to the passage from the Epistle to the Hebrews, which (somewhat cryptically) reminds its readers of the mystery and power of God to which, even though we cannot fully understand it, we best respond with reverence and awe. And then, there’s the Gospel lesson, in which Jesus makes a sharp point about keeping the letter and not the spirit of God’s Law. The tension, for me, is in the contrast between the emphasis on the unfathomable, mysterious mind of God expressed in the first two lessons, and Jesus’ relentlessly practical, even pragmatic, actions in the Gospel lesson.

I’ve always identified with the story of Jeremiah’s call. The feeling, so poignantly expressed in the passage, that one is unworthy and unequipped for whatever God has in mind, is a familiar one to me. When God tells Jeremiah that he has been chosen to be a prophet, Jeremiah protests: “Ah, Lord God! Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy.” The protest, that denial — “Me? You can’t possibly mean me! But I’m ordinary!” — is echoed in many of the Biblical stories recounting God’s calling of someone; and I think we often have that reaction, too. Sometimes, even, we have that reaction to the very idea that God — God! — might call our flawed and sinful selves to any task or work. But God does call Jeremiah, even if he is only a boy; and God tells him not to be afraid, and promises that the Divine presence will be with him to strengthen and encourage him. “Do not be afraid, for I am with you to deliver you,” God promises; and with a touch, he equips Jeremiah for the ministry to which he is appointed: “Now I have put my words in your mouth. See, 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.”

Now, if you’re thinking that that must have meant that all Jeremiah’s doubts disappeared, and that, reassured and confident in God’s service, he ventured forth into a successful ministry, read the rest of the book. Even a powerful experience of call and affirmation wasn’t enough to shield Jeremiah from doubts; and even God’s ongoing presence in Jeremiah’s life didn’t mean that every time he spoke a word from the Lord, he was listened to! Much of the book of Jeremiah prophesies disaster and destruction for the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, and Jeremiah himself is often at odds with the leadership of the kingdoms; he gets arrested, flogged, he even ends up imprisoned in a dry pit; and when a king finally shows him the kind of respect and care one might expect a prophet of God to receive, it is King Nebuchadrezzar of Babylon, and not an Israelite at all. God assured Jeremiah that the Divine presence was with him, but that clearly didn’t mean that the things God asked Jeremiah to undertake met with success, or led to Jeremiah’s being respected and revered. There must have been many times when Jeremiah found himself wondering whether what was happening could possibly be what God intended. In those moments, it’s easy to imagine that Jeremiah’s faith must have been more hope than certainty. It seems to me that the Psalm appointed for today reflects the kind of faith I imagine Jeremiah had — a deep understanding of God’s presence constantly struggling with the uncertainties and doubts of a limited human perception. The Psalm is balanced between statements of faith and pleas for deliverance from trials and fears. “In you, O Lord, have I taken refuge” — an affirmation of faith. “Let me never be ashamed” — a plea. “Be my strong rock, a castle to keep me safe” — surely, this is a prayer, a cri de Coeur, — balanced by the affirmation: “You are my crag and my stronghold.”

I think we may spend a lot of our time in a similar kind of faith place. Like the centurion in one of the healing stories, who is told, “Only believe and all will be well,” we, like him, struggle with belief and fear: “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief.” We know that God loves us; we believe that Christ redeemed us; we understand that our sins are forgiven; but we don’t always behave (or feel) as though any of those things was really true. God may touch our lives and call us toward some task or project; the Spirit may awaken in us some insight, some new vision; Christ’s compassion may transform our hearts or our understanding in some particular way — and we may, or may not, have the courage, dedication, confidence, and audacity to move in the direction we are called, or to share the vision or understanding with others. It sounds so arrogant, so self-righteous, to say: God told me to do thus and so, even if we’re only saying it to ourselves.

But, as the author of Hebrews points out: “You have not come to something that can be touched…” The God in whom we believe (oh, help our unbelief!) is not something solid, corporeal, tangible. Even the incarnate Christ, Jesus, is not someone we can touch — now, today — the way his disciples and detractors could during his human lifetime. God — Creator, Christ, and Spirit — is not a huge and looming presence for us; and our interactions with God are subtle, mysterious, and require of us intentional efforts of discernment and interpretation. And because we are (as a culture, and — often — as individuals) so suspicious of that which cannot be proved, and (at the same time) deeply resistant to truths others assert (without what we consider adequate proof), it can be very, very hard for us to describe our experiences in terms of God and faith. I recall being put on the spot, at a friend’s party, by one of her aggressively Evangelical cousins who, having apparently been primed that I was an Episcopal priest, opened a conversation with me by asking: “So. What’s God up to in your life?” I didn’t have the kind of answer he expected on the tip of my tongue; but it didn’t exactly matter, because he was quite sure that he knew what God really wanted me to be doing, and wasn’t shy about instructing me.

Often, I suspect, when we endeavor to engage our life and experiences in terms of our faith journey and God’s will for us, we end up using a kind of mental and emotional shorthand. There are things that we do (and sometimes have done for a very long time) that nourish our faith and prayer: receiving the Eucharist; reading the Daily Office; spending quiet time in meditation; contemplating nature; journaling; listening to or making music; making art; reading the Bible. We may or may not be comfortable talking with others about these things; we may or may not find it easy to identify insights or convictions that come out of these practices as a word from God. We may have ideas and assumptions about what it means to be a person of faith — and how other people of faith ought to act; and we may not have examined these very deeply. Today’s Gospel story connects to this train of thought, because — although Luke relates the incident in a way that places the leader of the synagogue clearly in the wrong — what’s at the heart of the clash is the tension between traditional and expected practices and an inspired innovation. In addition to being one of the “Big Ten,” as an old seminary professor of mine referred to the Commandments — keeping the Sabbath was a fundamental and identifying practice of the Hebrew community. There were necessary exceptions to the Sabbath ban on work — more of them, I suspect, for people without the resources to make other arrangements than for the affluent faithful; but keeping the Sabbath was part of how one could identify him or herself as a member of the children of Israel. Nonetheless, when Jesus was confronted with a crippled woman, he felt transforming compassion and took action to alleviate her suffering. It was controversial action: he cured her on the Sabbath — and not only on the Sabbath, but in the synagogue where he was teaching. So it was a public action, (and in the context of his time, that made it also a political one); it was an action that could be interpreted — even before his inflammatory defense — as defiance of the authority of the Temple. The point Jesus was making (and which was not lost on either his followers or his opponents) was that the rituals and practices that were taught and observed should not become more important than that to which they were intended to point. That is, the Law, the Torah isn’t God; and the Holiness Code should (only and always) serve to bring people closer to God, and should never serve to exclude God from their lives and experience. Perhaps the question this sharp exchange raises for us, in our lives of faith, is what radical innovations are we being urged toward, and are we letting our comfortable practices and unexamined assumptions distract or deflect us from whatever God may have in mind for us? It seems to me that we are poised — politically, environmentally, economically — on the edge of a period of tremendous upheaval and change; and if so, then surely God is calling and urging us, individually and collectively, toward some new vision, some new balance. So… Are we listening? Or are we, like the leader in the synagogue, so sure of ourselves and our comfortable practices — or so threatened by anything that appears to run counter to our familiar patterns — that we are not only oblivious of but also hostile and resistant to the radical innovations God intends?

I don’t have neat answers to these questions. And I don’t have a clear vision of the transformation I do believe God is urging us toward. We (collectively) may be, like Jeremiah, appointed “over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant;” but the specifics are obscure. There’s only a sense — not something that can be touched — that changes are inevitable, and a deep and abiding conviction that the Spirit is present to inspire and guide us, and to help us shape whatever is coming into a world where Christ’s transforming love and the abundance of Creation is shared, justly, among all of God’s children.

May it be so. Come Lord Jesus. AMEN

Sermon preached by Beth Hilgartner
at St. Barnabas’, Norwich, Vt.