Call Waiting

Jeremiah 1:1-10

By

Reverend Litton Logan

January 28, 2007

Scriptures:

¹ The words of Jeremiah son of Hilkiah, of the priests who were in Anathoth in the land of Benjamin, ² to whom the word of the LORD came in the days of King Josiah son of Amon of Judah, in the thirteenth year of his reign. ³ It came also in the days of King Jehoiakim son of Josiah of Judah, and until the end of the eleventh year of King Zedekiah son of Josiah of Judah, until the captivity of Jerusalem in the fifth month.

Jeremiah’s Call and Commission

⁴ Now the word of the LORD came to me saying,

⁵  “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,

    and before you were born I consecrated you;

    I appointed you a prophet to the nations.”

⁶ Then I said, “Ah, Lord GOD! Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy.” ⁷But the LORD said to me,

    “Do not say, ‘I am only a boy’;

    for you shall go to all to whom I send you,

    and you shall speak whatever I command you.

⁸  Do not be afraid of them,

    for I am with you to deliver you,

says the LORD.”

⁹ Then the LORD put out his hand and touched my mouth; and the LORD said to me,

    “Now I have put my words in your mouth.

¹⁰ 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.” Jeremiah 1:1--10 (NRSV

Sermon:

          My son and several of my friends have call waiting on their phones.  My current cell phone came with this feature--I hate call waiting.  In the middle of a conversation, with my son or someone else, click, click, “Just a minute, I’ve got another call coming in.”  So, right in the middle of a stream of thought off they go and I am left hanging and trying to hold on to my thoughts, which gets harder and harder as time goes by.

          All this modern communications stuff such as voice mail, answering machines, emails, instant messages, call waiting, as  beneficial as they may be at times, they are none the less a source of annoyance and frustration.  Any more, it is hard to escape unwanted and annoying communications.  It seems telemarketers, people with cell phones, global email, global pagers, spammers, etc. can and will reach you no matter what.

          I’ve often wondered if some of the OT prophets and maybe even Jesus felt over burden by divine communications.  I am sure the prophet Jeremiah did, he says so.  Imagine if you will that right in the middle of a conversation with some one Jeremiah gets this inner sense—what many call a voice—talking to him.  Can’t you hear him mid-conversation with a friend as he says, “Excuse me, just a minute, God’s calling me and needs to talk to me, hold on, I’ll get right back to you.” 

          Can you imagine Jeremiah sleeping, having lunch, reading a book, or looking out over the country side and suddenly he hears it again, that persistent inner voice confronting him and calling him to a destiny that he does not want.  On one occasion, however, the inner voice like some telemarketer says, “Have I got an opportunity just for you?  Jeremiah because you are one of a special group of people, I have an opportunity of a lifetime.  This opportunity will put you at odds with everyone you know.  This opportunity will cause people to try to kill you, they will beat you, and they will throw you down a well and leave you if you accept this opportunity.  In fact, there is a good chance you will be assassinated or at the very least exiled to Egypt if you avail yourself of this opportunity.” Truth be told, God didn’t tell Jeremiah about all the danger he would be in.  God just said he would be with him to deliver him in whatever lay ahead.

Jeremiah’s call came to him as a young priest from a family with a long line of priests.  His call was most likely a gradual coming of awareness that culminated one day in this highly imaginative and stylized call we’ve heard read today. Yet his call was so all consuming and pervasive that it seemed to be a providential claim on his life even before he was born. Like prophets before him, he baulked at his call and made excuses—he said he was too young.  God told him that what he was to say would carry God’s authority and that authority would make up for what that he lacked in age or experience.   Moreover, God told him not to be afraid of what lay ahead because God would see him through.

          Jeremiah’s call comes at a time when things were looking up for the people of Judah.  The Assyrian empire, which had dominated Judah for so long, was all but over and for all practical purposes; Judah was an independent nation again.  There was much optimism in the land with national autonomy and rebounding prosperity. Many of the in-crowd prophets were speaking of coming glory days of blessings, wealth, and prosperity.  Jeremiah, however, it seems did not join in the hurrah of the day.  Instead, he talked about another enemy from the North that was a threat to Judah, especially given the nationalistic and immoral pathways Judah was pursuing.  Jeremiah’s insights and his prophecies caused quit a reaction. 

A few years after Jeremiah started his prophetic ministry the so-called original book of Deuteronomy was supposedly discovered sealed away in the Temple during a renovation project.  This find prompted a rash of religious and political reforms.  The renewed zeal for covenant and reform along with national prosperity drowned out Jeremiah’s words of warning. 

In the book of Jeremiah, it appears that Jeremiah’s response to the Deuteronomic reform was somewhat ambivalent.  Nonetheless, Jeremiah took on a preaching ministry to popularize the reforms.  However, these reforms in Jeremiah’s estimation didn’t go far enough and therefore didn’t set well with his sense of God’s spiritual and moral claim on the national life of Judah.  Because Jeremiah was a young and relatively unimportant prophet, he was discounted and ignored for a while.  This, however, did not shut him up or stop his confrontations.

Jeremiah’s sense was that his people and their leaders were becoming morally and spiritually complacent and falling into old patterns of accommodation with other religions and outside cultural influences all for political and economic gains.  These accommodations and their resulting prosperity fostered political oppression and exploitation of the least powerful in society, and in general, weakened people’s moral, religious, and spiritual resolve.  This weakened moral, religious, and spiritual resolve lay at the heart of Jeremiah’s prophecies.  His prophetic voice often put him at odds with his family, friends, and colleagues and placed him in grave peril.  Yet, he persisted even amid doubt and uncertainty; he never turned his back on his call.  He griped and complained about it almost constantly, but he did not abandon his call or God’s message.

          “Call Waiting” didn’t distract Jeremiah.  He was not distracted by the calls from the so-called voices of reason of his day.  He was not interrupted by calls for personal security and comfort and peer esteem. He didn’t listen to the calls from his family and friends who marketed conformance to the status quo and moderation in his preaching.  He avoided calls and admonishments from his superiors and colleagues to get on board with the reforms and become a good team player at the expense of God’s message and his call.  Nope, Jeremiah stayed online with God, stayed focused on God’s claim on his life and God’s word for his time and his people.

          In a minor way, I identify with Jeremiah and his plight.  I too had a sense of an unavoidable destiny in ministry that culminated at age seventeen. Mine however was maybe not so providential.  Mine was a given to me by my Aunt Mattie and my paternal grandmother Lottie.  Both of these women decided that one of the Logan men was not going to be a redneck and a knot-head.  I was elected for some reason.  (A footnote to their ambitions from me:  Ladies, especially you young women, it is impossible to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, but you can make a functional purse out of a sow’s ear.  Therefore, if you see some guy and you think he has potential if only he had you in his life, forget it.  No matter how well he turns out; he starts as a pig’s ear, he will remain a pig’s ear.)

Over my formative years, these two women selectively steered me and positioned me to be in church, involved in religious activities and out front.  They knew where I was going and my protests to go in another direction meant little to them, especially my grandmother Lottie.

          I didn’t want to be the song leader for youth week.  I didn’t want to be president of the youth group.  I didn’t want to hang around with the kids that went to Royal Ambassadors, Baptist Training Union, or Sunday school.  I didn’t want to take piano lessons.  I wanted to hunt, fish, play ball, and prove my manhood on something other than whoosie, church stuff.  Even when I tried to run from my call as a young adult it didn’t’ work—I was miserable.  At age 32, one day while out jogging, I gave in and started my educational processes leading to ordination. 

          I am not unique in this.  I’ve talked to hundreds of people who have told similar stories about their call to ministry as young people and their attempts to avoid the call.  Did you know that the average age of entering seminarians today is between 35-40 and more than half of all seminaries are over age 30?  Thank God, women now make up over half of entering seminarians but even these women are on average around 39 years old while entering men are 37.  All Protestant denominations as well as the Catholics are experiencing critical shortage of clergy. 

          Looking at these figures, it appears that God has had to reach back one full generation to find people whose parents valued and took an active and responsible role in their children’s religious education to find a few prophetic voices for our day.

          However, our scriptures today concern Jeremiah’s call and the statistics I’ve shared with you are about those called to full-time ministry, sort of an over-plus to the normal call each Christian receives.

Let’s me speak for a moment about each Christian’s call. Remember that moment in time when we felt the Holy Spirit at work in our lives?  Remember when we came to understand the special nature of God’s claim on us?  That moment carried with it, not only great joy in our relationship to God but it carried a call of divine responsibility with inherent costs.  It seems to me that fewer and fewer people in our nation are willing to step up and assume the divine responsibility of their call to God in Jesus Christ in spite of God’s blessing of this nation.

          Over the last seventy-five years, America has enjoyed great prosperity, political power, and economic growth.  We are the world’s economic, cultural, and scientific leader. Yet, the best social indicators tell us that our nation’s morality has declined to a very dangerous level--decay has set in that makes us vulnerable to our enemies and cultural accommodations, not unlike those in Jeremiah’s day.  We see this in increasing crime rates, growth in sin industries, illegitimate birth rates, drug and alcohol abuse, tolerance of the intolerable; more and more marriages ending in divorce caused by adultery, indicating a lack of moral commitment to marriage and family, etc.  This nation is in big, big trouble beyond the corruption and ineptitude of its government.  It appears, we are like many great nations before us--we are decaying morally from the inside.  Our nation and its people are selling out their moral and spiritual resolve to political correctness, multiculturalism, and personal decadence just as the people of Jeremiah’s day.  Why is this happening?

          That answer is easy; people refuse to respond to God’s fundamental moral and spiritual claim on their lives, especially during times of prosperity, comfort, and relative safety.  This is increasingly the case among many so-called religious people.  We have highly religious people in our nation who refuse to listen to the Jeremiahs in our times of plenty, prosperity, and relative safety.  People worship individuality and feel-good religion promoted by the optimistic, materialism of so-called modern prophets of God, not unlike the prophets of Jeremiah’s day.  All the while, the moral foundation of this nation is being eroded and awful consequences loom on the horizon.

Religion in America frequently becomes a form of justification for decadent affluence or escapism and self-pleasuring.  People long to participate in self-aggrandizing religion, which promises status and eternal security without spiritual and moral substance rather than devote themselves to God’s claim to do the hard work of justice, morality, compassion, mercy, and wholeness for all the people of this world.  

People choose safety in the herd, which is heading for moral and spiritual destruction. Christians as a rule do not want to stand out, be different in ways that make a real difference in the physical, moral, and spiritual quality of life for all.  Christians shy away from living the life of a prophet with only a divine, internal compass to guide them.  Yes, there are many religious folks in this nation but various moral and spiritual indicators tell me few want to be guided by the Holy Spirit of God. Too many people today would rather be guided by the spirit of western, Christian culture and its gospel of prosperity.  And, for the want of a few prophets to make the stand, to speak the voice of God to an immoral, greedy and complacent generation our country and many of its people are heading down a path that seems right but the ends there of are death.  For a lack of prophets, who are willing to reach out to the moral and spiritually needy people, millions live in utter mental, spiritual, moral, and physical despair and death is their only hope.

          Friends, Jeremiah’s call is highly imaginative and poetically.  Maybe some of our calls to serve God were dramatic and poetical, but the fact is that every Christian that has experienced the power and presence of the Holy Spirit has received a call to serve God, to give testimony, and witness to God’s claim on our lives in the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  It is a call that will push us beyond the scope of our personal comfort and security but to deny it is to live in an annoying and reoccurring spiritual nightmare.

          Click! Click! Click! Hear it, it’s a call waiting.  Stop what you are doing; this is one call that is important enough to interrupt what ever you are doing to answer it.  God’s on the other line—desperately needing to speak to you.  Go ahead, I don’t mind you not listening to me, bow your head, right now in prayer, answer it, talk to God about God’s will for your religious and spiritual life.  In taking that call, you will be happier and more fulfilled as a person.  In taking that call this church, this community and the world will be more blessed because you did.

          Oh, by the way, the only promises God makes if you accept this call, is God will be with you come what may.