Baptized Into Ministry

Jeremiah 1:4-10
The word of the Lord came to me saying:
“Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you
And before you were born I made you holy;
As a prophet to the nations I appointed you.”

I said, “Ah, Adonai Yahweh, look, I don’t know how to speak because I am just a youth.”

But Yahweh said to me:
“Don’t say, ‘I am just a youth;’
because you will go to all to whom I send you
and you will speak all that I command you.
Don’t be afraid of them,
because I am with you to deliver you, says Yahweh.”

Then Yahweh put out his hand and touched my mouth. Yahweh said to me:
“Now, I have put my words in your mouth.
See, this day I have set you over nations and kingdoms
to pluck up and to pull down,
to destroy and to overthrow,
to build and to plant.”

God is calling you and it is NOT a wrong number. It may not involve a phone ringing, or a text message on your cell phone, or a pager going off, or a new IM popping up on your computer screen saying “God wants to be your buddy; would you like to add God to your friends list?” It may not be a voice in the night or a whisper at dawn. It may not be clear and it may not be like a lightning bolt from heaven. But rest assured, God is calling you and it is NOT a wrong number.

How do I know this? Because of the water. The water in the baptismal font…the same water that we used last week to baptize Isaac Christopher Stodghill…this water has a claim on you. This water is speaking to me and it is calling to you. You were not baptized to be an entertaining moment in the worship service. You were not baptized to recognize a rite of passage in your family or in your life. It wasn’t an archaic ritual that we have domesticated so that we can sell more Hallmark cards, like we have done with Groundhog’s Day. (Did you ever think about that? Groundhog’s Day was once a day that our ancient Celtic ancestors met with a great deal of trepidation because if it didn’t happen just right then light and fertility would not return to the earth. Now we celebrate it by pulling a terrified rodent out of a box in Pennsylvania in front of TV cameras.)

No, this will not happen to baptism because it is God’s work and God refuses to be domesticated. God claims us in these baptismal waters. When we pass through these waters we follow Christ into a new community with new brothers and sisters and with a new purpose. We have something to do in this life and God is calling us to it. We are launched onto a journey into deep waters where winds will blow and storms will come, but we are not alone. When we hold close to the water…when we remember the claim that God has on our lives…when we respond to the love that has been shown to us…when we sense that all of our lives are a gift…a gift made known to us in the saving work of Jesus…then all that follows is a glorious “living up to” our baptisms or living into them. We may have been infants when we were baptized…we may have been youth…we may have been adults…but we were certainly not complete when we came to the waters. We had a long way to go and we still do.

Perhaps there are some of you who have not yet been baptized. Maybe you’re wondering if you’re ready. You are. All it takes is a willing heart and a willingness to accept that God has had an interest in you since before you were born. Saying it that way I realize that that’s a whole lot more than it sounds.

I tell you who would recognize this language about calling: Jeremiah. Jeremiah was a prophet, (not a bullfrog). God was calling Jeremiah when he was very young. Perhaps he was just a teenager, living in a land and a time when it seemed that everything was falling apart. His nation, Judah, had been set apart by God. It was meant to be a light to the nation but it all seemed to be going wrong. Babylon and Egypt, two major powers of the day, were threatening on either side. The nation was corrupt, its roots in God’s promise forgotten. The end seemed near. Then God called.

Actually the call had come long before. Before birth, God had set Jeremiah apart for the work he would eventually do. “Before I formed you in the womb,” God said to Jeremiah, “I knew you. And before you were born I made you holy. Before you could even say ‘yes’ or ‘no’, before you could utter a word or consider whether you had anything as crazy as choice in the matter, I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”

Of course, Jeremiah objected. Who wouldn’t? He didn’t ask for this. He wasn’t equipped for the job. At least he didn’t think so. He was just Jeremiah. Not Jeremiah the Prophet. Not Jeremiah the Lord’s Anointed. Not Jeremiah the Great and Mighty. Just Jeremiah. So he resisted. He remembered a line that Moses had used when God spoke to him from a burning bush. “Ah, God, look, I…uh…I don’t how to speak.”

Then for good measure he threw in a second excuse. “And the reason I don’t know how to speak is that I’m just a youth.” Now if the question were “Can I stay out late?” or “Can I use the car?” or anything like that, Jeremiah would have been protesting with all his might that, hey, he was almost an adult. But when God comes a calling and the question is “Will you save the world?” suddenly he’s just a youth.

God, who has seen this act before, is not fooled. “Look, Jerry,” God said. (They were on good terms. When you know someone before they are born you can call them by their nickname.) “Jerry, don’t say, ‘I’m just a youth,’ because it really isn’t about you. Or maybe I should say it differently. It’s ALL about you. You won’t become who you were meant to be unless you respond. The world doesn’t hear my words in your voice unless you respond. It’s all about you because YOU are the one I’m calling. But it’s not about you because it’s also ALL about what I am doing in the world. I am sending you and I am giving you the words to say and I will be with you to get you through.”

Then God does a really touching thing. Like a lover really encountering his beloved, or like a mother shushing her anxious child, God takes a finger and touches it to the lips of Jeremiah. The next words must have been spoken in a whisper. “Jeremiah, I have put my words in your mouth. I have set you over nations and kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant. Don’t you see that the world will be transformed? It has to be if it is to be my dwelling place. And whether or not the world will change is not within your power to choose. Your choice is to look me in the eyes and see that I have given you everything you need to live this calling OR to turn away from me and feel this calling as a burning in your bones, a flame that feels like hell that you will ignore at your own peril.”

Of course, that’s exactly how it felt to Jeremiah. Later in the book he reports that he tried to resist God’s call but whenever he suppressed it…whenever he tried to hold in what God had given him to share it felt like a fire in his bones. God’s claim was powerful and it was not going something he could ignore easily.

So he spoke God’s word and it took him to the king and it took him to the pit and it took his whole life until he was dragged off by his own people into exile in Egypt. It was not an easy life. It was not an easy work that he had to do. But it was his work and in listening to what was implanted within him from his mother’s womb and in responding to this God who touched his lips with a promise he found himself and he found the purpose for which he was set apart.

God is calling you and it is not a wrong number. I have heard that calling at several significant points in my life and it has taken many different forms. Last week the Witness Committee of our church met and Kathleen Kenyon had us go around the table and share the story of how we came to hear God’s voice speaking clearly to us. For me it was first from my family that thought it important enough to have me in church every Sunday so that I could feel that place as home and that congregation as family. I can’t tell you much about the content of the sermon in those early days but I can tell you about what it felt like to be a part of something and to belong. To be a child and to know that I was in a place where people accepted me and encouraged me and talked to me about God and told me to listen because had something to say to me.

Then one summer, at the age of 11, I went to a church camp and God did speak to me. It came in the midst of all kinds of other messages. That was the week I learned about snipe hunting and the sound of bullfrogs by the pond and it was the week when I developed a crush on Faith Gheen. But it was also the week I got it. God was speaking to me…even me. And I was surrounded by adults who told me to be audacious enough to believe that an 11-year-old had things to do for God. I didn’t have to wait for adulthood. The relationship with Faith didn’t last, but that message did.

There were other callings. The people I met volunteering for two years as a high school student with a program for mentally challenged adults. The day my Uncle Bill, a minister, showed me his journal and opened up a lifetime of writing for me. The woman I met clogging one summer who didn’t know what she was getting into when she agreed to marry me but who became a partner in this calling business. A story about a weasel that called me away from a career in radio and into seminary. The day I realized God was speaking to me in Spanish and asking me to speak back to a congregation I was called to serve in a place so different from where I grew up that I wondered how in the world I had anything to offer. The day God’s voice sounded a lot like Jim Hewitt’s in calling me to a place called Franktown. All of these were moments of calling where the only correct answer was ‘Yes.’

And the most miraculous joy has been to share in the callings of others, whatever those callings might be. I never thought it was going to be my role to walk with so many young people in their journeys. It wasn’t anything I was consciously seeking. But somehow, God used a guy who was pretty socially awkward as a college student to listen other students into their own callings. Now it doesn’t surprise me so much when I get an e-mail telling me how seeds planted before have grown.

Just a few weeks ago I got an e-mail from a student who was a part of our campus ministry at UVA and who had spent a semester abroad in Zimbabwe. She quoted me back an e-mail I sent her while she was there…one that I don’t even remember. “I remember when I was in Zimbabwe,” she said, “and pretty angry with the church and you wrote me an e-mail inviting me back into a church that can perhaps still be redeemed ‘by the radical teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.’…Thank you!” She remembered the moment because it was on a spiritual timeline she was developing for a school application. She’s going to seminary this fall to become ordained.

Somehow God, all these centuries after Jeremiah’s time, is still calling people. And some of them are still saying, “But God, you’ve got it wrong, I can’t speak.” Some of them are still saying, “But God, I’m too young.” Others are saying, “God, I’m too old.” Others are saying, “God, I have kids.” Or they’re saying, “I don’t have the talents. I don’t have the words. I don’t have the money. I don’t have the mind or the body or the spirit.” And they keep saying this…you keep saying this despite the fact that God has given you everything you need. And despite that fact that it’s not about you; it’s about what God is going to do. And despite the fact that it’s all about you and no one else is getting the call that you are meant to hear.

Sometimes the call will be to serve God in the place where you are. You don’t have to go to seminary or head off to Africa to serve. The world is transformed in small ways and large and there is plenty to do as a layperson on God’s Eastern Shore.

But don’t be surprised if the call comes with some changes attached. Don’t be surprised if it’s something large and don’t think that the large things are always meant for someone else. Sometimes we are the saints we’ve been waiting for and the word is to be a prophet to the nations.

It’s meant to be disturbing to have water in the sanctuary. There’s always the possibility that it might escape the font. We might knock over the font and that would be messy. Worse yet, we might start to take it seriously and then these pleasant mornings we spend in song and prayer and fellowship would become more than a nice way to spend a Sunday. The water might actually move us to do something more, to follow that wandering teacher from Nazareth who was always inviting others to leave the comfortable life they knew behind to discover the new thing God had for them to do.

Now I’m naïve enough to believe that you and I were born with a mission and a destiny. We were meant to live in God’s presence and to shed the delusions of this life for the reality of who we are in God’s eyes. We were meant to be God’s children. It’s very easy for us to forget that. It’s very common for us to neglect the fingerprints God has left all over us.

But every now and then God’s voice gets through. People have been hearing that voice in this place for over 200 years. And when they hear it they do incomprehensible things. Why would people do such things? Because they have been baptized into ministry…seized by a God who formed them and claimed them…who places a finger to their lips and consecrates them for service. This God of water and Spirit and the wild transformations of a world being born anew places a finger to your lips and says, “I have given you all that you need. You are mine. Won’t you come discover what my love can do?” God is calling your name and God does not have the wrong number. Never. Thanks be to God.