From the Pulpit:

 
                                                                                              Who is God, and What Does God Want from Us?

We’ve been talking a lot about prophets lately. The way our lectionary works, this time of year we read pretty much sequentially through some of the prophets. We spent a number of weeks with Isaiah. Last week we saw the prophetic side of Jesus, and from now until the last week of September we are going to be reading from Jeremiah. I think it is a good idea from time to time to step back, to do a little bit of teaching and to provide some background, some frame of reference so that we are all at least a little bit on the same page. So here is a wide sweep of how we got to this passage in Jeremiah.

Where I’d like to begin is not with Adam and Eve and the talking snake. Not even Noah. I think the best place to begin is when an old guy named Abraham sticks his nose out of his tent one random morning and is met by God – a god nobody much had ever heard of before – and this God promises him that if he’ll just pack up everything he’s got with his elderly wife Sarah and head off into unknown territories that God will give him a bazillion offspring and a land to call his own.

So Abraham and Sarah did just as God said, and in time they had a son, Isaac, who then had a son, Jacob, who then had twelve sons. The next to youngest son was Joseph, and his story is great, but we’ll deal with the details on another day. The deal is that Joseph becomes a high muckety muck in the court of the Pharaoh of Egypt during the time of great famine in Israel , and so eventually his whole family takes refuge there and over many generations the Jewish people become enslaved.

They are abused and persecuted, and they cry out to their God for rescue. The deliverance of the children of Israel from the cruel empire of Egypt is the foundational story for the identity of all Jews, and it is deeply and firmly embedded in our identity as Christians. Who is God? God is the one who hears the outcries of the oppressed and persecuted. God is the one who delivers the powerless from the power of empire. Every year at Passover Jewish families celebrate this deliverance and their identity as God’s chosen people. When God made that very first deal with Abraham, God said,
“If you’ll just be my people, if you’ll just promise not to worship any god but me, then I’ll be your God, and I will bless you  so that you may be a blessing to all the peoples of the world.” I will bless you that everybody else be blessed through you.

That is the heart of what we are talking about when we talk about the prophets. Well, we know that Moses heard the voice of God calling to him from a bush that was burning but was not consumed. And we know that when God called him to be a prophet he did his level best to wiggle out of it. Frankly, I’d be leery of anybody who wanted to be a prophet. I think there might be just a little too much ego involved. The people who finally concede to being God’s mouthpiece by and large tell God that they’d rather eat glass. “No way, God, I have a speech impediment.” “No way, God, I’m not smart enough.” “No way, God, I’m just a kid.” That was what Jeremiah said. He was probably about eighteen, but he was smart enough to get it, that what God was calling him to do was more than a man’s job, and maybe an impossible one.

It’s a long stretch from Moses to Jeremiah, and the relationship of God with his chosen people has taken a lot of hits. All God asks of the children of Israel is that they be faithful, and every time this great experiment gets derailed it is because the children of Israel stray off the straight and narrow and let other gods move onto the altars of the one God and into their hearts. But again and again and again God sends the Jews into time out – so many years under the Edomites, so many years under the Midianites – it is a pattern that goes on and on, but whenever they repent of their sins God relents and draws them back to his heart to try this experiment all over again.

But finally there is a change, and it is the first historically verifiable event of the Old Testament. Somewhere around the year 1000 BCE David is made king of all the tribes, and he declares that Jerusalem is the one and only place where they are to sacrifice to God. He makes plans to build a great Temple to God, but God puts his plans on hold.

When David dies his son Solomon takes over, and we hear lots about how wise Solomon is, but there are other issues. Solomon is also business savvy, and he is rich beyond belief, and he has seven hundred wives – and we’re not talking nice Jewish girls here, at least not all of them – and he has three hundred concubines, and he has power. Solomon has so much power that he builds the magnificent Temple to God, but he builds it with slave labor.

If we step back and look at all this we see that Jerusalem has become the empire, and we’ll remember that God hears the voice of the oppressed. Solomon has war chariots. Solomon has untold offspring, but when he dies there is no clear line of succession, and this is what led to the division of the promised land into the Kingdom of Israel to the north, with ten tribes, and the Kingdom of Judah to the south, with two. By the time Jeremiah was born the northern kingdom was gone, and the southern kingdom was on its way.

Jeremiah writes:

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 consecrated you;
I appointed you a prophet to the nations."
Do not be afraid of them,
for I am with you to deliver you,
says the LORD."

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.
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."

So I return to the question: who is God, and what does he want from us? I think the Bible itself is the answer to this, and I don’t mean just the words written on the page in Hebrew or Greek or English, King James, New Revised Standard, Jerusalem , The Message. I mean the Bible lived in our lives. God says to Jeremiah, and God says to us, "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you;”
We are not an accident of cells. God knew us before we were conceived, and we are formed of nothing less than God’s intentions, and all God’s intentions are good.

A couple of years ago we had a Christian formation class on the best-seller, The Purpose Driven Life, which I think is written in response to these very same questions. Who is God and what does God want from us? We had good discussions, though we had many occasions when we needed
to push against a narrow theology. Yes, God does indeed have a purpose for our lives, but I don’t think it is a single prescribed purpose and God doesn’t challenge us to read his mind or end up in hell if we take a wrong turn somewhere and become a chef instead of an engineer.

No, when I think of what God wants of us, I remember a day a long time ago when we had a vacation home in Colorado – those days are long, long gone – and I had a houseful of little boys and one day I got together all kinds of stuff, scrap lumber and hammers and nails and paint and I don’t remember what all else, and I said, “Here, kids. Make me a surprise.” So they went out to the garage and I heard sawing and hammering and I heard them telling me not to peek, and after a couple of hours they appeared with the most amazing creations. If I’d told them to make bird houses I’d have ended up with a bunch of  bird houses instead of a bunch of miracles.

Every single one of us is formed of God’s intentions and equipped with a unique set of gifts and abilities. We’ve got a broad outline of God’s project: it is a project of love and inclusion, of creativity and kindness. The prophet Micah summed it all up: What does the Lord want? To do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your Lord. And God wants our imagination to go wild, to use the gifts we’ve been given, to team up with others who have their own gifts and to build and to serve and to praise and embrace as full partners in this project of God’s, which is nothing less than building the Kingdom.

Jeremiah was the prophet for his time and his place. He lived a long, bumpy, and interesting life. And I do believe that we are called, each and every one of us, to be prophets for our time and our place, to speak truthfully the message of Jesus, to love the Lord our God with all our hearts and our minds and our souls and our bodies and to love our neighbor as ourselves. We are called to receive, celebrate, and incarnate gratitude for all God’s blessings so that others may understand their own blessedness.

We can start small, with a Habitat build, with books for first graders, with an apartment for refugees, but let’s do let our imaginations go wild. Let’s see what we can do with the amazing toolboxes God has given us.

Let us pray: Playful God, who delights in all creation and whose wisdom mothers forth the universe, let your wisdom-spirit dwell in us, inspiring us to dance and play and create in wonder and beauty and love. With wisdom as our companion, let us midwife your vision of what life can be for us, our neighbors, the stranger, and this surprising and diverse world. Amen. (1)

(1) Holy Adventure: 41 Days of Audacious Living by Bruce Epperly

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