"Accidental Prophets" - January 31, 2010

Text: Jeremiah 1:4-10

After our latest blizzard, I was shoveling out on Tuesday morning.  I had run the snow blower, and after clearing the drive and the sidewalks, I used a shovel to clear around the house and on the front step.  I had been out in the cold a long time and I was losing feeling in my fingers.  I made a mental note to buy some ski mittens.  After all of this, I was down to the very last thing – I was digging out a little area for our dog Rudy to do his business.

As I threw the very last shovelful of snow, I heard that familiar sound that nobody shoveling snow wants to hear.  It was the rumble of the city snow truck coming down the street, the truck with that blade that throws all of the snow onto your driveway.  I had finally finished shoveling and everything had been clear for all of 5 seconds.  And sure enough, the truck dumped a bunch of snow in our drive.  And not nice and fluffy snow – it was the hard, icy, heavy, hard to shovel kind.

I stood in Rudy’s little dug out area of our yard and as I saw this truck doing the unthinkable, I just said “Dude,” and stepped back.  Of course, I stepped back and hit the bank of snow I had been digging out, and I promptly fell on my backside.  It was a nice landing.  I was cold and tired and it felt pretty good to just lie there in the snow for a minute or two - until I felt my jeans getting wet and decided it was time to get up.

I had made a snow angel.  I didn’t mean to, it just happened.  It wasn’t my intention – I guess you could say that I was an accidental angel.

Upon reflection, I think there are a lot of accidental angels.  There are a lot of folks who don’t necessarily plan to do what they are doing, they just kind of fall into it, as we say. 

Our Old Testament scripture gives us the story not of an accidental angel, but an accidental prophet.  This is not a job that Jeremiah sought out.  In fact, prophet is probably not a job that anyone really seeks out.

Jeremiah is a teenager.  A youth.  Now if you check out our bulletin cover, they have it completely wrong.  We subscribe to a church art service and Gayle generally finds a nice clip art to go along with the scripture or the theme for each week.  But look at this guy and tell me he is a teenager!  He looks like what we might imagine to be a prophet – maybe Jeremiah as a veteran prophet – but this is definitely not a teenager.

The Word of God comes to Jeremiah, and he senses that all of his life has been leading him to this point, that from before he was even born, when he was but a twinkle in his parents’ eyes, God’s call on him was to be a prophet.  And how does he respond to this revelation, to this call of God? 

He says, “I am only a boy.  I’m just a kid.  I am too young, I am too inexperienced.  Who would ever listen to me?  I am definitely not the person for this job.” 

Jeremiah is in very good company.  This is the way that most of the prophets responded to God’s call.  Moses was full of excuses and said, “I am a man of slow speech.”  Isaiah responded, “I am a person of unclean lips dwelling in the midst of a people of unclean lips.”  Gideon protested, “My clan is the weakest of Manasseh.”  And Jeremiah said, “O Lord God.  Truly I do not know how to speak for I am only a boy!”

Prophets generally don’t seek after the job.  Seeking after it, in fact, might be a sign that you are really not a prophet. 

There are an awful lot of people working on their resume, trying to come across their very best to potential employers.  I talked to a student who had a job interview in New York City last week. It was very cool to go to New York, and he really tried to make the best impression he could.  Some seniors will go to job fairs.  You put on a nice suit, you get a haircut, you do some research on the companies that you hope to work for, all in the hopes of landing a job.  In a difficult economy, there may be even more than the usual amount of working hard to impress employers.

You will never find that with prophets.  They don’t really want the job, so that pretty well eliminates embellishing the resume or trying to impress the employer.  Instead, they say, “I’m too young, I can’t talk, I have no influence, I am morally deficient, nobody will listen to me, I am absolutely the wrong person.”  To speak of someone as a reluctant prophet is probably redundant.

This is true of modern day prophets as well.  No one aspires to the job, you just kind of fall into it.  You don’t really find the job, it is more a case of the job finding you.  Martin Luther King, Jr. was a young pastor, 26 years old, who had just come to a church in Montgomery, Alabama.  It just happened to be shortly before Rosa Parks decided one night that she was tired of having to give up her seat on the bus.  The bus boycott started, they needed a leader, the more seasoned pastors had the good sense to beg off, and Martin Luther King Jr. became the leader of the movement.  And it turned out that growing up in a pastor’s home, being educated both in the south and in the north, having gifts as a preacher and a leader as well as a scholar, and having a passion for justice, he was perfectly suited for the task.  Looking back, he may have had the same sense that Jeremiah had, that he had been born for this, but he wasn’t eager for the job. 

The call of God can be a funny thing – sometimes it comes dramatically, as it did for Moses, speaking to God in the burning bush.  Or Isaiah, caught up in ecstatic worship.  But sometimes, it just kind of happens.  That’s the way it is for many of us.  We just kind of fall into it.

I have a friend who lives in southern Iowa who saw a need for after school care for children.  And so she did something.  She started out small, with a story and games and some snacks for a few kids at her church.  But it grew and grew, and now there is this wonderful program with tutoring and activities and all kind of kids, many from at-risk backgrounds.  She loves what she is doing and she is good at it - she has kind of fallen into the job that she didn’t know God had been preparing her for her whole life.

When we talk about the call of God, what comes to mind generally is the call to ordained ministry – to go to seminary and become a pastor or a missionary.  God certainly calls people to this kind of ministry, and we need to encourage folks to consider this call.

But God’s call on us is a lot broader, than that.  We are all called to be disciples.  And God calls people to all kinds of vocations, to a wide variety of places of service.  Sometimes a person’s calling is not necessarily where he or she is employed.  And the call of God often comes in a roundabout, unexpected way.  It can look like it came from clear out of the blue until in retrospect we see that God was preparing us all along.

How often have you seem someone wind up doing something they had never in their wildest dreams imagined themselves doing, only to engage in that work and discover that God had been equipping them for years for a task they were not even aiming at?  Most often, providence is best recognized in retrospect.  God’s work in our lives may be quiet, behind the scenes, and perhaps even unrecognized at the time.  But later, looking back we can see God’s hand at work, preparing us all along.

God saw Jeremiah coming from a long ways off, and God appointed Jeremiah to be a prophet.   This came as startling news to Jeremiah, who had not considered being a prophet as his life’s work.  

Hearing and answering the call of God in our lives is not just something for those who work in the church.  Evelyn McLachlan has a quilting group in her church.  Evelyn asked one woman how she got started quilting.  She said that she grew up sewing, making clothes and curtains, and the like.  She had never quilted, though.  It was about 15 years ago, when her son needed the car and she asked to be dropped off at a quilt show - she just needed a place to hang out a little while until her son came back with the car.  And as she walked through the auditorium, she realized she didn’t just want to learn to quilt ... she needed to quilt.  It became her passion.  She has made quilts for many people, and it is indeed a calling.

Marilyn McDonald is a pastor who a number of years ago was called to a new congregation and moved into the parsonage.  She noted that the lawn needed mowing, and planned to get to it the next day.  But when she returned home, it was already mowed – the yard looked beautiful.  This happened a couple of times, and she didn’t know who it was that had mowed it and obviously taken care of the grounds around the church next door as well.

But one day she came home to find her secret lawn mower at work.  She introduced herself, and then thanked him for his “ministry.”  He was quiet-spoken, but asked, “What did you say?”  She repeated, “Thank you for your ministry.”  She told him that what he was doing was certainly appreciated by many - even if they did not know who it was who was doing it - and that this was a valuable ministry.

The next Sunday he was in church, which this new pastor did not know was unusual.  His daughter, it turned out, was the Clerk of Session – kind of like our moderator - but he had never gone to church except for funerals and weddings.  He became a very active member of the church.

The idea of calling goes far beyond what we often think of as “church vocations.”  I have visited in hospitals and nursing homes and observed nurse’s aides who have great joy in their work.  It is not easy work and the pay is not great and the hours can be long and you don’t necessarily get off for holidays because hospitals and nursing homes don’t close for holidays.  Those who stay at it for a long time usually do so because it is a calling, and they are performing a very real ministry.

Parker Palmer tells of the time he went to a college to lead a workshop on teaching.  Early on, he was warned about the curmudgeonly Professor X.  Professor X would come to the workshop, he was told, but likely only to debunk whatever was said.

As the workshop began, Palmer asked the teachers to tell the group about a mentor, someone who had taught them how to teach.  The teachers related many stories, some very moving stories.  After several people had gone, Professor X began to speak, not in the cranky tones his colleagues were used to hearing, but in a voice full of sadness and regret.  He confessed that for twenty years he had been trying to mimic his mentor's teaching style, and the results had been disastrous.  His teaching wasn’t working because he was trying to be someone he was not.  Twenty years into his career it was just starting to dawn on Professor X that what he was doing was not his life.  Palmer speaks of “listening to your life” as a way of recognizing God’s call.

That can be hard.  And sometimes, listening to our life – listening to the way that God is leading and guiding us – can be costly.  It can sometimes cost us – in comfort, in security, in popularity, perhaps in the kind of paycheck we earn.

Historian Howard Zinn died this week.  Zinn once made this statement that I think has to do with listening to our life and listening to God’s call.  He said,

I’m worried that students will take their obedient place in society and look to become successful cogs in the wheel - let the wheel spin them around as it wants without taking a look at what they’re doing.  I’m concerned that students not become passive acceptors of the official doctrine that’s handed down to them...

Prophets have been called a lot of things, but a successful cog in the wheel is not one of them.  Now, a person may wind up making what we might think of as very traditional and conventional choices in life.  And that is fine, that is well and good as long as that is where a person finds joy and meaning and that is where a person can best make a contribution.  The point is that rather than just going through the motions and being a part of the herd, we need to be open to the surprising ways God may lead us.

Our New Testament scripture was I Corinthians 13, a very familiar passage.  We remember the part about love – love is patient and kind, it dos not envy or boast, and so on.  But we may not remember so well the latter part – about our knowledge being only partial.  We see through a glass dimly.  Since we don’t know everything, the best we can do is to be loving.  This applies to our own lives.  We don’t know which way our lives will turn and we don’t know how God may use us.  This also means we don’t know how God may use another, and we should be very careful about judging another’s call.  I have heard men say out loud, “God can’t be calling you because you are a woman.”  I think that people who say things like that need to pay attention to their own calling.        

We need to “listen to our lives,” as Parker Palmer puts it.  We need to be open to God’s call.  Those whom God called in the Bible were often as not the last ones you would expect.  He called poor speakers like Moses and and shepherd boys like David and prostitutes like Rahab and mere youth like Jeremiah and a herdsman and vinedresser like Amos and a young peasant girl like Mary.

Look at Jesus: he begins his ministry by assembling a motley group of fishermen, tax collectors, political radicals and assorted peasants.  He turns to the twelve of them and says, “I’m going to take over the world.  Guess who’s going to help me?”

God can use us all, and there is a calling for each of us.  And there is joy and fulfillment in claiming our call:

• Calls to serve in ordained ministry.
• Calls to work with youth or preschoolers or older adults.
• Calls to attend to the church’s physical facility.
• Calls to work with the finances of the church.
• Calls to serve as a deacon.

But not only calls to work in the church, calls to serve outside the church:

• Calls to work with the homeless and the hungry.
• Calls to be counselors and mental health workers.
• Calls to care for the earth.
• Calls to be good accountants and bankers and teachers and scientists and doctors and electricians.
• Calls to be caring and honest and ethical and trustworthy people wherever we work.
• Calls to be good moms and dads and grandparents, calls to care for aging parents, calls to be good neighbors.
• And sometimes, calls to be a prophet like Jeremiah, pointing out injustice and working for what is right.

All of us are known by God and all of us have been called by God.  Sometimes, we just kind of fall into that calling.  We can be accidental prophets.  But in God’s eyes, it is no accident.  Amen.

thank you to Evelyn McLachlan and Marilyn McDonald for contribution on the "Midrash" list.