To Always Be Known: Sermon, 16th Week of Ordinary Time

"Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you and chose you…to uproot and to pull down…to build and to plant." (Jeremiah 1:5,10)

Not to be too melodramatic about it, but when I was five days old, I almost died. It seems that I was born with too much fluid in my lungs. I had nearly suffocated in the hospital. But my parents took me home after 3 days on the doctor's belief that I had gotten it out of my system. But on my fifth day of life, I began to choke again, and my parents rushed me to the emergency room. By the time I arrived, according to my mother, my face looked like one big bruise. I pulled through, and to my mother, who had miscarried two years earlier, I was her "miracle child."

Of course, is that we are all miracle children. Before God formed us in the womb, he already knew who we were. I'm sure that each and every one of us has a story, a memory, from which we know that God, and only God, has protected us, comforted us, encouraged us, and/or guided us. Before our parents had even conceived of us, God knew who we were. We may not have had any physical body yet, but we existed in the mind and heart of God. And God was already looking forward to seeing us grow in faith and love. Parents of grown children have experienced what the parents of younger children can only look ahead to. We have temporary custody of them. We can guide them for, maybe, 17 or 18 years. And then they will begin to discern their own way. But they will not be alone, for the God who conceived of them before we did will always be with them.

Of course, for some of us, our relationship with our parents is more difficult. Some of us were not given a foundation of love and protection from which we could venture out in confident expectation. For those grown children who suffered abuse at the hands of their fathers, the very term, "Father" can become a barrier between themselves and God. But what God tells Jeremiah, and us, is that God was our loving parent before he gave us to our earthly parents. And we should not confuse our earthly parents with our heavenly parent. Through prayer, study, and a community of people brought together in God's name, we can unlearn the dysfunctional rules of relationships we picked up from our earthly parents, and learn something of what it means to be loved, forever and ever, by the Father of us all.

Before we were formed in the womb, God chose us. He consecrated us and made us holy, meaning he set us apart, but for what? We are special, but what is it that makes us special? Well, what did God originally choose Jeremiah for? It was, after all, to this particular man that the word of the LORD came. For what purpose did God set apart Jeremiah? "I give you authority over nations and kingdoms to uproot and to pull down, to destroy and to demolish." No wonder Jeremiah protested that he was too young, that his speaking skills weren't up to snuff. Jeremiah was called to be a prophet. But the message that Jeremiah delivered from God to his fellow Jews was not a positive one. The kingdom of Judah was besieged by more powerful empires bearing down on this tiny kingdom. The people of Judah feared the same genocidal destruction that had fallen on the Northern kingdom of Israel some years earlier.

And what message did God call Jeremiah to deliver. Indeed, their precious Jerusalem and temple were going to be destroyed. And they all deserved the disaster that is coming; for their abandonment of the God who brought them out of bondage in Egypt; for their worship of idols; for their injustice toward each other, and their oppression of the poor. They might as well have surrendered to the Babylonians and hoped for the best. There's no power of positive thinking in Jeremiah's prophecy.

But if we are to claim the promise of God to Jeremiah, "Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you and chose you," then we must accept that with that promise comes a call, to action. If God has consecrated us and made us holy, then we must accept that he has set us apart. If God has always known us, then we too are prophets with a task, "to uproot and pull down, to destroy and demolish." We are to look clearly at what is wrong in the world, and point it out, regardless of whom we irritate. As I quoted at the beginning of this sermon, we are also called "to build and to plant." In Jeremiah's case, there was no time for building and planting. He died early in that 70-year period of Jewish history known as the Babylonian Exile. He held out hope that the Jewish people would be replanted in their own land. But he himself died in Egypt.

But at least at the beginning of Jeremiah's prophecy is God's promise to all people. There shall be uprooting, but there shall also be replanting, in God's good time. We are called by God to ask some hard questions, about our community, our nation, our world, and our church. But we need not fear those questions, and the answers we come up with. We need not protest that we are inadequate to the task before us. For God our Father, who has always known us, will always remember us.