Called to Greatness (Prophet Margins – Part VIII)

Sermon Title: Called to Greatness

Good News Statement: God calls us to greatness

Preached: Sunday, September 4, 2022 at Dogwood Prairie UMC & Seed Chapel UMC

Pastor Daniel G. Skelton, M.Div.

 

Scripture (NRSV): Jeremiah 1:4-10 Today’s scripture reading comes from the Prophet Jeremiah who finds himself being called to become a prophet of God—who has been appointed over nations and kingdoms. We will be reading from Jeremiah chapter one verses four thru ten. Listen to what Jeremiah has to say about being called…

 

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.” ⁷ But 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.”

 

This is the Word of God for the People of God; And all God’s people said, “Thanks be to God.”

 

 

Introduction:

During a Sunday School lesson, a child learned about how God created human beings. The child became especially focused when the teacher explained how Eve was created from Adam’s ribs. Later in the week, the boy’s mother saw him lying down on the floor, so she asked him what was wrong. His reply was priceless: “Mom, I have a pain in my side—I think I’m getting a wife.”

Last week, Isaiah reminded us through his not-so-love-song-love-song that God had planted a vineyard; and this vineyard was supposed to produce a bountiful and ripe harvest of sweet grapes. To make sure that the vineyard produced sweet grapes, the people of Israel, on a very fertile hill, “dug [into the hill] and cleared it of stones and planted it with choice vines; they built a watchtower in the midst of it [from the stones that they removed from the hill]; and hewed out a wine vat in it…” (Isaiah 5:2). The people of Israel did all this hard work to make sure that what they expected to happen would happen. They did all this hard work to bring forth a harvest that would last all season. They did all this hard work to please God, who they have been continuously rebelling against. Remember back in Hosea, God called the people of Israel “Children of the living God” (Hosea 1:10), giving them hope that their faith was being restored, but now the tables have turned again. The people of Israel expected their vineyard to yield sweet, ripe, and beautiful grapes, but instead it yielded sour, bitter, and rotten grapes. Their faith was rotten yet again.

Isaiah tells us, that because of their lack of faith, God is going to destroy their vineyard: “I will remove its hedge, and it shall be devoured; I will break down its wall, and it shall be trampled down. I will make it a wasteland; it shall not be pruned or hoed, and it shall be overgrown with briers and thorns; I will also command the clouds that they rain no rain upon it” (Isaiah 5:5-6). The vineyard that once had such high hopes is now being destroyed and is producing sour grapes. This story reminded us last week that we are God’s vineyard. God has planted us where we need to be, He is pruning and trimming us to become His disciples, His church, and He is calling us to search our own heart for sour grapes—for those moments, things, or even persons that test our faith, that may cause our faith to dwindle a little. We are God’s vineyards; and our faith is represented by the harvest of grapes that we produce. God wants us to be cultivated grapes—sweet and ripe—guided by the Word and tended by the Spirit, wherever we live and whatever we do. God needs us, God needs you, to help cultivate a healthy and faithful vineyard so that others will be nourished and replenished by the same grace and love that God has given you. This world has enough sour grapes. It needs more sweet grapes. What does your faith look like? Is it sour? Or is it sweet?

Although we may work every minute of every day striving to maintain a sweet faith, life doesn’t always make it easy to do that. We are tested. We are tempted. We are put through trials and tribulations. Our faith is tested on a daily basis. However, God is still working in your life because He has called you to do something great. God knew you before you were born, and He is going to be by your side as you live into the great things He has in store for you. Jeremiah from our text was uncertain about answering God’s call, but through reassurance, grace, and faith, Jeremiah accepted the call and found a way to bring the good news to many lost and hurting people. God calls us to do great things. God is calling you, today, to do extraordinary things; you just have to being willing to let God lead you. You have to be willing to answer God’s call.

Opening Prayer:

            Let us pray… God Who Knows Us, we read how you formed our souls, long before anyone knew us. You consecrated us for kingdom work long before our birth. You’ve called us to be a prophet to the nations! We know that life moves in cycles of growth and destruction, picking and pulling, building and overthrowing. Yet, we may rest in the assurance that we are known and loved by you, who creates beautiful things! May my words fall to the ground as your words settle in the hearts of all those before me. In Your name we pray, Amen.

 

Body:

It has been recorded that just before John Wesley, the founding father of the people called Methodists, passed away in 1791, he uttered these words, “Best thing of all, God is with us. Best thing of all, God is with us.” We love to celebrate that God is with us. We love to celebrate that with God in our lives we are never alone. We love to celebrate that because of God we are here today. We love to celebrate the sacrifice of His one and only Son who gave us eternal life and salvation. We love to celebrate that the presence of the Holy Spirit is our reminder that He is looking out for us. We love to celebrate the amazing grace that has set as free. We love to celebrate that God is with us.

However, from our scripture text today, we are introduced to another prophet who lived during the critical years spanning the “golden age,” 640-586 BCE, who was having a tough time celebrating God. During this time, King Josiah was ruling Judah and the Babylon’s, led by Nebuchadrezzer II, destroyed Jerusalem for the first time and deported many Judeans. This was certainly a time in history where celebration was hard to come by. Instead of celebration and adoration, fear and intimidation settled into the heart of this prophet who has been given the name Jeremiah which means “appointed by God” in Hebrew.

Fear and intimidation are difficult to overcome, not just for us mortals but for the chosen prophets as well. Prophets are people who have been chased down, ganged up on, lied about, isolated, excluded, denounced, and in some cases killed. I’m not sure anyone would sign up for this job without a deep connection with the God that called them to it. It’s the type of job that you could be great at, and it would still be a difficult job to manage. At the end of the day, most of us want to be included, normal, everyday kind of people, just living a normal life. Not wanting to experience what the Prophets had to go through. But we all know today, that our understanding of normalcy went out the window three years ago when our lives were turned upside down. Like the many prophets of old, our lives were overcome by fear and intimidation.

I’m sure none of you have ever been scared before. I’m sure none of you have ever experienced fear before. I’m sure none of you have ever encountered something in your life that has made you stop dead in your tracks, wide-eyed, and white as a ghost. We have all been scared or fearful of something. But God didn’t give up on us. He comforted us, loved us, and reminded us that we have been appointed to do something great. Like being a disciple, Prophetic work can lead to sadness, depression, despair, fear, and spiritual fatigue. Engaging in prophetic ministry is starting something that is very messy and dangerous at first, but then receiving the satisfaction of God’s glory in the end.  Jeremiah wept. Elijah ran and hid. Hosea was discouraged and fed up. Nehemiah left the comfort of his job. Joseph, the father of Jesus, was the first to deny the foretold birth of his son. And let’s not forget about all the excuses that Moses came up with! It’s tough! It’s tough being called to do the work of God. Yet, there is something that can get us through. In fact, there are three things that we might want to recall this Sunday as we reflect on the early life of the Prophet Jeremiah.

First: God did not make a mistake in calling us to this ministry. God did not make a mistake when He called upon you to become His disciple. God did thorough research and examination, even before you came into being. You were made for this work. Jeremiah writes, “Now 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’” (Jeremiah 1:4-5). God’s promise to never abandon you never fails because He has called you to do something great in this life. Sure, you may feel inadequate at times to do what God asks us to do. But He is still calling you. You may even respond like Jeremiah, “Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy” (Jeremiah 1:6). But He is still calling you.

If God didn’t let the multitude of excuses get Moses out of doing what God needed him to do, then I strongly believe that God is not going to let you simply slide by. God is like the scanners that scan cars as they drive through tolls on the interstate. No matter what you try to do, no matter how close you get to the car in front of you, the scanner will still pick you up. God is always going to find you. Even if you try to flea God by travelling two thousand miles to Nineveh, like Jonah did, God is still going to find you. And no matter if you are able to put on the armor of King Saul or not to face Goliath, God is going to call upon you because He needs you to care for His children. God needs you because He has appointed you to do great things. God responds to Jeremiah by saying, “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. Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you…” (Jeremiah 1:6). We give God the list of reasons why selecting us is not a good idea. But yet, God has still appointed us to do something, to be someone, to go somewhere: God, through all of our excuses and mistakes, will not give up on us. God did not make a mistake calling you into His ministry.

Second: God handles those who stand in the way of God’s work being done. When things get tough and fear settles in, we have the temptation to lose sight of the actual goal and get distracted by those who are causing us personal grief, those who may be making our faith turn from sweetness to bitterness. These tactics aren’t our responsibility to manage. God tells Jeremiah to not let them get in the way of him doing what God told him to do: “Now,” says the LORD, “I have put my words in your mouth. See, today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms…” (Jeremiah 1:9-10). God has called Jeremiah, like many of us, to bring peace and serenity and healing to a lost and broken people. God has called us to take a stand for His children. To be a prophet is to stand, no matter what. Stand in fatigue. Stand in loss. Stand in the conviction that God’s voice can shake the foundations and remind the people to turn from their ways. Stand in the presence of hate so that love will have a voice. Stand during times of war to help people see what the peace of God looks likes. Stand for what God has called you to be and take a stand for those in your life who are unable to stand on their own.

According nhd.org, who released an article in 2017 titled, “Taking

A Stand In History,” taking a stand means taking a firm position on an issue or topic. For example, Martin Luther took a stand against the Catholic Church during the reformation and nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg, Germany, in 1517. John Wesley took a stand and formed a movement called Methodism in 1728. Rosa Parks took a stand, Martin Luther King, Jr, took a stand, those who founded this church took a stand and the list goes on and on. You don’t have to be great to take a great stand: you just have to be willing to listen to what God is calling you to do. Are you willing to take a stand for God?

Third and lastly: You must trust what you see. God asked Jeremiah and Amos the same question? “What do you see?” He asked Jeremiah thrice, “What do you see?” Jeremiah saw a branch of an almond tree, a boiling pot, and figs, some very good and some very bad. Amos saw a plumb line and a basket of fruit. Zachariah was another prophet given the same question. He saw a lampstand of gold, bowls of oil and seven lamps with seven spouts. On another occasion, he saw a flying scroll with a length of twenty cubits and its width of ten cubits. Prophetic ministry requires that we trust what “we” see, not what news and media outlets, social media posts, or even our own bias sees. The prophet must raise above all these short vision casts and instead see what God is showing them.

Jeremiah tells us that God needs us to see, what is plucked up, pulled down, destroyed, overthrown, built, and planted (Jeremiah 1:10). In way, what God is calling Jeremiah to see is what Solomon calls us to see through his words of wisdom in Ecclesiastes: “For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill and a time to heal; a time to break down and a time to build up; a time to weep and a time to laugh; a time to mourn and a time to dance; a time to throw away stones and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to seek and a time to lose; a time to keep and a time to throw away; a time to tear and a time to sew; a time to keep silent and a time to speak; a time to love and a time to hate; a time for war and a time for peace” (Ecclesiastes 3:1-8).

What God is calling us to see, is what lives in this world. God needs us to see the love and the hate, the peace and the wars, the new beginnings and the destruction, and the hope and the hopeless and everything in between. God needs us to see where His love, grace, mercy, and forgiveness will thrive and change the world. God needs us to see where hurting can be replaced with healing. God needs us to see where we can take a stand and make a difference. God needs us to see and hear His call of ministry in our life. The time has come to realize that God has created you to do something great, big or small. The time has come to answer the call of Jesus Christ. The time has come to surrender all and to be guided by the Holy Spirit. The time has come to know that God has appointed you to greatness.

Conclusion:

So, the question for this week might be how much of your life are you really willing to surrender to God so that you can truly live into what He has called you to do? We surrender ourselves to God. Yet God chooses to use the gifts that are within us to direct our paths. This means that God works with us and in us. Like Hosea and his desire to love us into wholeness, Jeremiah claims that God knows us into service and witness. God works within us to make us what we already are and to grow into what we will be.

There is a lot of uncertainty about how this works; how being a prophet works. Being a prophet or simply just being a disciple is not always easy. But because God knows us so intimately, God is always on our side. God has appointed you to do great things in this world. He appointed you before you were even born. The time has come to hear His calling and follow where He leads and to see the hope of His creation and take a stand for the Jesus Christ. The time has come to know that God will be with you wherever He needs you. It will be challenging at times, but “The best thing of all, God is with us.” God is with you.

 

Communion Transition:  

Gathered around the table with his friends, Jesus reminded them that they have been chosen for greatness; they have been chosen to transform the world. Although disciples, in time, they will become role models for us today as we strive to become the disciple that Jesus needs us to be. Gathered around this table, hope and love conquered fear and uncertainty of all those present. Today, we gather together as brothers and sisters in Christ to ask for forgiveness, to have our fear removed, and to be filled with strength and encouragement as we hear and see the call of God in our life. This table is open to all. This table is the first step to new beginnings. Please join me in celebrating Holy Communion…

Benediction:

As you strive to become the disciple that God has called you to be, may you be blessed with being able to hear and see His call in your life. May Jesus give you the strength to take a stand. And may the Holy Spirit lead towards greatness. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit go transforming lives as you live well and wisely in God’s world. And all God’s people said, Amen. Amen.