Called to be the Person You Are

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on The Fourth Sunday After the Epiphany by the Rev. Holly Huff, Deacon.

The call of Jeremiah begins with the voice of the Lord speaking these startingly intimate words: “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.” Tempting to think that this sort of personalized invitation into the work is just for the Jeremiahs, those appointed prophets to the nation. But this passage, often read at ordinations, has something to say to us all. Recall that the prayerbook catechism lists the laity as the first order of ministry—by virtue of our baptism all followers of Jesus are called and sent out. Each one of us is called to mission and ministry, and the church is here to equip the saints for ministry in the world, to feed and nourish us with the word of God and with the sacraments, then sends us back out the door in loving service to God and neighbor. 

So it’s not just prophets to the nation, but all of us, because we are baptized—or really because we are created—who have a vocation: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you / before you were born I consecrated you.” The word ‘vocation’ comes from the word for voice. God is calling out to us. Do we hear? We sometime think a vocation or calling is to a specific title or occupation, as we have been cast in a discrete preassigned role in a play, but I think very often there are many ways a person can listen to and respond to God’s call on their life. There are different forms that can play out in. Calling is deeper than roles or titles—it’s about who you are. Fundamentally the call is to respond to the voice that calls our name in creation. In Genesis God creates by voice, remember, by speaking. Let there be light. Let there be earth and water. God made us to be who we are, and when we answer to that and allow the seed of our life to fall into the ground and be nurtured and to flourish, when we become who we are, we are answering that voice that called at the beginning of creation. Let there be Jeremiah. Let there be Isaiah and Samuel, let there be Hannah and Naomi. Let there be Holly, let there be Russell, let there be Mary and Bill and Nancy and Ron and Carla and Carolyn and Wheeler and John and Bella and Trisha and Chris. All of us have been called by name, called into being so we might exist!

Vocation is a call to be fully ourselves. “The glory of God is a human being full alive,” St. Irenaeus said, a human being fully awake and fully themselves, just as God made them to be. Vocation is rooted in God’s intimate knowing of who we are. Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. I knew you exactly as you are, I have called you by name, I made you to be who you are.

Jeremiah, quite relatably, is skeptical of this all-embracing, intimate knowing acceptance. What wondrous love is this? It is too strange, too outside the usual calculus of costs and benefits to comprehend. We often find it hard to accept the completely free grace of God’s unconditional selfless love poured out on us without price. Having just heard “Before I formed you I knew you and called you,” Jeremiah proceeds to tell the Lord exactly why that idea will be bad for business. Lord, there are so many reasons you don’t really want me to serve you. I’m not wise or experienced or eloquent like a real prophet would be, truly I don’t even know how to speak! he says. I’m just a kid. You’re looking for someone else.

But love comes back to refute Jeremiah’s anxious retreat into himself, his fearful denial that he can answer a call, that he can be who he is and respond to the voice calling him to be Jeremiah. The Lord says tenderly and firmly, “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. I am with you.”

I really relate to this fear! I have struggled with self-confidence since I was a kid, and I have spent a long time working very hard to prove through achievements and education that I am capable, worthy, smart, and faithful. I have come to see that it was fundamentally an anxious pursuit. And it didn’t work—no amount of external affirmations or praise could overcome the nagging doubt that who I was made to be is wrong, broken, in need of fixing. Sometimes our fear draws us into ourselves and persuades us never to try, sometimes we become anxiously driven to disprove our fears about the inadequacy of who we are! But both strategies are fearful, and another way is possible. What would it be like to be love with a place of love instead of fear? It starts with listening. It starts with listening to the voice of the Lord who calls us beloved, and daring to trust that voice. You are my Beloved Child. By the grace of God, you are who you are. And I will be with you, I will help you. 

Jeremiah, who’s afraid of speaking, is given words. The Lord reaches out to touch his mouth—"Now I have put my words in your mouth.” When we turn to God in weakness, acknowledging our dependence and need, we are made strong. It is God who is at work in us, God who works and wills through us. God will speak through Jeremiah, words of grief and repentance and lamentation, and words of great promise, of a vision still to come and a joy that will be fulfilled. And in that prophetic speaking, God is with him, giving him words. Vocation is not a personal quest one is sent out on to prove themselves. God does the heavy lifting. We are shoulder to shoulder with Jesus under the easy yoke. True, this means we can’t take credit for anything we do, because it is always done by grace through us. But it is a joy and a liberating relief to say gratefully: thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory. 

So we each have a vocation, and the voice of God that called our life into being is calling us to flourish as the person we were created to be. That means there are exactly as many vocations as there are human beings, then, each unique and distinct in God’s infinite care. Responding to the call starts in listening and trusting God’s voice, trusting the voice of love instead of the endless spinning tapes of fear and not enough that play on loop in our heads.

We all have them, these stories of shame and insufficiency, and there’s no shame in that. It’s part of the human condition. But God’s stable and secure, radiantly attuned love is always shining, trying to squeak in through the cracks of our self-enclosure, to heal us, to bring us to experience and know in our own flesh what that stable, boundless love of God is like. To let it wash over us, like fine oil, like water rolling down. “There’s a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea,” as hymn says, and “The love of God is broader than the measure of the mind.” “For know we know only in part, we prophesy only in part, but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end…For now we see as in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.” “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.” “I have called you by name.” “You are my Beloved.”

Love is the nature of God, and love is the measure of our creation. Our vocation is to embody this love in the daily particularities of our life, infinitely unique. This love we are talking about is utterly unsentimental. No cotton candy or spun sugar here. The love of God is durable and strong. It has gone through the fire and the flood to be with us. It’s the love of the saints and the martyrs. “Greater love hath no man than this, to lay down his life for his friends.” To answer the call in our own flesh and blood, to live out the love God is calling us to be in the world, will put us in a dangerous spot. The closer we listen, the more dangerous, by the world’s terms. “Do not be surprised when you are hated and persecuted for my sake,” Jesus says. But be faithful, faithful to the love placed on your lips like a coal, the seal set on your heart, a love stronger than death. 

The radical, inbreaking love of God that Jesus enacts and embodies and teaches is threatening to the powers that be. Reinhold Neibuhr said that love lived out on a societal level takes the form of justice, and so love comes as a threat to business as usual. “The spirit of the Lord is upon me and has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor,” Jesus has just preached in the synagogue, and when it turns out this love-that-looks-like-justice means more than solving their immediate material problems, they are angry with him and turn on him, trying to kill him. But Jesus is faithful to his vocation. He trusts the voice that calls him by name, that calls him Beloved. For now, his hour has not yet come, and he passes through the midst of the crowd. He still has much to show them about love and peace and the kingdom of God which is so, so near. But always he listens and trusts and responds to the voice of God, the voice of love, following it even to death on a cross. Not because he wanted to die, but because he wanted us to live. He listens and acts from that sinewy, indestructible fleshy love of God. And later on, Jesus goes to the cross not out of any desire to be a martyr, indeed despising the shame of it!—no, he goes to the cross “for the joy that was set before him.” Even there he is listening and trusting the voice of love, knowing God is with him to deliver him.

May we each hear God’s voice, calling us by name. May we receive the love pouring itself out on us and then become that love for others. May we learn to say, with Paul, “By the grace of God I am what I am, and God’s grace to me has not been in vain.” And may we pray with the trust of the Psalmist:

5 …you are my hope, O Lord God, *
my confidence since I was young.

6 I have been sustained by you ever since I was born;
from my mother's womb you have been my strength; *
my praise shall be always of you.