Jeremiah 1: 4-10

A Texas high school track team had to postpone one of its meets to the following Saturday. That, however, was when one of its runners had planned to leave on a mission trip. When she told her coach about the conflict, he said, “Your teammates are counting on you. You can’t let them down.” When she went back to him the next day, he said, “You’re either here for the meet or you turn in your uniform.” So the athlete returned a third time, tearfully handed her coach her uniform and walked away. Many of the other runners’ Christian parents supported the coach. So the former member of the track team stunned them when she told them, “This is about God.” But I wonder why they were so shocked. One of their teenagers was choosing God and church over her track team. That’s the way her parents and church had raised her – to put God first in her life. Of course, she wasn’t standing up for racial justice or against a war. But, then, all prophets have to start somewhere...

(Story of the first African American student at a previously all white school in Alabama. Links to this text with "I am only a child".)

Throughout much of her life actress Helen Hayes was regularly hailed as “The First Lady of the American Theater.” Clearly this was a lofty, flattering title. Ms. Hayes must have felt honored each time she heard it. Or maybe not. Because as it turns out, Ms. Hayes is the one who came up with that title for herself! She cooked it up, stuck it into a press release, and forever after journalists made use of this sobriquet (or nickname) whenever they wrote articles about Hayes. But really the same thing happens all the time. In our age of media hype it is not at all unusual for actors, athletes, and yes, even preachers to come up with their own sobriquets or designations...

("Sooner or later pastors get asked about their "call to the ministry." You tell that story a lot when you are preparing to become a minister: "What let you to seminary?" people will ask. And after you've answered that question a half-dozen times in the early years of your seminary study, you get a whole new round of questions about your divine "call" as you prepare to leave seminary and enter the ordained ministry...")

30 years ago now, Unitarian Minister, Robert Fulghum, wrote All I Really Need to Know, I Learned in Kindergarten - a series of essays which are observations on life. I was one of 7,000,000 people to have bought a copy of the original and I now have the updated and revised edition on my tablet! I think the original copy did not survive “the cull” before I moved here. (Rick) Believe me, I once had a lot more books than I do now! Criticized by some as being overly simplistic this book touts the importance of lessons such as: play fair, share, don’t hit people, put things back where you found them, clean up your own mess, don’t take things that aren’t yours, say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody, wash your hands before you eat, flush, and my favourite, warm cookies and cold milk are good for you! While we could never get along in life with a kindergartner’s level of knowledge of most subjects it would seem that most, if not all, of the ways by which a civilized society are governed, can be boiled down to those tenets listed above...

During my second year in Divinity School, I had an internship with the Massachusetts chapter of CURE, Citizens United for the Rehabilitation of Errants, a national organization that lobbies for prison reform. The previous year, I interned in a prison chaplaincy program and had learned a lot of disturbing things about sentencing and incarceration in this country. I was passionate about the need to improve prisons so the working with CURE seemed to be logical next step. My boss was a Dominican nun named Dot. I had never met a Catholic nun like her—she wore jeans overalls and lived in an apartment in my neighborhood with another Catholic sister. Sister Dot had been a high school art teacher for many years. Messy and expressive and easily sidetracked, she fulfilled many of my stereotypes about artists. After retiring from teaching, she went to lead Massachusetts CURE, but to help pay the bills, she also worked a “Color Me Beautiful” consultant...

("David Lochhead, who was a professor at the Vancouver School of Theology, wrote a book for the World Council of Churches on the need for dialogue, not simply with other churches but with other faith traditions. He suggests that there are four styles of religious ideology...")

It was one of the worst days of her life. No, it WAS the worst day of her life. Oh, if only she could go back to her pre-marriage days and find the peace and contentment she had in her parents’ home. She had it so good then and didn’t realize it. She was afraid to call her Mom, who now lived 1500 miles away. Her best friend was on vacation. The minister was conducting a funeral that afternoon. Her sister was working on a big project for the company. Her husband was in a staff meeting with their biggest client. She felt all-alone and like the world was crashing down around her. The washing machine broke down and the wet clothes would have to be carried to the laundromat. The repairman could not get there until the day after tomorrow. That meant at least 4 more loads of clothes. She had scraped together enough money to finish the wash today, but that meant looking under the cushions on the chairs, sofas, and in her husband’s nightstand. Additionally, the telephone kept ringing and mostly with telemarketers who just would not take “No!” for an answer. Her head ached. She had not had a shower. The baby needed changing and the smell was getting to her. If only she could get him to nap so she could soak in the tub for a while. Then, the mail carrier brought a bill she had no money to pay. Could things get any worse? Almost to the breaking point, she lifted her one-year-old into his high chair after changing his diaper and almost gagging on the sight therein. The phone started to ring, the microwave buzzed, and she had finally had it. She leaned her head against the baby’s high chair tray and she began to cry. Without a word, her son took his pacifier out of his mouth, and stuck it in hers...

The mission given to Jeremiah seems harsh to modern ears. We want to hear positive words on Sunday morning. But we have all experienced the importance of tearing down and destroying. My last church was located in an area of urban blight, where nothing but homeless folks and tumbleweeds occupied the streets. While we faithfully preached the importance of caring for these needy people, we also knew that ultimately their welfare and the prosperity of our city depended on urban renewal. So nearly 30 years ago, the city and numerous construction companies began the long process of tearing down and destroying. That was necessary, in order to build a better city for all its residents. We could not build and plant until there was a good deal of uprooting and overthrowing. Now the city bustles with business, entertainment, hospitality and art. The tumbleweeds are gone, and the homeless have much better dwellings and care than they did before urban renewal began.

For years I have been blessed to be in a book group with ministers whose theological leanings might not always be my own. Recently, we read Richard Rohr’s Falling Upwards, which presents a “spirituality for the two halves of life.” He says that the second half of life, the mature phase of life, is more open, accepting, affirming than the first, in which we necessarily build boundaries in order to establish a firm identity...

There was a story in the Wall Street Journal about Harry Lipsig. Lipsig, at age eighty-eight, decided to leave the New York law firm he had spent most of 60 years building up. He decided to open a new firm. Eighty-eight years old. So at an age when most people have long since retired, Mr. Lipsig decided to try his first case in a long time. Here was the situation: A lady was suing the city of New York because a drunken police officer had struck and killed her 71-year-old husband with his patrol car. She argued that the city had deprived her of her husband’s future earnings potential. The city argued that at age 71, he had very little earnings potential. They thought they had a pretty clever defense until they realized that this woman’s argument about her husband’s future earning power was being advanced by a vigorous 88-year-old attorney. The city settled the case for $1.25 million. The message was, “He was only a senior citizen,” but thankfully Harry Lipsig didn’t buy that...

"Who is the God revealed through this call? First, he is a God of intimacy. There are no angelic mediators here, nor is Jeremiah overwhelmed with the vision of God's transcendent glory, as was Isaiah (ch. 6). Rather God himself fashioned Jeremiah in his mother's womb, like a potter working with a lump of clay (v. 5), as he has fashioned each one of us, and he knows Jeremiah and us through and through..."

Apart from the paper route I had as a kid — delivering the Asbury Park Evening Press from my bicycle — my first job was working in a roadside stand selling Christmas trees. I got the job when I was just 15: younger than the usuallegalage, but the business was classified as an agricultural operation, so they could hire younger kids. That also meant the owners got to pay us at the lower agricultural minimum wage:a dollar twenty-five an hour, if I remember right (plusthe occasional tip for tying a Christmas tree on top of someone’s car).It was hard work, especially on cold, snowy days. The farm stand had a little shed with an electric space heater. My fellow teenage tree salesmen and I would duck in there whenever we could, but it seemedlike we never had enough time towarmup.I felt very young to be out there in the working world. The pair of Italian brothers who owned the stand were in their fifties. The twenty something son of one of them, whom his father and uncle had put in charge of us boys, lorded his age and experience over us. He took every opportunity to shoo us out of the toasty-warm shed so we could sell more trees. He did it even if there were no customers on the lot. I think Charles Dickens could have done something with his character...

"We begin, today, with a story — a true one, from American history. It's about a boy named Christopher, who grew up in Missouri, the eleventh child in a family of fifteen. The family had moved to Missouri from Kentucky, following their good friend, Daniel Boone and his family. There they prospered — until calamity struck. Christopher was just eight years old when his father was killed by a falling tree, while clearing land..."

Humorist Garrison Keillor once told the story of how God called him to become a prophet. Keillor explains that once when he was a boy, it snowed on the fourth of July and God wanted him to tell people about it because many in his town offered alternative explanations for the event. He writes, A snow flurry hit Lake Wobegon on the Fourth of July when I was a boy, but if you talk to anybody, including my family who was at the Volunteer Fire Department Bean Feed that day in 1951 on the Fourth of July, they will tell you that was fluff from the cottonwood trees that came down. We prefer words from God that build us up, rather than words that leave us destroyed and overthrown. Garrison Keillor explains this tendency as he describes why he turned down his own prophetic calling. To stand and to tell people the truth that they have been successfully avoiding is not a pleasant business. People hurt prophets. They throw sharp things at them. They rip the clothes off them and they make them sit for long periods of time in uncomfortable positions on top of sharp objects that are extremely flammable. That’s what they do to prophets. I don’t want that. I don’t want any pain whatsoever. I don’t ever want to experience any pain. Minor dentistry is more than enough for me. So, no thank you. I don’t want to be a prophet and tell the truth...

Last week I read a book by Wendy Farley called The Thirst of God (2015). It's about three medieval mystics who answered God's call on their lives despite fierce opposition from a deeply corrupt, strictly hierarchical, and patriarchal church. Forced to the fringes, they critiqued the center, and in doing so they questioned what should be normative or marginal in Christianity. Mechthild of Magdeburg in Germany, Marguerite Porete in France, and Julian of Norwich in England were all lay women, not clerics or scholars. Much to the exasperation of the political powers and religious authorities, they wrote in the common vernacular for ordinary believers, not in academic Latin. All three of them proclaimed a threatening message to a church that was deeply invested in an angry god — for them God was radically good, loving, and gracious to all humanity...

Throughout much of her life actress Helen Hayes was regularly hailed as “The First Lady of the American Theater.” Clearly this was a lofty, flattering title. Ms. Hayes must have felt honored each time she heard it. Or maybe not. Because as it turns out, Ms. Hayes is the one who came up with that title for herself! She cooked it up, stuck it into a press release, and forever after journalists made use of this sobriquet (or nickname) whenever they wrote articles about Hayes. But really the same thing happens all the time. In our age of media hype it is not at all unusual for actors, athletes, and yes, even preachers to come up with their own sobriquets or designations...

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