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Jeremiah 1:4 “Formed for a Purpose” A sermon by the Rev. Roland Kubke January 31, 2010
Lessons for the 4th Sunday after Epiphany: Jeremiah 1:4-10; 1 Corinthians 12:27-13:13; Luke 4:31-44
The interest in the Vancouver Olympics is really rising as we come close to this popular event. In the lead up to it, there have been a number of stories in the news and in magazines and on TV about individual athletes. Some of those documentaries have mentioned the fact that it is certainly very costly to become an athlete of that caliber. It is not just costly in the fact that such people often have to quit their jobs to train full time. It is not just costly in equipment and travel and other things that actually cost a great deal of money over time. It is also costly in how the commitment to be an Olympic class athlete takes these people away from family and friends. It is costly in the risk to life and limb as athletes keep pushing their bodies to the limit. Eventually, something breaks down, or worse, a misfortune during a race can lead to lifelong injury and the loss at a chance to win a medal. Why do athletes do it? Certainly, a huge part of this has to do with the will to achieve something personally. There is much to be said about the desire to be the best in the world at something. Part of it has to do with the fame and the adulation many athletes receive. Sports facilities get named after some. Main roads in cities like Spruce Grove get named after others. Then again, there is the chance to make big bucks with promotional contracts. A big part of it, though, is more than just personal. A big part of it has to do with representing your country. If Olympic athletes only competed as individuals, chances are pretty good that the Olympics wouldn’t be the big deal that it is for so many people. Instead, the fans see this very much in a community spirit. It is not just an individual Canadian athlete, but Canada as a country that stands to win in the minds of many people. We speak of how many metals Canada can take home and how well Canada has done and every other country speaks the same way. The sense of national pride is so important to so many people that tax payers are willing to allow their government to spend billions of dollars on something like hosting an Olympics just so that Canada can have a place in the limelight alongside the individual athletes that compete under the Canadian flag. This is something that holds true when it comes to spiritual things, too. We often talk about faith as being something that belongs to individuals. We see it as something that individuals experience and we see the life of faith as the life that individuals lead. Yet, those individual experiences and individual risks and individual blessings that come out of faith are not just about specific people. What you experience actually belongs to all believers on some level. What each of us encounters in our relationship with Jesus Christ has an influence on the entire nation of believers.
In our lessons this morning, we see how God has called individuals to take unique risks and to receive unique blessings so that the entire group of believers can be influenced and blessed. Thank God that He knows each of us so very well so that all of us can be blessed together! On one level, the life of faith is about you and your relationship with God, just like on one level the Olympics is about an individual athlete and the individual abilities of each athlete. God knows you. God knows what flatters you. God knows what spoils you. God knows what saddens you. God knows what angers you. God knows the things that shame you and the things that overwhelm you and the things that leave you feeling like a fool. God knows what you want your life to look like, and God knows exactly what your life should look like. He knows it all because what He said to the Prophet Jeremiah, applies to you, to: “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.” (Jeremiah 1:5) The Hebrew word that is translated as “formed” in English is an interesting word. The word describes someone who begins with an image in the mind and then sets out with a strong sense of purpose to make that image become a reality. The word specifically describes a potter who imagines a beautiful piece of pottery and then sets to work on a lump of clay until the clay becomes the very image that began in the potters mind. This is what it means, then, when God says to you, “Before I formed in the womb, I knew you.” God had an image of you before you were born. He had an image, not only of what you would look like, but He had an image of what kind of person He would want you to be. God had an image of you, and He had a purpose for you even before you were born. He had a purpose for you, and that purpose is not as unique and as personalized as you might think. It is an image of you personally, but also of how you fit into the bigger picture as you stand with others under the flag of God. You see, God commonly uses the word, Israel, when He speaks to us through His Word. He plainly tells us our purpose, for example, when He says, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and with all your strength.” (Deuteronomy 6:4-5) The fact that He frames that within the context of Israel, and not your own personal relationship with God shows that God’s relationship with you and God’s purpose for you do not belong to just you alone. They belong to the entire group of believers. In the same way, the New Testament speaks about your purpose in far more than a personal sense. Peter tells us, “You are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of Him who called you out of darkness into His wonderful light.” (1 Peter 2:9) The Old Testament principle does not get changed in the New Testament. Instead, it is made all the more clear that your relationship with God is not just a personal relationship, but a family relationship. This is something that you may not always consider. When you hear words of personal comfort and peace from God’s Word, it is easy to think that the entire purpose of those words is to give you personal comfort and peace. It is easy to think that all that God’s forgiveness and grace toward you is intended to do is to make you personally ready and personally at ease with God. It is easy to think that salvation and faith and a relationship with God is just a personal thing. Many people think of their Christian faith as being something like the situation at home. Each of the kids in the family knows Mom and Dad in a unique way. The oldest kids may know them better than the youngest ones because they didn’t have to share Mom and Dad as much as the younger ones have. Then again, the younger kids may know them better because, by that point, Mom or Dad had to work fewer hours at the job. Some of the kids may have be closer to Mom or closer to Dad depending on their personality or temperament that allows them to get along better with one than with the other. The relationship may be different depending on how old each child was when some major challenge or conflict or tragedy hit the family, or when the family achieved a prosperity that family didn’t have before. Many things make it so that each child knows each parent differently from the rest. Each child has a personal relationship with Mom or Dad, even as each shares the parents with all the others. In some families where there isn’t much of a sense of family, that is all there is to it. In those families, brothers and sisters hardly know each other or feel no obligation to get along with one another. The children essentially live their own lives on their own schedules. The only thing that seems to bring them together is their common need to be looked after and the fact that they share their parents. Once they are no longer home, or once their parents are no longer alive, the family simply falls apart because the only thing that kept them together was the fact that they shared the same Mom and Dad. There are families, however, that are connected more closely than just through Mom and Dad. Each member of the family must have a personal sense of family if the family is going to survive as a family. Each has to understand the need to care about all the others and the need to love them as someone God has placed into their lives. Each has to recognize the blessing of being raised with brothers or sisters. Each has to realize that one after another, we are called to contribute and to share. Each has to understand that they are more than just room mates, but people who have a special bond of blood and a special bond of love. Each person has to understand that they have something to give one another so that together, they are stronger and better than each could be alone. When each one understands this, then the family truly becomes a place of blessing. For this to happen, though, God must call someone to bring people out of their self-centered places. God must raise them up to be above the attitude of each person just looking after themselves. He must inspire them to make sacrifices and to take risks. He must call them to reach out in love with a love that is “patient, kind, not envious or boastful and not proud. It is a love that is not rude, and it is not self-seeking, not easily angered and does not keep a record of wrongs.” In short, it is a love that binds people together and overcomes the sinful desire for each to want things our own way. This is what Jeremiah’s specific call was about. Yes, God used that call to assure Jeremiah that he was himself a believer with a special relationship with our Father in heaven. The purpose of that call, though, was to challenge the people who did not care for the family of God and would not see their place in the family of God to leave their selfish ways and return to that special family and once again be part of the true Israel. God appointed Jeremiah not just to speak to individuals, but God said, “I appoint you over nations and kingdoms.” It is not just the individual, but the group! In our Gospel lesson this morning, we see that nothing had changed in Jesus time. As once Jeremiah had been called to speak with great courage to people who claimed to love God but had turned away from Him, so Jesus was called to speak that message. Jesus tore away at false faith just like Jeremiah had. Just as Jeremiah was attacked for speaking the truth, Jesus was also attacked. In our Gospel lesson, the plan of Jesus’ former friends and neighbours was to get rid of Jesus by tossing Him off a cliff. God’s plan was different, though. Jesus first had to fulfill His purpose before God would let His Son be killed for speaking the truth. This is where things were so very different between Jeremiah and Jesus. Jesus had the power to walk right through the crowds that tried to seize Him and silence God’s Word. Jesus was able to choose exactly the death that He would die. Jesus chose to die in such a way that the Romans and the Jews would all see that they were killing Jesus in order to silence God’s Word. He chose to die in such a way that the anyone with any remnant of faith in God would be shocked into seeing that God’s own Son had to be uprooted and torn down, destroyed and overthrown before God could reach into your heart to build and plant God’s purpose in you instead and bring back the family of God to that place where He has always planned for it to be. Jesus Himself knows you. He knows you in love. He knows just how afraid you can be to see yourself for what kind of person you really are. He knows how hard it can be to seek God’s Will and follow God’s purpose for you when you are surrounded by people who laugh at the warnings of God and who think that God’s forgiveness is useless. He knows the opposition you face, not just in your own heart, but in the people around you, and in Satan himself. That is why God tells you, “Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you and will rescue you.” (Jeremiah 1:8) Do not be afraid, even as your fear is a sign that you do understand and that you do believe. Do not be afraid because Jesus Himself has rescued you. He Himself has shed His blood for you and offered His body on that Cross so that no fear and no opposition could separate you from the love of God! In our Gospel lesson this morning, Jesus blessed individual people by healing them and casting demons out of them. Yet, each case became a witness and testimony to the entire community around them. It was the community that was amazed at the authority of Jesus’ teaching. It was the group that was in awe when Jesus cast out the demons without injuring the possessed man. Luke tells us, “All the people were amazed and said to each other, “What is this teaching? With authority and power He gives orders to evil spirits and they come out.” (Luke 4:36) What did Peter’s mother-in-law do when she was healed? She immediately got up and waited on Jesus and the whole group of disciples that were with Him. Our Lord’s ministry was to the entire people, and it was groups of people who responded to the wonders that Jesus had shown them as they were restored not just to a personal relationship with God, but to the true Israel itself. Our second lesson this morning has a lot to say about God’s purpose for those people who are forgiven by God and who belong to Him through Christ Jesus. Firstly, it reminds us that God’s purpose for each of us can be very specific. Even today God calls people into special roles to serve God in special ways. The list of gifts in the first part of the lesson are gifts given especially so that God’s Word will continue to be proclaimed to do its work of tearing down and building up for the sake of Jesus Christ. God still provides the people that are needed so that there will be someone, somewhere, who will preach and teach God’s Word with courage and organize God’s children with a sense of thanksgiving and joy over our salvation! The lesson then continues with one of the most famous passages of all the Bible. God knows you and speaks to you, corrects you and comforts you so that you may realize His great purpose for you is to love Him and love one another with a love that comes from God! It doesn’t matter how gifted you are or how important you are if that godly love does not motivate your faith in Christ and your service to the Lord toward other people! God’s purpose for you is love with a love only He can give you and only He can maintain in you: It is the love of a saving faith that always protects, always trusts, always hopes and always perseveres because God Himself has given that love such a noble purpose! God indeed knows you and knows you well. May He lift you up in faith so that whatever you experience, you will never forget that God knows you with a purpose and for a purpose in the name of Jesus Christ. God knows you so that you can take your place in the entire people of God, blessing others with the blessings God Himself has given you. Remember this for Jesus’ sake. Amen. |
