May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts, be acceptable in your sight O God our Strength and our Redeemer. Maybe you recognize that litany as a prayer before sermons uttered by preachers.
I had a mentor in Kingston when I was studying for ministry who confided in me that his body reacted very queasily every Sunday morning at the thought of climbing into the pulpit to share the sermon message. Not from performance anxiety but from the fear that what he would say was not actually from God, but his own distorted version of that vision.
...Words are tricky. Language changes and adapts. The use of words shifts and slurs as new slang and jargon as well as cyber-speak with all of its acronyms and shorthanded terminology, spreads faster and farther than before.
In the call of the great prophet, Jeremiah, there is early assurance that our hero is exempt from such concerns. God literally put words in his mouth. What he speaks is not of his own accord but from a greater source and a higher power. He is but a boy when God commissioned him to a life of speaking out against the powers that be. He is one who would uproot, pull down, destroy and discard, calling to account the sins of the people.
...Jeremiah is a prophet to the nations – not just to Judah in the south where he lived, but to Israel in the north, to Babylon, to Egypt. What might his message be to the nation of Canada, a confederacy beyond his wildest imagining, thousands of years after his ministry?
He was preaching a message of impending doom and disaster at the hands of enemy armies because the people had rejected God and worshipped other false gods and idols. The people had failed in maintaining their side of the agreement to live fairly, treating each other with respect and above all, recognizing the supremacy of God over any human enterprise.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Our present society has entrusted more in its own devices and schemes than in God’s providence and abundance. Success is attained at the expense of others, winning over losers and part of me wonders if the decline in mainline churches is akin to the Temple in Jerusalem being overrun.
Even before he was born, God had plans for Jeremiah. This raises all kinds of theological questions about predestination and freewill, why bother making choices and decisions if God has already decided these things for us? Or we wonder why do some people have a great plan and purpose laid out for them in life and others have to figure out what they will do?
AJ Jacobs once spent an entire year living all the laws, rules and regulations of the Bible. He soon discovered that he could not. One of the consoling pearls of wisdom that a Rabbi offered him was this truth: “The words of the Bible are eternal. The meaning evolves.” That’s the comfort and challenge both: God’s message is with us, we have to figure out what it means for us.
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