All Saints by the Lake, Dorval
August 24, 2025
Jeremiah, from the Sistine Chapel ceiling. An image search for depictions of Jeremiah as the boy or very young man he is in this passage, came up empty …
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.” Then I said “Ah, Lord God! Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy.” 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. Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you, says the Lord.” 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. 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.”
Yes, I just reread the whole of the first reading. It’s short, and I think it was worth it, because I want to look closely at it this morning.
This reading is the inauguration of a series of passages from the prophet Jeremiah that will take us deep into October. For the next eight weeks (with breaks for Holy Cross Day and Thanksgiving) we’ll hear from this remarkable prophetic figure, whose words make up one of the longest books of the Bible (fifty-two chapters) as well as being the source of the book of Lamentations.
Jeremiah has a reputation as the prophet of doom (hence the English word “jeremiad” meaning an angry or pessimistic diatribe), and he did live at a particularly depressing episode in the history of God’s people, at the start of the sixth century BCE. The northern Israelite kingdom had been overthrown and sent into exile in Assyria about a century beforehand, and the southern kingdom of Judah was being threatened with the same fate by the ascendant empire of Babylon. The king and other leaders, after a brief resurgence of obedience to the law, right worship, and care for the oppressed under King Josiah, seemed intent on behaving as destructively as possible, while insisting that God would protect the kingdom and it could not be overthrown. Eventually, Judah and its capital city, Jerusalem, did fall – as depicted in the heartbreaking five chapters of the book of Lamentations – and Jeremiah ended up with a group of exiles in Egypt, where he wrote his final oracles.
But Jeremiah is about much more than bad news: in the midst of the catastrophic overthrow of everything he has ever loved, he clings stubbornly to faith in God and the promise of new beginnings. In today’s reading, God tells Jeremiah, “I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow” – but also “to build and to plant.” And over the coming weeks, as we hear some of the best-known and best-loved passages from Jeremiah, we will travel with the prophet along this arc from despair to hope. We will hear of cracked cisterns that hold no water, of ruined pots being reshaped on the potter’s wheel, and of the desolation of the ransacked city; but we will also hear God’s command to the people to seek the welfare of the city where they have been sent into exile, and God’s promise that the goodness of daily life will one day resume, and that the covenant between God and God’s people will be renewed.
In today’s passage, though, all that is still in the future. Today we hear what are almost the very first verses of the book, in which Jeremiah, in much the same manner as other prophets such as Moses, Samuel, and Isaiah, receives his calling and commission from God.
I’m sure that even Laura Hill, with her legendary level of detail orientation, didn’t read every scripture reading before deciding whom to assign as readers, so it’s a nice piece of serendipity that the passage was read by Peter, who’s probably not much younger than Jeremiah was when he received this call.
Preachers often use this portion of Jeremiah to inspire young people and reassure them that God calls them to do great things. If you are a young person wondering about the direction of your life, know that God has known and consecrated you since before you were born; that God gives you words to speak even to those who are older and supposedly more authoritative than you; and that God is with you to deliver you, so there is no need to be afraid.
But all of us, of any age, have been young once, and I think most of us can still relate to feeling like we’re not sure we have what it takes, we’re not sure our desires or intuitions are valid or congruent with what God wants, and overall the whole thing makes us more than a little anxious.
And sometimes God does in fact call us to do things that we don’t want to do! Jeremiah doesn’t say outright, “God, I’d rather not deal with the danger and hassle and general unpleasantness of being a prophet of mostly bad news, could you maybe find someone else?” but you certainly get the impression that he would be relieved if God left him alone. As the commentator Bruce Birch puts it about this passage, “a call to God’s service is not a carefully considered career choice.” More frequently, it makes a mess of all our sensible plans and sends us off in a direction we never expected. But, to quote Sally Brown this time, “Our angst and ambivalence are real – but, frankly, somewhat beside the point.”
Why can’t God just do the thing God wants done himself? You might as well ask, why did God bother creating anything in the first place? For whatever reason, God made us and loves us, and here we are, struggling to figure out how to do right and what particular right thing God is asking us in particular to do. To quote yet another commentator, John T. Debevoise, this text portrays “an audacious faith in a God who not only affirms, but indeed creates individual human worth and dignity.”
Young or old, eloquent or tongue-tied, we are created by God for God’s purposes, and if God gives us a calling, God will also give us what we need to fulfill it. Neither talent or enthusiasm is actually required – the fourth contributor to the section on this passage in my commentary book compares Jeremiah to Jonah, who had to be practically physically forced to go and preach repentance to the Ninevites, who presumably put the absolute bare minimum of effort into it when he did get there – and whose prophetic word was still effective, leading a hundred thousand people, including the king, to repent in sackcloth and ashes!
I’m sure that teenage or twentysomething Jeremiah had no idea of the path on which his prophetic vocation would lead him. I hope he had some inkling that it would not all be defeat and despair, that hope and possibility would persist. But, despite his reluctance, he was faithful. He preached the word of the Lord as God conveyed it to him and he understood it. He warned of destruction and overthrow when he had to, and he hung on long enough to build and to plant, as God’s covenant was renewed even among a people in exile.
God gives each of us work to do. May we, like Jeremiah, be faithful, rely on God for the courage that we need, and hold on to hope.
Amen.
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