There’s really no good time to hear from God, is there?

We’re almost always right in the middle of something. We have meetings scheduled; tickets to next week’s game; children to raise; careers ahead of us. Our weekly planners simply have no category for the divine claim on our lives. When that claim comes, most of us respond the only way we know how: We try to wriggle out.

“Ah, Lord God, I am only a boy!”

A reasonable objection, surely; but for some reason, God is not impressed. Apparently childhood is no excuse when it comes to God’s plans for us. The fact that Israelite society granted no voice or status to children; that the prophetic calling is a difficult and sometimes dangerous one; that the young Jeremiah has no credentials for the work—none of this is relevant, God declares. Only one thing matters, and that is that the call comes from God.

“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."

God reaches out to touch Jeremiah’s mouth—placing there words that will burn in his bones for the rest of his days. Words with the power “to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.” Words of power from the voice that called the worlds into being, that summoned Abraham and Moses, that liberated a people and uttered sacred laws for them to live by, that brought down tyrants and raised up kings—and that even now, the book of Jeremiah tells us, is stirring up nations to carry out God’s mandates in history.

The times were every bit as tumultuous as our own. Old empires were tottering, new ones rising to take their place. As usual, Israel was caught in the midst of it all, a small and militarily insignificant nation with an unshakable sense of its own destiny. Now, God appoints Jeremiah—a powerless child, a nobody—to be the instrument of that destiny. Small blame to him if the kid balks. Wouldn’t you?

Now, for most of us the call of God does not come quite as dramatically as happens in this story. For most of us it creeps in quietly, insinuatingly; perhaps less in words and visions than in a kind of persistent uneasy feeling. We may never recognize it as a call from God at all. It might begin with a sense of restlessness … a vision, an inspiration, a hunger for justice, an impulse of compassion. A call can take many forms.

Alas, the one form it will almost certainly never take is a call to stay put and keep doing whatever it was we were doing. That’s why the first response of most people in the Bible when they hear God calling their name is to start explaining to God why they could not possibly do the thing that God is asking of them. My favorite is Moses. “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt? If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them? Suppose they do not believe me or listen to me, but say, ‘The Lord did not appear to you.’ I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor even now that you have spoken to your servant; but I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.” And finally, in desperation, “O my Lord, please send someone else!” (Ex. 3:11–4:13)

And in a way, that’s a normal, sensible response to God’s claim on us. Because when God comes calling, you can bet that, ready or not, life is about to change.

Small surprise if we’re sometimes slow to respond. Indeed, some of us may spend a lifetime evading God’s call. God is very good at waiting, you know. Like a cat at a mouse hole, God can sit at the edges of your conscious awareness for decades, waiting for you to venture closer. Waiting for you to give in. Because that’s usually how it feels, if and when you finally say yes to whatever it is you’ve been putting off or pushing away. Not like defeat, mind you; no, more like relief and peace. Like giving in to a love that has slowly, gently been drawing you closer—a love that wants more from you than you have so far been willing to give. A love that wants not just your life but you yourself—all of you. Your gifts, your quirks, your faults, your graces. Just as you are, right here, right now. It seems that no substitute will do.

No, such a call rarely comes at a convenient time.

We think, after all, that our life belongs to us. We think of it as our own possession, to spend in whatever way seems best to us. It comes as a shock to find God making claims on that life with such loving confidence. We forget that from the first we have been part of something far bigger, far deeper, far older than ourselves. “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you,” says God to Jeremiah, “and before you were born, I consecrated you. I appointed you a prophet to the nations.”

Ours is a God who cares about the world. Enough to stay present to it, no matter how bad things get. Enough to keep patiently shaping and reshaping, calling each one of us into partnership in the process; naming each person as important—indeed indispensable—in the fulfillment of God’s great vision for creation.

What claim might God be making on your life?

And what claim might God be making on Old South Church?

Because, you know, what I’ve been saying about individuals applies to faith communities too. Our gospel reading today reminds us of that.

The story takes place in a synagogue on the sabbath. Now, as we all know, the sabbath is a very sacred time in Jewish tradition. “Remember the sabbath day and keep it holy,” says the fourth commandment.

Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it. (Ex 20:8–11)

For observant Jews throughout history, the Sabbath has been a day to stop and smell the lilies of the field: to enjoy the blessings of creation and give thanks and not try to get anything DONE. Like the silence after an amen, the sabbath is to be a holy space, a joyous savoring of God’s goodness. In Jesus’ day it served another purpose too. With assimilation a constant threat, it helped establish Jewish identity. It marked the Jews as different—“not like the other nations,” who worked seven days a week, with occasional festival days off for relaxation. (Workaholics, take note!) Setting the sabbath apart for rest and study helped Jews remember who—and WHOSE—they were, and so it was taken very seriously indeed.

The problem is, how exactly do you define work? The Bible doesn’t say. And so, in every time and place, faithful people have done their best to interpret the commandment in a way that will please God and honor the spirit of sabbath rest.

It seems that in Jesus’ day, healing was regarded as a form of work. And so when Jesus, teaching in the synagogue, catches sight of the bent-over woman and decides to release her from her condition then and there, in full sight of the crowd, he knows very well that his action will strike some present as a deliberate flouting of the fourth commandment—and as a direct challenge to the religious leaders.

You can imagine their frustration. They don’t want to appear heartless. They have nothing against healing, for goodness’ sake; just not here, and not now. The woman had lived with her condition for 18 years; surely she could wait a few more hours until the sabbath was over.

Now, it’s very easy and all too common for Christians hearing this passage to sigh and shake our heads at the empty legalism of Jewish religion in Jesus’ time. Let’s not. Because even if scholarship supported that picture, which it doesn’t, when we point the finger at the scribes and Pharisees, we’re telling ourselves that we’re different somehow—and I don’t know that we really are all that different. Here at Old South we have our customs and our traditions too: forms and practices instituted to help us deepen, grow, and live out our faith. Meaningful as these forms and practices have been to people over time, they are still just that—forms and practices. Today’s gospel lesson wants us to remember that it is the easiest thing in the world to get clingy and possessive about the WAY we practice our faith, and to lose touch with the center: the living God who calls us into dynamic relationship and who asks us to be ready to respond to the needs of the world with the same warm heart of compassion that God has shown toward us. Even if that means we have to change.

It’s hard to see what God is doing in our midst when we’re focused on our own mode of spirituality. This is what seems to have happened in the case of the crippled woman in our story. The gospel says that she “appeared” in the synagogue while Jesus was teaching. I imagine that by long familiarity, she had become all but invisible to those around her. A person like that would likely have had very little “standing” in the community: a woman, and disabled—bent over in a shameful position that must have made others want to avert their gaze. Year in and year out, nothing had changed for her, except that perhaps she had grown a bit more bent. She had been like that for so long, people had long since stopped thinking about it, or even really seeing her as a person. Her condition was just part of the way things were.

So it was a shocking thing when Jesus summoned her to the front of the room and healed her of her affliction, right then and there. He was doing exactly as he promised on another sabbath in another synagogue back in Galilee: bringing good news to the poor; releasing captives; letting the oppressed go free. He was making suffering visible in order to overcome it. “Whatever God does,” said Meister Eckhart, “the first outburst is always compassion.” In this moment God’s first outburst was to reach out in mercy to that bent spine and unloose whatever was weighing it down. Jesus called it by the name of Satan, but he didn’t say whether he was talking about the disease, or the stigma attached to the disease, or the economic struggle of her situation, or the woman’s overburdened spirit. All he said was, “You are set free.”

The reaction of the synagogue leader reminds us that liberation must always come at a cost: the cost of someone’s cherished way of life. This word spoken by Jesus is indeed the same mighty word placed on the tongue of Jeremiah: the word that plucks up and pulls down, that destroys and overthrows, that builds and plants, carrying out God’s vision for creation. It is one and the same word. Sometimes what gets pulled down will be our own treasured customs.

“There are many reasons for the failure to comprehend Christ's teaching,” wrote Tolstoy, “…but the chief cause which has engendered all these misconceptions is this: that Christ's teaching is considered to be such as can be accepted, or not accepted, without changing one’s life.”

Are we willing to risk change in order to go deeper with God? Can we trust this God?

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you.”

Can we trust this God enough to loosen our grip on our own destinies, and let ourselves be led to places we did not expect to go?

Enough to leave behind what is safe and familiar and risk uncertainty, change, and even, on occasion, failure?

These questions aren’t going to go away for any of us. They wait, the kingdom waits, like a cat at a mouse hole, for us to venture closer. I warn you that God will not tire until the kingdom is established—not in some future time and place, but right here, right now. As Jeremiah declared,

The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the LORD. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the LORD’, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD. (Jer 31.31–34)

If we never say yes, we will never know what it is to be free in the way that God intends us to be free.

And we will never know what unimagined joy God has in store for us.

Why not here? Why not now? God is ready. Are we?