Sermon preached by Rev. Margie Quinn on June 15, 2025
Let's have a little fun, shall we? How many of you have read the book Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert? So, this is a book about an author who had just gone through a really nasty divorce, and she decided to go on a pilgrimage, let's call it, and she wanted to spend four months in Italy, four months in India, and four months in Indonesia. She wanted to go to Italy to experience the pleasure of food. And she wanted to go to India to an ashram to find God. And she wanted to go to Indonesia to achieve balance before coming back to the States with this renewed travel.
So she—I'm going to skip over Italy. She ate a bunch of spaghetti, right? Okay. So, she's full from her experience in Italy and she goes to India, and she shows up. Do y’all hear this? Is it annoying? Okay. Can I just take this off for now? Okay. Better. Okay. Okay. She just ate spaghetti. All right. She goes to India and she gets to the ashram and she's very excited about what's going to happen there, and she was sort of hoping for what she says is a dazzling encounter with God. Maybe something like blue lightning or prophetic vision.
She describes how she had been talking too much all of her life—cannot relate—and she didn't want to waste this great spiritual opportunity by being really social and chatty all the time. She says she hoped to become known as that quiet girl. She showed up and after a few days, the ashram gives everyone a role while they're staying there in residency. Maybe she hoped she could have a role in the garden, growing beautiful plants and picking fresh vegetables. Maybe she could be in the kitchen baking bread and, um, reveling in the wafting scent of that experience. Maybe she could do maintenance and just find holiness in sweeping and mopping. Or maybe she could be the quiet administrator answering emails behind the scenes.
But she gets to the desk of the staff member in charge of the roles, and the staff member looks at her and says, "We would like for you to be the key hostess. You will talk to and greet every single person who enters the ashram during their time on this retreat. You will be the holy conversationalist." Meaning she was going to have to talk a lot more.
And I always think about this story. It makes me laugh because despite Liz's best efforts to perform a task that was so different from her nature, she is thrown right into a role that suits her gifts. And she is quite literally called to speak.
I know y'all have heard this passage before—Jeremiah's call story. God is in need of a prophetic voice once again in the midst of loss and war and exile. And God picks a very young boy, perhaps about 10 years old, named Jeremiah to be that voice. The word of God comes to him, and Jeremiah is really reluctant to have anything to do with this whole being the divine orator for God thing.
So, in what I imagine is a really tender and parental way of delivering this news, maybe God kneels down and gets down to Jeremiah's level and looks him in the eyes and says, "Jeremiah, before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. Before you were born, I consecrated you. I appointed you a prophet of the nations." I just think God reveals so much to us in that really personal and intimate moment—that we are known personally and intrinsically by God. God who is and has been always forming us.
But to be appointed as a prophet of the nations—no pressure.
Jeremiah's response is a familiar one because it's the same response as Moses and Isaiah and Jonah—particularly Jonah, who waited in a whale for three days before deciding to pray and answer God's call. He resists it. He says, "Ah, God, truly I don't know how to speak, for I am only a boy. I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy."
How many of us have voiced these same fears?
I do not know how to, for I am only...
I do not know how to join the choir, for I'm only an okay singer. But do you take okay singers? Yeah, TJ's going, "Come on."
I do not know how to teach Sunday school, for I am only learning some of this stuff myself.
I do not know how to preach in church, for I am only a youth.
I do not know how to be an elder, for I'm only good at praying when I'm by myself.
I do not know how to march in a protest, for I am only one person. I am only just becoming aware of certain social issues.
I only have one hour.
I only think I should stay home and advocate for folks there.
I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy.
Don't say that.
God responds, "Don't say that. Don't say that you are only this or that. You shall go to whom I send you. You shall speak to whom I command you. Don't be afraid of them, for I am with you. I will deliver you."
The word of the Lord isn't just heard by Jeremiah. It happens to him. God happens to Jeremiah in this event, this moment. Jeremiah doesn't choose God. God chooses Jeremiah. And not once has Jeremiah proved that he is qualified for this role, but God decided that he is. And God knows Jeremiah well enough to know that he's probably going to do everything in his power to resist. But God is a God who doesn't let Jeremiah slip away and go unnoticed. God has his back.
"I will send you where you need to go," God says. "I'll help you speak up even when your voice shakes. I will be with you, Jeremiah. You don't have to do this alone." Which is a good thing because God basically calls Jeremiah to be a holy nuisance, a constant annoyance, a weeping prophet who begs the people to see the injustice around them and do something about it.
And people mocked him. And people laughed at him. They didn't want to hear from him. He even tried to remain silent in Jeremiah 20, which I'll read in a second. He tried to give up speaking, just like Liz did at the ashram. He says, "If I say I will not mention God or speak any more of God's name, if I try to be silent, there is this burning fire within me shut up in my bones, and I'm weary from holding it in, and I can't."
The spirit of God is so strong in Jeremiah that when he tries to silence his calling, he feels like there is a fire in his bones that he cannot shut down—that is waiting to breathe out of him. That the word of the Lord has chosen Jeremiah's lips to be anointed.
Have you ever experienced that, church? Trying to resist what God is so clearly calling you to do? Trying to be the quiet girl at the monastery when God is calling you to be the key hostess?
Now, I don't want y'all to think that we all need to go out and be a public speaker, but I deeply believe that every single one of us has gifts and each of us has a calling based on those gifts. Whether it's sports or art or cheer or organizing or teaching or marketing or parenting—and it's not so much what our calling is but what we are going to do once we have said yes to God.
Amen?
Will we quiet it down or will we let that fire burn?
"I can't, for I am only..."
That's not going to cut it, folks. Not now. Not now.
We have to move beyond our hesitations and reservations and listen for God's affirmation of our unique callings in this world.
We don't need to read these prophets as biblical superheroes. Jeremiah, as James Calvin Davis wrote, was the everyman's prophet. He showed that fear and anxiety and resistance and inadequacy and even resentment toward God are understandable reactions to the call to represent God in the world. And these feelings don't disqualify us from serving God's intentions. In fact, I think they make us a little more human, a little more relatable in our serving.
Church, I'm looking at a bunch of everyman's and every woman's prophets. Not superheroes, but people who are called by God.
And I'm wondering what happens when we just ditch the "I can'ts" and the "I'm onlys" for "I must" and "I definitely."
Jack read what happens after Jeremiah heeded the call in chapter 7. He stood outside of the temple of the church and he spoke of God's judgment—not because there was corruption necessarily happening in the temple, but—and I want y'all to listen here—because the temple was a place to hide after people had been corrupt in the public sphere, in public policy.
And Jeremiah says this from right outside of the gates to the temple. So he is on the outskirts of this group, both physically and socially. He says:
"If you want to amend your ways and your doings, you've got to truly act justly with one another. If you do not oppress the alien, if you do not oppress the orphan and the widow and shed innocent blood in this place, if you do not go after other gods to your own hurt, then I will dwell with you in this place, in the land that I gave to your ancestors forever and ever.
And here you are," Jeremiah says through God, "trusting in deceptive words to no avail. Will you steal and murder and commit adultery and swear falsely and make offerings to Baal and go after other gods that you don't even know and then come and stand before me in my house?
You'll feel that parenting coming through.
"Come and stand before me in my house, which is called by my name, and say, ‘We're safe,’ only then to go out and do more abominations. Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers to you?"
Who else talks about that?
It's the answer to every Sunday school question.
Jesus. Woo. Y'all better wake up.
"I am watching," says the Lord.
Strong, prophetic, bold words are spoken by the boy Jeremiah—words that convict me. Words that make me question what I am hiding from when I come here. What I am saying when I'm out there that I'm not willing to confront. And yet he threw away his "can'ts" and his "onlys" to preach a message of justice and fairness—particularly for the most vulnerable in his community—in the name of the Lord.
He couldn't. He was only a boy.
Not anymore.
We can't. We're only a small church in a southern city showing up, doing what we can.
Not anymore.