If it is Lent, we must be reading Jeremiah. Here we have the call of Jeremiah and we
learn that he was created to be a prophet.
Before he was formed in his mother’s womb the Lord knew that he would do
this work. Don’t you wish you knew exactly what you were formed to do? The question of purpose is central to our
being and yet did the purpose of Jeremiah’s life give him any joy? The Lord tells him not to be afraid, that He
will deliver the prophet when he protests that he doesn’t know how to speak, he
is only a youth. This protest sounds a
bit like Moses’ statement when the Lord called him to the work of leading the
people out of Egypt. The Lord told
Jeremiah, “I have set you this day over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up
and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.” You have to believe that this was an
encouragement to the man but his life would be filled with hardship and
disappointment, his call would not be pleasant to him for much of his life.
Jesus isn’t denying his family, he is expanding it. Family is composed of those who know the will
of God and do it. The family reaches
back into history beyond familial ties of blood and into the future as well as
the present. We have brothers and
sisters in Christ all over the world and yet too often we see ourselves as
competitors and enemies rather than family.
We become Pharisees too easily.
The parable of the sower tells us to sow indiscriminately doesn’t it? We tend to target our activity in ways that
don’t fit with this parable. We never know
the true condition of the soil on which we sow.
In our first lesson, Jeremiah was essentially promised that a good bit
of his work would produce nothing but enmity.
We just have to do what he did, keep at it.
Paul preaches the KISS principle, keep it simple,
stupid. The foundation is already laid,
Jesus Christ. Whatever we add to that
foundation needs to be as valuable as the foundation. In this season of Lent we
are called to self-examination, seeing what we are adding onto that foundation
in our lives. Are our lives built of
eternal or temporal things? If that
which is eternal is the foundation doesn’t that tell us that we need to make
sure the house itself, or the temple as Paul argues, is of equally valuable
material? If we are to have wisdom let
it be true wisdom, not worldly wisdom.
No comments:
Post a Comment