W

hen I re-read this morning’s passage from the prophet Jeremiah, I couldn’t help but think of Cheryl’s new job. Many of you know that Cheryl has accepted a position with the new chancellor for the District of Columbia Public Schools, Michelle Rhee. It seems to me that over the next several months the new chancellor and her team will indeed be called upon, as Jeremiah was called to do, “to pluck up and pull down, to destroy and overthrow, to build and to plant.” The tricky part will be figuring out what requires plucking up and pulling down, and where they are required to build and plant. Both jobs are going to be tough. As Colbert King put it in his op-ed column last weekend, “gird yourself for incredible blowback.” Come to think of it, those might have been helpful words for God to have spoken to Jeremiah as well. I addition to “I will be with you,” he might have also warned, “gird yourself for blowback.”

      But there is another sense in which Jeremiah’s story reminded me of Cheryl’s. When we moved here, seven years ago, we were under the impression that we had moved here for my job. It was my decision to leave my last church. It was Pilgrim’s decision to call me as pastor. Now, as it turns out, we moved here seven years ago for her job– we just didn’t know it at the time. We thought we were masters of our own destiny, captains of our own ship, but in ways we Presbyterians have come to call “providence,” God has a way to moving us in certain directions unfettered by our best laid plans. So God says to Jeremiah,

      “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.”

Not “while I was in high school I decided to study prophecy, so I majored in the prophetic arts in college, and when I graduated, prophecy seemed like a good career path to me.” No, God says, “I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” And what does Jeremiah do? Like virtually every other biblical character to receives a call from God, he objects. You must have someone else in mind. I’m only a boy. I’m not much for public speaking. This wasn’t where I tested best at the career guidance center. To which God says, “Don’t be afraid.” I will give you the words to say.

      So in ways that she could not have imagined, Cheryl is in a position that I’m not sure she even would have aspired to seven years ago. Yet there is this overwhelming sense that everything she has done in her professional life over the past twenty-five years has prepared her for this moment, to say yes to a call that she didn’t even know was coming. Not that it will be easy. Long hours. Demanding schedule. Endless workload. And that whole “blowback” thing. But in a way that she has never felt before in quite the same way, she senses that she is where she is supposed to be.

I t is a rare moment, and a gift when that happens. It doesn’t happen to all of us. And, who knows, it may prove fleeting even in Cheryl’s case. But it is something that most of us yearn for, to feel that we are at the right place in the right time, that our lives matter, that we are fulfilling our purpose in this world. The popular author Harold Kushner, after thirty years as a congregational rabbi, concludes that most people aren’t afraid of dying. They’re afraid of not having lived. It’s not that we want to live forever. We just want to live long enough that our life matters.

      The paradox from a Christian perspective is that finding a life that matters is not something we can set out to achieve but rather something we respond to. In the church we speak of “call” because it is something you have to answer. The Quaker writer Parker Palmer, in one of my favorite little books, Let Your Life Speak, suggests that the key to discovering your calling in life is listening to what your life is trying to say. That’s the meaning of the Quaker phrase “Let your life speak,” from which he gets the book’s title. It’s not about living up to some ideal, it’s not about trying to live somebody else’s life. It’s about discovering the life you are truly meant to live. He writes,

      Vocation doesn’t come from willfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about–quite apart from what I would like it to be about–or my life will never represent anything real in the world, no matter how earnest my intentions.

      The danger of Jeremiah’s story is that we imagine that the clue to discovering our vocation is waiting for some external voice to tell us who we are supposed to be. So we wait for God’s voice to boom from the heavens, and if that fails to happen, we settle for the minister’s voice, or a teacher’s voice, or our parent’s voice. Those other voices may have something to say, but Palmer suggests that listening to our own lives is the best way in which we listen to the voice of God. Calling comes from within. Our true vocation is not always high and noble. It may not be something that we would choose for ourselves. Jeremiah’s calling is one that few of us would aspire to. It caused Jeremiah no small amount of personal suffering. God placed him into the vortex of the most critical moment of Israel’s history. As Jerusalem was destroyed by an invading army, and its leading citizens carted off into exile in Babylon, it was Jeremiah who interpreted for the people the meaning of these events. It is not overstating the case, as one commentator put it, to say that without Jeremiah’s prophetic word, the Israelites might not have had the conceptual and theological tools to comprehend this monumental tragedy in their national life and to move beyond it.

F ew of us imagine such a high calling in our own lives. We don’t conceive of ourselves as having a roll at the center of world history. We’re often not even sure what impact we make on the lives of those closest to us. We long for that feeling, however fleeting, that we are in the right place at the right time doing what we are meant to do. Much more often we live with the nagging feeling that we are not living the life we are supposed to live. In reflecting on his own spiritual journey, Palmer writes of coming to the realization at various points in his life that the life he was living was not the same as the life that wanted to live in him.

      Letting your life speak– listening to the voice of God within– does not mean that we are each called to a life or a moment of dramatic gestures. The moments that really effect people’s lives are often the simplest gestures that any Christian, any human being, can perform if we are attentive to the moment and responsive to those around us. I often imagine at memorial services here at the church that the deceased would be surprised to hear the ways in which their lives impacted those around them. Yet at the same time, if the Biblical witness is in any way our guide, the voice of God is often calling us beyond our comfort zone, beyond what is safe and familiar, engaging us in the world in ways we had not anticipated, awakening gifts within us that we did not know we had.

      “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,” God said to Jeremiah. The word “to know” in Hebrew does not mean to be merely acquainted, but to know in the deepest, most intimate sense. Indeed, it is the same word used in the Bible to describe sexual relationships. This is how God knows us. Deeply, into the very core of our being. We listen to our lives in order to know ourselves as we are already known by God, to know as we are known. “Before you were born,” God said to Jeremiah, “I consecrated you.” Can we be so audacious as to believe that God speaks those same words to each one of us? Listen to God’s call in your life. Let your life speak. Then you can say with the Psalmist, in words that are read at most memorials at the church,

      For it was you

             who formed my inward parts;

      you knit me together

             in my mother's womb.

      I praise you, for I am  

             fearfully and wonderfully made. 

(Psalm 139:13-15) ✞

© 2007 Jeffrey K. Krehbiel