Give Yourself Away
a homily based on Jeremiah 1:4-10
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by Rev. Thomas N. Hall

In the opening words of our lesson, God says some important words over Jeremiah and I believe, God speaks some important words about us. Listen to these words again:

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.

Before Jeremiah knew God, God knew Jeremiah: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you.” This turns everything we ever thought about God around. We think that God is an object about which we have questions. We are curious about God. We make inquiries about God. We read books about God. We get into late night bull sessions about God. We drop into church from time to time to see what is going on with God. We indulge in an occasional sunset or symphony to cultivate a feeling of reverence for God.

But that is not the reality of our lives with God. Long before we ever got around to asking questions about God, God has been questioning us. Long before we got interested in the subject of God, God subjected us to the most intensive and searching knowledge. Before it ever crossed our minds that God might be important, God singled us out as important. Before we were formed in the womb, God knew us. We are known before we know.

This realization has a practical result: no longer do we run here and there, panicked and anxious, searching for the answers to life. Our lives are not puzzles to be figured out. Rather, we come to God, who knows us and reveals to us the truth of our lives. The fundamental mistake is to begin with ourselves and not God. God is the center from which all life develops. If we use our ego as the center from which to plot the geometry of our lives, we will live eccentrically.

We enter a world we didn't create. We grow into a life already provided for us. We arrive in a complex of relationships with other wills and destinies that are already in full operation before we are introduced. If we are going to live appropriately, we must be aware that we are living in the middle of a story that was begun and will be concluded by another. And this other is God.

My identity does not begin when I begin to understand myself. There is something previous to what I think about myself, and it is what God thinks of me. That means that everything I think and feel is by nature a response, and the one to whom I respond is God. I never speak the first word. I never make the first move.

Jeremiah's life didn't start with Jeremiah. Jeremiah's salvation didn't start with Jeremiah. Jeremiah's truth didn't start with Jeremiah. He entered the world in which the essential parts of his existence were already ancient history So do we.

Our self-knowledge is as broad as a person pulling up to the table during an intense conversation between three others. The newcomer may abruptly offer her opinions and argue her positions completely oblivious to what’s been said during the past two hours. We just want to say, “Why don’t you just shut up for awhile and find out what’s going on here. Get in tune with our conversation.

God has more patience than we! Puts up with our interruptions and passionate arguments.

The second item of background information provided on Jeremiah is this: “Before you were born I consecrated you.” Consecrated means set apart for God's side. It means that human is not a cogwheel. It means that a person is not the keyboard of a piano on which circumstances play hit parade tunes. It means we are chosen out of the feckless stream of events for something important that God is doing. What is God doing? God is saving; God is rescuing; God is providing, judging and healing. There is a spiritual war in progress, an all out moral battle. There is evil and cruelty, unhappiness and illness. There is superstition and ignorance, brutality and pain. God is in continuous and energetic battle against all of it. God is for life and against death. God is for love and against hate. God is for hope and against despair. God is for heaven and against hell. There is no neutral ground in the universe. Every square foot of space is contested.

Jeremiah, before he was born, was enlisted on God's side in this war. He wasn't given a few years in which to look around and make up his mind which side he would be on, or even whether he would join a side at all. He was already chosen as a combatant on God's side. And so are we all. No one enters existence as a spectator. We either take up the life to which we have been consecrated or we traitorous) defect from it. We cannot say, “Hold it! I am not qui« ready. Wait until I have sorted things out.”

For a long time all Christians called each other “saints.” They were all saints regardless of how well or badly they lived, or how experienced or inexperienced they were. The word saint did not refer to the quality or virtue of their acts, but to the kind of life to which they had been chosen, life or a battlefield. It was not a title given after a spectacular performance, but a mark of whose side they were on. The word saint is the noun form of the verb consecrated that gave spiritual shape to Jeremiah even before he had biological shape.

In the neighborhood in which I lived when I was in the first grade, all the children were older than I. When we had neighborhood games and chose up sides, I was always the last one chosen. There was one time—it probably happened more than once, but this once sticks in my memory—that when everyone else had been chosen, I was left standing in the middle between the two teams. The captains argued over who was going to have to choose me. Having me, I suddenly realized, was a liability. As the argument raged between them I went from being a zero to a minus.

But not with God. Not a zero. Not a minus. I have a set apart place that only I can fill. No one can substitute for me, no one can replace me. Before I was good for anything, God decided that I was good for what God was doing. My place in life doesn’t depend on how well I do in the entrance examination. My place in life is not determined by what market there is for my type of personality.

God is out to win the world in love and each person has been selected in the same way that Jeremiah was, to be set apart to do it with God. God simply doesn't wait around to see how we turn out before deciding to choose or not to choose us. Before we were born he chose us for his side—consecrated us.

The third thing that God did to Jeremiah before Jeremiah did anything on his own was this: “I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” The word appointed is, literally “gave” (nathan)—-I gave you as a prophet to the nations. God gives. God is generous. God is lavishly generous. Before Jeremiah ever got it together he was given away.

That is God's way. God did it with his own son, Jesus. God gave him away. He gave him to the nations. He did not keep him on display. Didn’t preserve him in a museum. Nor was he paraded as a trophy. “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3: I6).

And so he gave Jeremiah away. I can hear Jeremiah objecting, “Wait a minute. Don't be so quick to give me away. I've got something to say about this. I've got my inalienable rights. I have a few decisions about life that I am going to make myself.” Imagine God's response: “Sorry, but I did it before you were even born. It's already done; you are given away.”

Some things we have a choice in, some we don't. It is the kind of world into which we were born. God created it. God sustains it. Giving is the style of the universe. Giving is woven into the fabric of existence. If we try to live by getting instead of giving, we are going against the grain. It is like trying to go against the law of gravity—the consequence is bruises and broken bones. In fact, we do see a lot of distorted, misshapen, crippled lives among those who defy the reality that all life is given and must continue to be given to be true to its nature.

There is a rocky cliff on the shoreline of the Montana lake where I live part of each summer. There are breaks in the rock face in which tree swallows make their nests. For several weeks one summer I watched the swallows in swift flight collect insects barely above the surface of the water then dive into the cavities in the cliff, feeding first their mates and then their new-hatched chicks. Near one of the cracks in the cliff face a dead branch stretched about four feet over the water. One day I was delighted to see three new swallows sitting side by side on this branch. The parents made wide, sweeping, insect-gathering circuits over the water and then returned to the enormous cavities that those little birds became as they opened their beaks for a feeding.

This went on for a couple of hours until the parents decided they had had enough of it. One adult swallow got alongside the chicks and started shoving them out toward the end of the branch-pushing, pushing, pushing. The end one fell off. Somewhere between the branch and the water four feet below, the wings started working, and the fledgling was off on his own. Then the second one. But the third was not to be bullied. At the last possible moment the fledgling’s grip on the branch loosened just enough so that it swung downward, then tightened again around the branch with bulldog tenacity. The parent, apparently unruffled by such resistance, just pecked at the desperately clinging talons until it was more painful for the poor chick to hang on than risk the insecurities of flying. It released its grip and the inexperienced wings began pumping.

Swallows have feet and can walk. Swallows have talons and can grasp a branch securely. They can walk; they can cling. But flying is their shtick; it’s what they do. And only when they soar are they living at their best, gracefully and beautifully.

Giving is what we do best. It is the air into which we were born. It is the action that was designed into us before our birth. Giving is the way the world is. God gives freely and deeply. And God also gives away everything that is. No exceptions for any of us. We are given away to our families, to our friends, to our enemies—to the nations. Our life is for others. That is the way creation works. Some of us try desperately to hold on to ourselves, to live for ourselves. We look so bedraggled and pathetic doing it, hanging on to the dead branch of a bank account for dear life, afraid to risk ourselves on the untried wings of giving. We don't think we can live generously because we have never tried. But the sooner we start the better, for we are going to have to give up our lives finally, and the longer we wait the less time we have for the soaring and swooping life of grace.

Jeremiah could have hung on to the dead-end street where he was born in Anathoth. He could have huddled in security of his father's priesthood. He could have conformed to the dull habits of his culture. He didn't. He believed what had been told him about his background, that God long before gave him away, and he participated in the giving, throwing himself into his appointment. Amen.