I Appointed You

Psalm 71: 1 - 6

Jeremiah 1: 4 – 10

Feb 2, 2025

I remember when our girls were little and one received a talking Teddy Ruxpin bear. Teddy was soft, cuddly, could speak 13 languages and had a library of 60 stories on cassette tapes that children could interact with. Ruxpin actually had 3 motors in its body and was billed as the first animatronic bear for children.

Coming out first to the toy market in 1985, millions of these bears were sold in the mid to late 80s. But the phenom that was Teddy Ruxpin quickly faded. Perhaps, like the one we had, families found that Teddy Ruxpin quickly froze up under the active play with small children.

Of course, we have had “talking” toys for a long time. The first that we know of was created in 1877 by Thomas Edison and was brought to the market in 1887. The Edison Phonograph Doll actually played a small record that was placed in its back and, as you might imagine, this doll did not last long on the market.

Of course, we talk today with all kinds in inanimate objects. We call out to Siri, Alexa, and Echo every day to get weather and traffic reports. We ask these objects all kinds of questions and often get amusing results. Supposedly, if one asks Alexa to tell the questioner a secret, Alexa responds, “You’re not supposed to tell anyone [remember, this is Alexa speaking] You’re not supposed to tell anyone, but I really like to dance when no one is watching.”

A few years back, Barbie came out with a doll that used a Wi-Fi- connection and speech recognition technology to have seemingly real conversations with children. An interviewer from CNBC “interviewed” Barbie at a New York City Toy Fair with the results being so convincing that onlookers believed that there was someone offstage with a microphone giving Barbie the words to say.

Of course, Chat GBT and other AI technologies are generating all kinds of “conversations” today.

As these technologies grow, as the conversation capabilities expand, it is going to get harder and harder to tell if we are listening to real voices. The internet is already full of bots pretending to be real people and engaging in real advocacy.

How do we know which voices are real and, perhaps more important, how do we know which voices are worth listening to?

Scripture is full of stories where young and old get called to momentous work and they have to decide if the voice they are hearing is of God.

Moses, in hiding for a murder he committed in Egypt, is tending sheep in a forgotten place and hears God calling him back to Egypt from a burning bush.

Gideon, a young man, is beating wheat to store the resulting product from the Midianites who are oppressing them. An Angel of the Lord calls out to Gideon, asking him to rise up and save Israel against their foes.

Saul is called by God to be prince – the first king over Israel to rally them against the Philistines.

In our text for today, Jeremiah – a young boy – receives a call from God to serve as prophet in the kingdom of Judah, as foreign armies occupy the northern kingdom and now the Babylonians threaten to occupy Jerusalem, destroy the Temple, and lead the people of into servitude and exile.

Faithful people, a variety of ages, coming from different life circumstances – how did they know these are voices worth listening to?

Today, how do we know which voice to listen to? There has always been competing voices in our public world whether those voices are captured in voice, song, text, or image. To whom will we listen?

I think our text for today gives us some possibilities.

In every case I mentioned, the recipient of the call felt inadequate. Moses couldn’t speak. Gideon is the least in his household and his family is from the weakest of the tribes of Israel.

Saul was just out looking for donkeys belonging to his father who had run off. He was not looking for a political mandate. He wasn’t trying to seize power. Like Gideon, he had no backing, no influence, no family legacy. But God, through Samuel, calls him to be king. Jeremiah is a boy, how can he speak truth to the corrupt power that is afflicting Israel?

It is interesting to me that every great person I have met, every person of influence, every person – regardless of age or gender – who had accomplished great things for God started off with a humility that said, “Am I really the right person to lead this?”

How do we know which voices to listen to? Perhaps we start by looking for the humility that does or does not surround their leadership.

Second, I think it is always helpful to try and discern where the advocate thinks they got their idea and, are they willing to try that idea out first within the community of faith. We are a faith tradition that is very leery of the wildly charismatic individual who asks us to climb onto their shoulders and let them, in and of themselves, carry us to the promised land.

The words that Jeremiah will speak are words – not of himself – but words given to him by God. Jermiah is the son of Hilkiah from the priestly class of Levites. Growing up in the priestly class, growing up in the community of faith, Jeremiah would have known the stories of others who had received similar calls by God to service and had that call worked out in the faith community.

These calls would have been heard in community, tested in community, validated in community. While Jeremiah needed no commissioning other than that which he received from God, his faith community would have served to validate and affirm the call.

In 40 years of the church, I have heard people come forth with outlandish ideas. Wild things. Seemingly impossible things. Those ideas were heard in the faith family and somehow, in some way, people sensed that these ideas were of God. They became spectacular examples of faithfulness.

Today, there are hundreds of homeless fed a cooked meal and given a bag lunch by the dozens of youth that have provided the labor in the Agape kitchen for over 30 years. 30 years! That is not just one group of students. Those are generations of youth that have felt called to a great service.

Initially, those who had the idea of a youth operated food kitchen were laughed at. They were told all the reasons why it couldn’t be done. But they, with the Holy spirit, were persistent. Their sponsoring church leadership prayed, discussed, and discerned that perhaps God was ready to do something miraculous through these students. That ongoing ministry is, in part, a testimony to community discernment.

In 2001, the church I served was horrified, as we all were, by the events of 9/11. As the Session discussed ways that we could pray for and support the military response generated by that attack, a few wondered if perhaps – in addition to that prayer and support (and please hear clearly, “in addition to that prayer and support”) a few wondered if there were any efforts that could be made to create alternatives to the hatred that gave birth to those attacks.

Initially, they were laughed at. These people were talked about, they were scorned, their patriotism was even questioned. But over time, in partnership with the Anglican Church in Jerusalem, ministries that changed people’s lives were created. Alternatives were offered and embraced. Those ministries became a very bright light in an otherwise darkened world.

The community that once scorned and ridiculed these ideas became strong advocates.

In every case, wild ideas were brought before faithful men and women. The community discussed and sought the leading of the Holy Spirit. Not only were new transformative ministries created, but the community was made stronger for the work.

Advocates conducting themselves with humility, unafraid of adjustments brought forth by community discernment.

Humility, the value of a community discerning and validating calls to service, those called to service by God may be called to – as it says in our text – to pluck up and tear down, to destroy and overthrow. But notice it doesn’t stop there. After the rot is removed, it is time to build and plant.

Prophets always called people to a faithful alternative. Yes, they strongly and passionately described what they saw as wrong and condemned by God. But they didn’t stop there.

When folks come to me with concerns it is rarely a surprise. Typically, while they might think they are the one, lone, prophetic voice identifying a problem it is much more likely that a number of folks have already shared similar concerns. That does not mean that they shouldn’t speak out, but it is actually a good thing if the faith community is discerning the existence of a problem together.

But the prophets I listen to most closely are those who speak with humility, representing shared opinions, identifying opinion holders, and who also spend as much time trying to build and plant, as they do pluck up and pull down.

We have a multitude of voices clamoring for our attention today. These voices are passionate, strongly presented and often convinced of their own brilliance. Social Media has expanded the reach and power of these modern-day prophets, and it is difficult to escape the clamor.

Perhaps we might feel that we are called to speak a prophetic word, to speak truth as we think God might have called us.

Humility. Testing our word – or the words we are hearing – in the community of faith. Listening for faithful and Godly solutions, not just problem descriptions. These are ways for us to discern if the voices, even our own, are worth listening to. Amen.