Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost (proper 17): August 28, 2005.

Jeremiah 15:15-21

Psalm 26:1-8

Romans 12:9-21

Matthew 16:21-28

Prove me, O Lord, and try me;
test my heart and mind.
For your steadfast love is before my eyes,
and I walk in faithfulness to you.
--Psalm 26:2-3

First Reading

Jeremiah's opening lament is reminiscent of Elijah's earlier bout of feeling sorry for himself, apparently a career danger to those called to the prophetic profession. But Jeremiah's description of his calling is unusually vivid, poignant and painful as he accosts the One who had called him when this reluctant prophet was but a youth: "Your words were found, and I ate them, and your words became to me a joy and delight of my heart." The "delight" was short-lived, however, as just three chapters later we find Jeremiah regretting the prophetic calling that has overtaken him, making him a laughingstock who, like a person afflicted with Tourette's Syndrome, finds the most horrendous and hateful words escaping from his mouth, "a burning fire shut up in my bones" that he could no longer hold in (20:9). See B. Davie Napier, Time of Burning (Philadelphia: Pilgrim, 1970), 52ff., for a searing series of poetic reflections on Jeremiah's sense of being captive to the Word.

Painful indeed is Jeremiah's ensuing bitter inquisition of God: "Why is my pain unceasing, my wound incurable, refusing to be healed?" But the effrontery and brutal honesty of the prophet's accusation of the One who called him is even more shocking: "Truly, you are to me like a deceitful brook, like waters that fail" (v. 18). "Steadfast love? What a joke!" God's Word-bearer seems to be saying in response to the psalmist's calm assurance.

Yet Yahweh is not easily provoked and promises to make Jeremiah "a fortified wall of bronze." Our reading concludes with the reassurance "I am with you to save you and deliver you, says the LORD. I will deliver you out of the hand of the wicked, and redeem you from the grasp of the ruthless."

Brian Wren's "God of Jeremiah," set to the tune of a Scottish folk melody, is a rare hymn that sings the painful prophetic song in a key relevant to our own day of aspiring empire (New Beginnings [Carol Stream, IL: Hope, 1993], #7).

Having reached the paranetic/exhortatory conclusion of Romans, we encounter words that begin with the injunction to "let love be genuine." "Genuine" here is a translation of the Greek word that literally means "un-hypocritical," action that does not indulge in playacting or wearing a mask. To me Paul's advice sounds as though he may have been inspired by a familiarity with Q's version of what would become at Matthew's hand Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. (See George Forell, The Christian Lifestyle: Reflections on Romans 12-15 [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975] for a series of short meditations on Paul's practical, ethical advice to the Roman Church.)

Pastoral Reflection

As summer vacations wind down and folks prepare to resume their ordinary routines of work and school, today's Gospel text and the looming Labor Day secular holiday provide an opportunity to reflect upon our shared sense of Christian vocation in the world. Renewing Worship 3, Holy Baptism and Related Rites (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2002), 85-86, provides a useful rite for the "Affirmation of Christian Vocation." Fred Pratt Green's "How Clear is Our Vocation, Lord" (Presbyterian Hymnal [Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1990], #419) is a rare hymn on the subject of vocation, set to a familiar tune. Jesus' words following Peter's confession and rebuke, as well as our reading from Jeremiah, challenge us to reflect on the nature of our vocation as Jesus' cross-bearing followers. Jesus promised: "For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it."

Inasmuch as this year marks the fortieth anniversary of Albert Schweitzer's death in 1965, the occasion of his commemoration (September 4) would be a good opportunity to hold before our congregations the life and witness of perhaps the best-known Lutheran of the twentieth century. Already a celebrated philosopher/theologian/pastor/academic administrator/musicologist/organist, at age 30 Schweitzer began medical studies, as he explains in his autobiography, "that I might be able to work without having to talk. For years, I had been giving myself out in words, and it was with joy that I had followed the calling of theological teacher and of preacher. But this new form of activity I could not represent to myself as being talking about the religion of love, but only as an actual putting it into practice" (Out of My Life and Thought: An Autobiography, trans. C. T. Campion [New York: Mentor Books, 1949], 77). And so on Good Friday, 1913, the newly graduated and licensed medical doctor set out for French Equatorial Africa to become a missionary doctor for the remainder of his life, a life of service eventually recognized and honored by the granting of the Nobel Peace Prize.

What had turned Schweitzer's life from its initially already remarkable and distinguished bivocational academic and musical career path was an experience he'd had more than a decade earlier, when at his parents' home for summer vacation, in the Lutheran parsonage in the little village of Gunsbach in the Voges Mountains near Strasbourg, where his father served as pastor. Schweitzer later recounted how in his 21st year--then as now a coming-of-age time--he was suddenly struck by the thought of how incomprehensible it was that he should be allowed to lead such a happy, carefree student's life while he saw about him so many people wrestling with care and suffering.

In his autobiography he remembered: "One brilliant summer morning there came to me as I awoke, the thought that I must not accept this happiness as a matter of course, but must give something in return for it. Proceeding to think the matter out at once with calm deliberation while the birds were singing outside, I settled with myself before I got up, that I would consider myself justified in living till I was 30 for science and art, in order to devote myself from that time forward to the direct service of humanity. Many a time I had tried to settle what meaning lay hidden for me in the saying of Jesus: 'Whoever would save their life shall lose it, and whosoever shall lose their life for My sake and the Gospel's shall save it.'" Schweitzer concluded: "Now the answer was found. In addition to the outward, I now had inward happiness" (p. 70).

No longer a household name, Albert Schweitzer is worth commemorating in our churches as a saint who took to heart Jesus' call to cross-bearing discipleship marked by the kind of "genuine love" that even the secular world could recognize and celebrate. It may also be worth noting that his theology and his "reverence for life" ethic were considered too "spacious" by many of his fellow Lutherans! JR