Sermon preached at Newport United Methodist Church and Community United Church of Christ in Newport, Minnesota.
Text: Jeremiah 1:4-10.

I have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to clergy stoles—so many beautiful and lovely fabrics to wear as symbols of God’s call to ministry! When I left parish ministry to begin full-time faith community organizing,
I hung them up in my closet and wondered when I would wear them again. So when Pastor Anne reached out to ask me to preach and share communion this morning, I’m just vain enough to start asking, “What should I wear??” In most Protestant churches, the Epiphany season of growth and wisdom is marked by the color green. So I went to the green and gold stole that a mentor gave me at my ordination, with the reminder that green is worn most often throughout the year. But I was also drawn to this other green one made by a pastor friend in Duluth, which includes the rainbow colors, fabric showing love, the spiral way of faith, and the Black Lives Matter salute that communicates resilient determination. Then again, anticipating seeing here some of the dear Community UCC members, who ordained me fifteen years ago last month in a sanctuary just down the road, made me reach for another stole that the church’s moderator there once gave me: “Blah, blah, blah”! (I think it was a joke?) Finally, Pastor Anne told me that the color for the day was every color—the rainbow! So I have opted for this stole of rainbow colors, made by a gay man in the congregation where I taught Sunday school while in seminary. You may not be able to see it from farther away, but this stole is made of hundreds of small colorful fabric squares, all stitched together by painstaking work into a colorful and diverse tapestry.

It’s not only vanity and nostalgia, though, that has me fixated on stoles. These simple or exquisite strips of cloth are a visible marker of a person’s service to the loving and just God of Jesus Christ. This is the God who addresses Jeremiah in today’s scripture, who calls him to step into prophetic leadership, and who through these words also addresses us as disciples who are known, called, and commissioned for bold, prophetic ministry now. The call story of Jeremiah, chapter one, follows a characteristic biblical shape: God calls, the prophet objects, and God reassures before commissioning to the work. That’s usually the way it goes with prophets in Scripture, and how it might go for us today.

God has the first word, proactively reaching out with a promise: “Before I shaped you in the womb, I knew all about you. Before you saw the light of day, I had holy plans for you.” How many of us need to hear, down to our bones, such words of divine affirmation? As we go through life, some of us beginning from childhood, we tend to pick up the negative judgments others have about us, and we can come to believe them ourselves. Many LGBTQ people have been told by family members, school bullies, social media, churches, and now this latest presidential administration that we are fundamentally wrong in who we are and how we love. Such negative messages can become a toxic stew that mars our self-image, until queer people come to believe this of ourselves. But no matter what humans might say in their false judgments, and whatever painful self-images we might carry within us (LGBTQ or not), the Creator promises that we are beautifully and wonderfully made, just as we are. Listen again to God, and let these words soak into your tender soul: “Before I shaped you in the womb, I knew all about you. Before you saw the light of day, I had holy plans for you.”

The prophet’s response, characteristically, comes from a place of humility and self-doubt. Jeremiah says back to God: “Hold it—look at me. I don’t know anything. I’m only a boy!” His words are deeply relatable to any of us who have ever faced daunting challenges and felt our own inadequacy. “There’s no way I can do anything about these great and terrible things in my life and in the world—I’m just one person.” Jeremiah’s fearful paralysis feels very close these days, as Americans of all kinds are buffeted by new executive orders that are being announced like royal decrees, with destructive consequences for our justice system, our economic safety net, and the lives of anyone who isn’t a white, wealthy, straight, cisgender male. The Trevor Project, a national effort to reduce LGBTQ youth self-harm, reports that in the 24 hours after Donald Trump’s reelection, calls to their crisis hotline went up seven hundred percent. Queer youth and adults—especially those who are transgender—recognize that the coming years of dominance by anti-LGBTQ forces threaten deadly marginalization and legal erasure. Amid the bewildering blizzard of this administration’s new beginning,
we’re feeling small and overwhelmed by design, as though we were only a child.

Yet God has the last word—to the boy Jeremiah and to us. God promises, “Don’t say, ‘I’m only a boy.’ I’ll tell you where to go and you’ll go there. I’ll tell you what to say and you’ll say it. Don’t be afraid of a soul. I’ll be right there, looking after you.” In other words, no matter what legislative and executive chicanery comes your way,
the God who knew and loved you before you were even born is not going anywhere. As it says elsewhere in Scripture, we can do all things through Christ who strengthens us.

God looks after Jeremiah—and Christ strengthens us—not just to survive the coming years but to transform for the better. Like the biblical prophets, we have received God’s word, a higher authority than any government or presidential office in the world. God charges Jeremiah to use his God-belovedness from before he was born, and the promise of divine ever-presence in this way: “I’ve given you a job to do among nations and governments—a red-letter day! Your job is to pull up and tear down, take apart and demolish, and then start over, building and planting.” The job description to Jeremiah is also what God’s people are commissioned for now, a gritty and comprehensive overturning of the powerful evil that is white Christian nationalism. This self-serving fanaticism uses the name of Christ and distorts biblical faith to suggest that God favors (and therefore humanity should give preferential treatment to) those who are male, white, straight, wealthy, cisgender, able-bodied and American. Followers of Christ and God’s people today are called alongside Jeremiah
to pull up and tear down, take apart and demolish such sinful idolatry. We are commissioned with Jeremiah instead to start over, building and planting for the world to which Christ gave his entire life, the realm of God where love is written on every heart, and written into the just laws of a compassionate society. We have been known and God-beloved just as we are since before our birth, we are called to serve as prophets even when we feel inadequate, and we are commissioned for the sacred and lifelong purpose of changing the world as it is into the world as it should be in God’s eyes.

In this moment, especially when we might feel dumbstruck or numb after the bullying domination we’ve seen from the federal government, our faith can pull us from helpless resignation to evil and push us forward with hope. Confronting threats and danger, there are at least five ways that humans respond. Our bodies are instinctively trained for fight, flight, or freeze. Another learned reaction is to fawn—seeking to disarm through flattery and approval. But the faithful response that we are commissioned for alongside Jeremiah is not to fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, but to build. We are here to build the realm of God on earth as in heaven, centering communities around care for those who are hungry, unhoused, imprisoned, and others like those whom Jesus called “the least of these” (Matthew 25). I have heard and responded to a call to build something new for our times, a network called Prism that partners with others and gathers community power in a multiracial, multifaith, statewide coalition for LGTBQ equality. What you are building in this community of faith is an essential part of that work, insofar as you have a Jeremiah-like boldness about building and planting a Christian witness of God’s love for every person, no exceptions, and this faith community’s full-hearted embrace of God’s rainbow people.

Which brings me back to where we started—a stole. Visible or invisible, every person here wears the stole of God-belovedness, with its corresponding commission to proclaim and build a world of belovedness in our words and our actions. We have received grace, and we give our lives to build the ways of grace however we can in words attributed to John Wesley, doing “all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.” Each of us does so individually—when we’re in this sanctuary or in the world—and each community of faith extends such grace in their own way, and each movement for justice brings forward its bright color for the tapestry. Be about this good and holy work, beloveds, in a persistent and daily way, for we are known, called and commissioned into God’s bold, prophetic service. None of us can or will do it all, but each of us can do some good. And by the powerful mystery of God, our colors, our community, and our nation too will be stitched together from pieces into a greater whole. Thanks be to God! Amen.