The Greatest Biblical Loser: And What Evangelicals Need to Learn From Him

For nearly 18 months now I have been reading and studying the book of Jeremiah. My Logos Bible Software has two commentaries open and available to me, the Hebrew text and exegetical guides are out, links to Strong’s and the BDB are also open. I have a running file 34 pages of notes that I have gathered in this past year and half.  With all of these tools I typically get through 3-4 verses at a time. For those who really know me this is not a surprise. For if I’m not 4-5 layers deep into a text then I might as well be skipping through the Biblical forest on my way to Joel Osteen’s house. I am not really reading or studying the text unless I am up to my arm pits it Biblical exegetical tools and questions. But one thing is as clear as day about the life of Jeremiah—Jeremiah was a loser. 

By all Earthly accounts (No super spiritualizing his life with quips of ‘he won the eternal race.’ It is a cheep cheat.) he failed in all the ways we determine success and failure in American Christianity and we can even say how we measure success in the biblical world.  His call was to preach to a stiff neck rebellious people a message of repentance. They did not repent. He never climbed the temple establishment’s political power structure. His network of movers and shakers were small and grew smaller with time.  When he was commissioned to tell the nation to accept the punishment God was bringing, they ignored him.  In fact in Chapter 21 when defeat and ruin where immanent, they hoped coming to Jeremiah would earn them brownie points and a message of good news.  It did not, and the results was one of the hardest and most bone chilling messages of the entire book.  When in the end of the book he prophesied to the nations, there is no indication they even got the message let alone did anything about it. The Israelites chose to sing the proverbial “kumbaya” and hope that their status as God’s chosen would be enough to get them out of this latest jam. Jeremiah was beaten, jailed, ignored, mocked and finally exiled against his will to Egypt. He was not even allowed the courtesy of heading off with the rest of the exiles into Babylon or staying in the land he had called home for his entire life. Compared to Jonah who begrudged his calling, even betrayed his calling, Jonah could in the end say that he was the instrument of God’s successful rescue mission of Nineveh. Jeremiah could not even say that on his resume.

Adding to my sense of Jeremiah as the Bible’s greatest example of  failure is Eugene Peterson’s Running With Horses. In just two hundred pages Peterson describes Jeremiah’s futile attempts to get Israel to listen to God’s voice and be the people God had called them all to be. Peterson’s book is in many ways a recounting of the depressing story of a man whose inner constitution was made of iron and bronze (as God himself describes Jeremiah) as much as his heart and body was made of flesh and blood. 

It is at this point in the story where I believe Evangelicals need to embrace Jeremiah on Jeremiah’s terms. We too often look for spiritual heroes, people who overcome their personal demons, the established hierarchy, and the wickedness of their culture. We expect, even demand that God give us victories, that our spiritual leaders move from one success to a greater success. We are failing to embrace the fact, the reality that often times Yahweh faithfulness also means failing to accomplish any of those things. And as in the case of Jeremiah, Yahweh faithfulness means failing at everything. 

Our culture is sick and dying.  America has killed over 55 million unborn human beings, we embrace sexual perversion as an expression of our individualism, and we are increasingly inclined to embrace radical Islam over and against culturally uncouth Christianity. Rather than sounding the trumpet to form ranks in a culture war (which may already be lost), might it be that God is calling us to develop a soul of iron and bronze? What would it mean to name our churches First Church of the Losers, as opposed to Victory Assembly?

I am not saying I like this prospect. Far from rejoicing with the loser label, I dread it, hate it even. I read Jeremiah hoping that this is not my own personal calling, nor that of the Church in North America.  No one wants to be a loser.  No one wants to bang his or her head against a corrupt and sinful culture only to be proclaimed a loser at the end of his or her life.  Jeremiah is a testimony to the reality that what God does too us is often as important, if not more important, than what he does through us. It is a difficult pill to swallow because it ultimately means we can’t guarantee hero status in the eyes of our peers or our enemies. It may just mean that the only thing we have to hold onto for our sense of worth is Christ himself and nothing more. 

Collect for Jeremiah 20

But if I say, “Forget it!

 No more God-Messages from me!”

 The words are fire in my belly,

 a burning in my bones.

 I’m worn out trying to hold it in.

 I can’t do it any longer!

Curse the day

I was born!

The day my mother bore me—

a curse on it, I say!

He should have killed me before I was born,

with that womb as my tomb,

My mother pregnant for the rest of her life

with a baby dead in her womb.

Eugene H. Peterson, The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2005), Je 20:8–9, 14,16.

Father, you birth in your servants words we cannot bear to speak. Grant that we may find comfort in your love and mercy. That, in the end we can fulfill our calling by the power of the Holy Spirit, with Christ-like humility and obedience to the Glory of your name.

Ehud's Gift

One of my favorite narratives in scripture is found in Judges chapter 3:12-30; the story is Ehud and the deliverance of Israel from the king of Moab. Since I posted two weeks ago concerning calling I thought I would take my own advice and meditate on the idea of calling, using this passage as the basis of my meditation.    On one hand it is a serious recounting of how once again God works through a uniquely prepared individual to provide salvation for his chosen. On the other hand, it is a macabre comical scene, a Biblical example of bathroom humor. 

To lay out the narrative, the king of Moab, Eglon, has managed to oppose the people of Israel for 18 years. He extorts the people demanding that tribute be brought to him each year.  It is Ehud’s turn to take the tribute to the king.  He delivers the tribute without a hitch, but then returns to the king with a “secret message.”   The king clears the room and thus provides Ehud with the privacy he needs to carry out God’s judgement.  With his left hand Ehud stabs the king through, the entire sword disappearing within the fold’s the of kings fat.  Eglon’s attendants are paralyzed. They think their king is relieving himself and do not want to interrupt, thus allowing Ehud to escape. 

What really grabs my attention in this passage, as it regards calling, is the description of Ehud as left handed.  At least one commentator suggests that his left handedness was in fact more of a skill. A cleaver fighting ability that was learned.  This same commentator sights 1 Chronicles 12:2 of men who could fight with either hand.^⁠1  For a moment let us take the scripture literally or at least at face value.  Let us assume Ehud was born with the left hand dominate over his right hand.   That he indeed was left-handed in the modern American sense. 

As a left hander myself, I am aware how everything feels as if it is made for right handed individuals.  Left handedness has overtones of sinisterness and curse: for example, a left-handed compliment.   Or take the fact that our world is designed for those who are right handed. Ever notice vending machines require you to put money in with your right hand, assuming that you are in fact right-handed.  Or the left hand associated with dirtiness. Which side of the toilet is the plunger? The left side of course. It is hard to imagine the stigma of left handedness has changed since even Ehud’s time. Ehud most likely faced some level of  stigma and felt that sense of awkwardness and outsiderness which comes with being odd or different. 

 It is this quirk of fate that puts Ehud in the right place, at the right time ,with the right gifts, no pun intended. All his life his left handedness has been at best a curious mystery.  At this moment of deliverance it becomes the essential key to the plot of God’s redemptive story.  Calling is both time (Ehud’s entire life to this moment), and created makeup (who Ehud was physically). As it so often does the tension lays in waiting around to see how the puzzle pieces of circumstance and created order fuse together at the critical moment of our lives.  Admittedly, calling is often not what we expect and even if, as in the case of Ehud it all comes together, there is no guarantee that we will feel that all the questions have been wrapped up in a neat little bow.  

Take for example one of the most difficult passage of scripture to come to terms with.  In John chapter 9 the disciples ask Christ a question concerning a man born blind.  They asked, “who sinned?” In other words who is at fault, who is to blame for the sorrow this man encounters on a daily basis.  Jesus’s answer is staggering, it raises incredible questions.  “Neither. . . . This happened so that God may be displayed in him.”  It is difficult for me not to take this answer personally. It appears as if an entire life of disability was for the purpose of an object lesson.  Does God take lightly the suffering of others? Is the man’s suffering dwarfed in comparison to God’s glory?  

To one extent the answer is a resounding, “Yes, God’s glory far outstrips the suffering of any one individual.”  Calling is not something we make up, creating it out of our own sense of ourselves and desires.  Instead, calling is that which God grants as a gift, a strange, mysterious grace that is ultimately more concerned with God’s greatness then our own.  And yet, as with Ehud we are perfectly made for the calling God gifts to us. We are perfectly fit for the narrative in which we are placed. 

¹ “They were armed with bows and were able to shoot arrows or to sling stones right-handed or left-handed. . . . ”

6 Marks of a Godly calling

One of the first steps in the ordination process in the Anglican Diocese of Pittsburgh is to write a spiritual autobiography.  As a part of this autobiography you answer the question: When and how did you receive a call to ordained ministry?   I wrote, “I received a “call” into ordained ministry at age six.  My father was an interim pastor of a Southern Baptist church in Wisconsin while I was in grammar school. One Sunday morning, I recall looking up at him from the first pew and thinking to myself, ‘I want to do that. I want to preach from the Bible and tell people about Jesus.’”  As one might then suspect the path for me toward ordained ministry has not been a straight one.  In fact, for the last 15 years, since starting seminary, the first time, my calling has been an enigma, wrapped in mystery, wrapped in a London fog.  As such, it was near the end of my first semester at Trinity School for Ministry when I began to look very carefully at the entire idea of calling.  What happens when there is a call from God, but it is in fact not the calling you either expected, or even the calling you wanted?  What happens when the shape of the call, the destination, and goal of the call which is in your mind’s eye is not the one God has in his mind?  

This is what I have been wrestling with in particular vigor in the last 18 months. I came to Trinity with a plan. I would earn my advanced master’s degree, and parle that into a placement in a PhD program.  From there it would be a career teaching theology and spirituality in a seminary.  However, my thesis advisor last January sat me down in his office and told me many of the faculty could not square what they saw with what I was selling. The calling I hoped for did not appear to be the calling for which I was built.  So it all came as a quite, albeit, welcomed crisis. A wrestling with God’s call.  Who am I? What is my life’s work? By the way, it is a wrestling I don’t believe is over yet.  I purpose that there are at least 6 marks of God’s call, not just for Holy Orders but to borrow a phrase from Laity Lodge, The high calling of our daily lives.

 There are 3 people, three saints that have helped me in the last 12-18 months consider the idea of calling and helped me to wrestle through what it means to have a difficult calling from God. The first is the OT prophet Jeremiah. I can’t imagine a seminary student, past, present, or future walking into his mentor’s, pastors’s, or professor’s office and telling that person, “I am called into a ministry just like Jeremiah!”  Jeremiah is as one commentator put it, the “weeping prophet.”  Jeremiah ranks right next to Job as a Biblical character in which God calls  him to a life of immeasurable suffering and isolation.  The second saint is Mother Theresa, the diminutive nun, whose larger than life heart made her famous for serving the undesirables and untouchables.   The final saint is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a man born with more going for him than most of us could hope for in our wildest fantasies.  At the same time he was called to lay his life down in a failed, though noble opposition to Hitler.

The first mark of a Godly calling is God’s calling never arrives in the way you expect it. Consider if you will the life of Samuel. In Chapter 3 of 1 Samuel, the title character expects to serve in the temple his entire life; he expects his service to be outlined by God through the chief priest Eli.  Instead of this, God calls to Samuel directly.  Also consider the calling of the first disciples in John chapter 1:46, “Nathanael said to him, Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”  Implied in this question is an expectation the Messiah and Nazareth had nothing in common, but here God arrives through the place least expected.  

 Second, the call is often enough not to the people we expect.  It is not simply the how, but the who.  Consider Mother Theresa, a five foot tall uneducated nun called to see Christ in a person’s poverty whether that be physically or spiritual. A gifted academic and scholar who is called to rally the Church against a dictator and take active steps to overthrow a government. As Eric Metaxas points out it was unthinkable that anyone born to the education, class and influence that Bonhoeffer was,  would have ever taken an active roll in trying to assassinate Hitler. God has little regard it seems for the things we think we are, or are not good, gifted, or equipped to accomplish. 

Third, a person is called into a ministry and to a life only he or she can live. There is never any validity when a person says,  “I want to be the next. . . .”  There is never a next. You are who you are, and though shaped and influence by others an individual’s call is the individual’s exclusively.  Psalm 139 praises God’s wondrous ability to craft one of a kind individuals,

when I was being made in secret,

    intricately woven in the depths of the earth.

Your eyes saw my unformed substance;

in your book were written, every one of them,

    the days that were formed for me,

    when as yet there was none of them.

 And lest we forget there is nothing easy about God’s calling. In fact, in one manner of speaking God’s call is always beyond the individual’s ability to accomplish the call from his own power.   Implicit in the prophet’s call as prophet is a dependence on God to accomplish the task God has laid down. Samuel in 1 Samuel chapter 3 responds to God’s voice saying, “Speak, for your servant hears.”  Mother Theresa could never have hope to meet the needs of the poor and dying but time and time again as Katherine Spinks point out in her biography of Mother Theresa the funds and resources needed would be divinely provided.   

 Fifth, the call is always for the next step never the final destination. Christ says to Phillip, “follow me” (John 1:43).  Can you imagine if Christ would have told Phillip or any of the disciples that they were going to build God’s Church on earth, be martyred for their faith, challenge the power of Rome, and that they would reshape the world as they new it, as any of us knows it?  Quite simply, there has not been a saint in the course of human history who has ever been told the exact shape and destination of his or her calling.

The final mark of a Godly calling is this— God is present.   In my own life,  I have often wondered about this, through rejection letters from graduate schools, in the midst of  my wife’s numerous health struggle.  However, Psalm 139 makes it clear.  

Where shall I go from your Spirit?

    Or where shall I flee from your presence?

If I ascend to heaven, you are there!

    If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!

I believe that any christian called into a ministry can and probably should turn these six marks of calling into question for spiritual journaling.  At the very least they can be a starting point to prayer and reflection. God how am I the man/woman to accomplish the task you set before me?   Lord, show me how you have always been present in my life?