You Shall Go to All to Whom I Send You

Now the word of the Lord came to me saying, 

“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.”

Then I said, “Ah, Lord God! Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy.” But the Lord said to me,

“Do not say, ‘I am only a boy,’
for you shall go to all to whom I send you,
and you shall speak whatever I command you.

Do not be afraid of them,
for I am with you to deliver you,
            says the Lord.”
(Jeremiah 1: 4-8, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)

“[Jeremiah] called, he urged his people to repent—and he failed,” Abraham J. Heschel writes in The Prophets. “He screamed, wept, moaned—and was left with a terror in his soul.”

I don’t imagine many of us care to embrace such a fate.

We like to think that if Spirit came to us with a calling, we could drop everything to follow where God led. But we’ve all seen how society treats prophetic voices like Jeremiah or—let’s go ahead and connect this to Quaker history—Benjamin Lay. We don’t want people to shun us. Oh, sure, we have a lot of issues with how the way the world runs, but deep down we like it when we get along with the people around us. Fitting in feels good, and, as Heschel warns, “a man whose message is doom for the people he loves not only forfeits his own capacity for joy, but also provokes the hostility and outrage of his contemporaries.”

Perhaps, then, we might find reasons not to take up our callings. We might, like Jeremiah, offer some polite excuses as to why God shouldn’t have come to us:

“Truly I do not know how to speak.”
“I don’t have enough experience for this.”
“This comes at a really bad time.”
“I have way too many responsibilities to take this on right now.”

This assumes we even accept that the leading in question genuinely comes from Spirit. As members of the Religious Society of Friends, we believe in the principle of continuing revelation, but many of us share with the wider world an ability to convince ourselves that “God doesn’t speak to people like that anymore, if anything like that ever actually happened.”

Or we can believe firmly in continuing revelation but still persuade ourselves, or let others persuade us, that a particular calling comes from some other, less divine source. (It might very well, of course, and so John the Evangelist wisely advises us to “test the spirits to see whether they are from God” before acting on their instructions.)

This doesn’t reflect poorly on us. Remember, even Jeremiah balked at first.

The 17th-century Friend James Nayler also dragged his feet…pretty much literally. “I was at the plow, meditating on the things of God,” he recalled as he stood trial for blasphemy, “and suddenly I heard a voice saying unto me, ‘Get thee out from thy kindred and from thy father’s house.’” He accepted the leading as authentic, even rejoiced to have heard the voice of God speak to him. He went so far as to give up his wealth, but could not bring himself to leave his home and family. 

Nayler then became so ill that everyone thought he would die, and he saw this as divine punishment for his recalcitrance. So he reaffirmed his willingness to obey God, and subsequently recovered, but still dawdled. This went on until, one day, he testified:

“going agateward with a friend from my own house, having on an old suit, without any money, having neither taken leave of wife or children, not thinking then of any journey, I was commanded to go into the west, not knowing whither I should go nor what I was to do there; but when I had been there a little while I had given me what I was to declare; and ever since I have remained, not knowing today what I was to do tomorrow.”

That sounds an awful lot like Jeremiah’s life—or the life of any prophet—especially once we factor in the burdens Nayler faced for following through with what he was given to declare. So why, we might ask ourselves, would anybody want to live like that? Why wouldn’t we, like Jonah, grab the first boat out of town rather than cry out against the people of Nineveh?

For one thing, we see how that worked out for Jonah.

More seriously, though, I believe that when we set aside our own insecurities and wishes for comfort, we can see how bad things have gotten. Or, rather, that we can no longer not see the world’s present condition. In one of his many considerations of the prophet’s life, the theologian Walter Brueggemann says that “Jeremiah must do truth-telling not because he is a scold but because he knows, as deeply as anyone can know anything, that this is a community on its way to death.”

Friends understand, I think, that if we should come to a similarly profound state of realization, we can do little else but offer our testimony against it, trusting in God’s love and support however the powers of this world may respond to the challenge we bring.