January 31, 2010
Grace Church
Rev. Robert E. Hensley

Jeremiah 1:4-10; Psalm 71:1-6; 1 Corinthians 13:1-13; Luke 4:21-30

            Let us pray.  Holy God, we come before you with awe, for you are great in love and power. You call us to carry out your mission of love to the world, yet we struggle to understand why you choose us. Speak to us through your Word. Assure us of your continuing presence, as we worship and as we share the risk and challenge of living our faith. By your powerful Spirit, turn our fear to courage and our confusion to confidence that we will serve as faithful followers of the One in whose name we pray. Amen.   
(Adapted from a prayer by Ronald S. Beebe, from The New Century Hymnal,  
ed. Arthur G. Clyde (Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 1995), 831.) 

            My younger sister Sandy keeps me well supplied with stories that she comes across on the Internet.  She sent me one this past week about a Quaker woman who, like me, is not one to suffer fools gladly, and has quite a struggle with anger.  She wrote about sitting in Quaker meeting across from a man she assumed to be an emissary from the National Rifle Association. He was wearing a shirt that read "Support Your Right to Bear Arms." This proclamation made her furious. She stewed about it all through meeting, building up quite a stomachache, by her own admission. Later, in the fellowship hall, she discovered that she had misread the man's shirt, which proclaimed instead the comic takeoff, "Support Your Right to Arm Bears."   (Originally from Mary Rose O'Reilly, The Barn at the End of the World, Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2000, P. 200.) 

      So much of our anger is based on this kind of misunderstanding. It's our interpretations and constructions that cause so much pain in our own gut and in the outer world where we will often act out our misapprehensions. Popular culture is no help, because it frames issues in ways that teach us to feel offended at our victimization over one thing and another.  

      It is often all about interpretation.  One of the vehicles or interpretation that is popular lately is something that is called a “Poetry Slam.” Poetry slams are cool, because they show that words have power. Poetic Verse can touch our hearts, especially when it is read aloud, presented, performed and proclaimed. It is much the same for the Word of God, but more about that in a moment. 

      The story that I was reading this week was about poetry and 13-year-olds. Now that is not a very likely combination.  Thirteen-year-olds and pizza, yes. And hip-hop, yes. Possibly Abercrombie and Fitch.  Video games, MTV and PlayStation 2 – definitely.   

      But poetry? I really didn’t think so.  But I was wrong. 

      Adolescents know about poetry because they see it in books. They know it is boring. And they know that there is no way that they are ever gonna write any.  That is until someone like Miss Gayle comes along. Miss Gayle's an earthy, soulful, "gutbucket from the South" type of a woman who puts feelings into words and then makes words into music. 

      Miss Gayle showed up one Monday afternoon in the spare room at the back of Annapolis Middle School. She started talking about her mother, Pearl. She started almost singing a sad, sad poem about her mother, and her mother's death. By the time she finished, every kid in the room, including the toughest of the boys, was crying. One of them, 11-year-old Deonte Ward, was crying so hard he had tears dripping off his elbow.  Miss Gayle showed them, said 13-year-old Deondre Richardson, that "using words is power."  

      Next thing you knew, all of these tough kids were writing poems. Sitting for two hours straight and writing. And they weren't just writing. They were rewriting, editing. Adding flavor. Cutting the fat. And practicing their performances. And then they slammed their poems, right along with Miss Gayle Danley, who happened at the time to be the 35-year-old national poetry slam champion.  

      If you are not familiar with the term, a "slam" is an open competition for poets that was created by Marc Smith and designed to bring poetry back to the people. At every slam, poets have three minutes to read or perform an original creation. Five judges who have been randomly selected from the audience score each of the poets on a scale of 1 to 10, considering both the performance and the craft of the poem. Cash prizes are awarded when the top three poets at the end of the slam are given permission to pass a hat. The one with the most money in the hat wins the Audience Prize.  

      But of course, money is not the point – especially when prizes top out at usually no more than $40. What matters is touching human hearts, and showing that words have power.  

      For example, here's a sample slam, by a boy, about an aunt who drank too much and died too young – a poem called "She Always Kept It Real": 

She took it too far 
To the limit  
Until the inside of her body shut down  
One moment she was looking around and talking to us  
One hour later the hospital called us and said we should get down there quick  
The day was Nov. 2, 2000  
The funeral.  
My younger brother was crying so much you would have thought he had made a puddle…  
I am still sad  
I could tell her anything...  
She always kept it real. 

      Words such as these have power. They touch our hearts and move us to a new place. And if this is true in a visual and electronic culture such as ours, consider how true it must have been in an oral culture such as the prophet Jeremiah. 

      When Jeremiah resists the call of God, it is not because he doesn't understand the power of words – it is just the opposite; it is precisely because he does understand that he attempts to demur. Like one of the youths in Miss Gayle's class, he argues that he is too young to use words with power. 

      God's call to Jeremiah itself came in the form of a poetry slam.  Recall the words: 

Before I formed you in the womb I knew you. 
Before you were born I set you apart. 
I appointed you as a prophet to the nations (Jeremiah 1:5). 

      After Jeremiah protests, God promises to put his words in Jeremiah's mouth, and the case is closed. Jeremiah will function as a prophet to Judah and throw a few Scripture slams of his own throughout his illustrious career. 

      Jeremiah is not all that much different from us. God says that God "formed" Jeremiah, "set him apart," and "appointed" him. Formed, set apart and appointed. That is true of every one of us. 

      What this means is that we are equipped for every challenge or opportunity God throws at us. And while we work with icons and pictures, music and video, and fascinating media technologies, there are some jobs for which words, words that we trust God will put in our mouths, are the preferred media. 

      It turns out that we need words.  We need words to execute forgiveness, or make a confession, for example. Fine wine and roses help, to be sure, but nothing makes up for: "I was wrong; will you forgive me?" One of King David's slams goes like this: 

Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love; 
According to your great compassion, blot out my transgressions. 
Wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin. 
For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me.

      We need words to express comfort to the grieving.  We need words to nurture relationships. We need words to witness to the core beliefs of our faith.   
We need words to participate in redemptive confrontation.  We need words to make promises and commitments.  

      We are so immersed in an electronic culture nowadays that we are often afraid to use words in any context that goes beyond the mere sharing of information. Words that express intuition or have emotional impact are increasingly difficult to speak. 

      Jeremiah was extremely uncomfortable with his prophetic role. He didn't see himself as someone, especially at his age when God called him, who could confront sinners in their sin.  It is all the more surprising, then, to hear him throwing some slams of his own in his new prophetic role: 

      Later in Chapter 2 he writes: 

You are a swift she-camel running here and there, 
A wild donkey accustomed to the desert,  
Sniffing the wind in her craving, 
In her heat, who can restrain her (2:23-24). 

Or this, 

Go up and down the streets of Jerusalem, 
Look around and consider, search through her squares. 
If you can find but one person who deals honestly and seeks the truth, 
I will forgive this city (5:1). 

Or this, 

Call to me and I will answer you  
and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know (33:3). 

      God reminds us in this text that we weren't formed, set apart and appointed to be speechless, word-less Christians who excel in nonverbal communication. God prizes the power of the word. Jesus himself came to us as the Word of God. Scripture is full of proverbial wisdom about the value and power of words. "The word spoken in due season, how sweet it is." The apostle counsels, "Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone" (Colossians 4:6). 

      Jeremiah thought himself too young to play with God's word.  He wasn't. And neither are we.

      Nor are we too old.  In fact there is no excuse for not using the words we need to use when the occasion calls for them. 

      God set us apart and appointed us for the very moment when we might need to say, "I love you," or "I was wrong," or "God loves you," or "I am here to help," or "What can I do to share and bear your pain." 

      God’s words are already in our mouths. So let's all start slammin'. Amen. 

Source:

       
Johnson, Darragh. "Empowering young poets," The Washington Post, 
December 30, 2000, B1.