"The Touch Confirms" Jeremiah 1: 4-10; Isaiah 6: 5-8

We continue our series on "Being in Touch." This week, the touch will involve the anointing of the confirmands as they join the church.

The two texts are taken from stories of how the prophets Jeremiah and Isaiah wee touched as they received God's call.

The Isaiah passage has the Isaiah suggesting that his unclean lips prevent him from serving as a prophet.  The answer from God is the fiery touch of coal on his lips to make him clean.  Now, when God asks, "Whom shall I send?" Isaiah can answer, "Here I am!"

Again in Jeremiah we have the touch of the lips as part of Jeremiah's call to be a prophet.  This story also notes that God knew Jeremiah in the womb.  A reminder that the one who calls us is also the one who creates us and claims us,.

I love Tony Campolo's story of being called by his mother! It might make it into the sermon.

  Tony Campolo says that whenever anybody asks him, “How were you called into ministry?” he replies that when he was a little boy, his mother used to say to him, “You were brought into this world to love other people in the name of Jesus Christ, to serve other people, especially the poor and the oppressed. Do you understand that, Tony?” People ask Tony, “How did you get called to the ministry?” and his response is that he never once was called, his mother decided!

(By the way, sometimes people tell Tony that parents can’t decide things like that for they children. His response is, “Why not? Everybody else is telling their children what to do with their lives: the media, their peer group, the counselor at school. What is wrong with a parent standing up and saying, ‘As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.’ My calling to serve Jesus Christ came from my mother and that’s a good place for it to come from. I advise all mothers and fathers to do that for their children.”) (1) Tony Campolo, “Becoming What God Intended You to Be,” sermon and interview broadcast, Chicago Sunday Evening Club 30 Good Minutes, January 25, 2004. www.csec.org.  

I also ran across this poem by Wendell Berry.  It might make it into the sermon as well.

An untitled poem by Wendell Berry, at the beginning of Remembering, (a novel), 1988

Heavenly Muse, Spirit who brooded on
The world and raised it shapely out of nothing,
Touch my lips with fire and burn away
All dross of speech, so that I keep in mind
The truth and end to which my words now move
In hope. Keep my mind within that Mind
Of which it is a part, whose wholeness is
The hope of sense in what I tell. And though
I go among the scatterings of that sense,
The members of its worldly body broken,
Rule my sight by vision of the parts
Rejoined. And in my exile's journey far
From home, be with me, so I may return.

-- Wendell Berry