One of these exercises was to pick the biblical character you most identified with, and then to gather in small groups where you all shared something about your choice. After a few minutes everyone had to find a new group and share the same information, a dance that went on for several rotations.
Nothing particularly memorable about the activity itself. In fact, I doubt I would even recall it but for one fact. It seemed like nearly everyone had picked Jeremiah, the prophet who occupies the daily lectionary's Old Testament readings for the moment.
I suspect that this arose mostly from the opening of the book of Jeremiah where God calls the prophet but he objects. "Ah, Lord GOD! Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy." (This complaint probably refers not to Jeremiah's being an actual child but to his being young and inexperienced.) Presumably many of us new seminarians thought of ourselves as called to something we weren't ready for, something for which we felt ill-equipped.
Of course there is another piece to Jeremiah. There is a lot of doom and gloom from this prophet. At one point Jeremiah is actually arrested as a traitor for telling the folks in Jerusalem to accept their defeat at the hands of Babylon as punishment from God. I don't know how much identification with this facet of Jeremiah was present in that seminary ice-breaker, but a lot of us had some sense that the church did need some reforming, rejuvenating, and rediscovering of its call. Few, if any of us, saw the situation in the dire terms of Jeremiah, but a lot of us probably felt a little kinship with the change agent part of a prophet's call.
Today's reading in Jeremiah is a curious mix of oracles of judgement along with anguish over what will happen. At one moment the anguish seems to be that of the prophet, but then God seems to feel the anguish as well. And there is only a hint of hope. "Yet I will not make a full end."
I think that many who love God and love the Church struggle with how to call the church to turn toward greater faithfulness without falling into the anguish found in Jeremiah. How does one call the Church away from its idolatry to consumerism, its captivity to giving its members what they want regardless of whether it is what God wants, without becoming Jeremiah? Or are there times when pastors are called to be Jeremiah?
I once had a wrestling coach who yelled a lot. He could be quite intimidating, but he would regularly remind us not to despair when he yelled at us. We should despair if he didn't yell at us because that meant he had given up. Yelling meant he saw hope that we could become something better.
Now I'm not sure this translates very well beyond athletic endeavors, and even there my old coach belongs largely to a different time. But still there is this quandary of how to call people and religious institutions to repentance. (I use the word "repentance" here in its biblical sense of changing direction, of turning toward the direction of God's call.) And when it came to repentance and religious institutions, even Jesus had a hard time staying positive.
I think I struggle most in my ministry with how to balance God's love that in Jesus dies for us, with God's call to repent and follow Jesus, to learn a new way of living from him. Many years ago, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote about this in terms of "cheap grace," which he defined in part as "the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance."
Socrates had his own take on this. "The unexamined life is not worth living for a human." But we often do not want to take the critical look at ourselves that might lead to change, to repentance. We often prefer cheap grace. So how do we call people to change, to lives reshaped by God's love and grace, while still holding tight to the love and grace part? I'd lile to know your answer.
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