Before you were born, I knew you

“Before you were born, I knew you.” Jeremiah spoke truly. Let these words settle into you because they are trustworthy.
Before you were born, God knew you. You were held in God and then God spoke you into being. But you did not depart from God; just as the words I am speaking now go into your heart, but that does not make them ever leave my heart.

And now that God spoke you into this existence, you are here, in these body clothes, with your own particular personality and you’re your own particular experiences, and your own particular questions and responsibilities and needs and wants – and it is as true as ever before. Now that you are born, God knows you – intimately – just as surely as God knew you before you were born. And when you die, when God breathes into you for the last time and then withdraws his breath for the last time, you will return into God’s knowing and you will wake up fully and completely known and loved. Loved as you have been from before, loved as you are now, and loved, as you will be when your stay here is over.

You are never separated or apart from God. And the truly blessed and merciful thing is, you don’t have to wait to die to know this! To know God’s embrace. To know God’s gifting you and commissioning you and sending you out to translate God’s love into your own friendships and family and responsibilities and pleasures.

This was Jeremiah’s experience. This was Paul’s experience as well. though he came to it differently. Because before Paul ever knew God’s grace, he knew God through the commandments, through the law, and he thought he was commissioned and sent by God. He thought God wanted him to keep the faithful safe from harmful influences. And in Paul’s case, the harmful influences were the Christians – who, for Paul, were heretics. He presided over their being driven out of the synagogues and in some cases stoned and killed.

Convinced in his heart that this was God’s will and way, he was literally knocked off his horse, blinded by light, and deeply questioned by the God whom he thought he served. His sincerity saved him. His sincere desire to love and serve God enabled him to immediately recognize God’s touch. It was a touch that permanently altered his consciousness and changed his life.

So instead of persecuting the heretics, he became one! The earliest Christian writings we have are Paul’s letters to the churches that he himself founded. Chapter 13 of the 1st letter to the church at Corinth is probably the best known of all of Paul’s letters. Some sorority chapters read it at every meeting. It is read at almost every wedding. It is beloved by Christians and non-Christians. Why? Because it springs from the same fountain as the opening to the chapter read this morning from Jeremiah. “Before you were born, I knew you. I formed you in your mother’s womb. You are mine. “ And you are beloved. This is your birthright. It is your inheritance. It is your wealth. And it is pure sweet gift. It is Love Mercy that sustains you at every moment, whether you are currently blind to God’s grace or whether you have begun to see through the glass though still darkly.

Paul invites you to put on Love’s clothing – so that you will be more easily recognized for who you really are. – a beloved child of God, and a friend of our Lord Jesus Christ. So Paul tells us to put on the clothes of patience and kindness. He encourages us to wear the warmth of endurance and hope and rejoicing in God’s truth.

Just before this, In the 12th chapter of this letter, he named a whole variety of spiritual gifts – gifts that are given by God to build up the whole body – and now he says – as wonderful as these gifts are – gifts of preaching and teaching and healing and administration – as wonderful and good as these gifts are, they are nothing, they are worthless, without Love. Without the continual awareness and thanksgiving that they arise from God and are given solely for the purpose of letting more Love loose in the world.

We are called, commissioned and sent out, each and every one of us, to serve the world God loves so dearly, and to do so undergirded in every moment by Love. We rely on Love. We trust Love. We hope in Love. And Paul insists that this is not something we do. It is something we receive and that flows through us.

I don’t know about any of the working of this congregation at Corinth – except what is contained in Paul’s two letters to them. But from that little bit, it is striking to me how similar they seem to have been to us in our own day and age. They were proud people. They were, for the most part, educated people. They followed Christ, but they retained the cultural norms of their time. When they gathered for the Eucharist, they copied the patterns of every Greek dinner – the wealthy ate in the dining room, with copious amounts of food and wine, and the poor stood waiting in the outer rooms, eating little or nothing at all. They boasted of their spiritual insights and wisdom – and Paul writes to them with some testiness. This isn’t it – he says. You are a new community. You are a community gathered now in Christ – and at the root and heart of your being – your own individual being, but not just that – at the root and heart of your being as church – is this sweet mercy of unending, unearned, sustaining Love that knows you fully.

Once you have grounded yourself in that, all the other decisions about your communal life, and your individual lives will sort itself out. You won’t always agree, Paul says, but in kindness and patience, and by giving up what we would call “black and white thinking” you can make room for difference, and you can discover the enormous energy of the Holy Spirit guiding you into greater and greater faith, and hope and love.

Called, commissioned and sent out – Jeremiah experienced this. Paul and the church in Corinth experienced this. Jesus experienced this. After his baptism, Jesus fasted. He prayed and he lived in solitude for a good length of time. He let himself be fully and completely pulled into God’s orbit. It took time to incorporate this profound awareness that he was God’s heart walking around in human form.

Then, filled with the power of the Spirit, he followed God out of the desert and into the lives of ordinary men and women. He followed God right back to his home town. What harder and more difficult place could there be to claim the fullness of who you really are. To come out of the closet – because of course, each in our own way – we have to do this. Thanks to our gay brothers and sisters for the terminology – but they do not own this experience. It is true of each of us as we shed more and more of our accumulated defenses and coping mechanisms and let the God self within become the self that our partners and our children and our colleagues and our community can see and taste and touch and know. Not easy sometimes. But Jesus led the way close to the beginning of his public life.

And truth be told, he didn’t get a really great reception. Still, he was spoke truth as deeply as he knew how – and entirely in Love. He wasn’t touting himself – though by that point, it was impossible to separate himself from the God who formed, called, commissioned and sent him. Impossible to say where the Word ended and he began. Impossible to untangle the Divine and the Human. And so, Jesus sat in the synagogue among his brothers and sisters, his aunts and uncles, his fellows, and spoke the truth in love.

And eventually, some of those who wanted to throw him off a cliff that day, became followers and fellows and friends in this with God life that he imparted and for which he died and to which he was raised. Praise be to the one God almighty and merciful and everlasting.

“Before you were formed,” God says, “I knew you. I formed you in your mother’s womb. You are mine. And do not say – you are only…..Alice. You are only….a pianist. You are only….an attorney. You are only…..Joe. You are only…..a boy. Do not say this. Because I touch you. I gift you. I commission you. I send you. I uphold you. And I am with you now and forever more.” Amen.