Epiphany
January 26, 2016

Scripture Reading: Jeremiah 1:4-10

Then the Lord put out his hand and touched my mouth; and the Lord said to me,
‘Now I have put my words in your mouth.
See, today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms,
to pluck up and to pull down,
to destroy and to overthrow,
to build and to plant.’ –Jeremiah 1:9-10

Jeremiah felt called to turn the world upside-down in the process of making it upright. There are a lot of politicians wanting to do exactly that today. How do we know to whom we should listen? How do we know who speaks for God and who speaks for the other gods that strive to rule our land? Those other gods are being quite successful it seems.

There are no easy answers in a diverse society. Jeremiah got one thing right for sure. All of us have to change some for all of us to experience some level of life’s adequacies. Food, clothing, shelter plus, I think, hope and a sense of wellbeing, good health and a sense of making a contribution to the world are necessities.

Actually Jesus, some two-thousand years ago, gave us the simplest answer of all: love. For some reason we find it hard to implement. Love requires us to consider the needs of the other. It is hard to quiet the voice in our head that fills our subconscious’ filters with the debris that say, “If the other has enough, I won’t have.” Or “I am no one unless I have more than another.” The saddest thing is that God took care of all that need to covet when God created us. We were all made in God’s image unique. Worth is not measured on any scale but God’s.

Prayer: Lord, heal our souls, clean our clogged inner filters from years of distrust and fear, let your love so overwhelm us that we can do nothing other than love one another. Amen.

All scriptures are quoted from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicized 
Edition, copyright 1989, 1995, Division of Christian Education of the National Council 
of Churches of Christ in the United States of American. Used by permission. All rights 
reserved.