Jeremiah,
Chapter 1, verse 8
Do
not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you—oracle of the
LORD.
Jeremiah in this chapter received the call of God
and he was afraid. Jeremiah as a young man felt inadequate to do the call of
God. Moses on the other hand was a much older man but like Jeremiah when he
received the call of God he felt inadequate. When Peter received the call from
our Lord Jesus he felt insignificant and cried out, “Leave me Lord. I am a
sinful man.” (Luke 5:8b). The lesson here is that when we are called it will be
scary. Christ asks us to not be afraid.
The perfect example of what our attitude to the call should be was the attitude
of Mary at the annunciation when God called her to be the mother of Christ. Mary’s
fiat was "Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me
according to your word." (Luke 1: 38).
An interesting thing in this verse, is the use of
the word presence. Worldly people are masters of presence or the
projection of power. When called do not fear
powerful people for is not God greater than the world? Give it to God, let him
take control for our Lord will empower us and deliver us to accomplish his word
just like he did Jeremiah and all the Saints. We for our part must be, ready
for change, for God will prepare us for the challenges of our calling. We must
be open to the promptings of our Lord and be willing to give up any of our own
façades of presence or false images of power we may have developed over
time.
We may have, at times, found ourselves projecting a
presence, which is actually just an overreaction to our fears and self-doubts. Let us follow
the advice of Father J. Brian Bransfield and realize: To find the depths of our identity we must
pass through our fears.[1]
Sacred Images[2]
The protestant
reformer John Calvin was forceful opponent of devotional images and favored
bare church walls and bare crosses. He held images—even of Christ—led to idolatry.
Catholics use statues, paintings, and other artistic
devices to recall the person or thing depicted. Just as it helps to remember
one’s mother by looking at her photograph, so it helps to recall the example of
the saints by looking at pictures of them. Catholics also use statues as
teaching tools. In the early Church they were especially useful for the
instruction of the illiterate. Many Protestants have pictures of Jesus and
other Bible pictures in Sunday school for teaching children. Catholics also use
statues to commemorate certain people and events, much as Protestant churches
have three-dimensional nativity scenes at Christmas. If one measured
Protestants by the same rule, then by using these "graven" images,
they would be practicing the "idolatry" of which they accuse
Catholics. But there’s no idolatry going on in these situations. God forbids
the worship of images as gods, but he doesn’t ban the making
of images. If he had, religious movies, videos, photographs, paintings, and all
similar things would be banned. But, as the case of the bronze serpent shows,
God does not even forbid the ritual use of religious images. It is when
people begin to adore a statue as a god that the Lord becomes angry. Thus when
people did start to worship the bronze serpent as a
snake-god (whom they named "Nehushtan"), the righteous king Hezekiah had
it destroyed (2 Kgs. 18:4).[3]
One
interesting thing to consider is one of the most sacred images that we have in
the Americas is the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe which was gifted to the
church on St. Juan Diego’s apron. The image of our lady came to us about the
same time that nine million protestants left the church and almost simultaneously
that nine million loss of saints was filled by nine million Aztecs and other
native Americans.
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