This Sunday we are starting a new sermon series, Lessons from Jeremiah (spoiler alert!). Jeremiah didn't have an easy life. He is known as the "weeping prophet" because of all the times he warned the people of Israel to turn away from their wrongdoing and was ignored. He could see that God wasn't going to let them get away with the way they were living for much longer - they were worshipping other gods, ignoring widows and children who were starving, taking advantage of poor and marginalized people, and cheating others to get ahead. When Jeremiah called them out for what they were doing, they chased him away, stoned him, had him arrested, and so on. God told Jeremiah, when he called him to be a prophet, that all this would happen ... but that Jeremiah would be rewarded for his faithfulness in the end. 

The beauty of Jeremiah's story - and it's a long one - is that while Jeremiah responded to God's call, he wasn't always happy about it. In other words, Jeremiah, for all his faithfulness to God, was human just like us. He believed in God and in God's vision for the people of Israel, but he didn't always want to be the one to deliver hard news. He wanted to be liked. 

It isn't always easy for us to live as a people of faith either. We don't want to be seen as "preaching" to others. We don't want to be laughed at because we go to church and place importance on helping others. We want to be liked. 

Most of us, thankfully, aren't called to be like Jeremiah. But we are all called. Called to love others. Called to care for one another. Called to share our faith in different ways. We don't have to speak words of doom and gloom because, unlike Jeremiah, we have the good news of Jesus and the resurrection. We can speak words of hope, peace, grace, and love. But it begins with us living our lives in a way that shows we have experienced these gifts in us. I can't show God's forgiveness if I don't forgive others. I can't show God's love if I don't show love to others. I can't show God's message of peace and hope if I am consistently angry and hopeless. 

There are days I struggle to exemplify even one of these qualities, let alone all of them! Like Jeremiah, I have my days when I don't want to be a "prophet," days when I would rather not be known as a person of faith. But the more I work at it, the less often those days come. What do you think? Are you showing others the love of Christ in how you live? (If you need to work on it, that's ok, because so did Jeremiah!).