Sermon for Sunday, August 24, 2025 || Proper 16C || Jeremiah 1:4-10

Today we are going to talk about inadequacy. Specifically we are going to talk about how God calls people, not in spite of, but because of their inadequacies. This pattern holds throughout Holy Scripture, but we’ll get into that later. First, a personal story.

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In ninth grade, I couldn’t play soccer because my growth spurt made it too painful for me to run. So I joined musical theatre instead. This was great because it was the only way my sister, who was a senior, and I could be in a class together. The trouble was, I really couldn’t sing. I liked singing, but I could not match pitch to save my life. So where do you put a kid who can’t sing in a musical? You give him a small but memorable role where he gets to do a funny accent and only has dialogue but no songs. This was great in ninth grade when I was Evil-Eye Fleagle in Lil’ Abner and Professor Zoltan Karpathy in My Fair Lady.

I didn’t do musical theatre my middle two years of high school, but I was back for senior year. I still couldn’t sing well, but if I stood next to my best friend Kyle I could follow him pretty okay, and he was a heck of a singer. I was cast as the parson in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, but the musical theatre director didn’t trust me to sing my small solo, so she gave it to someone else. She had no desire to help people learn to sing, and her lack of confidence in my singing made me even less confident.

Fast forward a year to my freshman year of college at Sewanee. I was in chapel the first week of school when the University Choir processed by. I still couldn’t match pitch too well, but even I could hear the bass at the end of the line squawking out a bunch of wrong notes. If he can be in the choir, so can I! I thought. Turns out the University Choir let in anyone who wanted to join and through sheer number of rehearsals (four a week plus singing every Sunday), you couldn’t help but get better. Plus, the director, Dr. Delcamp, was a great teacher. Over four years, he and other teachers encouraged my singing until I could sing all by myself, loudly and confidently.

I’m telling you this story because it illustrates in my own life the way God uses our inadequacies to fulfill God’s call in our lives. I had always built my identity on “being good at stuff.” If I wasn’t immediately good at something, I quit. But for some reason, singing was the exception. I knew I wasn’t a strong or confident singer in high school; I felt inadequate in a room of better singers. But I loved to sing anyway. If I hadn’t been a less than adequate singer when I joined the University Choir, I’m not sure I would have appreciated the experience as much. If I had already been a great singer, I would have seen it as my right to be in the choir, rather than as the gift of grace it truly was – something undeserved still given freely and joyfully. Singing in the choir at Sewanee kept me going to church, and I am convinced that those years singing literally thousands of hymns, psalms, and anthems in praise of God fueled my call to serve God as a priest.

I think God sees our inadequacies from a different perspective than we do. To us, inadequacy is an impediment. To God, our inadequacy is an opportunity for God to display God’s glory. In this morning’s first reading, Jeremiah’s feelings of inadequacy prompt him to dissuade God from calling him to be a prophet. After God informs Jeremiah that God has appointed him to be a prophet to the nations, Jeremiah says, “Ah, Lord GOD! Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am [only] a boy.”

God hears these words and keys in on the second half. “Do no say, “I am a boy.” Your youth doesn’t matter because I am with you to deliver you. You can’t help being your age. If I wanted someone older I’d call someone else. But notice that no similar assurance addresses Jeremiah’s inadequacy in speaking. God never tries to assure Jeremiah by saying, “Do not say, ‘I do not know how to speak.’” Rather, God uses Jeremiah’s inadequacy in speaking as an opportunity to put God’s word in Jeremiah’s mouth. God sees room for growth in Jeremiah, and God fills that room with God’s own words.

What Jeremiah doesn’t realize is that God picks him precisely because of his inadequacy in speaking. This is an example of the pattern I mentioned earlier. Moses has a speech impediment, but God still calls him to stand up before Pharaoh. David wears no armor and carries only a sling and stones when he challenges Goliath, the Philistine champion. Gideon drastically reduces the numbers of his army – from 22,000 to three hundred – when he contends with the Midianites. In each of these cases, the human vessel called to work God’s purpose is laughably inadequate to the task at hand. And every time, God’s purpose succeeds.

God works through human inadequacy to display God’s own glory. In a sense, God is showing off. But not in a vane way. God’s showing off is educational. We often have trouble attributing our giftedness to God, which allows the sin of pride to creep in at ground level and start rotting out our appreciation for God’s blessing. This trouble magnifies greatly for the strengths we perceive we’ve always had because the constancy of our strengths makes us less apt to remember to thank God for them.

But we have a much easier time thanking God for abilities we’ve had to work hard to obtain. God cultivates growth in us by targeting our inadequacies. We remember what the inadequacy felt like when we didn’t have certain abilities, and so we thank God for helping us to step outside of our comfort zones and try new things. This is my experience with learning how to sing, and I bet each of you can think of a similar example in your own lives.

Whatever our inadequacies – perceived or real – God can work through them to display God’s glory. God uses the inadequacy of Jeremiah to put God’s words in his mouth. God uses the inadequacies of Moses, David, and Gideon. And not just them. Aaron built an idol five minutes after he heard the commandment not to. Jacob was a cheat. Joseph was a prima donna. Ehud was left-handed. Jonah hightailed it in the opposite direction. Ruth was a stranger in a strange land. Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, and Hannah all had trouble conceiving a child. Paul was a persecutor. And oh yeah, the disciples fled.

So why not us? Thousands of years may have passed, but our inadequacies are the same. (Well, being left-handed isn’t so bad anymore.) This week, I invite you to pray about the ways in which you have always felt inadequate. Ask God how God might use those inadequacies for God’s glory. What gift of grace is God showering upon you that you might have been too afraid or too embarrassed to recognize? That place of inadequacy might just be a gift of grace in disguise. Embrace that gift. With God’s help, grow your comfort zone. Step out in faith and try something that has always made you feel inadequate. For that’s where God’s grace and God’s glory will find you.

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Banner: 17-year-old Adam in costume as the parson in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.