Drawing Lines, Breaking Boundaries

Now the word of the LORD came to me saying,”Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.”

Then I said, “Ah, Lord GOD! Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy” [Jeremiah 1:4-6].

“If you don’t have a call, then you better get one.” This seminary humor circulates endlessly in divinity schools. Its persistence speaks to a universal truth about the nature of calling. The joke’s irony lies in suggesting we can manufacture what only God can initiate.

The tension between human agency and divine calling was particularly vivid when, in 1986, I arrived at Duke Divinity School at age 35—leaving behind a decade of law practice and uprooting my family of six—I found myself in a small seminar discussing our various calls to ministry. Despite years as a litigator, despite countless hours before judges and administrative agencies honing advocacy skills, I confessed to feeling utterly inadequate. More telling perhaps was my admission of years spent resisting God’s persistent prodding before finally surrendering to His direction. When I suggested to my classmates—most of whom were fresh from college and thirteen years my junior—that my experience felt somewhat like Jeremiah’s reluctant call to prophecy, one quickly responded.

“You sound more like Moses than Jeremiah,” he suggested with a grin. “After all, Jeremiah could only claim he was too young—you’ve managed to resist God’s call well into middle age!”

Still chuckling at my classmate’s comment, I admit that the Moses parallel has stayed with me all these years and, as I reflect on this week’s Old Testament reading [Jeremiah 1:4-10, the OT reading for the Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany, RCL, Year C], I’m struck by how God’s boundary-breaking sovereignty overwhelms human categories of adequacy and readiness.

Consider how YHWH opens this exchange with Jeremiah:

Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations” [1:5].

There’s no gentle introduction here, no careful preparation. YHWH simply declares a sovereign claim that transcends human boundaries—even the boundary between one’s existence and non-existence. Before Jeremiah drew breath, before his first cry, before his formation in the womb, YHWH knew him and had appointed him.

Jeremiah’s response is thoroughly human: “Ah, Lord God! Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy.” Like so many of us, he attempts to draw a boundary around YHWH’s calling, to define its limits through human categories of age and experience. But notice what happens next—or rather, what doesn’t happen. YHWH doesn’t engage with Jeremiah’s protest at all. There’s no “You’re old enough” or “Age doesn’t matter.” Instead, YHWH simply reaffirms the original commission: “Do not say, ‘I am only a boy’; for you shall go to all to whom I send you.”

Moreover, the scope of YHWH’s commission is breathtaking: “See, today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms.” Such a commission would have struck Jeremiah’s first hearers as shocking, perhaps even blasphemous. A boy—this boy—given authority over not just Judah, but nations and kingdoms? The scope deliberately pushes against every conventional boundary of authority and influence. And notice the verbs YHWH uses: “to pluck up and pull down, to destroy and overthrow, to build and to plant” [1:10]. This isn’t gentle, careful reform. At least some—if not all—human boundaries need demolishing while new structures need building. The question for us becomes: which is which?

Yet there’s something deeper here than just the dramatic scope of Jeremiah’s commission. When YHWH declares “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,” we encounter a claim about divine sovereignty that transcends every human attempt to set limits around God’s purposes. This isn’t just about when life begins or even about divine foreknowledge. It’s about God’s absolute claim on human life and purpose—a claim that precedes our existence and overshadows our carefully constructed categories of readiness and adequacy.

Perhaps our most subtle boundary-drawing comes in how we partition divine calling itself. We sometimes act as if God’s sovereign purposes are reserved for those with formal theological training or official church positions. We let the ordained staff carry the weight of ministry while we sit comfortably in our pews, as if God’s boundary-breaking sovereignty somehow stops at the chancel steps. But this passage confronts such thinking head-on. YHWH’s claim on Jeremiah preceded any formal qualification or official position. Indeed, it preceded Jeremiah himself.

We’re unsettled with the implications. If God’s sovereign purpose can claim someone before birth, before any training or qualification, then none of our carefully constructed categories can limit where and through whom God might work. When the administrative assistant feels drawn to prison ministry but protests “I have no training in counseling,” when the accountant senses a call to teach but objects “I’ve never led a class,” when the retiree can’t shake the urge to start a homeless outreach but insists “I’m too old for new projects” —all these mirror Jeremiah’s protest: “Ah, Lord God! Truly I do not know how to speak ….” Like the man who said “I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home” [Luke 9:61], we set conditions on our response to divine calling. God’s response remains the same: “You shall go to all to whom I send you.”

What boundaries are we drawing around God’s calling in our own lives? What categories of inadequacy have we constructed? More importantly, what might it mean to surrender to this God whose sovereign purposes transcend every human limitation we can imagine?

At some point, each of us faces this reality of God’s boundary-breaking sovereignty. Like Jeremiah, we may try to hide behind our youth or inexperience. Like Moses, we might resist for decades. Like me in that divinity school seminar, we might admit to years of dodging God’s persistent prodding. But the God who knew Jeremiah before formation, who appointed him before birth, who commissioned him beyond every conventional boundary, is the same God who continues to call us beyond our carefully constructed limits.

When YHWH tells Jeremiah “Do not be afraid … for I am with you,” it’s not just reassurance. It’s a fundamental reframing of the question. The issue isn’t our adequacy but God’s presence, not our readiness but God’s sovereignty. And that sovereignty, as Jeremiah would discover, has a habit of breaking every boundary we try to draw around it.