Today’s joint worship service celebrates a great week of “Do Something Superheroes” Vacation Bible School! No matter your age or abilities, God has a mission for you. Everyone can answer the call to DO SOMETHING to share God’s love through your words and actions!
This week’s readings are Jeremiah 1:4-8, Psalm 105:1-5, 1 Timothy 4:12, and Mark 12:28-34. The worship livestream is embedded below, and this is a fun one to watch!
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Grace to you and peace from God our Creator and our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen
On Friday evening while we were eating supper, with pretty much zero context, Jonah announced: “I’ll be a grown up when I grow up!” True enough.
A minute later he added, “Then I’ll be able to reach the candy bin in the closet!” As my sister said when I shared this insight in the family chat, “It’s good to have goals.”
There’s a lot of stuff you get to do as you grow up, right? A frequent source of conflict in our family is when Micah can do something, but Jonah can’t yet, because he’s too young.
It’s not just little kids either—we’re picking up the van rental on Saturday for next week’s Lighthouse youth mission trip, and I remember the first time Christin led a mission trip, we ran into a problem because you have to be 25 to rent a 12 passenger van, and even as employed college graduates, we weren’t old enough.
Shortly after turning 18, my friend and I stopped at a gas station to buy a scratch-off lottery ticket. Complete waste of money—we won nothing. But we did it just because we could.
There’s a lot you can’t do until you’re old enough; that’s just the way the world works. But as many of you heard this week, that’s not the way God operates.
During our week of VBS, we looked at five Bible stories of God calling kids to do something. Not adults, not old men with big white beards, but kids, or maybe teenagers.
Miriam watched over her baby brother Moses, protecting him while he was hidden from the Pharaoh’s soldiers in a basket in the Nile River.
Mary was a young, unmarried girl—probably a teenager—when she said yes to God and agreed to be the mother of Jesus, to give birth to the Son of God.
On Wednesday, we learned about Samuel, who was a young boy living in the temple as an apprentice to Eli the priest when God called him to be a prophet.
David was the youngest son in his family, just a shepherd boy, but he trusted in God and stood up to the enemy giant Goliath, even though he was too small to even walk in a borrowed suit of armor.
Finally, on Friday, we looked at the boy in John’s story of Jesus feeding the 5,000. We don’t know his age or even his name, but he offered his five loaves of bread and his two fish to Jesus, and Jesus used this kid’s small offering—used his lunch—to do an incredible miracle.
In this morning’s service, I wanted to share one more Bible kid call story with you, the story of Jeremiah. We didn’t include Jeremiah’s story in VBS because his mission is a little harder to explain or act out or connect to a craft project.
Jeremiah doesn’t get to fight a giant, or give birth to God’s son, or even protect his little sister; he’s called to be a prophet, which means he’s called to share a message from God. And not just one message: the book of Jeremiah has 52 chapters, and Jeremiah’s also traditionally credited as the author of the book of Lamentations.
His message isn’t especially kid-friendly, either. Jeremiah’s assignment is to prophesy about the coming destruction of Jerusalem and tell people if they don’t repent, they’ll be invaded, plundered, starve, and eventually be taken into exile. He’s known as the weeping prophet, because the people don’t listen to him, and he has to witness their destruction.
But I wanted to mention Jeremiah this morning because when God first calls him to be a prophet to the nations, his response is—this is verse 6 in Jeremiah 1—“Ah, Lord God! Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy.”
He thinks he’s too young. He thinks he’s not skilled enough, not educated enough, not good enough. Not ready. Maybe you’ve had some of those thoughts.
And God says, basically, “Don’t worry about it. Do not say, ‘I am only a boy’…do not be afraid of them,’—here’s the key—‘for I am with you to deliver you.’” He doesn’t have to do it on his own. It’s God’s mission in which he gets to be involved. God can overcome our human limitations.
The biggest takeaway we want kids to have from this week of superhero VBS is not that they’re a superhero, but that God can use them to do super things. Even if you can’t fly, or have super-strength, or leap tall buildings in a single bound, you can do amazing, heroic things when you answer God’s call. God is with you.
God knows who God is calling. God wasn’t surprised Jeremiah was young, or that Mary didn’t yet have a husband, or that David was smaller than all his brothers.
God doesn’t need superheroes; God needs people willing to follow.
Our theme verse talks about not letting anyone look down on you because you are young. But it goes the other way too, right? You are not too old for God to use you. There are plenty of Biblical examples of that too: Abraham was not too old. Elizabeth was not too old.
Maybe in your life, God will call you to some specific mission. Maybe you’ll get an angel appearing, or a voice at night, a vision. Some people get that. Perhaps your mission will be really clear: Go and start a church, or work on a particular cause, spend your life as an advocate. God might give you a particular person or group to focus on, or an obvious career path. Great!
But if you don’t get that kind of big, flashy call moment, that’s ok. Jesus tells all of us how to be heroic.
Here’s your mission: Love God with all that you are. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. That is the first and greatest commandment.
And the way you do that, what that looks like practically, is to love your neighbors as yourself. That’s the second command, just like the first, Jesus says. Love the Lord your God and love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these.
Those commandments go together. You can’t love God and not enact that love by serving your neighbors.
Listen to First John chapter four: “We love because he first loved us. Those who say, ‘I love God,’ and hate a brother or sister are liars, for those who do not love a brother or sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.”
To love means to do something. Maybe that looks like helping your brother or sister. Maybe it looks like sitting by someone who needs a friend. It looks different at different ages, but it’s all acts of love.
Perhaps it’s finding a cause and chipping in a little bit month after month—there’s plenty that’s broken in the world. Sending that card or making that phone call to the person you haven’t seen for a while.
Making food, not for a crowd of 5,000, but for a kid who loves peppers when you start the meal but hates them when they’re actually on the plate. Volunteering at VBS. Calling a legislator. Your vocation as a Christian is to love.
Doing something to make the world a better place. Doing something to love your neighbor as yourself, in big or small ways, no matter how young or old you are. Loving because God has loved you.
This is our call: Do something, in Jesus’ name.
This is our mission from God: Love God by loving your neighbors. Not on your own, not relying on your own strength or willpower or skills, but trusting in God’s promise to be with you.
Will you accept this mission? Amen
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