Psalm 53 and Jeremiah 1:4-10

10th Sunday after Pentecost. August 2, 2026.

Texts from the NRSVUE Bible. Suggested in Un giorno una parola lectionary.

Giovanni Pistone PL

Psalm 53

Jeremiah 1:4-10

Sermon (preliminary notes)

Read the two call narratives side by side, and the contrast is more instructive than the similarity. In Exodus 3-4, God confronts Moses at the burning bush with news of deliverance, and Moses answers with a cascade of resistance: “Who am I that I should go?” “What is your name?” “But suppose they do not believe me.” “I have never been eloquent… I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.” And when God has answered every objection, Moses still asks, plainly, to be excused: “O my Lord, please send someone else.” Only then, we are told, does the Lord’s anger burn against him — though even in anger God does not withdraw the commission; he simply supplies Aaron as a mouth for the reluctant prophet.

Jeremiah’s scene is compressed to a single exchange. God speaks first, and speaks retrospectively: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you.” There is no negotiation over a name, no request for proof, no demand for a co-worker. Jeremiah raises one objection — “I am only a boy” — and it is answered not with an argument but with a touch: the Lord’s hand reaches out, touches his mouth, and the words are simply given. From protest to obedience is the space of two verses.

The two calls draw on the same grammar because they belong to the same office. Moses is the prophet against whom every later prophet, Jeremiah included, is implicitly measured — the mouth-for-Aaron of Exodus 4 anticipates the mouth-touched-directly of Jeremiah 1, and the promise “I will be with you” at the bush is answered word for word by “I am with you to deliver you” at Jeremiah’s call. Both objections turn on speech — eloquence in one case, age in the other — and both are met with the same divine refusal to accept inadequacy as the final word. God’s presence, not the prophet’s competence, is what makes a mouth trustworthy.

But the difference between one objection and five is not incidental; it says something about the shape of each vocation. Moses is sent to confront the most powerful throne on earth and to walk an entire people out of it, and his resistance is the resistance of someone who understands, correctly, the size of the assignment — he does not relent until Aaron is standing beside him. Jeremiah’s task, “to pluck up and pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant,” sounds no smaller — nations and kingdoms, not one Pharaoh — yet he yields almost at once. What Jeremiah is given instead of a co-worker is a word already placed in his mouth before he asked; his authority is not shared with a brother but planted directly by God’s hand. Two different remedies for the same fear, because two different offices: Moses leads a people out by acts he performs before Pharaoh’s eyes, Jeremiah moves nations by words he does not have to invent.

Read together, the pairing corrects two opposite errors about vocation. Against the illusion that a call feels like readiness, both narratives insist that hesitation, even open refusal, is compatible with — perhaps even evidence of — a genuine one: neither man auditions for the part; both are told, before they can answer, that they were shaped for it before birth. And against the illusion that inadequacy is disqualifying, both narratives answer excuse with provision rather than with argument: Moses gets a brother’s voice, Jeremiah gets the very words in his mouth. The question the two texts leave for anyone who has ever answered a summons with “I am only a boy,” or its equivalent, is not whether the objection was true — it very likely was — but whether it was ever the point.

A contemporary voice has made a related point in a wholly different idiom. Jordan B. Peterson (b. 1962) is a Canadian clinical psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto whose 1999 book, Maps of Meaning, and 2018 bestseller, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, made him one of the most widely heard public lecturers of the last decade on questions of meaning, responsibility, and truth-telling.¹ Rule 8 of that book states his teaching as bluntly as a commandment: “Tell the truth — or, at least, don’t lie.”² For Peterson this obligation is not satisfied by avoiding false statements; the person who sees a wrong and says nothing about it is not neutral but already compromised. As he puts it, “When you have something to say, silence is a lie — and tyranny feeds on lies.”³ The remedy he prescribes is not eloquence but plain, costly honesty: “Stop saying those things that make you weak and ashamed. Say only those things that make you strong. Do only those things that you could speak of with honour.”⁴ He has not left the theme behind. His 2021 sequel, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life, extends it into the discipline of speaking painful truths inside one’s own family and institutions, and his most recent book, the 2024 We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine, returns to the very narrative this liturgy pairs with Jeremiah’s, reading Moses’ own reluctant commissioning at the burning bush as one more instance of the same law: that a life is only bearable, and only truthful, when it is staked on saying what is real regardless of the cost.⁵ Set beside Jeremiah’s call, Peterson’s argument names the temptation the young prophet might have chosen instead of obedience — the comfortable silence of “I am only a boy” — and names, too, why it was refused: not because Jeremiah found the courage in himself, but because the word was placed in his mouth before he could talk himself out of using it.

But there is a problem. The public square is full of self-appointed prophets who pretend to tell the truth, while what they call truth is often plainly false. So who speaks the real truth? Biblical prophets are called by God; they do not speak their own fantasies. John Calvin (1509–1564) makes this point many times, and he has an answer.

On Jeremiah’s own call, Calvin insists that the office rests entirely on God’s antecedent choice, not on any quality in the man himself. Commenting on verse 5, he explains that to be “known” and “sanctified” in the womb means Jeremiah was “set apart according to God’s predestination and hidden purpose; that is, God chose him then to be a Prophet” — “before I formed thee in the womb, I destined thee for this work, even that thou mayest undertake the burden of a teacher among the people.”⁶ Jeremiah’s protest that he is a “child” Calvin reads as a plea of manifest insufficiency, “not in age, but in knowledge… he possessed not the gifts necessary for an office so important” — and God simply overrules the self-assessment: “though thou, indeed, thinkest thyself destitute of every qualification… thou shalt go wheresoever I shall send thee.”⁷ A true prophet, on this account, is recognizable by exactly the mark a self-appointed one lacks: he did not choose the office, and his own sense of adequacy has nothing to do with whether he holds it.

That still leaves the harder question — how a hearer, not the prophet himself, is to tell one from the other. Here Calvin’s answer, developed at length in the Institutes against the “fanatics” of his own day who claimed the Spirit’s direct sanction for whatever they preached, is that no spirit is to be believed merely because it claims to speak for God. The Spirit’s office, he writes, “is not to form new and unheard-of revelations, or to coin a new form of doctrine… but to seal on our minds the very doctrine” already given.⁸ Lest Satan should insinuate himself under his name, God “wishes us to recognise him by the image which he has stamped on the Scriptures.” The test, in other words, is never the conviction, the eloquence, or the volume of the one claiming to speak the truth, but conformity to the Word already revealed — “the author of the Scriptures cannot vary, and change his likeness.”⁹ A self-appointed prophet can imitate Jeremiah’s confidence; what he cannot forge is the prior, hidden call, and what he cannot survive is the plain test of the Scriptures against which every claimed word of God must still be measured.

We are down to the core question: what does it mean to be called by God? Is God calling his prophets to a distinct kind of agency, or is God, on Peterson’s reading, calling everybody equally to tell the truth? This is a deep theological question, and theologians have advanced answers of their own.

Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274) gives one of the classical answers, and it cuts the question differently than either alternative supposes. Asking directly whether a good life is required for prophecy, he distinguishes two senses in which a prophet might be called “good”: the inward root of goodness, sanctifying grace, which unites the soul to God through love, and the outward gift itself, one of the “gratuitous graces,” given not to perfect the person who receives it but, in Paul’s words, for the profit of the whole church.¹⁰ Prophecy, on this analysis, belongs to the second kind — an instrumental grace of the intellect, not a reward for virtue — which is why Scripture can record real prophetic speech even from a corrupt seer like Balaam or a hostile high priest like Caiaphas, men whose lives Aquinas does not pretend were good. The calling of Jeremiah, read this way, is not an intensified version of the universal duty to tell the truth; it is a different kind of agency altogether, one that can make a man a mouthpiece for God’s word whether or not the office costs him anything personally. The ordinary duty not to lie, the one Peterson presses on everybody, belongs instead to the virtue Aquinas treats a little later in the same work, under the heading of truth and its contrary vice, lying.¹¹ That is a discipline of one’s own speech, owed by every person, and answerable to no commission but conscience. Two calls, two kinds of agency: one that turns a man into an instrument for others regardless of his own character, and one that holds each of us to account, without exception, for our own mouths.

Personally, I do not find the distinction Aquinas proposes fully convincing. The question is not, I think, one of being good but of being right: the prophet and the ordinary believer face the same underlying task, the responsibility of finding the truth before telling it. Aquinas’s gratuitous grace explains how even a corrupt man can still speak truly; it does not explain how anyone, corrupt or not, is to recognize truth in the first place.

Calvin’s own approach answers that prior question. He grounds the very possibility of recognizing God’s truth in a sense of divinity built into the human mind itself, prior to and independent of any particular calling: “There exists in the human mind, and indeed by natural instinct, some sense of Deity,” he writes, “we hold to be beyond dispute, since God himself… has endued all men with some idea of his Godhead.”¹² On this reading, conscience functions as an inward witness — an internal eye — that every hearer, not only the called prophet, already carries. Modern Reformed philosophy has turned this into an epistemology. Alvin Plantinga (b. 1932) names Calvin’s doctrine the sensus divinitatis and argues, in what he calls the “Aquinas/Calvin” or “A/C” model, that it is a genuine cognitive faculty: when it is functioning as designed, belief in God, and derivatively the recognition of what is true about God, can be properly basic — warranted without needing to be inferred from further argument.¹³ All truth, on this view, is grounded in God’s own wisdom before it is grounded in anyone’s argument for it, a claim classical theology had already made in other terms. Augustine (354–430) held that wherever a Christian finds the truth, “it is his Lord’s”;¹⁴ Justin Martyr (c. 100–c. 165), two centuries earlier, went further still, teaching that everyone who “lived reasonably,” pagan or believer, shared in the Logos, “the Word of whom every race of men were partakers,” so that truth spoken anywhere is truth held on loan from Christ.¹⁵ Read together with Aquinas, the two accounts need not compete: prophecy may still be an instrumental gift given without regard to the prophet’s own goodness, and the truth that gift delivers may still be recognizable only because God has already placed the capacity to recognize it in everyone who hears.

Acknowledgments. This text was produced through the following workflow: G.P. drafted each argument in his own imperfect English; Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant, corrected the prose, improved its flow, and supplied the detailed references; G.P. then made a final edit.