Called Back by Love (Jeremiah 2:4-13)
Vicar Meagan Kim
June 22, 2025

Today, on this third Sunday after Pentecost, we continue our journey through the book of Jeremiah.
Pastor Pam began this series for us last week, which also happened to be Trinity Sunday—a day where we celebrate the mystery of God as Creator, Christ, and Spirit.
She shared with us Jeremiah’s call story, where we heard the young prophet respond to God’s invitation with protest: “I’m too young,” “I don’t know how to speak.”
This calling—to be a prophet to the nations—was not something Jeremiah sought out.
And yet, as Pastor Pam reminded us, the call of God finds us right where we are—confused, hesitant, and feeling ill equipped—and still draws us into something deeper, something bigger.
We’ll be spending the next five weeks in the book of Jeremiah, and I have to say—I’m especially grateful for that.
Because many of us struggle to understand the Old Testament, to understand what it means for us today, and especially how to talk about it with others.
Some Lutheran churches have even stopped including Old Testament passages in the liturgy altogether.
The stories, the people, the culture, the violence, the ways that God is talked about, the lists of impossible names.
Called Back by Love (Jeremiah 2:4-13)
Vicar Meagan Kim
June 22, 2025
These texts can become stumbling blocks for the Good News of God - especially if they are left in the hands of those who seek to justify cruelty, war, exclusion, and fear.
And yet—these texts are part of our sacred story.
They are part of the witness to who God is and to who we are as God’s people.
I believe one of the great invitations—and challenges—of the 21st-century church is to reengage these texts with honesty, courage, wisdom, and compassion.
Because the world is still waiting for a Christianity that can hold science and common sense and egalitarianism in the same hands that it holds the very word of God.
The work of faith is to not to dismiss what is difficult, but to enter it together and trust that God is still speaking, even from the pages that challenge us the most.
A particular calling that I feel as a preacher and a theologian in to reexamine these texts with the Spirit of Christ—the One that proclaims good news to the poor, that welcomes in and goes out to the marginalized, and defends the oppressed.
Christ is for us the clearest picture of who God is.
And with that lens—we return to Jeremiah.
Today as we enter this sacred text, we hear God speaking with a message for the entire people of Israel.

Our section today that was read begins at chapter 2, verse 4, but if we back up just a bit, and I think this is important because I want us to hear this tone of God, the first thing that God says through Jeremiah for God’s people:
“I remember the devotion of your youth, how as a bride you loved me and followed me through the wilderness, through a land not sown.” (Jeremiah 2:2)
This is how the book of Jeremiah begins.
A book that is so often associated with wrath and destruction—but begins with love.
With a memory.
“I remember the devotion of your youth, you loved me and followed me through the wilderness.”
God uses the words devotion and love, God describes the commitment of people, the kindness, piety, faithfulness.
This is how God remembers God’s people.
The wilderness years, as far as we remember, were not Israel’s proudest moment.
They might even be the kind of season Israel would have preferred to forget.
When we teach about it and preach about this time in Israel’s history it’s usually described as a disaster.
It was a time of rebellion and grumbling.
Called Back by Love (Jeremiah 2:4-13)
Vicar Meagan Kim
June 22, 2025
The people forgot God, melted down their gold to make a calf, turned against Moses, and even begged to return to Egypt where they’d been held captive as slaves.
And yet—this is what God remembers with affection.
It makes me wonder— What are those moments in your life that still sting when you remember them? The times when you said the thing you wish you could take back. When you hurt someone you loved. When the addiction had more power than your will. When you felt like you were failing as a parent, as a partner, as a person. When you made a choice you’ve never told anyone about.
We all have those seasons, those times that we carry like weights.
These moments we assume God looks back on with disappointment—if not outright anger.
But what if God sees them differently?
What if God looks at those same chapters—not through the lens of judgment, but through the eyes of love?
What if God remembers your wilderness not as a failure, but as a place of nearness?
A time when, even if you didn’t feel it, God was walking beside you, aching with you, and loving you still?

In Jeremiah 31, later in this book, God says - I have loved you with an everlasting love; I have drawn you with unfailing kindness.
I think so many of us, whether we realize it or not, carry around a picture of a God who is mostly disappointed in us.
A God whose arms are crossed, who is always looking over us chastising us - “get yourself together”.
I know this is the God that I believed existed for so many years of my life - that’s what kept me out of churches all those years, one of the things.
And I think it’s something that continues to keep people out of churches - afraid of the disapproval or the wrath of God.
It continues to be a God that I hear preached - maybe not here, but plenty of other places.
And at least part of the reason that this picture exists is because that is how God is described in the Old Testament.
It’s the language of anger, accusation, disappointment—it’s all there.
And if we’re not reading it carefully—or if we’re reading without the lens of Christ—it can sound like a God who is primarily out to punish.
Hearing the book of Jeremiah today, seeing God in this way, I pray that we will carry this idea forward as we explore this book for the four weeks after this Sunday - and really I hope that these are ideas that stay with all of us.
Called Back by Love (Jeremiah 2:4-13)
Vicar Meagan Kim
June 22, 2025
This is the only time that I will preach during this sermon series and, as they say in Hamilton - this is my one shot and I don’t want to throw it away - because what do we do with these texts, is an issue that is critical for the future and the health of the people of God.
Now, this grace that God gives freely, that I love to talk about - it doesn’t mean that there’s not responsibility.
Love always compels a response.
It demands it.
Think of someone in your life who has loved you quietly and steadily over the years—not with flash or extravigance, but with consistency.
Maybe it was your spouse, or a lifelong friend.
Maybe it was someone who just kept showing up: checking in on you when you were sick, standing by you when things were hard, forgiving you even when you didn’t deserve it.
When someone loves you like that—not for what you’ve done, but just because you are cherished—it changes you. It makes you want to be better.
And if that kind of love hasn’t had that effect, maybe it’s because your heart is still learning how to receive that kind of grace.
God’s grace meets us when we’ve wandered and says, “I’m still here.”
It reminds us that we’re loved first.

And the people of Israel had forgotten that.
“They went after worthless things and became worthless themselves.” (Jeremiah 2:5) “They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and dug out cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that can hold no water.” (Jeremiah 2:13)
When we forget who God is, we forget who we are.
And that’s why it’s so important that we remember who God is.
The heartbreak and the hope of Jeremiah is this: God watches as we dig cracked cisterns and go thirsty. And still—God calls. God reminds us of who we are. God sees more in us than we often dare to believe for ourselves.
Calling is the voice of God echoing through our forgetfulness, naming us again and again as beloved, and equipping us to be prophets and teachers, encouragers and truth-tellers, generous givers and servant-hearted leaders.
So may we remember the One who remembers us in love.
May we return to the Source of living water.
May we recommit to the call that has never left us—not because we’ve earned it, or because we will do it perfectly, but because we are God’s.
And God is not done with us yet.

Will you please pray with me?
Gracious and ever-loving God, You are the One who remembers us in love, even when we forget You.
Forgive us for the ways we wander. Call us back again. Give us the courage to trust Your memory of us, your plans for us. Teach us to live not in fear of earning Your love, but in joyful response to the love You have already poured out.
Help us to be a people formed by Christ’s compassion and to reflect Your character in the world.
We pray this in the name of Jesus Christ, our well of living water. Amen.