Mighty While Hiding: For the Week You Did Not Choose

The care list still has Thursday's name in the margin. Wait until he feels ready. The man who was asked to take a chair he did not pick sits two rows back with a sentence about being the least. The woman who was named into a household she did not choose sits with a casserole she already knows how to make and a church that already knows how to sell delay as kindness. Nobody asked who already spoke a name over a hiding place.

A deacon two seats over signed the last note that said we are praying. He also signed the first delay that left the named person under a quieter sentence. He has a theology of this stall: keep the sanctuary public and the naming indoors until the man feels capable.

This is a sermon for a church sitting with people who did not choose this week of being named and still selling wait-until-you-feel-ready as care. If you preach Judges 6 as a map of anyone's private insecurity, you will lie. If you preach it as Gideon in Ophrah, wheat in a wine press, Yahweh's angel speaking a name before the man felt capable, you give this church a God who names people by his purpose, and you take away the cheap care that hides behind waiting for a better feeling.

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Hear the calling as Holy Scripture tells it, from the World English Bible: "Yahweh’s angel came and sat under the oak which was in Ophrah, that belonged to Joash the Abiezrite.

His son Gideon was beating out wheat in the wine press, to hide it from the Midianites. Yahweh’s angel appeared to him, and said to him, “Yahweh is with you, you mighty man of valor!” Gideon said to him, “Oh, my lord, if Yahweh is with us, why then has all this happened to us? Where are all his wondrous works which our fathers told us of, saying, ‘Didn’t Yahweh bring us up from Egypt?’ But now Yahweh has cast us off, and delivered us into the hand of Midian.” Yahweh looked at him, and said, “Go in this your might, and save Israel from the hand of Midian. Haven’t I sent you?” He said to him, “O Lord, how shall I save Israel? Behold, my family is the poorest in Manasseh, and I am the least in my father’s house.”