The following teaching was presented by the Reverend John W. Howe, rector of Truro Episcopal Church in Fairfax, Virginia, at the Friday night prayer and praise service held on December 30, 1983. The title is, All God Requires is Faithfulness, and the scripture reference is Jeremiah 1, verses 4 through 12. 

I want to tell you three very brief stories, two of them failures, the third one nearly so. And you could look at Jeremiah chapter 1, which is the third of the stories, and that may be familiar to you already. Jeremiah chapter 1.

Tom is going to be our preacher on New Year's morning as well as New Year's Eve, and so I don't get to speak either time, so you're going to get it tonight. This is my New Year's Eve talk. Actually, what happened was I read a very startling editorial by Jamie Buckingham, and I'm going to read that in just a moment to you.

But what that reminded me of was something in my own life, and I want to begin with that. And that is that during my first year as chaplain at Miss Porter's school, we lived on a little side street. We weren't directly on campus.

We had a beautiful little home on a residential street and just part of the neighborhood. And a neighbor lady, who I had not met at all, came over to see me one day, and she somehow knew that I was the chaplain at Miss Porter's school. And she came with the request that I would visit her husband, who she said was very, very ill.

And I said, sure, I'll do that. It was very unspecific. Will you come sometime and visit my husband?

Yes, I'll come sometime and visit your husband. And I didn't have any, really, any pastoral experience. I knew nothing about visiting sick people.

I didn't really ever intend to be involved in that aspect of the ministry. I thought I was called to youth work. Kids are fun, sick people I don't know anything about.

now some of you may not be able to tell the difference between kids and sick people but anyway i just never got around to it somehow and a couple weeks went by and she stopped me one morning and she said would you come visit my husband and i said yes i'll come visit your husband and I didn't get around to it. And a couple of weeks after that, I saw him out in the front yard one day and I thought, well, he's doing marvelously well and I guess I don't need to visit him. And three days later he was dead.

And I had never visited him. And I apologized to that lady profusely begged her forgiveness. And she never spoke to me again.

And I don't really blame her for that. I don't know what his needs were. Whether he knew the Lord and needed encouragement.

Whether he didn't know the Lord and needed to come to know Him. Or whether maybe even God me to bring about a healing and prevent that death. I don't know because I didn't go.

And I was overwhelmed with the words of Jesus about the priest and the Levite who were too busy to stop and care for the guy lying in the ditch. And I said, that was me. And I'll never have that chance for that man again.

I made a decision after that that I would never again equivocate. If somebody asked me to do something, I will either say, yes, I will do it and set a time to do it, or I will say, I'm sorry, I can't promise that, but I will never again equivocate and say, yes sometime and I've been pretty good on that but I was reminded of that tremendous failure and I've committed it to the Lord and He knew I was going to fail before I failed and I don't think that that man was totally dependent upon me it's just that I might have been used had I been available and I wasn't available I was reminded of that by this editorial that Jamie wrote last month. It's entitled, I Was Scared.

I Didn't Go. In March 1975, I received an impassioned plea from an ad hoc committee of missionaries in South Vietnam. The letter was written and signed by a Christian and missionary alliance, missionary representing a large number of missionaries from many denominations.

It said, in essence, the communists have started their final push, and it is now obvious we are going to have to leave. The sad part is all we've worked for and accomplished so far will be destroyed when we pull out. The communists will burn the Bibles we leave behind.

They will turn the church buildings into communist meeting halls. They will take over our hospitals. They will disband the churches and kill the pastors.

There is nothing we can leave behind which will have lasting effect. They knew that. And that is what happened.

As we have prayed together and searched the scripture, we have discovered Jesus faced a similar situation when he left earth to return to heaven. He did not leave anything behind. No church buildings, no Bibles, no trained pastors.

All he left was his Holy Spirit. We are writing to ask if you are willing to come to Vietnam and impart to us the same gift Jesus imparted to his disciples. Now you understand, these are missionaries who up to that point have not known the blessing of the Holy Spirit.

They've been faithful evangelicals. They have not been open to the baptism and to the empowering of the Holy Spirit and to the gifts of the Holy Spirit. They've not known anything about that, but they said, we're writing to ask if you are willing to come to Vietnam and to impart to us the same gift Jesus imparted to his disciples that we might in turn give this gift to those we are going to have to leave behind.

I didn't know how to respond. Our church was small at the time and didn't have the money to send me. The publishing company I worked for was on the skids and had no money.

Even if I'd been able to come up with the money, there was another factor looming over me. I was afraid to go. This was a time when tens of thousands of people were fleeing Vietnam.

It didn't make sense for me to go there and possibly die there. I knew of three missionaries who had been killed in Vietnam. Just the year before, I had met the young widow of a Bible translator whose husband had been gunned down by the Viet Cong.

I heard reports of others having been captured and tortured. I waited another week. but the conclusion was inevitable.

I knew I had no choice but to go. I could charge my ticket on my credit card and if I didn't come back, somebody else would pay the bill. On Easter Sunday, I cabled a mission group at Da Nang accepting their invitation and asking for directions.

Tuesday morning, I picked up the paper. Da Nang had fallen. The nation was in chaos.

My cable had been too late. Within three weeks, it was all over. Since then, I've talked to several who were part of the group who issued the invitation.

All have tried to absolve me of guilt by saying their letter was sent too late. They, too, had put off asking. The prospect of changing their theology, requesting an experience they didn't even believe in.

The baptism in the Holy Spirit was a tough decision, even in the face of death. But eventually, they were forced to drop their traditions, cling to truth and ask God to give them the only thing Jesus gave His disciples, the gift of the Holy Spirit. That episode in my life drove me into a period of deep introspection.

Out of it came several positive things. One was a determination to define my purpose in life. I needed to know exactly why God had put me on earth.

Have you ever asked that? Recently? Seriously?

it's an interesting question I suspected my fear had come out of confusion of purpose rather than the mere desire for self-preservation but I would never know that until I had some kind of definition of purpose in good editorial fashion I decided to boil that purpose down to one sentence it was simple to impart the Holy Spirit to the generation in which I live. Having determined that, and I am not so cocky to believe purposes do not change, so I keep going back about every six months to see if the cloud has moved, I finally understood the motive behind those men mentioned in Revelation 12. They overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony.

They did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death. Once you know who you are and why you're here, there's no need to be afraid. And this sentence leapt off the page.

All God requires of us is faithfulness. That's all. Do you know that?

Karen and I were talking about this abortion issue which is before us as a parish in such a powerful way at the moment. It's before the nation. It's before the world.

And some folks are very angry that we're making such a big deal of this. Even those who agree with us are very angry about it. You know, we don't want to hear about that.

We want to hear about sweetness and light. Well, sorry, there's a lot of ugliness and sorrow out there. And some folks say, it's a hopeless cause, you know.

No matter what you do, it's a hopeless cause. The die has long since been cast. There is so much political and financial pressure to keep abortion on demand that it's a hopeless struggle.

Why get involved in it? As we were talking about it the other day, you know what we realized? That the pragmatist makes his mind up on the basis of probabilities of success.

Choose your cause on the basis of whether or not you're going to succeed. the Christian makes up his mind on the basis of what is God calling me to do no matter if I go down in flames all God requires of us is faithfulness and if the whole world says I'm wrong I'm going to stand on this one for what the scripture says all God requires of us is faithfulness I'll just complete the editorial Jamie said I determined back then not to make safety comfort or money a standard on which I made decisions for the Lord if God wanted me to go someplace no one else would go I would accept that decision has cost me dearly across the years it has also allowed me to be in the midst of some of the most exciting events since Pentecost some of you know the comment that C.S. Lewis made on a minor character in Shakespeare's King Lear.

In fact, he's so minor that he's not even given a name. He's simply called First Servant. And all the other characters are scheming and plotting.

They're terrific pragmatists. Each one of them has his goal in mind and he's going to get there somehow. And First Servant has no such plans.

But he sees an abomination taking place, the blinding of old Gloucester, and in an instant, his sword is drawn and pointed at the assailant's breast, and then he's stabbed from behind. And that's his whole part, eight lines. But, says Lewis, if it were real life and not a play, that's the part it would be best to have acted.

All God requires of us is faithfulness. What is God saying? to you.

Do it. No matter what. The third story is Jeremiah 1.

Verse 4. 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. And then I said, O Lord God, behold, I do not know how to speak, for I am only a youth. But the Lord said to me, Do not say, I am only a youth.

For to all to whom I send you, you shall go, and whatever I command you, you shall speak. Be not afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you, says the Lord. Then the Lord put forth His hand and touched my mouth, and the Lord said to me, Behold, I have put my words in your mouth.

See, I have set you this day over nations and over kingdoms to pluck up and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant. And the word of the Lord came to me saying, Jeremiah, what do you see? He saw a vision.

Perhaps he saw the literal reality. He said, I see a rod of almond. And the Lord said to me, you have seen well, for I am watching over my word to perform it.

Now you don't get that in English at all, but that's a play on words. Hebrew. Almond is shokheh.

And the word watching is shokheh. He's saying, you see the almond, let it remind you. I am watching over my word to perform it.

The Lord called me to speak to a dying man. And I was uncomfortable doing it. I'm just a kid.

What do I have to say to him. I don't know how to speak to the dying. I was afraid and I didn't go.

The Lord spoke to Jamie and said, go to Vietnam and maybe change the church, maybe change the nation. And Jamie said, how can I go to Vietnam? I'm afraid I might get killed.

And I didn't go. And the Lord spoke to Jeremiah and said, I'm appointing you to go in and pluck up and overthrow and destroy. That doesn't sound all that fun.

There will be planting and building afterward, but the first part is all negative. Jeremiah spent 40 years preaching his gospel, and as far as we know, there wasn't one single convert. Maybe his secretary.

Maybe. Maybe. He said, I'm afraid.

I don't know what to say and God said if I call you I'll enable you and I'll put my word in your mouth and all you've got to do is speak it and I am watching over my word to perform it and I believe that what God is saying to me tonight and I suspect what he's saying to you is do what I tell you to do don't try to calculate the odds of whether or not it's going to succeed do what I tell you to do and I am watching over my word to perform it the bottom line is that success in the Christian life is not a matter of our ability but our availability did you catch that? it's not what I can do I'm available Lord for you to do what you want to do through me. Let's bow our heads together.

The Lord has a purpose for you personally. If you're not available, His purpose is not going to be thwarted, but you're going to miss the blessing. He's had that purpose for you from before the time when you were conceived and formed in your mother's womb.

He has a purpose for you as you enter 1984. Paul's prayer recorded in Philippians is this. My eager desire and hope is that I may never feel ashamed, but that now as ever I may do honor to Christ in my own person by fearless courage.

Let's pray that together. My eager desire and hope are that I may never feel ashamed, but that now as ever I may do honor to Christ in my own person by fearless courage. Dear Lord Jesus Christ make us sensitive to hear you speak and give us boldness to be available and eager to obey to the glory of your name Amen