A true prophet must love the very ones they chastise
and reprimand.
Last Sunday, we began a new program year with the
voice of a prophet—the prophet Isaiah—calling God’s
people to repair, to restore, and to rebuild. His challenge
is rooted in the profound hope of a different future, if we
who claim faith can boldly and courageously build it.
Incidentally, I want to thank the member of the
congregation, quick-thinking and fast-acting, who
upgraded the sign on our street that I was concerned
about. We now have a new sign for our street: It’s time
to rebuild. [Rev. Henry holds up orange construction
sign with the words “It’s Time to Rebuild.”]
Jeremiah was a reluctant prophet. It’s a common story
in scripture. He was commanded to speak these painful
truths to people he loved. He resists. He protests.
Too young. Not enough experience. God, they will
never listen to me. Provided only the promise of God’s
unfailing presence, the young man ultimately yields. And
so, Jeremiah updates his LinkedIn profile—Prophet. He
begins to call his community to the radical, revolutionary
act of repentance. Repentance not just for individual
acts but for communal recalcitrance. Faith, he insists,
compels conversion. And not just once, but time and
time again. Faith compels conversion.
In this morning’s passage, God invites the prophet to
take a trip to the workshop of a local potter. Jeremiah
watches the sculptor working at the wheel, forming a
vessel out of clay. The first attempt fails, and so the artist
reworks it into another vessel. Jeremiah watches closely
and then listens attentively as God makes the analogy
explicit. God is the potter. God’s people are the clay. The
image is not new. Indeed, this is how it all began. In the
second chapter of Genesis, God sculpts and shapes a
lump of clay, forming humankind from the sediment of
the earth. God’s hands fashion us into being from the
ground. God’s breath gives us life animated by the Spirit.
This morning, as we begin a new sermon series on what
faith asks of us, we learn at the potter’s shed that God
did not shape us once for all time. The very clay of our
created being has not been fired. And so, faith asks us
to be malleable. We are called to be good mud.
Several of you have sent me a recent column in The
Atlantic written by David Brooks. The title of the piece
is “How America Got Mean,” and the observation at the
heart of it is this: “We live in a society that is terrible at
moral formation.” Now, whether or not you agree with
the particulars of Brooks’ description, I take it as noncontroversial that moral formation is part of what we’re
about in Christian community. After all, if we believed
that the shape of our character and the trajectory of our
lives were already formed and fixed, we’d have little use
for these gatherings every week. Here, we affirm that
God can and does still reshape us and the institutions
we’ve created. We and they can be re-formed…rebuilt.
I do not know why you came to church today. Perhaps
you are looking for a moment of peace in an anxious
time. You might be here because you are always here;
worship is a part of the rhythm of your life. Maybe you
are desperate for a word of hope. Perhaps on the verge
of an important decision. Maybe your heart is grieving
or filled with joy or anger. Maybe you’ve come seeking
forgiveness or the strength to forgive another. I don’t
know why you are here—maybe your mom made you
come. I don’t know. But I do have a hunch. It is this: that
all of us share the deep desire to be made new. For all
of us, there’s something we wish we could undo, some
word or action we want to retract. All of us want a fresh
start for ourselves and the troubled world we share.
And here’s the good news, what’s so encouraging about
Jeremiah in the potter’s house: The clay has not been
fired. Something new can be formed from this lump of
earth. New creation. A different world.
There’s this detail in this morning’s passage that is
fueling my sense of hope these days. The potter has no
need to change the substance with which he is working.
He does not toss the clay into the trash can and take
up painting instead. You see, the raw material is not the
issue. The problem is that which is good has become
misshapen and malformed, the flawed vessel has to be
collapsed in order for the potter to begin again. Same
clay, new creation.
Jeremiah loved the people he chastised and
reprimanded, loved them enough to call them to
collective conversion. Faith asks us to be good mud.
We are called to a kind of flexibility that allows God to
shape and reshape us. Here’s how I hear the charge at
the start of a new program year for our church: let’s not
be terrible at moral formation. Okay, we can aim higher
than that. Let’s commit ourselves to moral formation.
Fair warning: this will be particularly daunting in a
time defined by entrenched polarity and dogged
rigidity. There is very little in our lives that encourages
malleability. I’ve been reading about how the broad
trend of decline in church attendance is impacting
the health of our society. Research consistently
suggests that the evaporation of these communities
accelerates extremism. As the author of one survey
describes it, “Churches can be depolarizing institutions.
Because being part of a religious community forces
people to get along with others—including others
with different views—it channels efforts into work that
forms community and has little to do with division.”
That seems spot-on to me, which is why it concerns
me when churches acquiesce to the same kinds of
polarity that define broader culture or when worshipers
leave communities of faith because of difference and
diversity in the pews. Now here’s a little secret: there
is somebody in this room who disagrees with you on a
topic you both care about. Don’t look around. But it’s
true. And it is also a strength.
We desperately need to be shaped and formed by
places that challenge us, even places that make us
uncomfortable. That’s part of how moral formation
happens. I am convinced that apart from communities
like this, Christian faith is inevitably distorted and
disfigured by ideologies defined by human quests for
power and influence. When we are driven to warring
camps we foment fear, we cultivate contempt.
I had lunch this week with my friend Dennis Sasso,
longtime Senior Rabbi at our neighbor congregation
Beth-El Zedeck. He shared some thoughts on the
prophets with me, including this gem: one of the
essential characteristics of biblical prophets was
humility. So let me be clear because it’s an important
point in the age of artificial intelligence and assumptions
of humanity’s limitless potential.
The hope that Jeremiah finds in the potter’s house is not
hope in human ability. No, the clay cannot mold itself.
And neither are we self-made. In a recent piece on his
Substack, scholar and theologian David Bentley Hart
connects conjecture of AI’s ability to solve the world’s
problems or cause its total collapse to the character of
Narcissus in Greek mythology. You may recall the story
of Narcissus, who falls in love with his own reflection in
a pool of water and stares at it for the rest of his life. The
character provides the origin of the term narcissism, a
fixation on the self.
David Bentley Hart notes that the inclination to
narcissism pervades predictions on the promise of
artificial intelligence. I found his conclusion compelling.
He writes, “The danger is not that…our machines
might become [more] like us, but rather that we might
be progressively reduced to functions in a machine
we can no longer control…There was after all no
mental agency in the lovely shadow that so captivated
Narcissus, but it destroyed him all the same.”
Friends, we are not the Creator, no matter how creative
we may be. We are a part of this created world. Made
of mud. What faith asks of us is to be wise in choosing
what and who will shape us.
In his commencement address published under
the title This Is Water, David Foster Wallace wrote,
“In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no
such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not
worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we
get is what to worship.”
Friends at Second Church, listen. We do have a choice.
We are not self-made, but we can choose what will
shape us. We can bow down at the altar of power—it
will only fuel our fear. We can worship money and
things—they will never be enough. We can pray to the
idols of ideology, put our trust in trends, or find our
identity in enmity of our enemies—we will only find
emptiness and isolation. We can stare into the pools of
self-righteousness until we’ve sold our souls thinking
we’d bought our freedom.
Or we can worship the One who formed us. We can
place ourselves in the hands of grace. We can surrender
our power and yield to the Artist whose creative gifts
can bring beauty out of the mess we’ve made.
So, here’s the message from a prophet who loved the
people he reprimanded. We can still be molded into a
community carrying God’s truth in the world. In fact, the
Apostle Paul loved the image so much that he picked it
up. We hold treasure in earthen vessels.
It is not too late. We can be rebuilt. We can be
reformed. The clay has not yet been fired. The potter is
still at the wheel.
Clay pots carrying precious cargo. God’s intention from
the beginning. Amen.