The Act of
Malleability
By Rev Steven R
Mitchell
Mountain View
United, Aurora, CO 9/8/2013
Based on Jeremiah
18:1-11
When
I was in my early twenties, I was a member of a downtown church whose pastor
was one of those ministers that I list as being mentored by. Through him, I learned the value of
networking within the secular community, I observed the value of bringing
healing where there was brokenness, and experienced a man who always seemed to
know what to say. He was one of two
pastors that I studied under who I would refer to as mystics. There was a running joke among the faculty at
the Seminary that I attended that, “Roger Fredrickson could have a religious
experience while just walking across a golf course”, followed by childish
chuckling. But it was true, this role
model for me was so open to listening for a message from God, that he could
have a religious experience while just walking across a golf course.
There
are many places and many ways in which God can and does choose to speak to
us. It can be on the golf course, it can
be in a concert hall, or on a walk along a mountain path, or while patiently
waiting for a bite on your fishing pole, or in the safe space of your own
backyard. For Jeremiah, his word from
God came in two stages. The first place
isn’t identified but it could have been at home, or in a field, even at the
temple. No matter where it was God told him to go to the potter’s house for
that is where he would receive the message that God had for him. So Jeremiah goes to the potter’s house and
watches how the potter is working with the clay and it is through his observing
the artistry of this potter that God comes to Jeremiah with a message for the
house of Israel.
The
unfortunate thing for “Prophets” is when God is giving them a message for the
people, it usually isn’t coming in the form of a pat on the back, but rather
usually as a wake-up call! Prophets have
never been very popular among the general population because the message is
usually telling people something they need to know but do not wish to hear. Ministers from time to time have to be
prophets as well, which makes us uneasy as we tend to preferred to be viewed as
the caregivers and not the needle in the side.
Even with the
message of gloom and doom that God is passing on to Jeremiah, there is also
hope given. This message that God has
given to Jeremiah isn’t for individuals as much as it is for the larger
community. As we read this beautiful
metaphor about how the potter works with the clay to shape it into the vessel
that the potter has planned for it, it is easy for us to think of the clay as
the individual. But by thinking this
way, we are not giving full value to this passage. Please do not miss understand me in this, the
message is to the individual in as much as we are the sum of the whole. So, it is through the individual that the
whole community makes the larger shape of the vessel, that object that is
designed to do the larger purpose.
The warning here
for Israel and to Judah, is that they are not following God’s ways. As a people, they are turning away from God,
building temples and giving honor to the gods of other nations. God is saying, as a people if you continue to
turn away from me and my purpose for you, I will abandon you to your own
follies. Ultimately, this was seen
through the captivity the Hebrews experienced by being carted off to
Babylon. The outcome of turning away
from God, for the Hebrew people meant that they were going to be forced out of
the promised homeland that God had given them.
This passage begs a
discussion on the old age question of God’s divine sovereignty and human
freedom. In other words, can we as
people have the power to change God’s mind?
On the one hand, if we believe that God has a plan set out for us, does
this not make us little more than puppets?
If on the other hand we understand that as Humans God has given us
freewill, then how much power does God truly possess? Rev Sally Brown, Associate Professor of
Preaching at Princeton Seminary, says: “Jeremiah
is addressing primarily the life of the called community. God means to shape the community of faith in
its collective social, religious, and political life to serve divine purpose.” God states that if the clay doesn’t cooperate
with the forming image of the potter’s hands, then the potter will crush it
back into a formless state and start over again and continue to work and rework
it, until the clay finally becomes what the potter has in mind for it to be.
The question
needing to be asked is this: Are we
being true to how God wishes to shape us as a community of faith? Are we,
as a collective body serving God’s divine purpose? And if the answer is “no”, then
what can we expect for our future as a community of faith? If the answer is “yes” then what are the
fruits that tell us we are conforming to God’s will? As a society that prides itself on being
independent, of being masters of our own ship, this is a message that we do not
like to take an honest look at. Yet if
we do not, we can see through this scripture how God handles his people of
faith, by crushing them until they are ready to be malleable enough to be
reshaped to where they are useful to God’s purpose.
Again, Rev Brown
says of this text, “The language implies
that this clay can actively resist the hand of the potter! In our common life, too, we can choose to
align ourselves with God’s redemptive purposes or pursue self-interested
agendas.” As your pastor I must ask
Mountain View, “What is our purpose?”
“Is it of God’s purpose, or are we pursuing our own self-interested
agendas?” The truth of the matter is, if
we are pursuing our self-interested agendas, then like the Hebrew people, we
will be driven out of the ministry we say we are providing. This is probably the most crucial question
that we need to be asking ourselves this morning, “of whose purpose are we pursuing?”
Yet God does not
leave words of warning without words of hope.
If we look to other events when God has promised gloom and doom we see
where God has had a change of mind. When
Nineveh was going to be destroyed by God, he sent Jonah to warn them to change
their ways. When they believed and
repented, God did not destroy them but let them live. Again, Abraham bargained with God to save
those who were righteous in Saddam and Gomorrah, allowing for Lot and his
family to live while the cities were destroyed.
As a community of
faith, when we realize that we are not being the vessels that God has in mind
for us, when we realize we are not doing the desire of God, we too can have a
change of mind and heart, and become malleable in the hands of God and become
that intended vessel. When this happens,
business as usual will cease and a new style of living will immerge. The definition of insanity is doing the same
thing over and over again and expecting different results.
The church in
America in general can point to a myriad of reasons as to why we have lost
members over the past half century and thereby have become ineffective, but are
those true reasons or are they excuses for not being malleable to God’s
will? We as a specific community of
faith are 40 years old this year. Have
we moved forward over that time span or have we become stagnated, living out our
community faith through our own self-agenda over that of what God is calling us
to be? We have the free will to say
“yes” to God’s mission for this church if we really wish to be clay in the
potter’s hand. The future of this
ministry is in our hands, what shall it be, our way or God’s way? God was speaking to the people of Judah and
Israel through Jeremiah and God is still speaking to us today with the same
words of concern and of promise! Those
who have ears hear! Amen
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