"God Works"
September 9, 2007: 15th Sunday after Pentecost, Year C: Homecoming Sunday
The Rev. John MacIver Gage, senior minister
United Church on the Green, UCC: New Haven, CT
www.UnitedChurchontheGreen.org

Scripture:

Jeremiah 18:1-11

May God take these words and make from them a holy word for us today.

The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: "Come, go down to the potter's house, and there I will let you hear my words." So I went down to the potter's house, and there he was working at his wheel. The vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter's hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as seemed good to him. Then the word of the Lord came to me: Can I not do with you, O house of Israel, just as this potter has done? says the Lord. Just like the clay in the potter's hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel. At one moment I may declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, but if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will change my mind about the disaster that I intended to bring on it. And at another moment I may declare concerning a nation or a kingdom that I will build and plant it, but if it does evil in my sight, not listening to my voice, then I will change my mind about the good that I had intended to do to it. Now, therefore, say to the people of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem: Thus says the Lord: Look, I am a potter shaping evil against you and devising a plan against you. Turn now, all of you from your evil way, and amend your ways and your doings.

Friends, God is still speaking to the world. May we open our hearts to listen and respond. Amen.

Sermon:

It might be expected that on a homecoming Sunday such as this, when we're gathering as a community again after a summer spent hither thither and yon, a preacher might be expected to go slow, to tone things down a bit, and deliver an easy-going message to ease folks back into the pew. After all, it's true, we do tend to be a refugee congregation, a place where people who've been away from church for longer than just a summer season, or perhaps never really been in church much before, period, come to dip our toes back in the water, painfully aware that we have encountered sharks elsewhere. So, again, it might be expected that this morning's sermon might be delivered in a soothing, non-confrontational and non-controversial tone, as though to say, "Hey, it's okay. Come on in. The water's fine."

Instead, our first preacher this morning, the prophet Jeremiah in our reading, comes at us from another angle altogether. This is not a warm and fuzzy bit of scripture, meant to calm our frazzled nerves, but in fact a jarring wake-up call. Jeremiah describes a vision, an insight he had of God as a potter, working at the wheel, shaping a lump of clay into something beautiful, something useful. But when the vessel falters under the potter's hand, and its smooth sides suddenly wrench and twist beneath his fingers, reducing the whole to an unwieldy lump, God scrapes the mess off the wheel, gathers it up again, and starts over.

And in Eugene Peterson's often helpful paraphrase, The Message, the Lord doesn't mince words in explaining this meaning of this vision:

"Can't I do just as this potter does, O my people? Watch this potter. In the same way that this potter works his clay, I work on you. . . .At any moment I may decide to pull up a people or a country by the roots and get rid of them. But if they repent of their wicked lives, I will think twice and start over with them. At another time I might decide to plant a people or country, but if they don't cooperate and won't listen to me, I will think again and give up on the plans I had for them. So, tell all the people my Message: 'Danger! I'm shaping doom against you, laying plans against you. Turn back from your doomed way of life. Straighten out your lives.'"

Now, if you're like me, that sort of language sends a shiver down your spine, particularly standing as we do here in the shadow of another Katrina anniversary, and another September 11. We've heard that sort of talk before, haven't we? Out of the mouths of the Pat Robertsons, the Jerry Falwells, the Fred Phelpses, and too many other preachers, we've heard that these and other disastrous events were visited upon us by an angry God as punishment for our many sins, including—well, I'll let the Rev. Falwell's comments on the September 13, 2001 edition of Robertson's The 700 Club sum up that list:

I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say "you helped this happen."

Of course we all know that this kind of theology, in which sin and suffering are linked as direct cause and effect, isn't applied only to events in the public sphere. We've heard it from local pulpits and in private pastoral counseling sessions, perhaps cast in what are intended as kinder, gentler terms. "This bad thing that's happened to you—this lost job, this broken relationship, this illness—perhaps this is God's way of telling you that..."<fill in the blank with your lesson of choice>. We hear the same thing even from well-meaning friends in moments of crisis: "Don't worry. This is all part of God's plan."

It's as though God's preferred method of communicating is through suffering. And it seems many of us have internalized this understanding of how God works in the world until, on those bad days, we too imagine God as Gary Larson did in a favorite Far Side cartoon: as an old man with a white beard and long flowing robe, seated at the computer, his finger poised over the "smite" button, ready to drop a piano on our poor sinful heads at a moment's notice.

But at United Church we're are trying to build a very different kind of community, one grounded in grace and in the God of grace, whose love we see reflected in Jesus' tender concern for those whom the world labeled sinners, for the outcasts and the very least among us. So we reject the sort of simplistic carrot-and-stick, reward and punishment approach to divine activity exemplified by an easy reading of our passage from Jeremiah this morning: "Obey me, O my people, or I will pluck you up and tear you down and destroy you." We reject any God who employs the sort of negative reinforcement even the most ruthlessly pragmatic animal trainers dismiss as unhelpful to teach us, who are God's own children, and shape our world. We reject as hopelessly flawed, and his prophets as false, any God whose means of effecting change in the world do not jibe with God's own express end: a world redeemed, a world set free, a world of peace, justice, and compassion. God will not set fire to the world to save it—amen?

Amen. I believe this to be true with all my heart. And I believe it is a good first step toward creating the sort of Gospel community we intend to be—but a first step only, for we cannot build anything solid, anything that will last and live, on a foundation of rejection. We cannot become something new just by repeating over and over again what we are not. Sure, we may attract some initial interest from a general public on the lookout for the next novelty act—and, sadly, a church who rejects a fire-and-brimstone God is still a novelty on the Christian landscape today. For a while we may provide an oasis, a temporary sanctuary, for folks who are running scared and angry from that God and his followers. But we will not grow—really grow, inside—until we move past simply rejecting the pat, painful answers handed to us by someone else and take up the challenge of articulating a satisfying, faithful, real alternative. We already know what we don't believe. Now we have to work out for ourselves what we do.

So, do we believe God is at work in the world? And if so, how? This is not an idle question, some abstract bit of theological sophistry fit only for ivory towers. No, as we've seen, some answers lead to a lot of grief. So this is a vital question for us, here, now, today, if we want to move past those unhelpful and unhealthy understandings of God's activity toward something better. We don't have to arrive at an answer all at once, or even altogether. We don't have to produce some weighty edifice carved in stone, like some Alabama judge. But unless we spend some significant time wrestling with the question, pushing and prodding it, and letting it push and prod us, we run the risk of ending up with a God who is, in fact, not God at all, but just an abstract bit of theological sophistry, so removed from the real world and our real lives as to be utterly ineffectual, fit only to be trotted out for Hallmark holidays like some dusty centerpiece of a plaster Jesus. And there are churches—well-intentioned churches and good folks, even—who do just that, whose life of faith describes a bystander God, pleasant enough but not really willing to get involved. Going one step further, doubtless we all know people for whom God has become so diffuse, they've abandoned the idea altogether as irrelevant.

I hope we may be more. So again, I ask: Do we believe God is at work in the world? And if so, if not as some distant, impersonal watchmaker, if not as some pitiless police officer out to enforce the law without regard, or a game show host glibly handing out rewards and punishments, or even a heartbroken father weeping as he beats his child "for her own good," then how? Aye, there's the rub. I do not know, and to my way of thinking, that's an honest, faithful response. But I will tell you what I believe, which is another faithful response.

I believe God must be at work in the world, because God our Maker is not yet satisfied with who we have become as a creation. There have been some bright spots, to be sure, some moments here and there where we human beings have lived up to God's intentions for us—that we all should flourish in abundant life by loving God, one another, and ourselves in harmonious balance; indeed, there have been whole brave, beautiful, lyrical passages in our lives as individuals and communities to make God smile.

But by and large, folks, it seems we're just not done yet. Still a muddy mixture of sin and saintliness, we continue to act in ways, large and small, that undermine both our dignity and our humility as children of God. So, I agree with Jeremiah in this: I believe God is busy making and molding, forming and reforming us, in order to comfort the afflicted and challenge the comfortable and so bring the world around.

As to how, well, for that I look to the life and work of Jesus. That shouldn't be so surprising, really, since I call myself a Christian, that is, one who seeks to follow in the way of Christ, but then it's sort of shocking how many other Christians don't really seem to start with Jesus, but rather with the Church or the Bible. Sure, those are both important, but it's Jesus who centered his life so fully in God's call to love the world, to bring good news to the poor, proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free" (Luke 4:18), that we can say that when we look at Jesus in faith, we can see God. And this Jesus who was the face of the power behind the universe turned toward the world, didn't wield that power like a despot, even a benevolent one. Rather, in a move that seemed to stun the early church every bit as much as it astounds us still today, Jesus, "being in very nature God did not regard equality with God has something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant" (Philippians 2:6-8, NIV and NRSV) to accomplish God's purposes.

In other words, I believe that when we look to Jesus, we learn that God doesn't play the power-over card to impose justice, peace, and compassion on the world but rather works among us and with us to accomplish God's loving purpose. The insanity, the obscenity of Christianity, as its early critics saw it, was just this: The Maker is part of the Making. "Impossible," they said, "God isn't like that at all. Gods are high and holy, worthy of praise and glory! A true God would never deign to dirty the divine hands with such labor. Human beings are too sinful, too low. The divine honor would never allow it! You must be mistaken." Still sounds sort of familiar, doesn't it? And yet, bolstered by the witness of the Gospel, we persist in our foolish belief that God works with us in Jesus then and now, that God shares the costs and joys of this work, the laughter, the blood, sweat and tears, even the cross.

Which means that we matter, that what we do makes a difference in God's great plan. Jeremiah got that part right—along with a whole lot of other parts, really: our choices, our yeses and no's, care weight, and consequences, not just for us, but for the whole world. Which scares the heck out me, given just what I know about myself, about the countless ways I fall short of God's goals on a daily basis, much less all of you people!

But again, looking to the example of Jesus, we are reminded that we are created to be partners with God, not just peons, or puppets. Jesus called ordinary men and women—and not even very good men and women, at that, not the best of the best, the most capable and qualified, but cowards and liars and cheats and murderers, people just like us—to be partners with him in the precious work of the Gospel. And God help us, the Spirit does the same yet today, calling the problem to become part of the solution, calling us sinners to become part of our own salvation. As Saint Augustine marveled all those centuries ago, "Without God, we cannot. Without us, God will not."

Which must be incredibly painful for God, when you stop and think about it. I mean, to watch as we fumble our way through life, thrashing ourselves to bits; lashing out, willfully or ignorantly, causing one another to stumble; lurching forward, only to be distracted by this or that shiny object that God knows won't satisfy us ultimately and then falling back again—as anyone who's ever had a hand in raising a child knows, that's just got to break God's heart. And how incredibly frustrating! To watch us constantly twist and turn at right angles to God's ways of love, of life, distorting the pattern of grace God intends for us and all creation. To watch Jesus, God's own beloved, be misunderstood, mistreated, bullied, betrayed, tried falsely, tortured, and nailed to the cross for the crime of suggesting there might be a better way. To watch all God's children, on all their crosses. All God's children, their bloody hammers in their hands...

Of course, it's painful and frustrating for us, too, since it's our lives we're talking about, our bodies and our souls, our relationships. I can understand why so many people turn to cleaner, more clear-cut theologies and churches for comfort. When your life feels like it's in free-fall, all wild and chaotic, a little bit of order can sound awfully appealing, even if you have to sacrifice a piece of a larger, messier truth—like your freedom, or your dignity, or your neighbor—to purchase it. It may be easier to endure the vagaries of frail human life and the negative consequences of your own sinful actions and the actions of others if you believe there's an intelligence directing it all. I mean, at least that way we'll have hope, right?—well, some of us, at any rate. At least the trains will run on time.

But we don't have to claw and bite our way into the winners' circle, or cut off unpopular parts of our selves or our families or friends to achieve a half-measure of hope in this life. The good news is that even as our Lord does not lord it over us, neither does God stand idly by, crying great big tears and wringing his hands as the world goes to hell in a handbasket. God is not just love, but love in action. While it's true that God works with us toward redemption, it's also true that God being God works in spite of us, too—thank God! I believe God is constantly at work "behind the scenes," tending to the tattered fabric of our lives, picking up the frayed ends of all our choices, both our best efforts and our worst mistake, and weaving back into the body, with a beauty and grace that belie the whole inelegant process.

For me, the resurrection of Jesus is the sign and seal of God's power to make a way where there is a way. It's what leads me to confess along with the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.—himself, certainly no stranger to pain and frustration in the pursuit of a larger truth—that though the arc of the moral universe may be long, it does bend toward justice, justice and peace and love (Southern Christian Leadership Conference Presidential Address, 1967). Ultimately, and in a million little beautiful moments along the way, God will out.

So, are you in? Do you believe, or even at this point do you just want to believe, that, imperfect as you are—in fact no matter who you are, no matter where you are on life's journey—you are invited and welcome here in God's house and in God's company? Do you believe that God calls you to work for the goal of God's kingdom not because you must—because some angry God might at any moment cut your slender thread and cast you into perdition—but because you may, because as a child of God, you are beloved and you are free to choose? Do you believe you are called to put your heart and strength and mind into ministries of comfort and challenge, to use your best judgment to say yes to the things that lead to life and no to the ways of death, and do you trust that God's grace will cover you when inevitably you fall down and fall short? Do you believe that as followers of Christ, we are called not to wall ourselves away from the world and wait for the rapture, but to work alongside our sisters and brothers, no matter who they are, no matter where they are on life's journey, for the common good of all, because, simply, that's what Jesus would do?

Friends, are you in? Are you up for this wild ride? Because at United Church, we believe that not only is God still speaking, God is working like hell to make this world the heaven God intends. And God will. Amen and amen.