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Psalm 139 and Jeremiah 18:1-12

 

Just like the clay in the potter’s hands so are you in my hands O house of Israel.

Clay is a malleable substance – something that can be formed and transformed in a literal hands-on relationship between the potter and the clay.

Just like the clay in the potter’s hands so are you in my hands O house of Israel.

Do you think that the house of Israel was comforted by this thought?  Or was this a fearsome thing to hear?

How did you hear it when Laura read it to you?

I have heard it said that it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.  (Heb. 10:31) Just like this clay, one might end up entirely re-formed into something beautiful …. ?  What do we hear in this passage, and in keeping with our summer theme
“Holy headlines:  News and Good news,” how does it interact with the world’s news that reaches us through sound, video clips, twitters, status updates and newspapers?

I really liked Richard’s image from last week.  He suggested that encountering the Bible is like savoring fine wine or cognac and a steady diet of news – well that’s more like drinking beer.
Between the savoring of scripture and swilling about a dozen articles of news – I hope we don’t need to begin to worry about intoxication. 

Be that as it may.
I savored a couple of passages this week: this one from Jeremiah and also Psalm 139, both of which have been read for us.  Also many of our hymns this morning have been based on Psalm 139 – a favourite confessional and devotional Psalm.   But I’ll come back to the Psalm later in my sermon.
Beginning with Jeremiah, the image of potter and clay in Jeremiah is a powerful one.  The Word of God comes to Jeremiah, as it has a habit of doing, and tells him to go down to the potter’s house and there he will hear the words of YHWH.  Jeremiah hears God in multiple ways:
through these direct instructions from God,
his own compliance with those instructions,
his experience/encounter at the Potter’s house
and then God’s explanation of what this experience meant. 
       The image itself is not so fear filled or terrible; it’s the explanation that becomes difficult.
The potter is forming a pot on the potter’s wheel and it becomes spoiled and so the potter begins again and reworks it into another vessel as seemed good.
The explanation goes as follows:
If the House of Israel turns away from evil and listens to the voice of God then God will “build up and plant”, an echo of an earlier verse in chapter 1 in Jeremiah.  God has the power to do this.  But God also has the power to destroy and to overthrow, also an echo from chapter 1 in Jeremiah and will do so if the House of Israel does not turn away from evil and refuses to listen to God’s voice.  There is a glimmer of hope in this passage. The actions of the people will have the effect of changing God’s mind one way or another.    
      “Jeremiah,” God says, “tell the people of Judah and Jerusalem what I’ve told you and what you’ve seen here at the Potter’s house.”

The passage for this morning stops at verse 11. Verse 12 includes the chosen response of the people.

But they say, ‘It is no use! We will follow our own plans, and each of us will act according to the stubbornness of our own corrupted hearts.
It’s a hard passage. (and we want to say,  “nooooooo, don’t do it,”)

And the people of Judah and Jerusalem remain stubborn, following their own plans and the Babylonians come and lay siege to the city of Jerusalem and many people die and those who survive are carried off as refugees and exiles to Babylon.

The world’s news reveals that we live in a different time.  If I were going to try to allegorize the passage – I don’t know who the Babylonians might be in our day and I haven’t spent much time trying to figure that out.  So I wondered instead who are the prophets and where and how do we hear the Word or words of YHWH.  What exactly are we supposed to be listening to and are we being stubborn – refusing to listen or refusing to change?  And finally, how are we like clay in God’s hands, because our corporate and personal redemption may depend on how we answer this last question.

First prophets and words of God – who are they, where are they and how do we hear them?  Ultimately we can only answer these questions together as a community. Here is my contribution to the discussion.  I have long wondered if folks like Wendell Berry and Mary Jo Leddy are prophets.  Each of them are rooted and grounded in the Christian tradition and their voices come through the deluge of information and buzz words about economy and growth as clear and lonely and haunting as a Loon on a summer lake when they talk about the importance of local economies rather than global economies, the economy of radical gratitude and grace, rather than an economy of scarcity, and the importance of life in community.  I can’t get into their ideas this morning at length, but it is the clarity of their voices that helped me to hear a “new for me” voice this week – Bill Mckibben who writes about and speaks into the condition of our warming climate.
He writes in an online Christian journal this week:

 
What a summer we’ve witnessed, a summer like no other in human history. The researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration confirmed in July that we had just come through the hottest six months, the hottest year, and the hottest decade on record. ….In late May, in Pakistan, a new all-time record for
all of Asia was set, when the mercury reached 129 degrees Farenheit. [that’s 53 degrees Celsius]…..

       * In Greenland a chunk of ice four times the size of Manhattan broke off a northern glacier and floated out into the ocean.

•    In Russia a heatwave of epic proportions tested human endurance and contributed to countless fires that left a hazy smoke over Moscow.

       * And most devastatingly, in Pakistan, in China, and in the Himalayas, record rainfalls produced devastation. Scientists had been warning that flooding was on the increase — warmer air holds more water vapor than cold, so the chances of deluge are higher than they used to be. ….The mammoth rainfalls put 20 million people on the move in Pakistan;…, a humanitarian crisis bigger, according to the experts, than the tsunami and the Haitian earthquake combined.
  
He goes on to say:       
 
This trouble is no mystery. It stems from our unwillingness to live according to the dictates of Creation — to use the language of Deuteronomy, it stems from our unwillingness to “walk in the ways of the Lord, to keep his commands, decrees, and laws” (Deuteronomy 30:15)
By this, Mckibben means that God created a world with certain features namely that the burning of fossil fuels creates carbon dioxide and the molecular structure of carbon dioxide traps heat in the earth’s atmosphere. We are currently at 390 ppm when a safe level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is about 350 ppm.  So for this and possibly other reasons our planet is warming.  Our seeming inability to change from a carbon emitting/powered society is evidence that rather than worshipping the God of Creation we are bowing down to other gods, and the strongest one to which we have bowed, Bill Mckibben names as “the Economy.”
He may be quoting Deuteronomy, but I was hearing echoes of Jeremiah in his words. And I was most dismayed by the following words:
Maybe the saddest part of this story, [he says], is that carbon dioxide, in this creation, mixes completely in the global atmosphere. That is, even though people in Pakistan use very little fossil fuel, their atmosphere is the same as in [North] America, where people are the world champions of carbon production. And because Pakistanis are living closer to the edge, they suffer faster than [North] Americans. Instead of loving our neighbors, we’re drowning them.
Lord have mercy.
Is he right, is he not right, might he be right? – Is he a prophet in our midst?  These are difficult questions to answer.  And I’m not a fan of anything that creates manipulative guilt or fear – that would be unhealthy and ungodly.  But I do want to be brave enough to hear the truth. A prophet often names difficult truth and is often unpopular for it. As a community together I hope that we can prayerfully discern the truth about our warming planet and how the voice of God in our midst might be calling us as a community here at TUMC to respond.
And my prayer is that we are actually stubborn enough as followers of Jesus to say that we will have the God of all of creation for our God and not the god called “Economy.”  And that we will strive with all of our being communally and individually to listen for a word from that God.
      “If these people will listen to my voice and amend their ways, I will build them up and plant and not tear down and destroy” – is the basic message in Jeremiah.  That kind of wholehearted listening that leads to a wholehearted response in amended deeds can happen in so many ways. One of my favourite authors wrote the following reflection just this week.

     So we need to go to our prayer chair for at least twenty minutes at the beginning and end of every day. We need to walk among the trees and along the sea. We need to listen to music that stirs the soul and sing songs that touch the heart.
Only then can we be thoughtful people of measured speech and positive deeds.
 I hope that at some time during your summer you have had a chance to do as this author suggests.  I know how important a solo canoe trip on the York river in Northern Ontario was for me a couple of weeks ago.   During that completely non-verbal experience, I heard God and God’s presence more clearly than I had in a while.  I pray that experiences like those help me to be a more thoughtful person of “measured speech and positive deeds.”

Another way to hear the voice of the Creator and by doing so to amend those things in our lives and in our world that need to be amended is to be aware of our true identity within creation and before the Creator.

      The God of all creation formed earthlings from the very clay of the earth. The Hebrew word for what God created from the dust of the ground is adam (meaning person) from the adamah (earth). In this way the Hebrew Bible attests to the way in which we have always been and always will be intimately and intricately connected with all of creation.  A certain kind of
      dust plus water equals clay
and that’s what God used when God was intricately weaving our frames in the depths of the earth (intentionally hear echoes of Psalm 139).  This God knows us so intimately that there is nowhere in all of creation this side and the far side of death that we can be where God is not.  And even if we lose our tempers, hating with a perfect hatred those who hate God, we will still be allowed to pray with the Psalmist
     Examine me, O God and know my heart;
     Test me  and know my thoughts –
     See if there is misdeed within me,
     And guide me in the way that is eternal.
And back to Jeremiah:
Just like the clay in the potter’s hands so are you in my hands O house of Israel.

Please note the second person address in this passage is to the whole community.

Clay is a malleable substance – something that can be formed and transformed in a literal hands-on relationship between the potter and the clay.

And clay can have distinctive characteristics that make it easier or not to throw and then form and transform on a potter’s wheel.  I’m not a potter, so I had to look this up, but key characteristics of clay bodies for pottery are plasticity, strength and water solubility. 
Plasticity of clay as you might guess is about flexibility.  Clay must have a certain amount of plasticity or flexibility in order to be workable on a potter’s wheel, but too much and it won’t hold its shape.
The Strength of clay is made up of coarse particles within it – the clay can’t be made up entirely of fine sand or the thin walls of pots on the potter’s wheel won’t stand.  Coarse particles are helpful. (So maybe it’s okay to be a little rough around the edges?)
And water solubility is important because this helps the potter to shape the clay, but the longer the clay is on the wheel the more water it will absorb – not good.  Too much water will make the vessel weak or more likely to explode later in the kiln.

And finally (and I really like this one) age adds workability to a clay body.

There are things we can do as a community and as individuals to be workable clay on the potter’s wheel – flexibility, a little coarseness here and there, a balanced amount of time in God’s intimate life shaping presence and finally aging, all of these things enhance our workability before God.  It’s all-good and God is in the business of redeeming all that God has made.

Speaking of redemption.