Saturday, September 7, 2013

"God the Potter" - September 8, 2013

Jeremiah 18:1-11

One of the most vexatious questions anybody has ever asked me was, “Does God really control the weather?”

“Of course,” I want to say.  “Of course.  God is all-powerful.  Nothing is beyond God’s control.”  But I also know that Jesus himself pointed out what happens when human beings try to sort out the intricacies of God’s sovereignty.  If you want to give God credit for a beautiful fall day or a soft, spring shower I’m right there to say, “Amen.”  Can you really do that, though, without attributing tornadoes and hurricanes and drought just as directly?  Jesus warned that the Almighty

“makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.” [Matthew 5:45]
So when you get someone like Pat Robertson who is very quick to declare every natural disaster as God’s vengeance on the United States or (even worse) the Westboro Baptist crazies rejoicing in it, you have to ask whether it rings at all true with your own conscience, your own reading of the scriptures, and your own understanding of God as revealed in Jesus.

Having said that, a prophet like Jeremiah is still to be taken seriously as one who truly did speak for God, and Jeremiah did declare God’s hand visible not only in personal but also in national events. Hear again these words:

“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.” [Jeremiah 18:7-10]
Let me say this, though: there’s a real danger interpreting any passage in the Bible that talks in national terms.  In the Old Testament, the nation and the community of faith were the same thing.  Israel was the people of God.  But then came the exile and suddenly some of God’s people were living elsewhere.  Israel, in fact, was no longer a political reality.  The kingdom of Judah, around Jerusalem, hung on and continued to speak of itself in both political and religious terms without any break between the two.  Eventually, though, they were also overrun by their enemies.  Psalm 137 is the voice of someone who saw that terrible day and lived with its horrors and an aftermath of exile.

“By the rivers of Babylon— there we sat down
and there we wept when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there we hung up our harps.
For there our captors asked us for songs,
and our tormentors asked for mirth,
saying, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?
If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
let my right hand wither!
Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth,
if I do not remember you,
if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy.
Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites the day of
Jerusalem’s fall,
how they said, “Tear it down! Tear it down!
Down to its foundations!”
O daughter Babylon, you devastator!
Happy shall they be who pay you back what you
have done to us!
Happy shall they be who take your little ones and
dash them against the rock!”

Was that legacy of bitterness the hand of God?  I tremble to think of it that way.  Perhaps that is not God’s hand shaping the nation, but what happens when God’s guiding hand, the shaping hand of the potter, is withdrawn.  Perhaps that is what happens when the potter decides to begin again.

Jeremiah could speak of the nation and the people of God as one.  After his day, it could not be done.  The people continued but the nation was no more.  So when approaching a passage now that talks about God judging a nation or working through a nation, it isn’t right to equate the people of God with any particular country, but with the people of God within it, wherever they are, scattered among all the nations of the earth. 

That puts a great responsibility on us, because what Jeremiah saw when God sent him to observe the potter at his wheel was that

“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.” [Jeremiah 18:4]
Jeremiah didn’t live to see the new vessel that would be shaped when the potter returned his hand to the clay.  He did, however, advise the survivors how to begin again in their new circumstances.  It was not by looking forward to revenge.  Instead, he told them,

“seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” [Jeremiah 29:7]
That was a message that still speaks directly to us, the people of God living across the world. 

It means that we have a special role in the life of any nation where we find ourselves.  It is to speak, like Jeremiah, as those who recognize that there is a God who goes beyond the gods of the nations, whose interest is in the good of all people, who cannot be claimed by one language or culture.

            I saw something at Shady Maple a few weeks ago that disturbed me greatly.  It was a cross that was painted with stars and stripes.  The word “America” was written across the base, and an eagle was at the center with its wings spread out along the arms.  The eagle had taken the position that the figure of the suffering Christ would have on a crucifix.  This is a great nation, and has done great things in the world, and is worthy of great honor.  Uncle Sam, however, did not die for your sins, and the eagle is not the source of salvation.  A nation’s status begins to wobble and even to collapse precisely when the people of God within it fail to let the hand of God guide them, and when they allow any other hand to take its place. 

This nation is going through some ugly, ugly times right now and we are in deep disagreement with one another on many points.  Marriage, tax policy, gun control, education, abortion, the environment, how to prevent terrorism – all of those are being argued about and friendships of long standing are strained, or maintained only by avoiding whatever the sore subject is.  I have no doubt that somebody somewhere is preaching on this same text this morning, saying that because of some social policy or another the Lord is about to smash the United States into a formless lump of clay.  I have no doubt that at this moment someone is thundering,

“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.”  [Jeremiah 18:11]
For all I know, they may be right. I am no prophet.

            The thing is, and in this I find hope, both the conservatives and the liberals appeal to the issue, not of what is most useful or expedient, but what is right.  As long as that question is asked, then we are all seeking how we can best allow the hand of God to shape this or any other nation.  It may not be our role to give all the answers about the ways and means, but it is our role to keep that kind of goal in everyone’s thoughts. 

It takes the people of God to do that.  No one else will be bothered, because no matter where we are we alone have a loyalty to someone greater than any nation or culture.  We alone can point beyond self-interest to a savior of all, one who laid down his own life freely.  We alone are in a position to declare how

“the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”  [Matthew 20:28]
In that there is hope for any nation.  As long as self-interest is not the rule, as long as greed does not control the day, as long as there is consideration for the common good, things will work out.  It will take time, and it may get ugly, but as Theodore Parker observed, and as Martin Luther King, Jr. repeated, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”[1] 

            Call me a fool, if you wish, but I believe that God is no amateur, but a skilled artisan who understands the clay on the wheel and knows how to turn it around and around and around until it rises up the right way, all in God’s own time.

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