Cries of the Heart (Jeremiah 8:18-9:1)

“My joy is gone; grief is upon me; my heart is sick.”

The first verse of the passage we read this morning from the Book of Jeremiah reminds us that while the failures of Judah’s kings and the violence of Babylon’s invading army drives the book’s plotline, the prophet’s story is ultimately one of human loss and grief.

After all, Jeremiah was a spiritual leader to a people who were witnessing the destruction of everything they held dear.

Homes were destroyed, freedoms stolen, lives lost, and even though Jeremiah saw God at work in those events, he still gave voice to the hurt and pain he and his neighbors were experiencing.

O that my head were a spring of water

and my eyes a fountain of tears,

so that I might weep day and night

for the slain of the daughter of my people!

Sentiments like these are about as far removed from weak sauce optimism as one can imagine. This is, instead, a lament born of the love for, solidarity with, and the shared experience of a people in pain.

Jeremiah is one of the Bible’s most prolific authors of lament–he literally wrote the book on the subject, Lamentations–and lament is one of the Bible’s most prolific forms of prayer.

A lament is a prayer characterized by anger, grief, or sadness, that often includes questions of God, often stinging questions, questions like; “Why hasn’t the health of my people been restored?”, “How long will you hide your face from me, O Lord?”, “My God, why have you forsaken me?”

Above all, lament is honest. It’s prayer that doesn’t pull any punches, but lays it all out there for God to hear, usually as a variation on this theme–“I’ve heard it said and have come to believe that you are a loving and powerful God, but if that’s true, then why does what we’re going through hurt so much?”

Laments are cries of the heart and they are the backbone of our Faith. Without them, there’s no covenant, communion, or relationship with God, only fate and fatalism.

A community without lament, loses its sense of right and wrong and grows deaf to the call to “do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God.”

As Walter Brueggeman notes, “when lament…is censured, justice questions cannot be asked and eventually become invisible and illegitimate.” (p. 107)

Weak-willed and insecure tyrants only want to hear praise, but the Almighty God revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ invites real and honest catharsis.

“Pour out your hearts to God,” instructed the Psalmist because God welcomes our laments.

As common as prayers like these are in the Bible–as many as 65 of the 150 Psalms are laments–a lot of faithful people really are not good with the idea of giving honest expression to their struggles or with being around people who are. It makes them uncomfortable and elicits a misplaced or even idolatrous effort to fix everything.

I remember with gratitude the number of friends and family members who were just “there for me” when my wife Laura died, who didn’t try to say too much, who created a loving space where I could just do the work of grieving. That support meant everything to me.

Less meaningful were platitudes that, even if well-intentioned, came across to me as “Your grief is making me uncomfortable so please don’t do it anymore.”

“God just needed another angel.” I only remember hearing that one time and thinking to myself, “What kind of S.O.B. god would take my son’s mom just to add one more to an infinite multitude of angels?”

That, I would argue, is an example of the weak sauce optimism that Jeremiah wants us to avoid.

I read an essay by a woman named Krys Burnette this week about the death of her mother. Her words resonated with me, especially what she took away from a discussion with her mom’s pastor.

Krys explained how the pastor asked her and her brother if there would be any children at the funeral. “Since when are kids a deal breaker at funerals,” she wondered, but after talking to him about the way children grieve, Krys realized that rather than keeping them out, the pastor wanted the children in the family to attend.

His question was ultimately a question for self reflection — what are we protecting children from? Are we protecting them or are we, the adults, avoiding the difficult conversations about death? Are we the ones afraid to speak about our feelings, to show emotions, or become vulnerable in front of the children in our lives?

She continued,

The Bible and Christianity teaches us about the life and death of Jesus and that death, no matter how someone dies, is the most natural, and most certain part of life for all living things. Like anything in life, he said, the younger we learn these lessons, the further we can carry them through our journey in life. The more compassion we can have for each other, the more understanding we can have for each other as we grow.

Krys summarized this experience with the wit woven throughout her work.

Sure [the pastor] was talking about a child’s experience of death and mourning, but I mean, come on. Let’s copy/paste and put that right into our manual for “adulting” am I right?

Of course, she was right, and not just about “adulting” and grieving, but about a bedrock principle of Chirstian community.

“Weep with those who weep,” wrote Saint Paul, because when we silence the cries of hurting people, when we try so hard to protect those we love from life’s sorrows that we impede their ability to truly live and grow, when we allow propriety, or discomfort, or emotional fragility to short circuit the grieving process, we cause harm and fall short of the abundant relationships God’s grace makes possible.

I often repeat something my ethics professors in seminary once said, “Whenever I hear an old married couple say that they haven’t had an argument in years, it tells me that somebody gave up a long time ago.”

The same, I think, can be said about lament and prayer.

Whenever a Church makes no room for honest expressions of lament, or anger, or heartache, whenever a wounded soul is told “your grief is making me uncomfortable so please don’t do it anymore,” it’s evidence that that Church gave up on prayer a long time ago.

But if we’re willing to enter into lament’s crucible, if we’re willing to be honest about the brokenness within us and to bear witness to the brokenness we’ve observed, if we will “pour out our hearts” to God, then gracious mercy can flow through this covenant, this communion, this relationship between Creature and Creator.

“Where the cry is not voiced, heaven is not moved and history is not initiated,” wrote Brueggemann, but “where the cry is voiced, heaven may answer and earth may have a new chance.”(p. 111)

The promise of the Gospel is that, through Jesus, who wept with his friends Mary and Martha when their brother Lazarus died, God enters into and heals the human experience, all of it, even death.

There’s a reason we sing “Where, O death, is now thy sting?” on Easter Sunday.

You see, the breadth of that promise is greater than the notion that, as believers, you and I get to go to heaven when we die.

Rather, the promise of the Gospel anchors us in God’s steadfast and abiding presence and invites us to be our honest and authentic selves–to be a people who will lift our hearts in praise, who will bow our heads in prayer, who will open our hands in service, and who will bawl our eyes out in sorrow and anguish for this hurting world and its hurting people.

When we silence the cries of hurting people, when we try so hard to protect those we love from life’s sorrows that we impede their ability to truly live and grow, when we allow propriety, or discomfort, or emotional fragility to short circuit the grieving process, we cause harm and fall short of the abundant relationships God’s grace makes possible.

But when we confess our need to lament and choose to “pour out our hearts” to God, mercy may flow, heaven might move, and a new creation will be born within us.

Let it so be with us today.

Thanks be to God for this Good News. Amen.

Do the Work and Sing the Songs (Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15)

The prophet Jeremiah ministered during a season of war and rebellion that ended with the kingdom of Judah in ruins and many of its people in exile, so it’s not surprising that the Bible’s books that focus on Judah’s story have a lot to say about his timeline.

Here are some of the important highlights from that history.

King Josiah was the first of five kings to rule Judah during Jeremiah’s ministry, and the last good one. After a time of relative peace in the surrounding region, Josiah’s reign came to an end when Egypt’s army marched against his kingdom and he was killed.

The next king was Josiah’s second oldest son, a man Jehoahaz, who reigned for just a few months until Egypt carried him away and his older brother Judah’s ruler.

Egypt wanted Jeremiah’s third king, Jehoiakim, to be their stooge, but he was so bad he proved why it might’ve been a good idea to give his younger brother first dibs on the throne.

Jehoiakim was a horrible human being and a godless tyrant.

When Babylon superseded Egypt as the regional superpower, he switched his allegiance to them, but then tried to switch back again, and ended up dead for his troubles.

His son ruled for three months and then Babylon hauled him away and made Zedekiah Judah’s last king.

This is how Second Kings introduces him;

Zedekiah was twenty-one years old when he began to reign; he reigned for eleven years in Jerusalem…. He did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, just as Jehoiakim had done. Indeed, Jerusalem and Judah so angered the Lord that he expelled them from his presence.

Quite an endorsement, right? Zedekiah did such a poor job as king that God threw him and everyone that followed him out of the room.

Zedekiah was also Jeremiah’s nemesis, stooping so low as to order Jeremiah to only say nice things about him.

Can you imagine? What kind of thin-skinned leader would do something like that?

Jeremiah, of course, refused and ended up beaten and imprisoned more than once, telling the king, in one stinging rebuke, “You’re so bad at this that even if Babylon only sent their wounded soldiers into the fight, they’d still beat you, and God would help them do it.”

That’s the kind of leadership and politics that shaped Jeremiah’s ministry–a ministry often associated with things like judgement, weeping, and doom.

And then today, we encounter this strange evidence of the prophet’s hope.

With Babylon’s conquest of the land imminent, Jeremiah bought a piece of land in his hometown.

The biblical account of this transaction is incredibly detailed. “I”s were dotted, “T”s were crossed, witnesses were gathered, and all the proper paperwork was completed, in duplicate, the Bible tells us.

It all seems so absurd. With all Hell breaking loose all around him, Jeremiah not only bought a plot of land at ground zero, but he also made sure that everything about the purchase was done strictly by the book.

“Seriously, Jeremiah,” a friend must’ve asked him, “aren’t there more important things to worry about than getting this signed right now?”

But the prophet explained,

Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: Take these deeds, both this sealed deed of purchase and this open deed, and put them in an earthenware jar, in order that they may last for a long time. For thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land.

Defeated, the people of Judah were a mess. They were going through some things, and would continue to go through some things, but all wasn’t lost.

Buying the field was a way for Jeremiah to demonstrate his hope in the God whose steadfast love endures forever even as it adapts and evolves to reach, hold, and heal listless and wayward hearts.

Buying the field was Jeremiah’s declaration of faith that God would bring the people back to this place, but buying the field was also about Jeremiah’s hope and investment in his people. It was his way of saying that people and families who have lived through this would have a chance to lead good and peaceful lives again.

That’s why it was so important to him that he did his paperwork correctly.

After almost an entire career of watching God’s people lurch after empty alliances, and watching them forsake God and one another, and seeing them disrespect holy traditions and dishonor the poor, Jeremiah still believed that a hopeful future was possible, one in which the violent whims of kings no longer had the power to trump truth and where the honest ways of righteous people would bring order to their lives again.

After years of living under siege, of being under attack, of being tempted to believe that might-made-right and that invading armies possessed the only power that really mattered, Jeremiah imagined a scenario in which some future dispute might be peacefully settled by a bureaucrat or magistrate opening that sealed deed and declaring, “Whadda know? Jeremiah really does own that field. He bought it fair and square, so you can’t just take it from him–no matter how much money you have or how big a fuss you want to make”

That’s why the details of Jeremiah’s transaction are so important. They point to a time, beyond war and exile, when people commit themselves to, and blessed by, the ways that make for a peaceful society.

Like the prophet Isaiah who famously saw a future in which swords would be turned to plowshares and pruning hooks, Jeremiah saw a future where contracts and the testimony of witnesses were honored.

In other words, the prophetic hope was that a people who had only known and were still being shaped by violent surroundings would come to know, and embrace, and reap the benefits of real, and just, and transformational peace.

Take a look at the image on the cover of your bulletin. That’s Dreseden, Germany at the end of World War II, a city in ruin.

Now if that picture can be our stand in for Jeremiah’s Jerusalem for a moment, we can clearly see what an audacious thing it would be to preach hope in that setting and to say that those piles of rubble will be built into a thriving city again.

Jeremiah preached that message, but he also said that the people who lived through war and who had their lives impacted so deeply, would know what it’s like to live in peace again.

Buildings would be rebuilt, but so, too, would hearts and spirits.

And that’s still an important message for us, because we are a people and a nation that continues to be shaped by divisive and destructive forces that run counter to God’s desires for us.

We know violence and hate.

We know racism and arrogance.

We know self-righteousness and elitism.

We’re experienced with being sinned against and sinning, but God is calling us to reap the benefits of a life centered on and committed to sharing God’s mercy and love in all that we do.

God calls us to be the kind of people who care that Jeremiah had his paperwork in order because that’s a people who are willing to invest in each other’s wellbeing, trusting that God hasn’t given up on any of us.

Let me close with another example that I think illustrates the kind of hope for people that Jeremiah had.

This is a story told by Scott Alarik about Pete Seeger, the folk music legend and famed protest singer.

Seeger was invited to sing in Barcelona, Spain in 1971. Francisco Franco's fascist government, the last of the dictatorships that started World War II, was still in power but declining. A pro-democracy movement was gaining strength and to prove it, they invited America's best-known freedom singer to Spain. More than a hundred thousand people were in the stadium, where rock bands had played all day. But the crowd had come for Seeger. As Pete prepared to go on, government officials handed him a list of songs he was not allowed to sing. Pete studied it mournfully, saying it looked an awful lot like his set list. But they insisted: he must not sing any of these songs.

Pete took the government's list of banned songs and strolled on stage. He held up the paper and said, “I've been told that I'm not allowed to sing these songs.” He grinned at the crowd and said, “So I'll just play the chords; maybe you know the words. They didn't say anything about *you* singing them.”

He strummed his banjo to one song after another, and they all sang. A hundred thousand defiant freedom singers breaking the law with Pete Seeger, filling the stadium with words their government did not want them to hear, words they all knew and had sung together, in secret circles, for years.

Pete Seeger believed that even people who had known 35 years of fascist repression could sing freedom songs again.

Wounded hearts could be made whole again.

“Chords that were broken would vibrate once more.”

Buying a field was Jeremiah’s declaration of faith that God would bring Jeremiah’s people back home again to not only rebuild their houses, but their hearts, their minds, and their lives, too.

That’s why it was so important to Jeremiah to do his paperwork correctly.

It was his way of testifying that God had not given up on the people.

Jeremiah and Pete Seeger show us we shouldn’t give up on each other either.

May we, then, do the work and sing the songs that lead to peace.

Amen.

Too Great a Burden (Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28)

On Friday morning, at a news conference announcing an arrest in the murder of Charlie Kirk, Spencer Cox, the governor of Utah, made an impassioned plea for people across this country to take ownership of their actions at this time.

Cox said, “We can return violence with violence. We can return hate with hate, and that’s the problem with political violence — is it metastasizes. Because we can always point the finger at the other side. And at some point, we have to find an off-ramp, or it’s going to get much, much worse.”

“History will dictate if this is a turning point for our country,” Mr. Cox continued, “but every single one of us gets to choose right now if this is a turning point for us.”

The governor is, of course, right about this. Left to their own devices, cycles of violence rarely starve, but can rage for years, generations even, and breaking them requires people to say, “No, I’m not going to feed this monster anymore. I’m going to choose a better way.”

A quote from Martin Luther King Jr. shared at our Bible study Monday night is on point, “I have decided to stick with love,” King remarked, “[because] hate is too great a burden to bear.”

A lot of what we heard, and saw, and felt this week is evidence of hearts and minds that are shaking, at times even crumbling, under the weight of that burden.

What you and I must be about when we gather here in Christ’s name is helping each other to put that burden down and “to stick with love.”

In order to help us get started with that important work this morning, I want to share with you a passage from a devotional book written almost twenty years ago by Bishop Rueben Job.

The passage comes from the book’s opening section in which Job explains the problem that he intends to help his readers solve. This is where he makes his diagnosis, so to speak, before writing his prescription.

I’ve actually had this passage in my notes for some time and watching this week’s events unfold, I was struck by how timely the Bishop’s assessment of our predicament remains.

Job writes,

We live in such a fast-paced, frenzied, and complex world that it is easy to believe we are all trapped into being someone we do not wish to be and living a life we do not desire to live. We long for some way to cut through the complexities and turbulence of everyday life. We search for a way to overcome the divisiveness that separates, disparages, disrespects, diminishes, and leaves us wounded and incomplete. We know deep within that the path we are on is not healthy or morally right and that it cannot lead to a positive ending. We fear that there is no way out. (p 7-8)

I think it’s fair to say that the pace at which we are living has become faster, more frenzied, and more complex since these words were written, our divisions more profound, and we have all been diminished by the disrespect and disparagements we have hurled and by which we have been hit.

The path we are on isn’t good, and we have to find an off-ramp before it gets too late.

In another time and another place, the Prophet Jeremiah preached to a people who had come to that point.

We’re working our way through Jeremiah’s book this season so I covered a bit of the book’s background and context last week. You can watch that sermon online if you need a refresher, but it’s sufficient for our purposes today to say that after an era in which corruption, waywardness, and injustice dominated the hearts and lives of God’s people in Judah, Jeremiah ministered as the consequences of those actions became apparent.

Being a prophet in ancient Judah, Jeremiah described those consequences with characteristically dramatic flair,

[And the LORD said,] “At that time it will be said to this people and to Jerusalem: A hot wind comes from me out of the bare heights in the desert toward the daughter of my people, not to winnow or cleanse, a wind too strong for that. Now it is I who speak in judgment against them.

“For my people are foolish; they do not know me; they are stupid children; they have no understanding. They are skilled in doing evil but do not know how to do good.”

As we heard in this morning’s reading, Jeremiah goes on to describe a desolate scene in which the kingdom is stripped of all things good and life-affirming.

“I looked, and the fruitful land was a desert, and all its cities were laid in ruins before the Lord, before his fierce anger.”

When we’re learning to read the Bible, it’s vivid images of desolation like this that grab our attention. Hot winds, earthquakes, eclipses–these are some of the prophet’s pyrotechnics, but in the art of prophetic stagecraft, such things are always used to illuminate or point us back to the spiritual or moral point.

In this case, it’s not a hot wind that should make us sweat, it’s our capacity to so completely lose the plot that we end up working against our own best interests and doing that which we never wanted to do.

In Jeremiah’s words, we become “skilled in doing evil but do not know how to do good.”

Or as Saint Paul described a similar conundrum, “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”

Or as Martin Gore of Depeche Mode translated this abiding truth into a song lyric,

I was in the wrong place at the wrong time

For the wrong reason and the wrong rhyme.

On the wrong day of the wrong week

I used the wrong method with the wrong technique.

Seeing our personal struggles in oracles like these, we must admit that our best efforts at doing the right thing often miss the mark and that by what we have done and left undone we’ve helped to create an environment and propped up systems that are actually capable of working against God and God’s desire for Creation.

We’ve done wrong.

Clearly stated, we are sinners, yet confronted by sin’s consequences, we proclaim Jesus as the way to forgiveness, healing, and holiness.

Years ago I had the opportunity to meet with a church group that was visiting New York to attend a seminar on global hunger and related issues of mission and social justice. The seminar’s organizers invited me to speak to the group about the way in which our Methodist tradition informs and enlightens our approach to such matters, an opportunity I took to share something about John Wesley’s method for encouraging people to live holy lives.

You see, John Wesley, Methodism’s founder, isn’t one of the figures in history who argued that the Church was teaching the wrong things. No, Wesley, for the most part, was okay with what the Church had to say about Jesus, but he was terribly disappointed with the way Christians of his day were following him.

Listless, joyless, indifferent to their neighbors’ struggles, filled with vice and void of virtue—Welsey saw these in parishes and pews everywhere he went, working against God’s desires not only for Christians, but for all people–that we would be free, and whole, and loved, and loving.

We can think of Wesley, then, as something like a sign flashing along the roadside telling us, “Take this exit. Get off here. Go another way. Follow Jesus where he leads you. ”

I told that group how Wesley wanted Methodists to discover in Jesus a model for how to love, and to think, and then to love better. And I told them how, in order to facilitate that kind of spiritual growth and discipleship, Wesley gave us three simple rules to hold ever before our hearts and minds–Do No Harm, Do Good, and Stay in Love with God.

Three Simple Rules–that is, in fact, the title of Bishop Job’s book that I quoted earlier. Three rules to help us break destructive cycles, heal sick thought patterns, starve hungry monsters, and center us in God’s love and grace–Do No Harm, Do Good, Stay in Love with God.

This week it felt like finding a faithful way forward in our “fast-paced, frenzied, and complex” world became even more challenging. We have every reason to believe that some of the loudest voices in our country will only get louder as they continue to monetize rage, foment divisions, and diminish the suffering of those they label as “them,” or “the other side,” or “not like us.”

As Jeremiah said, we are “skilled in doing evil but do not know how to do good.”

With God’s help, however, we can learn and I pray that we will as we heed the wisdom of Scripture and our Faith in this moment and choose the better way.

We can starve the monsters that would destroy us and, by following Jesus, we can be agents of forgiveness, mercy, and reconciliation. In fact, we must center qualities like these as the hallmark of our witness and our life with God.

We must “stick with love, because hate is too great a burden to bear.”

Amen.

The Potter's Touch (Jeremiah 18:1-11)

Jesus often described living a life with God in ways that radically upended commonly accepted notions of what was fitting, right, and proper for good God-fearing people.

For example, he once left a learned man named Nicodemus scratching his head when he told him that “no one can see the kingdom of God without being born again.”

Likewise, in a passage passed on by Saint Luke that we’ve read today, Jesus spoke of hating one’s family as a basic ante for following in his steps, a teaching that must’ve made his own mother do a double take, not to mention the two pairs of brothers he counted among his twelve closest disciples.

And then there’s what probably sounded like the most ludicrous thing he ever said.

“Take up your cross and follow me.”

A cross? The ultimate symbol of the Roman Empire’s violence and oppression? A tool of state sponsored execution? This was Jesus’ invitation to would-be disciples?

When Saint Paul wrote that the cross was “foolishness to the Greeks” it was an incredible understatement.

Jesus repeatedly described discipleship in ways like this, ways that assumed great tension existed between his teachings and what his audience would’ve understood as common sense and practical wisdom.

And, of course, he was right.

While it’s important to acknowledge that Jesus did use hyperbole and exaggerated figures of speech in order to make his points, he obviously understood that God expected a higher level of righteous behavior and holiness of heart from his followers than that which came easily or without intention, formation, or revelation.

Remember how Jesus once told a parable about the dangers of putting new wine in old wineskins which was basically his way of telling the people that trying to fit him and what he had to say into a neat and tidy box of religious things just wouldn’t work.

In this way, Jesus stands as the fulfillment and source of the Bible’s prophetic witness, the crucible in which God’s Word and human experience intersect and react with one another.

Over the next several weeks we’re going to explore that same prophetic witness by taking a closer look at the ministry of one of ancient Judah’s greatest prophets, Jeremiah.

Jeremiah was a priest-turned-prophet who ministered among God’s people about 600 hundred years before Jesus was born during an era defined by the ferocious threat and ultimate defeat Judah faced at the hands of the Babylonian Empire.

Jeremiah and his neighbors witnessed the horrors of war and famine. They saw Jerusalem conquered, King Solomon’s magnificent temple destroyed, and thousands of their own forcibly deported.

A team of archeologists recently excavated a site from Jeremiah’s era that shines a light on the terror Judeans faced. Working within ancient Jerusalem’s city limits, the team found in the remains of a Judean house layers of ash, Babylonian arrowheads, and, quite tellingly, a piece of gold and silver jewelry.

The dig’s co-director, Shimon Gibson, noted, “the combination of an ashy layer full of artifacts, mixed with arrowheads, and a very special ornament indicates some kind of devastation and destruction. Nobody abandons golden jewelry and nobody has arrowheads in their [household trash].” Imagine for a moment the circumstances that could lead you to lose your most precious and valuable possessions in the pile of ashes and weapons that used to be your home, and you get a sense of what Jeremiah’s community went through.

This is the context and background for the scriptures we’ll read this season.

And we begin with a scene that brings us back to that same principle that Jesus so often articulated–the principle that faithful discipleship often requires us to reject, or to hold ourselves at a distance from, or to radically change our perspective about what once seemed like good advice and wise counsel.

We start in Jeremiah, chapter 18.

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.

God led Jeremiah to the potter’s house where the shaping and remolding of a vessel on the wheel held a promise of good news for Jeremiah. God’s people were still a work in progress. Change and transformation were still possible. The way things were was not the way things needed to stay.

However, the bad news for Jeremiah was that the way things were wasn’t good at all. Not only were the people up against it with the Babylonians, but, even more important to the prophet were the choices and behaviors that lined the path leading to the people’s present troubles.

Faithfulness to God’s covenant, keeping God’s law, honoring the poor, working for justice–these pillars of the Faith had fallen to the wayside long before Jerusalem’s defenses.

It seems as though the people had given their hearts over to all manner of beliefs and practices based only on their ability to generate profits and material gain.

As a consequence, what counted as wisdom to the people was, in fact, foolish.

Jeremiah explained this in chapter 8.

How can you say, ‘We are wise, and the law of the Lord is with us’, when, in fact, the false pen of the scribes has made it into a lie? The wise shall be put to shame, they shall be dismayed and taken; since they have rejected the word of the Lord, what wisdom is in them…because from the least to the greatest everyone is greedy for unjust gain”?

Like a spoiled vessel in the potter’s hand, the people needed to be shaped anew and reformed.

Now, therefore, [Jeremiah,] 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.

The thought of God “shaping evil” against anyone is a challenging concept, like so many things that Jesus said, but I think what’s translated “evil” here in English, brings to mind something like a broken relationship or perhaps even an intervention.

It’s as if God was telling the people, “You need to own the fact that you’ve caused some harm here and the time to make amends is now.”

Because, as God said, even though they had messed up terribly, the substance of their hearts was still malleable, able to be refashioned, like clay.

We can learn a lot from Jeremiah’s visit to the potter’s house.

You and I, the Church, and our country, like the people of Judah, are works in progress.

Some things have definitely gone wrong with us and we need to get them fixed even if that might feel a whole lot like starting over.

Like the prophet’s people, we, too, may look at the circumstances in which we find ourselves today and wonder, how did we get here? How are we going to get through this?

Are lockdown drills in our schools and masked federal agents on our streets really the best we can do?

Have we lost the ability to see any issue–from polio and measles to the legacy of January 6 and the ongoing killing of civilians in Gaza–through anything other than our own partisan looking glass lenses?

Are we not willing to acknowledge that while this nation and the Church in this nation was travelling down the path to where we are, we accepted as wise the foolishness that values profits over virtue, tribe over truth, and shortcuts and quick fixes over disciplined and often difficult work?

With cruelty in the ascendency and a threadbare social fabric, someone might say we need to be born again or that we need to take up our cross and follow Jesus.

As people of Faith, we must confess that God expects a higher level of righteous behavior and holiness of heart from us than that which comes easily or without intention, formation, or revelation.

When the whole world seemed to be spinning out of control, God took Jeremiah to the potter’s house.

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.

It was a bit of good news for Jeremiah and his neighbors, good news that God’s people were still a work in progress. Change and transformation were still possible. The way things were was not the way things needed to stay.

And that’s still good news for you and me today.

“Can I not do with you just as this potter has done?” says the Lord. “Just like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand,” so let’s open our hearts and our lives, our church and our world, to the potter’s touch.

Thanks be to God. Amen.