Formation

Scriptures:  Jeremiah 18:1-11     Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18

                     Philemon 1:1-21       Luke 14:25-33

In junior high school, I dreaded art class.  While I was great at reading and solid in math, somehow, my artistic skills stopped developing around age 3 or so.  I never got much beyond stick figures and lollipop trees -  you know, tree trunk that looked like a lollipop stick and a round green blob at the top representing leaves, that looked like a green lollipop.    And to this day, that’s about my level of artistic achievement.  I never wanted the teacher or other students to see my alleged artistic creations. The one brief segment I actually enjoyed – sort of - was on making pottery.  Maybe because I liked playing with Playdoh when I was very young.  I remember being handed a ball of clay, being told to roll it out flat and pound it with all my might so that any air bubbles were forced out – we were told that if there were any air bubbles in the clay, anything made from it might explode in the kiln.  The teacher really went on an on about pounding out the air bubbles.  So I duly used a rolling pin to flatten out the clay and pounded it to get rid of the air bubbles, formed a tiny little pot, and painted it some hideous color or other, and then over the weekend the teacher fired all our creations in the kiln.  By some miracle my little pot didn’t explode – I guess I got rid of all those dreaded air bubbles after all – and I had an ugly little pot for my mom to use as a planter or such.  And thus ended my career as a junior-high student potter.

In today’s Old Testament reading, led by the Spirit, Jeremiah goes to the potter’s house for a kind of art appreciation class.  Jeremiah notes his observation. The potter was working at his wheel, spinning the clay as the potter worked it.  At my junior high school, we just had stationary tables – two dozen or so pottery wheels weren’t in the budget, and would have taken up a huge amount of classroom and storage space if they had been.   As the clay spun on the wheel, the potter was dissatisfied with the form it had taken, so the man rebooted the process, smashing the clay back into a lump, pounding out those nefarious air bubbles, and then reworking it into something else.

And then Jeremiah had a thought….a horrible thought.   A flash of insight, bringing dread upon him.  “That’s what God intends to do with this messed-up country of mine, with this messed-up people of mine.  God intends to basically flatten the country and start over to create something new out of it. Yikes!”  Jeremiah went on to write, speaking for God, that depending on a country’s actions, God can relent and spare a country for which God had intended punishment, or can punish a country that God had previously blessed.  And then, speaking for God, Jeremiah wrote that God was a potter shaping evil against Israel – which Israel could avoid if it changed its ways.  Of course, we know from history that Israel didn’t divert from its self-destructive course.  And the image of a potter flattening out and reshaping a lump of clay is a vivid image to describe the exile to Babylon and the restoration that came decades later.

A few thoughts.  God is constantly in the process of forming and re-forming us, as individuals, as a congregation, as a nation.  Jeremiah’s words with respect of Israel are a helpful, if humbling, reminder that though our country has been greatly blessed in the past, God’s future plans could be more of the same, or could be very different….depending on our actions, our obedience or disobedience.   In the words of Proverbs 16:18, “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”  That’s true for individuals, and for nations as well. 

As individuals, in the words of the Psalm we read together earlier this morning, we are fearfully and wonderfully made.  And we are constantly being remade, re-shaped, re-formed throughout the course of our lives.   If the clay I pummeled back in junior high school were a living being, the process of being formed into a pot would have been very painful for the clay as I flattened it out with a rolling pin and pounded it to get rid of those sneaky air bubbles.  And while we are grateful for blessings, it is often the painful experiences in our lives that form or deform us, depending how we respond to them.  Someone who grew up poor, or experienced poverty in early adulthood, may respond by becoming greedy, wanting to hoard money so that they never experience hunger again.  Or they may respond with generosity, deciding that they didn’t like being hungry and don’t want anyone else to experience hunger.  Someone who has been bullied or excluded or threatened may respond by shutting down and becoming a bitter recluse, or may respond by drawing a wide circle of inclusion in their lives so that others don’t experience what they experienced.   Our painful experiences can make us bitter or can make us better, depending how we respond.  Or as Franciscan Fr Richard Rohr writes, “If our pain is not transformed, it will be transmitted.”   It’s tempting to rebel – Isaiah also contains images around pottery.  In Isaiah 45:9, we’re given the comical image of a lump of clay criticizing the potter, saying “what are you making” or “you have no hands”.  But we can also trust that God can bring good from our painful experiences.

Our New Testament readings show people in process of formation.  In our reading from Paul’s letter to Philemon, Paul asks Philemon, a wealthy slaveowner, to welcome back a runaway slave, Onesimus, as a brother in Christ.  In the society of the day, a slave was seen as a sort of living tool, to be used as the master saw fit, with no rights of his or her own.   Onesimus had run away from Philemon and been led to the Gospel of Christ by Paul.  Remember that Paul had written to the Galatians that “In Christ there is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female”.  Before Christ, Onesimus and Philemon were on the same level.  And Paul encouraged Philemon to see Christ in Onesimus, even to see Paul himself represented in Onesimus – that is to say, treat Onesimus as you’d treat Paul.  Of course, Paul was a man of his time, and we can criticize him for not demanding Philemon liberate his slaves.  Even so, Paul was asking Philemon to set aside his privilege as master in dealing with Onesimus, which must have felt to Philemon like an amputation. 

In our reading from Luke’s gospel, Jesus is calling on his listeners to let go of their attachments to anything that would hold them back from the reign of God.  Wealth, possessions, even beloved family ties – Jesus said all of these had to be let go.  The theme of letting go of wealth recurs in the book of Acts, which was Luke’s sequel to his gospel – remember that the early disciples sold all their possessions and shared the proceeds to support the poor.  To let go of wealth, comfort, family – all of this feels like a series of amputations.  But, like a master sculptor, Jesus is trying to remove anything from our lives that keeps Christ from being formed in us.

God is a potter forming us as a nation, as individuals – and as a congregation.  Especially in a tiny congregation like Emanuel Church, every new person who arrives, every new experience in the lives of our new or longtime members, everything that happens on Sunday morning or at other gatherings of the church, everything that happens in our community ministries, shapes us as a family of faith, forms us into the likeness of Christ.  We are a different congregation from what we were a month ago, a year ago, five years ago, fifty years ago. 

As we go forth, may we be open to the work of the Master Potter in our lives.  May we be open to being shaped and formed into Christ’s image, no matter what the cost.  And may we be used by God in the salvation of our neighbors. Amen.

Worthy

Scriptures:  Jeremiah 2:4-13    Psalm 81:1, 10-16

        Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16       Luke 14:1, 7-14

A funny meme was going around on Facebook a few years ago.  The words say, “Do I have a place in your home?  1 like = 1 prayer   1 share = 10 prayers”  It looks at first glance like a run of the mill inspirational message – except, if you look at the picture a second time, you realize, “Wait a minute, that’s not Jesus! That’s a picture of Charles Manson!”  Of course, it’s a satire, even though at the time Manson’s cult was at its height, Manson did resemble some artistic depictions of Jesus, especially if you don’t look too close.  Unfortunately his life resembled that of Jesus not at all.   But as I remembered this meme, I thought of those lost souls – about 100 in all, mostly young women - who gravitated to Manson and looked to him as a spiritual leader on the way to ushering in a new age.  These followers saw Manson as a manifestation of Jesus and lived with him in a hippie commune, lived according to Manson’s direction even as he led them into random sex, hallucinogenic drugs, and, for a few of them, into murder.    Many were runaways and had already left their parents and sisters and brothers behind, and were only too eager when Manson invited them into his “family”.  While its likely that many of their families of origin had been troubled, I’m sure at least some of their parents had to ask themselves, “What did we do wrong?  What on earth does our daughter see in this guy?  How could she turn her life over this loser?”

Indeed, perhaps one of the more difficult things to navigate in a family is when a member of the family makes a connection with someone who doesn’t share the family’s values, even if it’s someone less awful than Charles Manson.   Perhaps, if it’s a highly religious family, it’s someone who doesn’t share the family’s faith.  Or perhaps the son or daughter in a fairly conventional suburban family starts dating someone with a nose ring and multiple other piercings and tattoos, and the parents go “what have we done wrong?”  Or the son or daughter in a workaholic family starts dating someone who lives with their parents, has no job, and just wants to play video games.  It’s an awkward situation – you love your child and don’t want to hurt them, but you don’t want to see them get hurt by this new relationship.   And you surely don’t want to see the new person’s values rub off on them, because, at least from your viewpoint, you taught them better than that.

The pain can be even greater if it’s a spouse, and not a child, who strains or breaks relationship by pursuing others, especially if it’s clear that the other party doesn’t really care and is just using the person.  It doesn’t have to be an intimate relationship.  It could be that one partner in a marriage gets involved in a new circle of friends with very different values, or joins some highly demanding or even cultish religious group, that demands ever-increasing amounts of time and money and pulls that person away from their spouse, putting strain on a marriage.  And the spouse is left wondering, “What did I do wrong?  Why am I not enough for my spouse?  What did I do to deserve this?”

In our reading from Jeremiah, God sounds like a rejected parent or a neglected spouse to Israel.   The people have not completely walked away from God.  They’re still going through the motions of worship.  But their real devotion is to false gods.   That  may not show up in their religious worship.  Where it shows up is in their relationships with their neighbors.  They exploit rather than uplift.  They curse rather than bless.   And God feels like many of us would feel if our son or daughter started going out with some punk, and started picking up the punk’s bad habits.  Or if our spouse joined a religious cult, and all they talked about was the cult leader – “he did this, he said that, oh he’s so charismatic, he’s just amazing”,  as the spouse is saying to him or herself, “What am I, chopped liver?”

As he channels the Divine, Jeremiah’s language is devastating.  “What wrong did your ancestors find in me that they went far from me, and went after worthless things, and became worthless themselves.”   Ouch!  But we can all likely think of people we’ve known who were raised in a loving home by supportive parents, who left home and wasted their lives, who pissed away everything their parents gave them.  And Jeremiah is saying that this is how God feels – heartbroken, furious at his people, ready to punish, and yet not able to abandon them entirely.  Like a rejected parent or spouse, God reminds the people of all he had done for them in bringing them out of Egypt, through the wilderness, and into the promised land. 

Jeremiah goes on: “Look at the surrounding nations.  Has a nation ever changed its gods, even though they are no gods.  But my people have changed my glory for junk.  My people have committed two evils; they ditched me, the fountain of living water, and they dug out cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that can hold no water.  We might say that they put all their eggs in the wrong basket.

As I’d mentioned last week, Jeremiah’s prophetic ministry – which was decades long, since he was called as a young man – was an unsuccessful attempt to get his people to change their ways.  We should probably take a few moments to consider what it meant for Jeremiah to be a prophet.  Particularly  with regard to those texts that we see as pointing to Jesus, it is commonly believed that prophets foretold events thousands of years off.  But while we do indeed read and gather meaning from these prophetic texts in our time, their first and primary audience consisted of those listeners of the prophet’s time.  That is to say, Jeremiah’s primary intent wasn’t to foretell events thousands of years off, but to interpret the events of his day – primarily to say, “If you continue on your present course, here is where you will end up – and you won’t be happy there.”  For example, if I pick up the El at Frankford Terminal and take it in the direction of 69^th Street – the only direction it’s possible to go from Frankford Terminal - while I will pass other stops on the way, eventually I’m going to end up at 69^th Street.  If I expect to end up at Franklin Mills, I’ll be sorely disappointed.  The people of Jeremiah’s time, metaphorically speaking, were on a train hurtling at high speed off a cliff, though there were stops along the way.  Throughout his ministry, Jeremiah tried frantically to get his people to get off that train to destruction before it hurtled over the cliff – but without success.   While the religious and political leadership occasionally went through the motions of listening to Jeremiah’s predictions of doom, they treated Jeremiah’s words like the sad trombone representing the teachers’ or parents’ voice in the old Charlie Brown cartoons:  “Wah wah wah wah wah”  The religious and political leadership of Jeremiah’s time considered him a troublemaker – and this is the response of entrenched power to all true prophets, including Jesus and his earliest disciples.

At first listen, this may sound like a historical discussion, interesting enough on its own terms, but irrelevant.  And it’s true that we live thousands of years after Jeremiah  in a very different society from his.  And yet, part of the power of prophetic texts is that they tell truths that can be both timeless and timely.  That is to say, when any society behaves as the society of Jeremiah’s time did, it risks some version of the same consequences.   Remember last week I asked us to consider what response Jeremiah – or a modern-day counterpart – would get if he or she preached in Washington, DC, or Wall Street, or outside one of the many megachurches that exists primarily to bless the status quo. When country’s leaders behaves in ways that are arrogant and abusive, as the leaders of Jeremiah’s time did, it risks the consequences of how others  will respond.  When those leaders put their faith in false gods, in idols, those idols will inevitably fail to save them. As the saying goes, while history may not repeat itself, it rhymes.

The false gods and idols of Jeremiah’s time were literal carved figures representing imaginary deities that were said to control weather – sun, wind, and rain – and fertility.  Our false gods, our idols, do not take the form of carved figures, but just as those ancient carved figures, they promised protection from harm and control over outside forces.  And remember, anything, however neutral or apparently harmless, can be turned into an idol if we invest too much faith in it.  Often if there’s something we’re not allowed to question, that something may be an idol.  

In our country, guns fit the description of an idol, an idol demanding human sacrifice. Moloch was an ancient idol that demanded child sacrifice, and guns are the Moloch of our day.  There are as many guns as people here, with 101 guns owned for every 100 people.[1]  The two countries with the next highest rates of gun ownership are Serbia and Yemen, with slightly over 50 guns for every 100 persons.  Of course, many people don’t own even one gun, and some people have stockpiled countless guns.  Switzerland has a rate of slightly over 24 guns for every 100 people, and they also take gun ownership very seriously – but they take it seriously enough to insist on gun training, and Switzerland has nothing like our rate of mass shootings.  Indeed, virtually no other functioning country does.  When it comes to gun violence, America is in a class of our own – an unwanted example of American exceptionalism.  But while our country is very insistent on gun rights, we’re much quieter about gun responsibilities.  Rights without corresponding responsibilities are a recipe for chaos, and gun rights without corresponding gun responsibilities are a recipe for blood running in the streets.  Our Conference Minister, Rev Bill Worley – a lifelong gun owner and Marine chaplain who served in Iraq – proposed in his message in the August 13 2019 PSEC e-news a national policy that anyone who owns a gun must be part of the National Guard or Federal Armed Services, where appropriate background checks, training, and community service are requirements.  This comports with the original 2^nd amendment connection of gun ownership with participation in “the militia”.  I’m not holding my breath waiting for that policy to be enacted – neither is Rev Worley - but it could be an improvement over status quo. There are any number of actions that could be taken to remove guns from the position of a national idol.  One thing that is certain: as the saying goes, “One definition of insanity is to repeat the same actions and expect different results.”   That is to say, if no changes are made, no change will happen; we will continue to have high and escalating levels of gun violence.  The blood sacrifices to the idol of the gun will continue.  And if no change is made, our inevitable “thoughts and prayers” after each tragedy will accomplish exactly nothing. To quote Isaiah 1:15: 

“When you stretch out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you;
even though you make many prayers,  I will not listen; your hands are full of blood.”

Nationalism is an idol that has become increasingly prominent in our day.  And I want to make a distinction between patriotism and nationalism.  Patriotism is a devotion to one’s country and a willingness to defend one’s country that wants the best for one’s country while recognizing its faults and wanting one’s country to be the best it can be.  Patriotism is a good thing, a very good thing.  Nationalism, by contrast, says that only my country matters.  We see nationalism at work in recent changes to immigration policy, which would seek to wall outsiders out and deport those former outsiders who have previously gotten in.   Over and over, Old Testament and New, there is an ethic of welcoming the outsider:  Leviticus 19:34 and numerous other passages teach that “the alien among you shall be as the citizen among you”, while the New Testament letter to the Hebrews 13:2 – part of today’s readings - speaks of “entertaining angels unawares”.  There is also a recognition that every person without regard to race, religion, or national origin is created in God’s image and precious in God’s sight. St Paul put it this way:  In Christ there is no male or female, Jew or Greek, slave or free. (Galatians 3:28).  These distinctions just don’t matter in God’s sight.  We would do well to remember that Jesus had brown skin, in his early childhood was a refugee in Egypt, didn’t speak English, never pledged allegiance to the American flag, not once in his life…..and didn’t have a lot of time for Rome, the empire of his day.  While I know that the Jesus of the Gospels would be welcomed if he showed up on our doorstep – we’ve become a very welcoming congregation - I can’t help but wonder: if the Jesus of the Gospels showed up at some churches – brown-skinned, non-English speaking, non-citizen - would he be welcomed, or pelted with rocks?  Some churches would probably call ICE, and Jesus would end up locked in a cage or deported – as I believe Jesus is present with those in these situations.  It is the Jesus of the gospels who reminds us that God’s saving work extends beyond American borders, as his life and ministry witnessed that “God so loved the world.”

I could go on, but we’d all like to get home before lunchtime.  The Rev Dr Martin Luther King named racism, materialism, and militarism as giant triplets of evil to be overcome, and for many they function as idols – and like all idols, they will fail us.  Wealth as an idol has entailed horrific sacrifices, as the health and well-being of billions are sacrificed so that a few can profit, and the ability of our planet itself to sustain life is increasingly put at risk, all in the name of creating value for shareholders.  While we’re not going to destroy the planet itself, we may very well destroy the planet’s ability to support ourselves and most other forms of life, at best perhaps leaving only a small remnant, if we continue on our present course. 

Idols come in many forms, but have two things in common:  they promise the world, and they don’t deliver.  More specifically, they promise safety, comfort, protection, and instead leave us open to danger, pain, and attack.  Truly they are, in Jeremiah’s words, like cracked cisterns that cannot contain the hopes we place in them.   

Jeremiah accused his people of “going after worthless things, and becoming worthless themselves”.  Bowing before our culture’s idols leads us to be less than our best.  By contrast, Christ is worthy not only of our worship but of our discipleship, of our time, talent, and treasure.  As we not only worship but follow Jesus, we ourselves become more like Jesus.  While devotion to idols bring out the worst in us, leading us to become our worst selves, following Jesus helps us more fully live out the best within us, helps us reflect the very image of God within us.  May we so live as to be worthy of the name of Christian, bringing glory to God in our words and in our works.  Amen.

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[1] https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/countries-with-the-highest-rate-of-gun-ownership.html.  Article from 2018.  Wikipedia shows slightly different figures, with an even higher rate of US gun ownership: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_guns_per_capita_by_country