The Tenderness of God’s Judgement

Sermon

Although not a potter of anything remotely utilitarian, I know enough about clay to get Jeremiah’s experience. Clay is a valuable material, and that business of smashing a flawed vessel is not trashing what didn’t work in an act of judgment, which is how we often interpret this story. In fact, what the potter does is good news for the clay. It’s a new beginning, a fresh chance to start over, maybe with greater structural integrity or better proportions. Sometimes with clay, it’s easier to start over rather than to keep pushing a product that just isn’t working.

This is such an appropriate passage to start off the fall preaching series, “Making All Things New.” We even have this gorgeous liturgical art to draw our imaginations further into the possibilities of hope. That can feel like a desperate hope, given the circumstances of global and national events. A fresh start might be just the ticket now that we’ve learned how to adapt to the circumstances. But there are some “fresh starts” that we would rather not have to make. Our congregation is experiencing one of those unsought and bitter “new beginnings” as we received news this week that our beloved Margi Brown had been killed in a tragic accident. The loss of Margi—such an integral part of this congregation and the wider community—this loss is not an act of divine judgment. Every death is a grief, and Margi’s is a terrible one, not just for her husband, Don, and their daughters. The preaching task here is to find a word of grace in the midst of that loss, in the face of the realities of the world so filled with incomprehensible injustice, in this terrible stew of “What’s the point; why do we even try?”

Most of my adult life—long before I took up preaching—I have brought the griefs and angers and even joys of life and put them next to the Sunday lectionary readings. I know: geek. But this has been such a source of insight and intimacy with the Divine that I want to do that with us today. While I would prefer to burble on about clay and the creative process, our hearts are full of so many other things, and burbling just feels obscene. And the gloss of judgment we usually hear in this text only confuses the issue.

As 21st century people, we are generally confused about Biblical judgment. We think judgment means guilty or not-guilty, going to hell or going to heaven. And yes, God is judging Israel. But in the sense of making a “considered decision” or coming to a sensible conclusion. That’s judgment, at least in the dictionary sense. When the lectionary committee ends the passage with, “I am a potter shaping evil against you,” we think it’s about divine punishment, as in destruction. What they’ve left out of the selection is the rest of the prophecy, which states that Israel has been consciously making disastrous choices rather than embracing God’s plan for them. Any impending disaster is simply natural consequences of their bad choices. In Hebrew scripture, when God is finally driven to the end of the Divine rope, God gives Israel what they want. Israel feared for its national security, so it made treaties with its enemies instead of trusting God. Their “punishment” was relying more on those cobbled alliances that required their paying crippling tributes, paid for on the backs of what they now considered the “undeserving” poor. Because this had happened repeatedly in Israel’s history, a discerning Deity can only come to the sensible conclusion that it’s time to start over.

As with clay, this is about malleability. God’s mind can change. God has absolute freedom to act differently. Out of an abundance of tender love, the Creator begins the reshaping required. Israel will go into exile, but out of that experience, scriptures as we know it emerged, vitalized worship practices developed. Rather than hearing judgment as disaster, we need to hear judgment as a fresh start, a new beginning. And to get to the point of a new beginning, truth will need to be told so the vessel can be started over.

One of Walter Brueggemann’s notorious assertions is that the church has a three-part prophetic task. It is to tell the truth in a society that lives in illusion, to grieve in a society that practices denial, to express hope in a society that lives in despair. Truth instead of illusion, grief instead of denial, hope instead of despair. Truth, grief, hope. It is an illusion that power can be arbitrary and self-serving. Any Al-Anon group can tell you about the addict’s drive to create chaos, how it’s designed to hide that addiction, how the resulting codependency morphs into blame shifting and the insatiable need for more power. You can see how this construct is just as prevalent in institutions as it is in families. This is what Jeremiah is talking about; this is what Richard Rohr tells us. Chaos distracts us from injustice toward the poor, from the theological inconsistency that allows us to forget that justice toward the poor is the same as knowledge of God. How do we tell that truth, how do we reclaim our faith away from the lie that says “wealth makes right, power makes truth”? How do we name what David Brooks calls “amoral gangsterism”? It really IS a crisis of disconnection in this country, a lack of faith in institutions. So now what?

In the most recent Chimes, Pastor Gregg encourages us to “be intentional about hope.” He quotes Suzanne Collins: “Hope is the only thing stronger than fear.” Gregg is not encouraging a facile “count your blessings” type of hope. But what? I think, these days, it’s about a ferocious practice of choosing hope instead of despair—in the face of daily news, in the company of our grief at senseless tragedy. How do we choose hope?

In sharing the loss of Margi with my spiritual director this week, the words of the funeral liturgy and the 1987 Brief Statement of Faith came to me: “In life and in death, we belong to God.” Grief, like few other things, brings us face to face with vulnerability. And that is part of the potter’s lesson: vulnerability. To be vulnerable, to have our hearts broken open, is the precursor of compassion; it is the ferocious underpinning of hope. Vulnerability changes not only the way we view the world but also sets our course of action. After all, what we see in this table is God’s own vulnerability. As we break bread together, we remember the One who first broke the bread, because his body was about to be broken. This is the God who, when Israel sinned and rejected that God, this is the God who only loved them more. When we eat this bread today, we are affirming our prophetic task, we are validating our vulnerability. We are that Body broken for the world—truth-telling, grieving, hoping, even when it doesn’t make sense. Because in life and in death, we do belong to God. And that is enough.