Potters, Prophecy, and Perspective
Scripture: Jeremiah 18:1–11 & Psalm 139:1–18
In today’s reading, Jeremiah is sent to the local potter’s house to see him work. Had Jeremiah lived 2600 years later, he could have simply put his copy of Ghost in the VCR to see some clay take shape, but they didn’t enjoy such amenities at that time. So he obediently went to the potter’s house and saw the craftsman at work. The first vessel didn’t work out, so the potter reworked it until it pleased him.
It turns out this field trip isn’t for fun, or a career exploration opportunity for Jeremiah in case his prophecy gig doesn’t work out. No, God is using this imagery to communicate with the people of Judah. Nations and kingdoms are like pottery in God’s hands. God builds and plants them, and God plucks them up. When it comes to Judah and Jerusalem, God is leaning toward the plucking option; thus, the message is for them — all of them — to turn from their evil ways.
It’s important to note the collective nature of God’s address. This wasn’t a threat to individuals caught up in the throes of sex, drugs, and rock and roll who were thus in danger of being squished; rather, God was pointing out that no powers and principalities were beyond God’s reach, and that Judah as a whole needed to change.
When I gained geopolitical consciousness, the USSR was often in the news and popular imagination. They fought a war in Afghanistan, and were in a never-ending arms race with the United States. Having watched the first Red Dawn movie at a formative age, I always had a contingency plan for repelling such an invasion in the back of my mind. The Cold War had been going on for decades, and to my young perspective it seemed it would continue in perpetuity. Sure, there were stories about the efforts of Lech Wałęsa of Poland and Pope John Paul II to loosen the grip of the Soviets, but they seemed a dim hope in the face of such power. It seemed the USSR would last forever . . . until I was in high school, when we saw the Berlin Wall dismantled.
Witnessing something so seemingly permanent disassembled in just a few weeks offered me an early dose of perspective, and those lessons have continued, whether through life experiences, education, or study of scripture. Jeremiah 18 certainly offers some perspective: To look at an entire nation of people as a moldable lump of clay gives an idea of the enormity of God and God’s timeline. I guess that’s not surprising, though, given that we’re talking about the one who created us from clay in the first place.
Four hundred years before Jeremiah, David was on the throne of the united kingdom of Israel. This could be considered the culmination of what God had promised Abraham, and the destination for the Israelites wandering in the desert . . . but it only lasted for a few dozen years. The kingdoms split around 922 and existed separately for about two hundred years. Then the Assyrians brutally destroyed the Northern Kingdom of Israel in 722, and the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem and the Southern Kingdom of Judah in 587. When you read books of prophecy like Jeremiah, you see most of their focus is on these events, which span only a few hundred years.
The writings of the prophets focus on a geographic area that is small when you take into account the entire globe, and they span a relatively short amount of time when you consider all of human history, but nonetheless they’re important to us. Those who lived in Israel and Judah are our spiritual ancestors, and so we return to these scriptures to learn about the relationship between God and humankind. We are also reminded that no nation or kingdom is permanent, even if it considers itself favored by God.
An exercise that offers me perspective is to consider that our own country has not yet existed as long as Israel or Judah, or for that matter as long as the Greek or Roman or Ottoman empires. Those who lived in the respective eras of those empires might have thought they would always be around, but as today’s scripture reminds us, no earthly nation or kingdom will last forever.
The same can even be said of the church. While “the church” very loosely defined as “the people of God” has been around for millennia, it has certainly changed form in that time. In fact, it’s undergoing a change in form as we speak!
Phyllis Tickle often writes about the Christian church, and she suggests that every 500 years or so the church has what she refers to as a “rummage sale.” If you look back 500 years ago, you find the Reformation. This was when the Protestant church came about, spurred by what reformers considered to be abuses in the Roman Catholic church. In its wake you found Lutherans and Presbyterians, and many other denominations followed.
Five hundred years prior to that, you had what is often referred to as the “Great Schism,” when the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches split. And 500 years before that, you had the beginning of the Dark Ages. Tickle points to the actions of Gregory the Great as the significant event in the church at that time. He created the monastic order, a structure that allowed the church to weather the wake of the fall of Rome.
And 500 years prior to that, you have the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and the founding of the church that bears his name.
So what now, 2000 years later? The Christian church is changing form again. It does not have the dominance it once did in the US, but it is the fastest-growing faith in the world. Many of the church buildings in our country are largely empty on Sunday mornings, but in what is often called the Global South, you’ll find many Jesus-followers.
What’s going on in our country? It seems the way churches have been churching for the past several decades is no longer resonating with most people. And the actions many faith leaders have taken to stand their ground has only driven more people away: forming unholy alliances with political parties, trying to mandate prayer in schools, persecuting LGBTQ individuals, countering “Black Lives Matter” with “All Lives Matter,” banning books, and the list goes on. It’s no wonder the church needs to revisit the potter’s hands.
Jeremiah offers some guidance on how to turn from our evil ways, and here I’ll offer what those instructions might mean in our place and time:
- Keep the sabbath — not by enforcing blue laws, but by pushing against cultural forces that tell us our primary purpose in life is to consume
- Don’t worship other gods — whether they come in the form of our stock portfolios, our possessions, our politics, a flag, or a face in the mirror
- Don’t victimize the innocent or unjustly amass wealth — recognize where our patterns of consumption cause harm, and seek justice for those who have been marginalized
- Trust the Lord — don’t let fear take precedence over continuing the work of Jesus in the world
When we collectively engage in behaviors that defy the common good, there are consequences. This is true for nations, it’s true for religious institutions, and — as we’re coming to find out — it’s true for species as well. Despite decades of data, scientific consensus, and increasingly severe weather, many of us have continued patterns of consumption that guarantee increased suffering for future generations. It’s increasingly possible we might even make the planet uninhabitable for humanity, at least as we experience it now.
While our individual behaviors play a role in this, it’s our collective behavior — systems and policies that favor fracking, petroleum dependence, beef consumption, and single-use plastics — that make this an existential crisis. Our focus on comfort, convenience, and consumption has led us to lose touch with our place in (and dependence on) God’s creation. As Katharine Preston writes, “we will not save what we do not love, and we cannot love what we do not know.” God created Earth billions of years ago, and humanity has existed for only a fraction of that time. While God cares about us to the extent that the hairs on our heads are numbered, we are not God’s only concern.
Time is vast, and as photos from the James Webb Telescope remind us, so is space. Just as nations are a blip on the timeline of earth, the beautiful blue marble we inhabit is a dot in an enormous universe. The big-ness of it all is beyond our comprehension, as is the God who created us. But it is that same God whose arms encircle it all, and who will ultimately reconcile all things.
That might be the most significant change that occurred for me in seminary: Some of the limits I had placed on God fell away, and my perspective expanded. Studying various theologies and Christian traditions, expanding my spiritual practices, and sitting with patients in crisis during my chaplaincy internship made God bigger; thankfully, it also helped me see more of the extent of God’s wisdom and how everything is intertwined. In the words of one of my favorite theologians, Douglas Ottati, “the destiny of humans cannot be abstracted from the vast nexus of interrelationships and interconnections. (Ottati, 231)
Speaking of wisdom, while books of prophecy like Jeremiah often address people collectively, the books of wisdom often focus on individual experiences. Such is the case with Psalm 139, which reminds us that God knows everything about us. God made us fearfully and wonderfully, knit us together in the wombs of our mothers, and will be with us until the end.
Yes, we face challenges, many of them large, but there’s comfort in knowing that the God who set the earth on its axis and gave us life didn’t stop there. God also provides a way to live, as described by the covenants, laws, wisdom, and prophets found in scripture, by the teachings and example of Jesus, and by the movements of the Holy Spirit. We may be tiny in the overall scheme of things, and the obstacles we face might seem enormous, but we also know that God often works through unlikely individuals to challenge those obstacles.
The apostle Peter comes to mind. He was a fisherman with anger management issues, but became the rock on which the church is built. The apostle Paul was a persecutor of Christians, and then went on to write many books of the New Testament. Julian of Norwich spent most of her life in isolation, and her writings were all but lost for centuries, but now they are inspiring new generations of Christians. Fannie Lou Hamer was the twentieth child in her family of sharecroppers, but went on to be an instrumental figure in the Civil Rights movement. Greta Thunberg is a teenager diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome and OCD, but is also a leader in the global environmental movement.
Some biblical scholars believe Jeremiah himself was illiterate, but he was faithful to his call, and his prophecies continue to challenge and inspire us centuries later.
What is your call, and what role do you play as part of your village, your nation, your faith community, and your world? Our earthly lives are fleeting, but how we live them has an impact on everyone and everything around us. We are part of a whole. And while we might not be able to wrap our own arms around the enormity of everything, we do know that we are all intertwined, and we have a God who can.
Thanks be to God.
Amen.
References
Anderson, T. Denise. “Like a Potter, God Can Reshape Us.” Sojourners Vol. 51, №9 (Sept/Oct 2022): 48–49.
Collins, John J. Introduction to the Hebrew Bible: Third Edition. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2018. Kindle edition.
Murphy, Kelly J. “Jeremiah,” in Fortress Commentary on the Bible: The Old Testament and Apocrypha, ed. Gale A. Yee, Hugh R. Page, Jr., Matthew J. M. Coomber. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014. Kindle edition.
Miller, Patrick D. “The Book of Jeremiah,” in New Interpreter’s Bible, Volume IV. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2015.
Ottati, Douglas F. A Theology for the Twenty-First Century. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2020.
Preston, Katharine M. “Earth’s self-care.” Christian Century Vol. 139, №17 (September 2022): 40–44.
Tickle, Phyllis. The Great Emergence. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Publishing Group, 2008.
