Jeremiah 18:1-11 (NLT)
A few years back I had a series of abdominal surgeries that kept me at home a good bit of the time. I had a desk set up in the sunroom and worked from there most of the week. As I recovered from the various procedures, my energy level wasn’t what it usually was, and I got off to a slow start in the mornings. I got into the habit of watching the Today Show before my shower. I really enjoyed the fourth hour with Hoda and Kathy Lee, or later on Hoda and Jenna. And my favorite segment that they often included was the Ambush Makeover. Someone would be chosen from the crowd outside on the Plaza, and that person would be brought in and given a complete makeover. The transformation was incredible! They often didn’t even look like the same people when it was all said and done. They got new hairstyles, clothes, shoes and makeup. Their friends or family members would come out on stage when the person was introduced, and the expressions on their faces showed just how incredible the difference in their appearance was. And the persons who underwent the total makeover weren’t allowed to see themselves in the mirror until they were onstage and on camera, and it was so much fun to see their surprise and satisfaction with the results.
The story in Jeremiah 18 is a story about a total makeover. Jeremiah was a prophet of God who lived during the time of the Babylonian conquest, which would eventually lead to the destruction of the Temple and the royal palace in Jerusalem, and the death or exile of thousands of people. Jeremiah is often called “the weeping prophet,” because he felt so much pain over the suffering of his people. He didn’t like the messages that God gave him to deliver to the people, because they were most often messages of judgment for the evil that the people had done and predictions of punishment that was coming their way.
One day God sent Jeremiah to the shop of a potter and told him to watch what the potter was doing. The potter had a pot on the wheel, but it was not turning out the way the potter wanted it to. Maybe it was uneven on one side, or the proportions were not what he had pictured. In any case, the potter decided to just start over, so he squashed pot into a lump of clay and began all over again. In this case, a simple tweak wasn’t going to do it; there was no correcting what had gone wrong. A total makeover was the only thing that was going to work.
I can relate to this image in my own life, and maybe you can too. There have been times when I was going along, doing my own thing, ignoring what God wanted me to be and do. I made a mistake, I chose poorly, I got distracted. And God had to get me back on track, and a simple adjustment wasn’t going to take care of the problem. So I had to get a total makeover, a complete transformation.
But this message in Jeremiah isn’t really about transforming individuals; it is about transforming an entire community. The message wasn’t addressed to a few people; it was addressed to all the people of God. The problem wasn’t so much an individual problem; it was a communal issue. And the makeover had to involve the entire community. Sally A. Brown, a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, writes that “God means to shape the community of faith in its collective social, religious, and political life to serve divine purposes.” The entire people of Israel had chosen the wrong path, and God had to mold them back into shape as a community. And to do that, he had to smash the clay back into a lump and reshape it. There was coming judgment, but it would be followed by a new creation.
I have been concerned for years about the condition of The United Methodist Church. We have been a divided denomination since 1972 over the issue of homosexuality. There have been words spoken that were filled with hate, mistrust, judgmentalism, exclusivism, stereotyping, and an unwillingness to even listen to what the people on the other side of the division had to say. The meetings of General Conference have been focused on this issue, whether or not it was even on the agenda. Lay people, pastors, and even bishops have been arrested for silent, peaceful protests outside arenas. Many people have been hurt by the horrible things that have been said about GLBTQ persons, and individuals, their parents, friends, and allies have chosen to leave The United Methodist Church to join other, more welcoming, denominations.
People have spoken for years – from the floor of the General Conference and in conversations outside the building – about the possibility of a denominational split. In 2016, the last year that General Conference was held, many people were hopeful that a plan would be adopted to allow for more differences in practice and theology across the denomination; but instead, the conservative delegates pushed through a plan that only made the statements in the Discipline even more exclusive and created a more formal method of punishing those who went outside the guidelines of the Discipline, whether a local pastor or a bishop. Many, if not most, of us expected the 2020 General Conference to end up with the denomination deciding to split in some fashion; but, of course, the General Conference was not held due to COVID, and the next one is now set for 2024. And so we wait.
Except that some have not waited. The conservatives established a new denomination called the Global Methodist Church, which retained the current statements in the Book of Discipline regarding sexuality. Churches in many parts of the country are choosing to disaffiliate from The United Methodist Church to join with this new denomination, or with no denomination. We are now more like the Untied Methodist Church. And more than a denomination is being torn apart. Churches, pastors, friends, families – they are also suffering because of this situation. I have colleagues in Ohio, Oklahoma, Virginia, Arkansas and North Carolina who have told me about the bitter debates going on in congregations about disaffiliation, the people who have been friends for years who no longer speak to one another because of this, and the uncertainty about what their Annual Conferences will look like by this time next year.
On one level, I am greatly grieved by the division of the denomination. After all, you would think church people – of all people – could figure out how to live together, even when there are disagreements. I believe strongly in the existence of one Church – an international body of all those who follow Jesus Christ. I have always loved the Preamble to the Constitution of The United Methodist Church, which states:
The church is a community of all true believers under the Lordship of Christ. It is the redeemed and redeeming fellowship in which the Word of God is preached by persons divinely called, and the sacraments are duly administered according to Christ’s own appointment. Under the discipline of the Holy Spirit the church seeks to provide for the maintenance of worship, the edification of believers, and the redemption of the world.
The church of Jesus Christ exists in and for the world, and its very dividedness is a hindrance to its mission in the world.
The prayers and intentions of The United Methodist Church … have been and are for obedience to the will of our Lord that his people be one, in humility for the present brokenness of the Church and in gratitude that opportunities for reunion have been given.
I don’t understand how any Methodist could claim to be following the Discipline of our church and still advocate for division. It is a shameful thing that we have gotten to this place, no matter which side of the issue you are on. We have failed to be a faithful church, we have not done what might have been done to preserve the unity of this body of Christ.
And yet, I also have hope for the future. It will be a relief to no longer have to fight the same fight at every session of General Conference. It will free us to spend that time in figuring out how to meet the needs of the world around us. Perhaps like the potter at the wheel, God is in the process of creating something new and good and transformational. As Sally Brown puts it, “God can raise out of the ruins of a [community] a new faithfulness and a new usefulness. Correction can lead to repentance expressed in action: practicing forgiveness, breaking silence about matters of justice, placing compassion ahead of self-interest. The divine potter hovers over us, shaping and reshaping us for our high calling as vessels of divine love and justice.”
While we must repent of all that led us to this place, we can also claim the grace of God in using us still, as a denomination, as a community of faith, with a new shape that is still emerging. John Debevoise, pastor of Palma Ceia Presbyterian Church in Tampa, Florida, says, “The opportunity to repent, to change, is an opportunity for faithfulness. It should be a source of pastoral comfort for the people that the changes into which God is calling them are a part of God’s intention and order, standing over and against the chaos and disorder of disaster. The New Testament promise is that ultimately God, the potter, will reshape us. It will look not like disaster but like resurrection.”
We gather at the table of Christ this morning, along with many Methodists around the country. We all worship the same God; we all serve the same Lord. While we may disagree vehemently about matters of theology or Biblical interpretation, we are still brothers and sisters in Christ. So let us claim the grace that is offered to us through the elements of Holy Communion and look to the future, not with panic or despair, but with hope of new creation.
