Paul Walker Christ Episcopal Church 9/8/13 Jeremiah 18:1-11 “God’s Yes To Your If”
In a recent conversation, a friend voiced a common struggle, one that I experience all the time. He said, “I know that it’s better to trust God and not try to control things, but how do you do it? How do you just get out of the way and leave things to God?” The conversation happened to be on the golf course, and I was preoccupied with trying to correct my slice off the tee, so I mumbled something obscure about God’s sovereignty and then hit my drive into the woods.
While I was worrying about a double bogey, God answered my friend directly, at least it seemed like a direct answer, or at least metaphor, to us. His drive was a towering shot that veered at the last moment toward the bushes. After searching unsuccessfully for a few minutes for his ball in the bushes, he gave up and hit another ball. But as he was walking back toward the fairway, he nearly tripped on something unseen wedged into the grass. You guessed it – it was his ball.
What were the chances that he would actually step on his golf ball – be forced to discover it without looking at all? And as an exclamation point to this little acted parable, it was the one ball that had his initials on it. It was as if God said, “Give up searching vainly in your own effort! Just walk in faith and trust. And just so there’s no doubt that I care for you personally, your name is on the ball.” Didn’t Jesus say, “the very hairs of your head are numbered?”
Well, life’s not a golf game, obviously, but there is something encouraging about this little vignette. Granted, life isn’t usually this tidy. There are plenty of times when the ball stays lost in bushes, or your toe misses the hidden ball by a half inch. And I think that my friend drove this particular ball into the water a few holes later. But still, the episode had the mark of a God-incident.
In any case, my friend’s question about how one actually trusts God really is the question, for anybody trying to live life with faith, even faith as small as a mustard seed. It’s not a new question either. 17th century clergyman Francois Fenelon answered it in this way. “The future is in God’s hands, not yours … try only to make use of each day; each day brings its own good and evil, and sometimes what seems evil becomes good.” God is in charge; you are not. Even when things look bleak, God has a plan.
This is what the prophet Jeremiah says in our Old Testament reading this morning. The context is the evil that Israel must turn from – they must amend their ways and their doings. But, I want to focus on the metaphor that God chooses to convey his message. The image he uses is that of a potter and his clay. The prophet is taken to a potter’s house and shown that God is the potter and we are the clay. ‘Then the word of the LORD came to me: 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.”
This image of God’s sovereignty – of God being in charge – could not be any clearer. Clay cannot shape itself; it is entirely dependent on the potter to shape it. Clay does not cooperate with the potter; it is an entirely passive medium that becomes a bowl or a cup or a plate at the will of the potter. Clay cannot choose or direct it’s future; only the potter can do that. Clay can’t get out of the way and leave things to God. Clay can’t do anything. The future is in the potter’s hands, not the clay’s.
This image/idea is usually met with fairly deep resistance, even though Jesus himself says quite clearly, “I am the vine, you are the branches. Apart from me, you can do nothing.” So imbedded into our thinking is the concept of our own sovereignty, our own control. Even Fenelon contracts himself at the end of his great quote. He says that God is in charge of your future and what seems bad can turn good…IF we leave it to God. If we leave it to God? Does that mean that God is waiting on our permission to act? Does a mother ask her infant permission to change a diaper? Does the potter need the clay’s permission to work at his wheel?
Whoever started the “God is a gentleman” nonsense might have done well to read this passage from Jeremiah, or Jesus saying that He is a thief in the night breaking into your home at will. God is not a gentleman waiting in his study, dressed in his smoking jacket with sherry in hand, waiting for you to leave it to him, or make room for him, or carve out space for him.
Being likened to clay is a serious blow to the human ego. And yet, live a little and you begin to see not only its wisdom, but its reality. Boxer, alcoholic and brilliant theologian Mike Tyson recently summed it all up: “everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
What do you need when you get punched in the mouth? You need care and you need comfort. Comfort is what I hope to communicate to you in this sermon. God’s work in your life for you and - better yet - despite you, no matter what you say or do, or don’t say or don’t do, is the deepest word of comfort there is in life. As the Episcopal 39 articles say, knowing God is in charge is “full of sweet, pleasant and inexpressible comfort to those who feel within themselves the working of the Spirit of Christ.”
Back to the original question: how do you leave it to God? By knowing that you don’t have to leave it to God, because God is in charge. The New Testament couldn’t be any clearer on how this plays out in our life - through trust in God. Trust is just another word for faith. Trust that God is good and that He loves you and that He will take that which is evil and in His time make it become a good.
The problem is that, because of sin, we do not trust God all the time. Some days we do, some days we don’t. One minute we do, the next minute we don’t. Trust can seem to come easily during the calms of life. But the calms never last, do they? Herman Melville, in Moby Dick says, “Would to God these blessed calms would last. But the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm. There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations….” In other words, we just don’t get better and better at trusting God.
Melville then describes how most of us experience faith or trust. “Through infancy’s unconscious spell, boyhood’s thoughtless faith, adolescence’ doubt, then skepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood’s pondering repose of If. But, once gone through we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, men, and Ifs eternally.” The calms crossed by storms can leave even the most “spiritually mature” (and I use the term ironically) in a vexing state of “If” – not fully sure, certain, trusting.
It’s no wonder then that at the very center of our faith is the cross. Because the people could not amend their ways and their doings, the evil with which God threatened his people through his prophet Jeremiah, He took upon Himself, not waiting for anyone’s permission. Yet, while on the cross Jesus experienced his own “If” –His own absence of faith and trust, crying out “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” In the end, however, God did not forsake Him, just like He will never forsake you. God raised Him from the dead. And in doing so, took the deepest evil imaginable and turned it into good.
The cross is the right symbol for our faith and trust, because like life, the cross is not tidy; it bears the weight of reality, of things done and left undone. Peter Lee, the retired bishop of Virginia spoke to this in his final pastoral address. Due to the turmoil in the Anglican Communion, his long and fruitful tenure ended in a storm of Ifs.
Bishop Lee says, “We place at the center of our lives the cross. It is a dramatic sign of…unfinished business, unfinished from a human perspective, at least, and Christianity commands us to follow that cross along the paths of our own lives. That means that tidy endings and finished business are not to be ours—not ever. Our endings are like frayed rope. There are loose ends, threads that go nowhere, untidy and disorderly strands. By placing the cross in the midst of life, Christian faith says that God is met in wholeness and in love just at the places we experience brokenness, incompleteness and alienation.” God is in the Ifs.
Though we may feel forever “If”, God’s word to you is always “Yes”, as St. Paul says. Yes, I am here, even and especially when you feel forsaken. Yes, I am working in you the Spirit of Christ, even and especially in places of brokenness and incompleteness. Yes, what may seem evil I will make good.
And none of this is up to you or how much faith you have. For, as Bishop Lee says “remember that the Church’s one foundation is Jesus Christ our Lord. We Christians declare that the Author and Finisher of our faith is Jesus Christ and not ourselves.”
Amen.