A Time of Turning

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

09.08.13; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Jeremiah 18:1-11

It’s a funny time of year, this week is.  For most pastors, this is the week of Rally Day, as we try to get folks fired up for getting back into the swing of the whole Jesus thing after a summer lull.

Hey everybody, we say!  Going back to church should bring you that same joyous, excited feeling you got when you were a kid and the summer ended and you got to go back to school!  Yay Jesus!

For me, this week is a bit different.  It has different echoes, and a different flavor, because of the bizarre mutant faith-o-rama that is my family.  On Thursday, I spent almost the entire day in worship at Bradley Hills Presbyterian Church, only I wasn’t doing the Presbyterian thing.  I was there because Bradley Hills Presbyterian Church shares space with Bethesda Jewish Congregation.  I was there because of my Jewish wife and Jewish children, and we were there because this week represents the holiest week in all of Judaism.

Thursday we spent the day celebrating Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.  Rosh Hashanah means, literally, “the head of the year,” and in the Jewish annual cycle, we just started the year 5774.  it’s a busy time for everyone except all of the Gentile schoolchildren in Montgomery County, who give thanks for getting a super extra bonus holiday.  

My wife, who’s now the vice president of the board at the synagogue, was sporting a nifty name tag announcing that to the world.  My older son was singing with the adult choir.  My younger son, who was Bar Mitzvahed this spring, was a liturgist for the children’s service.  All of which meant I was in Rosh Hashanah services for about four consecutive hours.  At about hour three, my little guy lamented that he wasn’t Presbyterian.   I mean, you guys get out after only an hour, he said.

It was actually both pleasant and spiritually uplifting, because I get a tremendous amount out of the High Holy Days.   The entire event, with the meals and the fasting, the singing and the shuttling back and forth from Annandale to Bethesda, the whole thing is about change.   Not just any change, either.  If the week of the High Holy Days has one central theme, it is repentance.  

With the transition from one year to the next, the purpose of this holiday is to acknowledge the ways that you’ve managed to mess up in the previous year, and to commit yourself to improvement.  What begins on Rosh Hashanah ends on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, when you commit yourself to changing those things that must be changed.

That call to personal transformation is a central part of both Judaism and Christianity.  “Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand,” as Jesus put it.  It was also a major part of what the prophet Jeremiah proclaimed and preached.

And Jeremiah?  He knew from change.  Jeremiah’s time was a messy one, one in which every single thing in the world around him was in wild flux.  And by “wild flux,” I don’t mean the trivial change of our consumer culture, the stuff of new car model years or smartphones with huge screens.  

For Jeremiah, the entire world had changed.

Jeremiah lived and taught right on the edge of a vast and wrenching shift in the life of the Jewish people.  There’d been a brief period of hope, after the fall of the Assyrian Empire in the year 627 BCE.  Assyrian rule had been brutal, and that the empire had collapsed seemed like an opportunity.  Finally, finally, the Jewish people would have a chance to be free, and to live as they so chose.

But things just didn’t work out.  Though the Jewish people had placed their hope in a new ruler, the wise and noble King Josiah, his efforts to rebuild were smashed on the slopes of the mountain of Meggido when he died in battle.

With all of that chaos going on around them, the Jewish people struggled to find direction.  More often than not, the direction they found themselves going in was to play exactly the same political games that were played by every other nation around them.  Their political leaders did so with the backing of a cadre of prophets who affirmed the principle that God would always and invariably defend Jerusalem, no matter what.

It didn’t matter what Judah did, or how they acted.  God’s temple was in Jerusalem, and that was that.  With God on your side, no matter what, you can pretty much do anything.

That also tends to make the prophets involved rather popular with the folks in power.  

But Jeremiah just couldn’t do that.  His messages were consistent and difficult, drawn not from his desire to say what folks wanted to hear, but instead to tell them what he knew to be real.

We find a particularly challenging message coming from Jeremiah today, as he wanders through the streets of Jerusalem to the house of a potter.  He watches the work of that craftsman, seeing how they worked and reworked the clay, correcting flaws, starting again.

And in that moment of observation, Jeremiah found that it spoke pointedly to the dynamic of God’s relationship to God’s people.  What would have been most challenging to his listeners, I think, would have been that he ran straight at their assumption that they were automatically the most special, wonderful, and perfect creatures ever in the eyes of their Creator.

They weren’t.  If a people are just and kind and stand in good relationship with God and neighbor, sure, all is well.  But if not?  Well, then all was not.   The point of this whole teaching was pretty straightforward.  

It leaves space for a people to change their ways, to make themselves anew, to restore themselves and bring themselves into right relationship with God and neighbor.  This is a good thing, but as I meditated on this passage during this week in which transformation is banging on my door, one of the most striking things about it not our own changeability.

We all know we change.  Life is change.  Life is continual shift and flux for we human creatures.  But what seems striking about this passage is that it is not simply human beings that shift.  Nations can choose and change.  But wildly and unexpectedly, we hear also that God, the creator of the universe, is capable of change.  If you change, then I will change, or so God speaks through Jeremiah.

This feels, on the face of it, a tiny bit unsettling if we think about it theologically.  Here we have the Creator of the Universe, the Alpha and the Omega, the God that knows all, sees all.  How can God possibly change God’s mind?  Doesn’t everything that happens fit within a plan that’s already mapped out, already certain, already complete?  Everything happens for a reason, we say.  It’s all part of God’s plan, we say.

And yet there it is, said once, said again, just so we don’t miss it.  I will change my mind, speaks the text which conveys the prophet who conveyed God.  I will change my mind, we hear again.  It’s not a clumsy choice of words, to be interpreted around or skipped over, as my bible commentaries did this week.

What does this mean?  Here we generally like to think of God as knowing all things, and being in charge of all of creation, and yet there is this peculiar statement that God willing to think about doing something, and then say, Nah, you know what, I just don’t feel like it any more.

If God is in charge, and God is in control of all things at every moment, then how can God be about to do one thing, and then decide not do it because of something we do?  And yet we hear, from Jeremiah, that this is so.

Wrassling with this passage, I find that the best way to approach this headscratcher is by remembering that God is both loving and love itself.  I also apply multiverse cosmology to it, but as we don’t want to sit here for another hour while I ramble on about my book, let’s stick with the love angle.

Loving another being does not mean that you delimit them.  If all that we are is cogs in a great linear plan, then we cannot be meaningfully held responsible for our actions.  I didn’t mean to smack you just then, we could say to our little brother.  It was predestined.  I didn’t mean to bomb your village and kill your children, a nation could say to another.  It was just part of God’s plan from all eternity, so, hey, sorry about that.

But if that is true, then repentance is meaningless.  Our choosing to live differently, which is the entire point of the holiest season in the Jewish faith out of which Jesus sprang...that’s meaningless?

Instead, God stands in relationship to us, loving us, showing us what it is to live most joyfully and fully in creation.  And as we freely choose to live towards that reality, God’s love for us grows richer and stronger.  Where we choose to live against it, seeking power or control, allowing our addictions and hatreds and resentments to govern us, God’s love remains as a stark reminder of what could have been, had we so chosen it.

And even if you don’t celebrate the turning of the calendar year from the year 5773 to 5774 this week, it remains a new day, every day.  Remembering that, and acting on the truth of it, and changing for the better?  That’s the point of faith.

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.