On the Basis of Love

Elizabeth Macaulay

September 5, 2004

I went to get my newspaper on Saturday morning and was greeted by the sight of children shattered by the force of hatred as it unfolded in Russian.

That vision lingered with me as I attended the Renaissance festival later that day. It was a perfect day of great fun – maybe even more so because I hadn’t planned on going. My sister and a friend arrived on my doorstep and invited me to go. I could say “yes”, and so I did.

The people-watching at the Renaissance festival is the main event, for me. It is like being at an extended costume party – played out in the light of day. It seemed that almost half the people there had chosen to don a costume and lose themselves in the persona they created for the day. The rest of us – the boring people in street clothes - made an appreciative audience.

The people watching at the festival is as good as it gets. God is many-imaged, based on the glimpses of the holy I saw yesterday in the people around me.

Each person, unique. Each person molded by a most wondrous and creative potter.

And… a potter powerful and demanding. Present - in the wrench of human tragedy as well as in the shine of summer festivals. What is it this potter God would have us to do and be?

As a people of faith, asking the question is essential.

We heard the message John read earlier from the prophet Jeremiah.

God instructed Jeremiah to go to the potter’s shed so that Jeremiah might have a vision for how intimately God is involved in the life of God’s people – in this case, the nation of Israel.

The people of Israel were surrounded always by the temptations we know so well – the temptation to give the sacred stuffs of life over to worship of other gods, the temptation to turn from the call to live justice and compassion.

So God spoke through Jeremiah and speaks yet.

The message is clear. To be in the hands of God is to be formed by the ways of God in such a way that it is God’s way that is lived. In community as well as in our private lives.

We can hear this text as threat – behave, or we’ll get reworked over and over and over again until we get it right.

Or we can hear this text as invitation. Be touched and held and caressed into the goodness of life that is yours in God. Be molded and sculpted by God’s intimate way of creating us and the promise we are.

It may feel like we are being reworked over and over and over again until we get it right. Has your life ever felt like it had collapsed in on itself? It can be excruciating, this forming of wholeness.

But Jeremiah would have us to know that throughout, there is a power greater than ourselves at the wheel.

Powerful and exacting and hope filled is this God who molds us.

The apostle Paul taught the same message, some roughly seven hundred years later. He wrote to Philemon from his prison cell in Rome. Kept behind bars for the message of the potter that he HAD to preach, even at the risk of his life. Paul writes to Philemon.

His message? Philemon is to take in a slave who wronged him (in the understanding of his day) by running away. He is to receive this man on the basis of love – as an enfleshment of Paul’s own heart.

Paul writes to Philemon that he is to treat his returning slave as a beloved brother – both in the flesh and in the Lord.

Paul writes to Philemon that being a follower of Jesus means holding the values of his faith more dear than the teachings of his culture.

How long will we face newspaper headlines? Pictures and stories that tell us every day that the ways of the potter are not being lived and that somehow this way of Jesus must be given a way to see the light of day because we are living the “not God” and it is killing us.

We are killing - the children, the earth, the hopes and imaginings of our hearts.

This is not a sermon about despair.

It is a sermon about the something more that is waiting for us on the other side of despair and brokenness and headlines that make our hearts grieve.

This sermon is a reminder and a challenge. An affirmation that God is at the wheel of creation, and God is not done yet.

Nor are we.

We are Philemon. Asked to welcome people into our lives as the very heart of the holy – those who have wronged us and those we will never know by name.

It sounds ridiculous. The wounds of the world are so great and the scope of our influence so small. What can we do to rewrite the kinds of headlines that break our hearts?

We do what we can. We see Christ in each person we encounter – most especially perhaps those who come to us with emotional or social baggage we have been taught to dodge.

And, we acknowledge that God is at work in the molding of this world and we have a part in the shaping of healing.

The Sufi tell a story:

Past the seeker, as he prayed, came the crippled and the beggar and the beaten. And seeing them, the holy one went down into deep prayer and cried,

“Great God, how is it that a loving creator can see such things and yet donothing about them?”

And out of the long silence, God said:

“I did do something about them. I made you.” (Corrigan, Disciple Story pg. 99)

We are the clay.

Amen