A true prophet must love the very ones they chastise

and reprimand.

Last Sunday, we began a new program year with the

voice of a prophet—the prophet Isaiah—calling God’s

people to repair, to restore, and to rebuild. His challenge

is rooted in the profound hope of a different future, if we

who claim faith can boldly and courageously build it.

Incidentally, I want to thank the member of the

congregation, quick-thinking and fast-acting, who

upgraded the sign on our street that I was concerned

about. We now have a new sign for our street: It’s time

to rebuild. [Rev. Henry holds up orange construction

sign with the words “It’s Time to Rebuild.”]

Jeremiah was a reluctant prophet. It’s a common story

in scripture. He was commanded to speak these painful

truths to people he loved. He resists. He protests.

Too young. Not enough experience. God, they will

never listen to me. Provided only the promise of God’s

unfailing presence, the young man ultimately yields. And

so, Jeremiah updates his LinkedIn profile—Prophet. He

begins to call his community to the radical, revolutionary

act of repentance. Repentance not just for individual

acts but for communal recalcitrance. Faith, he insists,

compels conversion. And not just once, but time and

time again. Faith compels conversion.

In this morning’s passage, God invites the prophet to

take a trip to the workshop of a local potter. Jeremiah

watches the sculptor working at the wheel, forming a

vessel out of clay. The first attempt fails, and so the artist

reworks it into another vessel. Jeremiah watches closely

and then listens attentively as God makes the analogy

explicit. God is the potter. God’s people are the clay. The

image is not new. Indeed, this is how it all began. In the

second chapter of Genesis, God sculpts and shapes a

lump of clay, forming humankind from the sediment of

the earth. God’s hands fashion us into being from the

ground. God’s breath gives us life animated by the Spirit.

This morning, as we begin a new sermon series on what

faith asks of us, we learn at the potter’s shed that God

did not shape us once for all time. The very clay of our

created being has not been fired. And so, faith asks us

to be malleable. We are called to be good mud.

Several of you have sent me a recent column in The

Atlantic written by David Brooks. The title of the piece

is “How America Got Mean,” and the observation at the

heart of it is this: “We live in a society that is terrible at

moral formation.” Now, whether or not you agree with

the particulars of Brooks’ description, I take it as noncontroversial that moral formation is part of what we’re

about in Christian community. After all, if we believed

that the shape of our character and the trajectory of our

lives were already formed and fixed, we’d have little use

for these gatherings every week. Here, we affirm that

God can and does still reshape us and the institutions

we’ve created. We and they can be re-formed…rebuilt.

I do not know why you came to church today. Perhaps

you are looking for a moment of peace in an anxious

time. You might be here because you are always here;

worship is a part of the rhythm of your life. Maybe you

are desperate for a word of hope. Perhaps on the verge

of an important decision. Maybe your heart is grieving

or filled with joy or anger. Maybe you’ve come seeking

forgiveness or the strength to forgive another. I don’t

know why you are here—maybe your mom made you

come. I don’t know. But I do have a hunch. It is this: that

all of us share the deep desire to be made new. For all

of us, there’s something we wish we could undo, some

word or action we want to retract. All of us want a fresh

start for ourselves and the troubled world we share.

And here’s the good news, what’s so encouraging about

Jeremiah in the potter’s house: The clay has not been

fired. Something new can be formed from this lump of

earth. New creation. A different world.

There’s this detail in this morning’s passage that is

fueling my sense of hope these days. The potter has no

need to change the substance with which he is working.

He does not toss the clay into the trash can and take

up painting instead. You see, the raw material is not the

issue. The problem is that which is good has become

misshapen and malformed, the flawed vessel has to be

collapsed in order for the potter to begin again. Same

clay, new creation.

Jeremiah loved the people he chastised and

reprimanded, loved them enough to call them to

collective conversion. Faith asks us to be good mud.

We are called to a kind of flexibility that allows God to

shape and reshape us. Here’s how I hear the charge at

the start of a new program year for our church: let’s not

be terrible at moral formation. Okay, we can aim higher

than that. Let’s commit ourselves to moral formation.

Fair warning: this will be particularly daunting in a

time defined by entrenched polarity and dogged

rigidity. There is very little in our lives that encourages

malleability. I’ve been reading about how the broad

trend of decline in church attendance is impacting

the health of our society. Research consistently

suggests that the evaporation of these communities

accelerates extremism. As the author of one survey

describes it, “Churches can be depolarizing institutions.

Because being part of a religious community forces

people to get along with others—including others

with different views—it channels efforts into work that

forms community and has little to do with division.”

That seems spot-on to me, which is why it concerns

me when churches acquiesce to the same kinds of

polarity that define broader culture or when worshipers

leave communities of faith because of difference and

diversity in the pews. Now here’s a little secret: there

is somebody in this room who disagrees with you on a

topic you both care about. Don’t look around. But it’s

true. And it is also a strength.

We desperately need to be shaped and formed by

places that challenge us, even places that make us

uncomfortable. That’s part of how moral formation

happens. I am convinced that apart from communities

like this, Christian faith is inevitably distorted and

disfigured by ideologies defined by human quests for

power and influence. When we are driven to warring

camps we foment fear, we cultivate contempt.

I had lunch this week with my friend Dennis Sasso,

longtime Senior Rabbi at our neighbor congregation

Beth-El Zedeck. He shared some thoughts on the

prophets with me, including this gem: one of the

essential characteristics of biblical prophets was

humility. So let me be clear because it’s an important

point in the age of artificial intelligence and assumptions

of humanity’s limitless potential.

The hope that Jeremiah finds in the potter’s house is not

hope in human ability. No, the clay cannot mold itself.

And neither are we self-made. In a recent piece on his

Substack, scholar and theologian David Bentley Hart

connects conjecture of AI’s ability to solve the world’s

problems or cause its total collapse to the character of

Narcissus in Greek mythology. You may recall the story

of Narcissus, who falls in love with his own reflection in

a pool of water and stares at it for the rest of his life. The

character provides the origin of the term narcissism, a

fixation on the self.

David Bentley Hart notes that the inclination to

narcissism pervades predictions on the promise of

artificial intelligence. I found his conclusion compelling.

He writes, “The danger is not that…our machines

might become [more] like us, but rather that we might

be progressively reduced to functions in a machine

we can no longer control…There was after all no

mental agency in the lovely shadow that so captivated

Narcissus, but it destroyed him all the same.”

Friends, we are not the Creator, no matter how creative

we may be. We are a part of this created world. Made

of mud. What faith asks of us is to be wise in choosing

what and who will shape us.

In his commencement address published under

the title This Is Water, David Foster Wallace wrote,

“In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no

such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not

worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we

get is what to worship.”

Friends at Second Church, listen. We do have a choice.

We are not self-made, but we can choose what will

shape us. We can bow down at the altar of power—it

will only fuel our fear. We can worship money and

things—they will never be enough. We can pray to the

idols of ideology, put our trust in trends, or find our

identity in enmity of our enemies—we will only find

emptiness and isolation. We can stare into the pools of

self-righteousness until we’ve sold our souls thinking

we’d bought our freedom.

Or we can worship the One who formed us. We can

place ourselves in the hands of grace. We can surrender

our power and yield to the Artist whose creative gifts

can bring beauty out of the mess we’ve made.

So, here’s the message from a prophet who loved the

people he reprimanded. We can still be molded into a

community carrying God’s truth in the world. In fact, the

Apostle Paul loved the image so much that he picked it

up. We hold treasure in earthen vessels.

It is not too late. We can be rebuilt. We can be

reformed. The clay has not yet been fired. The potter is

still at the wheel.

Clay pots carrying precious cargo. God’s intention from

the beginning. Amen.