Jeremiah 18:1-11
Proper 18 (23) - Year C
This sounds very much like a story from Kafka or one of the dystopian novels. There is a plan or template you are not aware of against which you are constantly being measured. Moment by moment you are being conditioned toward some endpoint. Sometimes you receive positive reinforcement and sometimes negative.
This is not really a learning environment. New occasions continue to come along. A new pot or people is raised up and has a flaw. What is a G*D to do—other than toss it aside, of course. If for whatever reason some flash of beauty might be seen beyond a flaw (or even within it), then it may sit on an honored shelf.
Appreciate this for the profligate creativity present as life is called into existence and claimed to be good. Appreciate this for Kali showing up to knock it all about with too many left hands not know what a right is throwing.
So, G*D can shape and unshape from the outside in response to our shaping and reshaping from the inside. This and $5 gets us where? Where is the on-going relationship that accounts for working together for a common good? In the aftermath of Labor Day this passage is weighted overmuch toward management.
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2013/09/jeremiah-181-11.html
Jeremiah 18:1-11 or Deuteronomy 30:15-20
Choose life. Throw that pot again.
Fire the pot and create an idol.
Between these two poles we find the choice of life that are approached rather humbly because their results can never be predicted.
Keep reworking the clay and never get to the investment of life that brings life.
A thing of beauty is a joy forever and closer than beauty we cannot get to G*D.
So, do your best to make some progress. It will be enough to choose as well as you can based on learning from your past and amending your current ways to better move toward wholeness tomorrow. In so doing we assist G*D in changing course. Mysteriously, it is G*D who assist us in so doing.
http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2004/september2004.html
Jeremiah 18:1-11 or Deuteronomy 30:15-20
When the United Methodist Church looks in the mirror, it ain't pretty!
We see the age spots of regressive theology,
And the wrinkles of deteriorating hope.
We see the scars of division,
And the unsightly bags of tired, sagging disputes.
We see the hunched shoulders of endless exclusions,
And the warts of legalism.
Oh my, the church is in need of an
Extreme Makeover!
Join the CoMotion and let God get under your skin.
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Kairos CoMotion 2005
Extreme Makeover Conference: A New Look for Ourselves, the Church and God
Saturday, March 12, 2005
Lake Street United Methodist Church
337 Lake Street
Eau Claire, Wisconsin
We have invited Rita Nakashima Brock to help with our transformation.
Using Dr. Brock's book, Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and the Search for What Saves Us we will put a new face on the Christian doctrine of the Atonement.
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We do hope to see many of you at our one day, regional events. You can go to our Kairos CoMotion website for more information.
Here is a paragraph from our textbook for this event that has connections with this pericope:
"Love is neither transcendence nor undifferentiated union. Love is the wisdom of life that knows when connection can heal and when separation will make life flourish. Love is the capacity to use the powers of holding on and letting go in the service of life. Love is capable of detachment as well as empathy, differentiation as well as union, hierarchy as well as mutuality. Love the guardian of powers. Love directs the use of specific powers, in response to particular circumstances, for the sake of creating, sustaining, or healing life. In every situation, love asks, 'What will serve life?' This means human love comes from a growing wisdom about life itself. If one wants to love, it is life that one must seek to fully know. To love is to choose life."
http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2004/september2004.html
Jeremiah 18:1-11 or Deuteronomy 30:15-20
Choice is inherent in life. There isn't one without the other. Here it is too easy to get caught up with only one end of a choice spectrum, that of humans (individual and communal), while ignoring choices of G*D.
At one point G*D is out of choices - G*D can only respond to our actions in their like manners. If we do "good", G*D does "good". If we don't, G*D doesn't. There is here no choice of steadfast love, regardless of the stimulus, simply stimulus and response.
At another point G*D becomes preemptive. G*D chooses to warn that G*D is getting into a non-choice - responding to "bad" with bigger "bad".
Go ahead. Choose. As an individual your choice may make no difference as the community around can and does make opposite choices. You are likely to get caught up in their choices and smashed, perhaps to be recast. And, yet, one choice is significant. Remember again the 100th monkey.
- - -
Sarah nor her husband could choose for me
Rebekah nor her husband could choose for me
Leah and Rachel nor their husband could choose for me
I cannot choose
for son and daughter
that descendants will live
I can choose
to live that they might
choose
sometimes I choose life prosperity
death and adversity
and more and less
for self
for neighbor
for G*D
what a tangled web we weave
when first we choose
and choose again
- - -
Anonymous (Reader) said...
The first thing that catches my attention in the Jeremiah passage is the coupling of "come" and "go" which introduces for me the theme of call and answer.
Something/Someone (Divine?) calls and we respond. We approach or gather together as community, then we go or scatter to be the community witnessing. I/We draw inward in order to become aware, and then we go to neighbor, other lands to share awareness and build the community, which in turn gathers and scatters.
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2007_09_01_archive.html
So good of G*D to give direction to a revelation, a looking at the world and seeing new connections. It happens a potter's house is a great place to find metaphors. Any number of them have been noted.
A significant part of this passage is the implication that we might also be called by G*D to specific locations where a revelation might be caught. Consider all that has needed to conspire together to get you to the spot where you are. What important metaphor can you look around and see at hand or listen to right now and hear a new melody? Can you remember to repeat a search each of the next four hours?
Not so good of G*D to give direction to a grand curse, a looking at the world around (one's image) and attending more to a wobble than a graceful of line. A potter's house is also a great place to find fired up certainties whose only possible change is that of breakage.
May you learn from G*D that changing your mind about the good you intended is not a healthy response, no matter what the provocation.
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2010/08/jeremiah-181-11.html