Joel D. Kline
September 5, 2004
Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren
The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Faith is a tricky matter, isn’t it? On the one hand, we hear the promise that faith enables us to experience a sense of satisfaction. In relationship with God through Jesus Christ our deepest needs are met, our inner longings and yearnings for purpose and meaning in life are satisfied. We encounter Jesus as living water, the bread of life, gracious Redeemer, gentle Shepherd, God-with-us. And most of us, I suspect, if only fleetingly, know the experience of intimate connection with God—times when God has seemed especially present, times when our wills seemed to be aligned closely with God’s will. For many of us, such moments may well occur in our times away from settled routine—perhaps on vacation time when we come face-to-face with nature’s beauty and grandeur, perhaps in a camp or retreat setting, perhaps on one of those occasions when we have set our own needs aside and responded selflessly to the needs of another.
But just when we begin to feel as if life is somehow making sense and coming together, seems like the other side of faith kicks in! For our faith experience also has a way of making us feel dissatisfied, reminding us of how very far we yet have to go in our life journey. The very faith that promises us a satisfied life at the same time makes us ever hungry and thirsty for more, so that, in a very real sense, in this life we shall never be fully satisfied!
The prophet Jeremiah seems to me to be an example par excellence of one who is both satisfied and dissatisfied in his walk with God. Feeling like a lonely voice calling his fellow Israelites back to a journey of faithfulness, Jeremiah goes so far as to lament that he had even been born. “Woe is me, my mother, that you ever bore me, a man of strife and contention to the whole land!” (Jeremiah 15:10), laments Jeremiah. The same prophet who says to God, “Your words were found, and I ate them, and your words became to me a joy and the delight of my heart” (v. 16), only verses later accuses God of forsaking him, crying out, “Truly, you are to me a deceitful brook, like waters that fail” (v. 18).
On the one hand, Jeremiah’s thirst for relationship with God is satisfied, and he is able to speak of God as the delight of his heart. Yet the same prophet knows deep dissatisfaction, even despair, so much so that he accuses God of being deceitful—offering not living water, but waters that fail.
We frequently speak of the Holy Spirit as a comforting presence within and among us, but perhaps Jeremiah’s experience—and our own—remind us that the Spirit may well come among us as a discomforting presence. How often the Spirit of God prods and challenges us, guiding and goading us into areas we might not choose, were we left to our own devices.
Some years ago, in a journal of preaching, Presbyterian pastor Nancy Topolewski wrote of an encounter from her college days when, as a biology major, she took a course in philosophy in order to fulfill a core requirement. The class was taught by Dr. Vujica, a professor with a reputation as a demanding instructor. A small man perhaps sixty years of age, clearly in love with teaching, Dr. Vujica began the initial session by reminding the students that the class was a forum on philosophy, not religion. As such, there would be no attacks on anyone’s personal faith; indeed, religion would not even be discussed.
Shortly before the final exam, however, Dr. Vujica called Nancy to his office. To Nancy’s surprise her professor began by saying, “You are a fine philosophy student, but after watching you in class and with others, I think your personal gifts are well-suited for the church.” Sensing that Nancy might find his observations to be at odds with his promise not to discuss matters of faith in class, Dr. Vujica went on to speak of his own struggles with faith.
He had grown up in Croatia and had been deeply involved in the student resistance movement against both Nazism and Communism. As a result, Dr. Vujica was arrested and for several years confined to concentration camps, during which time he abandoned his long-cherished dream to become a priest. God seemed little present to him in those difficult years, and so, reasoned Dr. Vujica, why should he bother with the Christian faith.
The professor then spoke of his immigrating to the United States, where he drifted through a number of low-paying jobs before finally finding, by what he later came to see as “an act of God,” a small college looking for teachers. Said Dr. Vujica, “If it were not for kind faculty friends, and a rare student like you, I probably would have ended my life thirty years ago. Years of unspeakable evil had driven faith from my conscious thought. But I discovered that I had never really left the church. God called me, not to be a priest, but to be a teacher.” And then, zeroing in on Nancy, Dr. Vujica said, “Something in you reminds me of myself at your age.” The professor went on to challenge Nancy, “Don’t spend the rest of your life, as I have done, trying to escape the call of God.”
Dr. Vujica’s words encouraged Nancy to consider new directions for her life, and the embrace of something new, while perhaps enticing, seldom leaves us feeling comfortable and secure. Indeed, God’s call is frequently discomforting. Jeremiah, you may remember, initially wants to shake off the call from God, urging God to find someone else for the task. And throughout his prophetic ministry Jeremiah seems to waver, one time celebrating God’s gracious yet challenging presence in his life, the next time seeing it as a curse.
And why shouldn’t he? This morning’s Scripture lesson from Jeremiah 18 centers on the familiar imagery of the potter and the clay. Perhaps because of its familiarity, we may think of it as a rather charming image, an image of rustic creativity. But consider what Jeremiah sees before him. It is a potter working at his wheel, and Jeremiah notices that the potter controls the clay, that the potter can reshape the clay at any time, and in fact the potter remains dissatisfied until achieving the shape he had long envisioned for the pottery.
Just so, Jeremiah understands, God is in the business of reshaping Israel. Indeed, this is what Jeremiah is being asked to proclaim. To a community living on the assumption that God will always be on its side, the prophet announces that if the people continue their current patterns of disobedience, if they continue to place their trust in material wealth and military weapons rather than in God, God may well choose, like a potter, to so reshape the clay that it bears little resemblance to its present form.
Israel—and you and I, too, for that matter—are not as independent as we think we are. There is a power greater than our own. And so Jeremiah finds himself burdened with the difficult task of urging a complacent people to repent. Repentance is not simply a matter of expressing regret for past failings; repentance is turning around, repentance is taking on a new way of seeing life, a new way of thinking; repentance is embracing an entirely new way of living and a new identity. So that Jeremiah is being called to proclaim this alternative way of living to a stubborn people, urging them to place their trust in God, to walk the path of justice and compassion, to live not for self alone, but for the glory of God and the good of one’s neighbors.
There are some who conceive of the Christian faith as little more than a ticket to heaven, as a “me-and-Jesus” sort of thing little aware of the needs for justice and compassion in today’s world. And yet, as Richard Foster writes in his book, Streams of Living Water, “The goal of the Christian life is not simply to get us into heaven, but to get heaven into us!”
Jim Wallis in his book Call to Conversion reminds us that living as God’s people enables us to see, hear, and feel—in the here and now—as never before. Asserts Wallis,
Faith is turning to belief, hope and trust…. Faith opens us to the future by restoring our sight, softening our hearts, bringing light into our darkness. We are converted to compassion, justice, and peace as we take our stand as citizens of Christ’s new order….
Heart, mind, and soul, being, thinking, and doing—all are remade in the grace of God’s redeeming love.
And the good news is that God not only places this challenge of a new way of living before us; God also promises to walk with us on the journey, and to share a strengthening, an empowering, Spirit with us. Centuries ago Julian of Norwich wrote:
As surely as there is in God a property of compassion…so truly there is in God a property of thirst and longing. By virtue of this longing in Christ, we have to long for God in response…. The property of longing thirst comes from the endless goodness of God…. Spiritual thirst will last in God as long as we are in need, drawing us up to God’s bliss.
Do you hear what Julian is saying? The very God for whom we thirst—this God first thirsts for us. And it is God’s thirst for abiding relationship with us that creates our own desire to encounter God and God’s way of living more fully. It is God who satisfies our thirst, while at the same time creating within us a yearning for even more. C.S. Lewis once wrote that God is intent upon making us into “dazzling, radiant, immortal creatures, pulsating all through with such energy and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine.”
As clay in the master Potter’s hands, let us continue to thirst for God, trusting that the God who thirsts for us will continue to make all things now—including you and me. Amen.
Gracious God, Creator of life, we come before you this morning acknowledging that we frequently feel overwhelmed by life’s pressures and struggles. Sorrows like sea billows roll. We yearn for peace of mind and heart in the midst of events often confusing and disheartening. We yearn for healing of hurts, for courage to confront injustice, for wisdom to work for genuine peace—not the sword’s peace, but peace that flows from mutual respect, compassion, and reverence for life. We yearn to be able to affirm, with the hymn writer, “It is well with my soul.”
O God, hear the deepest yearnings of our souls. Form us and recreate us in your image. Grant us strength and courage to embrace Christ’s vision of a new way of living and relating in the world. Guide us in paths of justice making, compassion, forgiveness, peace, hope, and purposeful living.
Hear us now, Lord God, as we remember others who are facing life’s storms…and hear us, holy God, as we hold in your loving presence those in special need of your healing touch…
God of compassion and grace, fill each one of us with your gracious Spirit, with your Spirit of peace and loving kindness, your Spirit of courage and hope. In the name of Christ Jesus we pray. Amen.