What is your favourite season of the church year? (people call out favourites…) This is not an official season, like Advent, Christmas, Lent or Easter, yet ‘Back to Church’ feels very seasonal, don’t you think? There is the wonderful energy of ‘newness’ in the air! After a summer rest, our many ministries reconvene and we are BACK! Study groups are back, fellowship gatherings are back, choir is back, Outreach is back, and the list goes on! As the sign on the corner reads: “Welcome back everyone!”
And so, we enter into a new season, and it provides an opportunity for us to begin anew. A turning point. A chance to begin again! I wonder what this year might bring in the progress of our growth as a local congregation in the rapidly expanding community of Fleetwood. You will recall that we have been wrestling with what it will mean to service a community that the Fleetwood Plan is expecting to grow by 200,000 over the next decade! A growing population, a growing cultural diversity, a growing church!
But, before we delve too deeply into that larger conversation, I wanted to start with the personal question of each of our faith development. The question centres around how we will shape our faith into the future. Churches are as strong as their people. The people that are alive with their spirit-gifts are the churches that are alive in the community. They are places that are vibrant, resilient, and growing. So, I wondered about each of us. How are we shaping our faith-led future?
Faith growth? Sometimes when people consider this question, they might feel stuck. They feel that they cannot change. They feel that the way they are is the way they always will be. A look at this morning’s texts will challenge this deterministic thinking. You need not feel stuck! Psalm 139 is a profound song in the Hebrew Psalter about the powerful nature of God. It sings of a God who knows you better than you know yourself. “O Lord, you have searched me and known me…You knit me together in my mother’s womb.” Those words inspired countless generations as they were reassured of a God whose foundation is love. A God who knows our strengths and also knows our struggles. A God knows when we have been faithful and when we’ve drifted. And that Psalm has assured the generations that this God still surrounds us in love, shapes us with care, and walks beside us. And so, if you feel that you have drifted, if you have stumbled, if your direction is away from the light, we are assured that God never gives up. In fact, quite the opposite, this is a God who sees what we can become.
And this leads nicely into the familiar Jeremiah passage. The prophet tells this visionary tale of when he is sent to the potter’s house. Jeremiah watches as the potter works the clay. Sometimes the vessel doesn’t turn out right. It is spoiled. But the potter does not throw it away. Instead, the potter reshapes it into something new. That is God’s message through Jeremiah… unto us. God is the potter; we are the clay. Our lives, our community, our church can be reworked, reshaped, redirected whenever we get off track. This passage is all the more significant if we happened to have been following through the many condemning passages that Jeremiah had uttered. The people of Judah had gone horribly astray. Jeremiah was prophesying a terrible downfall that was about to occur, just like Israel ~ their neighbours to the north. If you joined us last Sunday, you will recall some of these damning words. Yet, here, after all the troubling passages, we find that there still is hope. The future is NOT pre-determined. God yearns to reconcile, to reshape, to renew each of us!
In Jeremiah’s prophecy, what I think we see is a world of possibility; a world of forgiveness a world of course-correction; a world where the future of light is not determined by ways we have gone astray! I think sometimes people feel ‘stuck’. They passively believe that their future is pre-determined. Do you ever wonder about that? Do you wonder how you might get towards ‘the Way’ ~ God’s Way, when your way has been so distant from God’s. And it doesn’t always need to be such a MASSIVE course correction. I feel that I have had countless conversations with people who feel their faith is getting ‘stale’; they are not ‘growing’; they need a change. In this season of ‘back to church’, God’s possibilities for ALL of us are real and before us all!
We should just pause here for a moment and see where people are at. I offer this pause because, I believe that many of us have an (often unexamined) image of a God who has pre-determined our future. Usually this is an ‘unexamined belief’ we hold. But a belief, nevertheless, worth exploring. Sometimes we think of God as one who has decided how this all will work. Predetermining our future. And that is why the Jeremiah passage is such an important one. Jeremiah 18 is a reassurance that God has NOT made up God’s mind. The future…your future…is not decided. It is something that we play an active role in co-creating with God.
In Jeremiah’s vision, we are given this powerful image of clay: moldable, shapable, malleable…clay. Our lives, no matter how old (or young) we are today. Our lives still hold the possibility of change. In fact, the changing of God’s mind occurs in many places in scripture: When Moses intercedes for Israel in their exodus from Egyptian slavery (Exodus 32). The future determined…no. God’s mind was changed. In the story of Nineveh (which our ‘Camp Spirit kids’ learned about this past summer). The future determined…no. God’s mind was changed (Jonah 3). And in the case of King Hezekiah, God’s mind was, again, changed when Hezekiah prayed (2 Kings 20). Our future is NOT determined, but rather is like the piece of malleable clay where God yearns to shape us into beautiful elements of peace, justice, and love.
So, if the God of scripture is not rigid, but relational. Our choices then, indeed, matter. How we grow; how we are as ‘Church’ matter! Our prayers matter. Our faithfulness shapes the future God is creating with and through us. And the pivotal ‘Welcome Back’ question for all of us, then is: “How shall we grow in faith so that we can be shaped into what God intends?” Perhaps we might ask questions as individuals: How is God reshaping my heart, my priorities, my faith practices? And if God is reshaping my heart, then what needs to be reworked so I can be more aligned with God’s dream?
And I think for us as a church, we have these questions in a corporate sense: How do we grow in faith together? How do we further live into our mission of “embracing all of creation with the love of Christ”? What might God be reshaping in our ministries, our relationships, our witness to the community?
I would like to close with a wonderful image…Imagine yourself as a piece of clay on the potter’s wheel. God’s hands upon you: gently, steadily, lovingly shaping you. As long as we continue to draw breath, this happens. I wonder…What rough edges might God smooth away? What cracks might God repair? What new shape might God be forming in you? A vessel of compassion. A cup that overflows with hospitality. A strong jar that can carry justice and peace into the world.
So let us open our hearts to the shaping hands of the potter. Who knows us…fully and completely and dreams of the vision of the Kingdom of God unfolding through all Creation. And part of that Creation includes…YOU.
Amen.