C. S. Lewis, renowned theologian and author, once said, “It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.”
Change happens. It’s part of being alive, and for us believers, it’s a goal: continual transformation in the Spirit of God toward the likeness of God in Christ. Change is also part of being God, as our lesson from Jeremiah reminds us.
But certainty, familiarity, and predictability are comfortable and can tempt us to resist change. Now it’s true that some changes are better than others, and it can be hard to know which changes to make – but that’s where faith comes in.
For God’s people, there is nothing to fear in change. We’re in good hands. The LORD says to Jeremiah: “…go down to the potter’s house, and there I will let you hear my words.” So, Jeremiah goes where God directs him, and as he watches the potter reforming a pot that has spoiled on the wheel, Jeremiah hears the voice of God say: “Can I not do with you…just as this potter has done? Just like clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.”
Telling the people through the prophet Jeremiah (twice, to be sure we hear it) that the course of God’s plan is not fixed, God says, “I will change my mind.” When God’s mind changes, it is in response to our faithful or our faithless choices.
On the downside, this means that we can never fully ‘figure out’ God’s plan - it’s a moving target. So, we can never be absolutely sure we know what to do to get it all right. But we aren’t called to be right. We’re called to be faithful. As we prayed in our Collect: “Grant us O Lord, to trust in you with all our hearts…”
Have you ever worked with clay? You have to keep drizzling water over it on the wheel because clay that gets too dry becomes rigid and unusable. If we choose to be rigid, we must realize that we have also chosen to be unworkable by the Master Potter, who honors our choices, even when they are regrettable.
The basic message in all of the prophets in our Scripture is this: God has promised to be faithful to us, and IS faithful to us, even when we aren’t faithful to God. And we aren’t faithful when we become so rigidly attached to something that we refuse to change or to allow God to change us.
When we find ourselves attached to anything, we need to remember what Jesus said in today’s Gospel: “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.” You can almost hear the hearts of his listeners drop with a thud. I heard that here today!
But wait – there’s more! Jesus goes on to say: “Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple… and none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.”
When we read this, we justify our knee-jerk detachment from it by saying we just don’t believe that. Surely Jesus isn’t saying we should give up all of our possessions. And you’d be right. Rabbi Jesus is using hyperbole to make a point.
And the point is this: those things we attach to - our possessions – include things like houses, cars, and retirement plans; but they also include things like our reputation or status, our independence, or our need to be dependent. We can be attached to our secrets, our self-image, our opinions about others… even to our ideas about God.
Jesus says that to be a disciple we must trust only in God’s love and mercy, despite how it may look around us. We must take up our cross, symbolic of our death and our defeat by the systems of corrupt and evil power in the world, just as Jesus took up his.
While it may seem that those corrupt power-mongers who hoard money and exploit earth’s resources, who destroy social and medical safety nets and heap hardship on the poor, the sick, and the helpless - while it may seem that they are winning the day, we are called to hold fast to our faith, to trust that God’s love and mercy will have the final victory, that the new life brought by the resurrection of Jesus in his time continues in our time by the hands of our attentive, responsive God.
For our part, we must choose to shift our priority of loyalty (which is how the word ‘hate’ translates) from earthly power to the power of love, which is God, and live that reality into our world. As one Bible Studier asked: how can we do that?
To begin with, we must remember that we are not called to solve the problems of poverty, hunger, war, famine, violence, and oppression. We are called to be in relationship with God and one another – including everyone God draws into our orbits.
A very practical example here in St. Louis is: beggars at the street corners. When you come to a traffic light, do you look at them or look away? Do you hope for a green light so they don’t come to your window? Are you afraid of them? Grossed out by them?
If so, welcome to the human race. So, what do we do? How do we respond?
Last week I sat next to a very talkative man on my airplane trip to FL. When he asked and found out that I was a priest, he was very excited to talk about religious things. Our conversation led to a discussion about giving to street beggars, and the man shared with me about an experience he’d had a while back. When the beggar approached his car window, the man realized he only had a $10 bill – too much, he thought, wishing he had some $1’s, but he gave the $10 bill, feeling very generous in a Christian way. The beggar looked at the woman begging alongside him and said, “Look, we can buy a 6-pack now.” The man was incensed and said he hasn’t given to a beggar since.
That’s very sad, I said, because your $10 wouldn’t have solved his poverty, but the moment you looked into his eyes and connected with him, you showed him that he mattered enough for you to give him what you had.
That’s what we are called to do – to be in relationship, to let everyone God leads to us know that they matter. When we do that, we are bringing down barriers, opening a path of love, and living as the body of Christ in the world, because everywhere we go, we present the spirit of God in Christ who dwells in us to everyone we meet.
We give because we have it to give – whether it’s money, time, prayer, or simply presence. What they do with our gift is not our concern. That’s between them and God. We don’t know their story, and Jesus was very clear that we shouldn’t judge.
I should finish the story. The man on the airplane said he realized that he had been judging and would begin giving to street beggars again, looking them in the eye and trusting God’s love and mercy to make use of his meager gift for the benefit of the one begging.
Grant us, O Lord, to trust in you with all our hearts… that we may be hatched and learn to fly on the wings of your mercy. Amen.
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