Today begins a new series of sermons that will help us think about how our present circumstance can help form our future. I have borrowed part of the theme of the Biennial Session of the National Convocation of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). The theme of that meeting was “New Day – New Way: Equipping God’s People to Lead”. I want us to consider over the next few weeks, “New Day – New Way: Becoming A Transformed People”. When we become transformed people, we are changed from the inside out, and our passions, those things about which we feel deeply are become primary in our lives. Transformation is about adopting a new attitude and seeing a new perspective. Transformation gives us an attitude that says we will do bold and faithful ministry in this church. Transformation lifts our sights to see not only what has been and what is, but what can be.

The prophet Jeremiah whose words and actions we will hear about in September and October will be our guide as we consider how it is that God wants to mold and shape us for ministry. As it true with us, Jeremiah heard a word from God concerning the people of Judah and Jerusalem in a time of political upheaval with shifting alliances among nations and people jockeying for position and power. He eventually saw his nation defeated and destroyed and its leaders taken into exile, and the people were shattered. We know what it is to be emotionally, spiritually, and politically devastated.

Some of you remember first hand, the devastation in England, Germany, and Japan and other nations after World War II. We remember the death and destruction we saw on September 11, three years ago. Think of the greater blow to the nation if that fourth plane had slammed into the White House, or the Capitol, or the Supreme Court. Imagine the destruction of the National Cathedral or National City Christian Church. We know what it means to be emotionally and spiritually shattered.

Did you see the paper yesterday? The front page told of the horrible massacre in Beslan, Russia, we heard it on the news too, over three hundred people killed, half of them children as a first day of school program was transformed into a hostage situation, and a gymnasium became a killing ground. In Dafur in Sudan people are being ravaged by war, starvation, and rape. The world needs to be reshaped and restored. We read and see Hurricane Frances is hovering, threatening, menacing as it bears down on Florida and a former President is scheduled to have quadruple by-pass surgery.

We hear these things and we don’t always know what to do. But the song we heard Tramaine Hawkins sing a few minutes ago reminds us that when we are spiritually spent and shattered God will lead us to a place where our broken spirits can be put back together.

God sends Jeremiah to a potter’s house, where Jeremiah sees the potter working at his wheel. It seems to me that the potter is a friend of Jeremiah’s. He and Jeremiah have known each other a while. In fact Jeremiah can appreciate the potter’s work because he has seen him work before, and he knows what goes into making a pot that will last.

He has walked with his potter friend as he went out and dug the clay with his hands. Jeremiah sat and talked with him while he removed the straw and the rocks and other debris from the clay. He had seen his friend pound the air bubbles out of clay so that it could stand the heat of the oven without exploding.

Jeremiah watched while the pottery was glazed. Glazing would give the piece a hard, transparent coating; he watched as the pottery was fired again to make sure the vessel could withstand the pressure it will face and become strong enough to do what it is supposed to do. Then the clay pot, or plate, or drinking cup is put into the kiln, the oven that will dry the pottery, it is part of the strengthening process. He had watched as his friend did all he needed to do to produce a vessel a cup, or plate, or a bowl that could do what it was supposed to do. (www.glendale.edu/~rkibler/ceramicprocess.html).

Jeremiah knew the hard work his friend had to do in order to make clay pottery. And he shared the potter’s disappointment when the thing the potter was working on was ruined before it was finished. Something disturbed the process. It had been shaped for a purpose and now it was little more than a lump of clay.

Of course we are all smart enough to get that Jeremiah has just told us a parable. Humanity is the clay; God is the potter. God says to us, “I created you and I can take you and shape you in any way I want. My desire is for your transformation and renewal. I want to shape you for ministry”.

We have been shaped for many things in our lives. Here in the church and in other parts of our lives, we have been shaped to lead, to give, to teach, to serve, we have been shaped for ministry.

But something has happened and we are disturbed and ruined and unable to do the thing we are shaped to do. We are disturbed by people who won’t catch the vision or follow our leadership. We cannot give because we think too much about scarcity and not enough about abundance. We cannot teach because we have not learned; we will not serve because we feel incompetent. We will not engage in ministry because we either believe that ministry is work for others to do, or because we have come to believe that we have nothing to give. So we sit like a ruined lump of clay on a wheel, desperately needing to be reshaped and restored.

We are being shaped by God who wants to pick us up, and clean out of us all the debris that has gotten in the way of a healthy relationship with God. Will we let God clean out our self-centeredness, our insistence on getting our own way so much that we cannot hear another point of view? Can’t we give ourselves to God the Potter to mold and shape us so that when we are tested by fire and difficulty we can come out stronger than we were before?

God has given us gifts that shape and transform us. When we let God shape us, when we pray daily, when we read scripture and worship regularly, when we get that God’s love for us will not let us go, we receive God’s gifts, and we are ready to do the ministries we are called do to.

Can we let God shape us so that we are open to receive the gifts God has and then can we offer those gifts back in ministry of service to each other and to the world around us?

Like the church at Ephesus whose list of gifts we heard in our first reading, God has given us gifts for ministry. In fact they are the same gifts they had. Ephesians talks about apostles, evangelists, preachers and teachers. Apostles are people who are sent out in the name of Jesus. Prophets speak truth to power. We are called to be teachers and preachers. That is what we do. Each Sunday when we leave our worship service we are sent out in the name of Christ to be his representatives of the world.

The church and synagogue members who are active in the BREAD organization, the people who protested at the recent political conventions in Boston and New York speak truth to power and we pray speak the truth in love.

We speak the truth in love to our families when we say to abusive and disruptive members, we love you, but families are created for mutual support and mutual love and if you’re about brokenness and disruption, we will do what we can to get you the help you need so our family can heal. Maybe restoration happens, maybe not, but abuse is not a loving act.

We love our country, but it cannot be whole as long as name calling takes the place of rational debate, and too many people are still without adequate health care, housing, food, and education, and employment.

We love our church but something in us is shattered when we want to confine the living God to our theological understandings. Something is wrong when we fear the future more than we trust in God’s promised presence and when pessimism identifies us more than faithful persistence. We are called to tell the good news we know with joy and thanksgiving.

The good news is that we are shaped by God for life and hope and we are called to care for the church and its members and to teach ourselves to open its doors and to go out and live as if we believe we are gifts of God using our gifts to equip each of us in the body of Christ. We are in an era when there is tremendous emphasis on strengthening and shaping our physical bodies, and that is a good thing. It is a good thing too for us to strengthen our spiritual bodies, that is, the church.

We know that when the body of Christ is strong, we have unity of faith. Unity is not uniformity. Unity does not mean that we think the same or act the same, or believe the same except for this – we believe in the church that bears his name, that Jesus is the Christ, the son of the living God, and growing in relationship to him helps us to be mature Christians.

When we use the gifts God has given us, when we let ourselves grow up into Christ, we gain spiritual maturity and begin to act in Christ-like ways. Look at what he did. He loved unconditionally, proclaimed justice for everyone, lived the good news of salvation and trusted God with his life. We are called to do no less, even we are not at our best, so we put ourselves in God the potter’s hands again.

In God the Potter’s hands, our broken places can be made whole, our shapelessness can be reformed, our faith can become soothed and restored. When we put ourselves in God’s hands trusting God as Jesus did, and claiming our ministries as a gift from God, God can take us and remold us into a vessel that can carry our hopes for ministry and mission, vital worship, and worthwhile education we can hold, and it will be good to God and good for us. We can be reshaped and we can become transformed.

The saying is true, “as far as the east is from the west, so far will God remove our transgressions from us” (Psalm 103.12). As the potter starts over, God allows us to start over too and will give us grace to rebuild and remold our lives.

The good news is that the prophets are not all about anger and doom. They also always bring a word of restoration and hope to the people. Jeremiah will see a time of renewal. He was there when King Josiah rediscovered the holy books of the faith and read again the story of God’s deliverance. From that discovery there came a new relationship with God as Josiah led the people through a time of transformation and renewal. He helped the people find their way back to faith and new life. The rekindling of their spirits helped put them back together again.

We can rejoice today that the potter does not give up on us, and instead keeps us flexible enough to be transformed into new shapes and new ways of being God’s people in the world. Hear the invitation again:

“You who are broken, stop by the potter’s house!
You who need mending stop by the potter’s house.
Give him the fragments of your broken life.
The potter wants to put you back together again.

There is joy in the potter’s house, there’s peace for the weary soul in the potter’s house. The potter wants to put you back together again.”

(“The Potter’s House” written by Tramaine and Walter Hawkins. www.circlegame.com/music/potter.htm).

Thanks be to God. Amen.