11/02/47

(Jeremiah 18:1-11; Luke 19:41-48)

We seem to live these days in a perpetual state of post-war jitters. Our world is in pretty much of a mess. Confusion reigns in high places and low. Though the war has been over for two years, from the United Nations’ meetings at Lake Success there come reports of everything but success in the handling of peace plans and programs for international felicity. Those two titans among the nations, Russia and the United States, can’t or won’t cooperate. The announcement of our Marshall Plan to help the nations of Europe who are willing to help themselves get back on their feet inspires Russia to reorganize the Comintern. The West and the East are set one against the other even more irreconcilably than in the day when Kipling said: “East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” So even the most confirmed optimists are losing hope for the dreamed of “One World.” Mr. Winston Churchill assures that even though the Soviets walk out of the United Nations, war will not necessarily follow. But we wonder, does the aging Churchill really know this time? President Truman urges our nation to go meatless on Tuesdays and poultryless on Thursdays in order that we, out of our abundance, may share with a starving Europe. Then the President calls Congress to meet in Special Session to determine whether we can afford such charity, to grapple with the crisis of rising prices and dangerous inflation at home, and to struggle with the international chaos abroad.

Everyone is asking — what is to be the end? Are we again on the road to war? What are we stumbling along to?

The editor of Theology Today observes that the one thing everyone can agree on in these days is the commonly held “conviction that history has reached a watershed, one of the great divides in the fortunes of mankind.”

“There are, of course, differences of opinion as to where precisely this watershed is located. For some it is located within our civilization. Western civilization, they say, has entered upon its time of troubles but it will succeed in making the adjustment that is necessary for its continuance. For others the watershed is located at the end of our civilization. According to this view, today is bounded by a dark, unknown tomorrow. Another civilization, history’s 22^nd, will take shape in due course; but in the immediate future life’s main stream will plunge into a deep gorge on the shadow side of progress, becoming lost for a period in sunless night. For a third group, the watershed is located at the end of all history. The inevitable misuse of atomic energy, so the members of this group believe, will cause collective suicide on this planet and human history will come to a close.”

If there remains to a man in these days of confusion any remnant of religious faith he begins to wonder where does God fit into all this. What part is He playing in international politics, if any? Does God know what’s going to happen in the world? Does He have a plan for the future, or are we men just muddling along by ourselves? What is your idea my friends, your conviction, about God’s relationship to His world?

William Blake once painted a picture expressing his idea of the relationship between God and this world. On the canvass he drew just a great, gigantic hand seemingly spinning the world on its fingers. Is that the way you feel about God and the world today — that He holds it in all its immensity and confusion and contradiction in the hollow of His hand?

Or, do you agree with those who have thought of God and His relationship to the world as being more like an absentee landlord who has built and established His estate, put it in the hands of some men, and then gone off, leaving the men to run it as their whims and desires may direct? Do you incline to this view, holding that there’s no master plan for the world, just the many conflicting plans of selfish, scheming men?

Old Jeremiah, the gloomy prophet, puts for us quite picturesquely his conviction about God’s relationship to the world in his parable of the potter. Jeremiah had been deeply sad and puzzled to the point of utter confusion by the turn of circumstances. The rising power of the pagan Babylonian empire was casting its shadow of certain eclipse over Israel, Jeremiah’s native land. Among Israel’s lords and nobles, Jeremiah had witnessed a false, faltering and foolish administration. The prophet was sure of dire national calamity and proclaimed it. Israel must go away into captivity. Heathenism would triumph. But where, puzzled Jeremiah, does God fit into this picture of power politics? What will happen of the Lord’s promises to Israel if the Kingdom be destroyed? What is God’s relationship to His world?

Then it was that the Spirit of God led perplexed Jeremiah down to the potter’s house. There he saw the potter turning his round top table with a foot treadle. On the spinning table was a lump of wet clay. As the table went round and round the potter’s deft fingers shaped the clay into a vessel. But as Jeremiah watched, suddenly the vessel was marred in the potter’s hand. Then he saw the patient potter begin again and fashion from the same bit of clay a beautiful vessel.

The word of the Lord came with dawning light and burning conviction into the soul of his prophet: “O house of Israel, cannot I do with you as this potter?” saith the Lord. “Behold, as the clay is in the potter’s hand, so are ye in mine hand, O House of Israel. At what instant I shall speak concerning a nation, and concerning a kingdom, to pluck up and to pull down, and to destroy it; if that nation, against whom I have pronounced, turn from their evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them.”

As the clay is in the potter’s hands, so is this world of ours — human history and the destiny of nations in the hands of Almighty God. Such, says Jeremiah, is the relationship that exists between God and His world.

Now this prophetic doctrine found in the parable of the potter is no strange and unique philosophy. Here is just the Biblical doctrine of providence, succinctly put. And if you and I can but believe it, the parable of the potter can give us poise and hope in these confusing times.

First of all, this parable of the potter proclaims that God has a plan in history which He is working out. We are not just stumbling along. Jeremiah saw in that potter, spinning the clay on the potter’s wheel — an analogy of what God is working in history. He saw that at the heart of the universe there is an intelligent workman turning the wheel of circumstance, molding in accordance with his own pre-conceived plan, the destiny of nations and individuals.

This is also the understanding which Jesus had of God’s relationship to His world: “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing?” said the Master, “and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are numbered.”

And John, that political prisoner on Patmos, with the smoke of battle before his eyes, and the agonizing cries of faithful martyrs ringing in his ears, and the battle flags of the evil enemy flying victoriously oe’er all the carnage and ruin of earth, lifts up the clear voice of unwavering faith and cries in his book of the Revelation: “The Lord God Omnipotent Reigneth.” And angels and archangels and all the hosts of heaven echo back the loud “Amen”.

John Calvin writes in his Institutes that, “what is called Providence (in the Bible) describes God, not as idly beholding from heaven the transactions which happen in the world, but as holding the helm of the universe, and regulating all events. Thus it belongs no less to his hands than to his eyes … Whence it follows, that providence consists in action; for it is ignorant trifling to talk of mere foreknowledge.”

And in our own day Reinhold Niebuhr says: “The Christian faith declares that the ultimate order and meaning of the world lies in the power and wisdom of God who is both Lord of the whole world of creation and Father of human spirits. It believes that the incongruities of human existence are finally overcome by the power and love of God.”

Therefore, take courage, O Mortal Man, for it is not in the Kremlin, or even in Washington, but in highest heaven, where ultimate world policies are formulated.

Secondly, the parable of the potter proclaims the destructive power of sin. Jeremiah saw the vessel was marred in the hands of the potter. What was the cause? Well, there was something in the clay which collided with the hand and the will of the potter.

There is something in the clay of human nature which collides with the planning will and fashioning hand of God. That something is sin. Because of sin, human resistance to and rebellion from God’s righteous will, the vessel of human felicity is marred — ruined — broken.

Why is sin destructive? Why? Because God has so ordained and organized His universe that sin and corruption in human life always destroys individuals, and whole nations and empires. There is a moral and ethical warp and woof to the universe. God’s righteous will must be supreme throughout His creation. Universal disregard of God’s moral law has brought us to the brink of universal chaos and destruction. If in our day we find the vessel of human affairs lying in formless chaotic ruin under the hand of the master potter, there’s a reason for the destruction. And we know what that reason is. The parable of the potter reveals the ruining, marring, damning power of sin in human life.

Finally, the parable of the potter proclaims the blessed doctrine of the second chance, the everlasting mercy of God. When the vessel is marred in the hands of the potter, the patient potter does not cast away the stubborn and unyielding clay, but puts it back on the wheel and tries again to mold it to conform to his plan and purpose.

Dr. Crowther Gordon says that the crux of the whole teaching in Jeremiah’s parable is the revelation of what sorry stuff, what hopeless dirt, the potter has to work with. But the glory of our God is that He does not become weary of working with us forlorn failures. He is not tired of trying. He turns round the wheel of circumstance to give us another chance to respond to the gentle touch of His hand, the wooing of his righteous will.

We bring to a close today in our church the observance of our “Week of Prayer and Self-Denial for Home Missions”. As usual a special offering is made. We’ve done this, year after year, for years. Perhaps you have been thinking, “Oh hum, what a weariness. The same old appeal year after year. When will we ever get through with it?” And of course, the answer is, “When we at last do the job.” The appeal comes, again and again, because we have not yet responded as we should. We have not yet risen up and made God great in America. We have not yet carried His saving gospel to the people of our own land. There are still places in our national life where God is not feared, nor His name revered, nor His commandments kept. This season of prayer and self-denial for home missions is not just another dun, another nagging, but one more chance, one more merciful opportunity granted to us forlorn failures, by our patient and merciful God.

The President of our nation has challenged the American people to subject themselves to some self-denial to go meatless on Tuesdays and poultryless on Thursday, in order to feed the hungry of Europe. And we ought to do it. And we will.

Well your church, in this season of self-denial, is likewise challenging you to offer yourself, your prayers, your gifts, sacrificially, that spiritual food may be provided for the spiritually destitute of America — to the end that our nation may respond in this critical hour to the fashioning hand of the Master Potter and be fashioned into a vessel fit for the Lord’s purpose.

Our nation, our world, we, individually, are just getting another chance. That was the message God meant for us to get when He, out of His infinite grace, opened our eyes this morning to look out on another bright new day that He has made. I hope Jeremiah’s parable of the potter will help to open all our eyes to this abiding truth. If we find our individual lives, our nation, our world, at a time of crisis, in a sorry mess, marred, well-nigh destroyed by sin, there is still hope. The hand of the potter is ready to remold us.

Dr. Walter Marshall Horton has compared the Providence of God to two hands: one of grace and the other of law … one iron-gloved and the other warm and human. Is it conceivable that God should alternately woo us with one and strike us with the other? Could we believe this, we might hear Him saying to our generation, in tones of mingled sorrow and anger, “You must and shall have deeper fellowship in your social order, you must and shall proclaim the truth that makes men free in this land and all lands, you must and shall establish my righteous will in all areas of human life. You may take it this way — stretching out the right hand, warm and tender in love; or you may take it this way, shaking the hard-mailed fist.”

Which will we take in this, another day of God’s remarkable grace?

 

PASTORAL PRAYER

Into Thy house of prayer for all people, O Lord, we have come this day. Usher Thou our spirits into Thy presence that we may truly pray. Visit us with an inward vision of Thy glory that we may bow our hearts before Thee and receive that grace which Thou hast promised to the humble and contrite heart. Teach us, by Thy mercy, the things that belong unto our peace. Awaken us to an awareness of the time of our visitation — of the day of our opportunity to receive gladly Thy salvation.

Gird our nation in this hour for her tremendous responsibilities. Endow this people with largeness of spirit. Fill the leaders of our country with the wisdom which comes from on high. Inspire America with a sense of divine destiny and mission. Clothe her with garments of righteousness. Send her forth into Thy world as the servant of the most High God.

We pray, our Father, for Thy church in the world –especially Thy church in America, which stands today at the crossroads. “Put upon her lips the ancient gospel of her Lord. Help her to proclaim boldly the coming of the Kingdom of God and the doom of all that resist it. Fill her with the prophets’ scorn of tyranny, and with a Christ-like tenderness for the heavy laden and down-trodden. Give her faith to espouse the cause of the people, and in their hands that grope after freedom and light to recognize the bleeding hands of the Christ. Bid her cease from seeking her own life, lest she lose it. Make her valiant to give up her life to humanity, that like her crucified Lord she may mount by the path of the cross to a higher glory.”