Preached · January 25, 2026
Series · [[Surviving Saturday]]
Text · Jeremiah 18
[[Jeremiah 18]].1-11
Jeremiah 18
Jeremiah 18:1-11 The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: "Come, go down to the potter's house, and there I will let you hear my words." So I went down to the potter's house, and there he was working at his wheel. The vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter's hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as seemed good to him.
Then the word of the Lord came to me: Can I not do with you, O house of Israel, just as this potter has done? says the Lord. Just like the clay in the potter's hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.
At one moment I may declare concerning a nation or a kingdom that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, but if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will change my mind about the disaster that I intended to bring on it.
And at another moment I may declare concerning a nation or a kingdom that I will build and plant it, but if it does evil in my sight, not listening to my voice, then I will change my mind about the good that I had intended to do to it.
Now, therefore, say to the people of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem: Thus says the Lord: Look, I am a potter shaping evil against you and devising a plan against you. Turn now, all of you, from your evil way, and amend your ways and your doings.
James Baldwin wrote in 1961,
"[To be Black] in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost all of the time." —James Baldwin
For a long time, that was a statement white Americans could read and nod at sympathetically without really understanding. But I think more of us non-melanated folk are starting to get it now. The incessant rage. The constant low-level hum of it. The way it sits in your chest when you read the news.
Historian Jemar Tisby put it this way:
"Authoritarianism isn't new in the United States. It's just newly visible to most white people." —Jamar Tisby
This month, ICE murdered Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Lynched them. There's no other word for it.
We're one year into this administration. Our president is threatening wars over Greenland like it's a board game. Jobs in this city feel precarious because so many of them are tied to a federal government that's being gutted. The news is relentless.
So let me ask you a question: Does the future feel inevitable to you?
What I've noticed in myself and in conversations with many of you is a creeping sense that the future is already written. That the kiln has fired. That the clay has hardened.
And despair starts to feel rational. Responsible, even. Like we're just being realistic about how bad things are.
But what I want to name this morning is that despair is its own form of determinism.
Despair says the future is sealed. Despair says there's nothing to be done. Despair lets me off the hook because if everything is already decided, then my actions don't really matter anyway.
Go Down
God tells Jeremiah "Go down to the potter's house, and there I will let you hear my words."
Not "I'm going to tell you something right now." Not "Here's a vision, deal with it."
Go somewhere. Position yourself. And then - there - I will speak.
There's actually quite a bit of direction language in this passage. Rise. Go down. Turn. Uproot. The Hebrew is full of movement.
What I want to point out is that Jeremiah had to go somewhere before he could hear anything.
I think about that for us - a congregation of activists, of people who are already rising and going and marching and donating and voting. You're already in motion. You're already doing the work.
But are we going to the places where we can hear?
Or just the places where we can act?
There's a rhythm implied here. Go down. Watch. Wait. Let the word form before you speak it.
The Potter's Wheel
So Jeremiah goes down. And he watches a potter at work.
And the vessel gets spoiled. The clay doesn't cooperate. It collapses or goes off-center or has an air bubble or something.
But…the potter doesn't throw it away. The potter reworks it into another vessel, as seemed good to him.
Now, the Hebrew here is doing a lot. The word for "making" - yatsar - is the same word used in Genesis when God forms the human from the dust of the ground. Good is the word tov, which is that repeated word in Genesis 1, and it was good. And it was good. And it was very good.
This is creation language. God the sculptor. God with hands in the clay.
And that word "spoiled" - it shows up in Genesis 6, right before the flood narrative, when God sees how corrupt the earth has become.
So Jeremiah is watching this potter, and he's seeing echoes of creation and fall and re-creation all happening on this wheel.
Conditional Prophecy
Then comes the theological bombshell.
God says: I might declare that I'm going to tear down a nation. But if that nation turns from its evil, I will change my mind.
And I might declare that I'm going to build up a nation. But if that nation does evil, I will change my mind.
This is not how we usually think about prophecy. We tend to think of prophecy as prediction - God sees the future and reports it. Done deal. Written in stone.
But that's not what's happening here. This is conditional prophecy. Written in wet clay.
This is God saying: the future is not sealed. The future responds to what you do.
I remember sitting in chapel at my Christian college, and a preacher said something like, "God has no Plan B."
But that's just obviously untrue. Of course God has Plan B. And C. And D. And double-Z. Because the whole biblical story is God responding and adapting and working with the mess that we make.
Adam and Eve eat the fruit - God adapts.
Israel wants a king - God adapts.
The people reject the prophets - God adapts. And ultimately, God adapts by becoming one of us.
God is not a deity who sets things in motion and walks away. They are a God who is in it with us, responding, reworking, refusing to give up on the clay.
Almighty vs. Omnipotent
Now, let's be careful here. Because this potter imagery can easily become a picture of God as cosmic puppeteer. God as the one with total control who can do whatever God wants.
But any potter or artist will tell you - clay has a mind of its own. You work with the clay. You respond to what it's doing. You can't just impose your will on it.
In theology, there's a difference between omnipotence and almightiness.
Omnipotence is an idea that comes from Greek philosophy - this idea of an unmoved mover who can do literally anything. Snap fingers, fix everything. It's interesting, but it is more influenced by Greek philosophy than by Hebrew Scripture.
Almightiness comes from watching what God actually does in Scripture - a God whose wisdom and power are adequate to the task God has undertaken. A God who is in all places, at all times, working to maximize well-being. But working with us, not instead of us.
The Hebrew and Greek words we translate as "almighty" in our Bibles don't actually mean omnipotent. They never did. Omnipotence - this idea that God can singlehandedly control any outcome, that God alone can be the cause of whatever God wants - that's Greek philosophy. That's Aristotle's "unmoved mover." It's not the Bible. Theologian Thomas Jay Oord has pointed out that if biblical writers believed God could control outcomes singlehandedly, they did a remarkably poor job of saying so. They never claim it.
What we do see in Scripture is a God who is the decisive cause among other causes - a God who works with creation, not despite it. A God who invites cooperation rather than overriding it.
And that's actually a more powerful God, not a weaker one. Anyone can win a chess game if they're playing both sides. The mastery is in working with an opponent who has real moves. The potter's skill isn't in forcing the clay - it's in responding to what the clay does, reworking what gets spoiled, shaping something beautiful out of the collaboration.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing from a Nazi prison, put it this way:
"God is weak and powerless in the world, and that is exactly the way, the only way, in which God can be with us and help us." —Dietrich Bonhoeffer
This is incarnation theology. God experienced helplessness. Hunger. Godforsakenness. Lived in a backwater country occupied by empire. Died at the hands of state violence.
And yet He didn't stop being God.
Jesus as Clay
We're still in the season of Epiphany - still sitting with the implications of the incarnation. God with us. Emmanuel.
Philippians 2 says that Jesus, being in the very nature of God, emptied himself. The Greek word is kenosis - a pouring out, an emptying.
The potter became clay.
--- ## Reverse Pinocchio
It's like the Pinocchio story, but inverted. In Pinocchio, the wooden boy becomes a real boy. But the incarnation is more like if Geppetto became a wooden figure - in order to show the wooden figures how to become real.
"For the Son of God became man so that we might become God." —St. Athanasius
And Jesus' hands were always in the dirt. When he stops the crowd from killing the woman caught in adultery, he writes in the dust. When he heals a blind man, he spits in the mud and makes clay and puts it on the man's eyes.
The potter knows what it is to be clay.
Wrath as Good News
Now, there's a harder edge to this passage that I don't want to skip over.
God says: "Look, I am a potter shaping evil against you and devising a plan against you."
That's uncomfortable. Many of us want a nice God. A safe God. A God who would never get angry.
But I'm not sure I'm committed to a wrathless God. I need God to be angry.
It's cliche in sermons, but hard not to quote The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. “Safe?” said Mr. Beaver. “Who said anything about safe? ’Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”
I need God to see the violence of our country - the deportations, the cruelty, the casual disregard for human life - and be angry about it.
Because here's the thing: God's wrath is good news if you're the one with a boot on your neck.
If you're being oppressed, the last thing you want to hear is that God is totes chill about it. That God is neutral. That God sees what's happening and shrugs.
No. I need a God who sees and is moved. Who gets riled up. Whose spirit then moves in God's people to act.
But we have to be careful here. Any church that claims to act on behalf of an angry God can go down some evil paths very quickly.
So our anger has to be shaped by Jesus. Cruciform. Self-giving.
To love my enemy means to work so that my enemy stops causing harm—because that harm hurts their victims and it also corrupts their own soul.
To bless those who curse me means I ultimately want for them not destruction, but repentance. I want them to turn, so that God can relent.
I have to do what I can to not be like Jonah, who was afraid of his enemy's repentance and God's relenting.
I have to watch my own heart. It's easy to cheer God on - "Yes, God, bring disaster on the evildoers!" It's harder to pray for the evildoers to repent. To want the spoiled clay reworked rather than thrown away.
The passage ends with an invitation: Turn now, all of you, from your evil way, and amend your ways and your doings.
There's parallelism here. God is shaping and devising. Israel is also doing evil. The question is: who will turn first?
The Clay is Still Wet
So here's where we land.
Despair says the kiln has fired. The clay has hardened. The future is sealed.
But the potter says: the clay is still wet. The wheel is still spinning. I am still at work.
The future is still open.
Intercession
I know this congregation. You're already doing the work. You're voting, protesting, donating, showing up. You don't need me to tell you to go do more.
What I want to offer is this: your spiritual life is not disconnected from your activism. Prayer is not the thing you do before the real work starts.
Prayer is work.
--- As Howard Thurman said,
> "The movement of the Spirit of God in the hearts of men and women often calls them to act against the spirit of their times or causes them to anticipate a spirit which is yet in the making. In a moment of dedication they are given wisdom and courage to dare a deed that challenges and to kindle a hope that inspires." —Howard Thurman ---
The theologian Walter Wink put it better than I can:
"History belongs to the intercessors who believe the future into being." —Walter Wink
Think about that. This isn't prayer as magic. It's not "pray hard enough and God will fix it." It's something deeper.
"The future belongs to whoever can envision in the manifold of its potentials a new and desirable possibility, which faith then fixes upon as inevitable.
"This is the politics of hope. Hope envisages its future and then acts as if that future is now irresistible, thus helping to create the reality for which it longs.
"The future is not closed. Intercession is spiritual defiance of what is, in the name of what God has promised." —Walter Wink
The Invitation
So what do we do with this?
Let me speak to you personally first. Some of you walked in here today carrying something heavy. A mistake you made. A relationship that fell apart. A path you thought your life would take that didn't pan out. And you've been treating that like hardened clay - like it's done, like there's no reworking it, like God has moved on to other projects.
But the wheel is still spinning. The potter's hands are still wet. God is not finished with you. Not because you've earned another chance, but because that's who this potter is. The spoiled vessel gets reworked into something else, something good. Your past is not your destiny. The kingdom of God - this reality where things are made new - is available to you today. Right now. Not after you get your act together. Now.
And I want to speak to us collectively. To those of us who live in this city, in this country, in this moment. It is very tempting to believe that America is a lost cause. That the clay has hardened. That the kiln has fired. That we're just watching the slow collapse of something that was maybe never as good as we thought it was.
I'm not here to tell you everything is fine. It's not. Jeremiah wasn't telling Israel everything was fine either. God was shaping consequences against them because of their evil. And our nation has its own evil to account for - the cruelty at our borders and in our cities, the worship of wealth, the neglect of the vulnerable.
But the passage doesn't end with judgment. It ends with an invitation. Turn. Amend your ways and your doings. Which means turning is still possible. Which means the future is not sealed. Which means the Church - capital C, scattered across this country in little communities like ours - has work to do. Not just protest work, not just donation work, but the interior work of intercession. Believing a different future into being. Refusing the seduction of despair.
Fannie Lou Hamer said it plainly from the middle of the Mississippi freedom struggle. She told a room full of church people, "You can pray until you faint, but unless you get up and try to do something, God is not going to put it in your lap." And she also said, "All we have to do is trust God and launch out into the deep."
Both things are true. Prayer and action. Trust and movement. Intercession and incarnation.
History belongs to the intercessors who believe the future into being.
The clay is still wet. The future is still open.
Amen.
Benediction Go from this place knowing that the clay is still wet. That the wheel is still spinning. That the potter's hands have not left the work. Go knowing that your past is not your destiny, that your nation is not beyond repair, that the future has not yet been written. Go as intercessors who believe the future into being, as people who refuse the seduction of despair, as communities who incarnate the presence of God wherever you are. And may the God who became clay to know what clay knows, the Christ who wrote in the dirt and healed with mud, the Spirit who hovers over chaos and brings forth life, go with you, work with you, and shape something beautiful out of all that seems ruined. The clay is still wet. The future is still open. Go in peace. Amen.
Cut Things
Ki Hine KaKhomer - sang at Yom Kippur
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_t0noOQQdME
