Sunday Sermon
A Pot and a Crowd
September 5, 2010 Jeremiah 18: 1-12 Luke 14: 25-33
Rev. Catherine Purves
A week ago on Saturday Andrew and I were making the long eleven hour drive from where we were vacationing off the southern coast of North Carolina back to Pittsburgh. We were getting out right before hurricane Earl started to wreak havoc with the weather. At the same time, thousands of people were gathering in Washington D.C. for two separate rallies. It was like dueling crowds of political supporters on the left and on the right, each trying to make their own statement on that hot summer Saturday. The competition for visible crowd support had begun much earlier, and we had been following it on the news while we were on vacation. Which side would get the bigger crowd? And what would that mean?
Big crowds were also mentioned in our Scripture reading from Luke. Did you notice? It was in the first verse. “Now large crowds were traveling with him (that is, Jesus).” Isn’t that great? Jesus was getting so much support. We all know the stories of the 5,000 and the 4,000 people who were fed by Jesus. And there are other stories of crowds trying to keep up with him as he crisscrossed the Sea of Galilee in his perpetual wanderings from one village to another. Then there was the story of the men who lowered their friend through a roof so that Jesus could heal him, because there were too many people filling the house and the streets for them to get near him. There were always crowds, and you’d think that Jesus would be glad about that, since more people could then hear the good news and then spread the good news.
But in our text Jesus turns on the crowds, and with a ferocious harshness apparently tries to drive them away. Or at least, he raises the bar on discipleship so high that most would want to re-think the cost of becoming a follower of this particular rabbi. The crowds really seemed to anger Jesus. Why would that be? And what were those two strange little parables about building a tower and waging a war - what were they about? His final pronouncement was fairly clear and straightforward: “So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.” But what does that mean for us as we sit here in our small crowd of would-be disciples?
It is a puzzling text. But I do think that the key is in the whole notion of crowds and what they tend to represent. Crowds, I think, are always suspect. They congregate for a multitude of reasons. After the miraculous feedings, when the crowds continued to try to keep up with Jesus, he basically accused them of only looking for another free meal. Jesus repeatedly told the crowds that they didn’t understand his message. And that unnerving saying of his was repeated again and again as he spoke to the crowds: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”
Crowds gathered in Washington D.C. last Saturday and it was a beautiful summer day. There were some rousing speeches. There was food and fellowship. Everyone felt righteousness - whether they were from the right wing or the left. God was mentioned a lot. And everyone in those crowds had a raring good time. They made the news. No one was quite sure how many people turned out, but the photos were really impressive. Somehow, both groups thought that God was on their side, and they weren’t shy about claiming that. What’s wrong with this picture? And what would Jesus have had to say to those crowds do you think? Would he have been as harsh and as demanding as he was with the crowds that followed him? Would he have issued a similar warning? I think he would.
There are two sorts of people who frequent crowds, and they both need to hear a wake-up call of the sort that Jesus delivered. There are the hangers-on who are there for the free food and the spectacle. And there are the true-believers who never question their own set-in-concrete points of view. Both of these types of people were in the crowds that followed Jesus, and both sorts were in the crowds that gathered in Washington last Saturday. It could be that there are hangers-on and true-believers here in our small worshiping crowd this morning.
First, let’s consider the hangers-on. To these folks - the curious for whom the notion of a crowd was magnetic, and who would be easily drawn to a charismatic leader who offered hope or a hand-out - to these folks Jesus said, “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. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.” There was definite shock-value in that pronouncement.
Jesus was saying: Everyone who has casually joined this crowd, thinking that this was a day-outing with a possible picnic thrown in, you need to think again. Jesus didn’t want hangers-on or casual Christians. Jesus wanted lives, and he wanted to change lives, to re-mold people, to teach them and to confront them with God Almighty in his own person, so that nothing would ever be the same again, and so that they would be transformed in body, mind, and spirit. Anyone in that crowd (or any crowd) who didn’t want that, might just as well go home.
And how about those other folks, the true-believers? Compared to the casual hangers-on, these people are intense. They are dedicated, they are sure that they have the truth, and that they have God all figured out. They claim to know what God thinks, who God likes, what God will do. They believe that God belongs to them and to their nation. They are unteachable and thoroughly self-righteous. Jesus encountered plenty of these true-believers, and it is evident that they were there in crowds in Washington last week too.
The true-believers are no more prepared to hear the commanding word of Jesus than were the hangers-on. Their view is too narrow and too self-centered. They are certainly not ready to give up self in order to call themselves Christian. They want to mold Christianity to fit their self-important notion of who they are and their personal ideas about how the world should work. To these true-believers Jesus also says, you must count the cost, you must give up everything to be my disciple.
Jesus knew that all true-believers have visions of building monuments and waging wars; they want to be leaders, not followers. But they will not succeed, and Jesus warns them of that in his two little parables about the tower-builder and the king waging war. Only those who are willing to let go of their most precious possessions can be followers of Jesus. In the case of the true-believers, that means that they need to let go of their narrow, self-serving ideas, their dreams of personal glory, their desire for conquests and monuments, their small view of God who they claim as their own possession and who they insist will work with them to make their nation great.
I’ve talked a lot about crowds in this sermon. But how does this relate to the potter and the clay that we read about in the book of Jeremiah? The prophet Jeremiah had his own run-ins with crowds, and, like Jesus, he had to deal with those same two types of people. The hangers-on didn’t take seriously what he had to say about repentance; they didn’t want to change. And the true-believers acted as if God was Israel’s possession (rather than the other way around), and they were doing everything they could to keep Jeremiah from proclaiming his message of divine judgment.
Jesus used words to try to shock the crowds who followed him, but Jeremiah was given a visual image to convey God’s message of judgment to the crowds. In the potter’s house, Jeremiah watched as the potter made and then re-made a pot. The message from God was clearly stated. The nation of Israel, and all nations and peoples, are like clay in God’s hands. God can form and re-form them. As God declared to Jeremiah, “At any one moment I may declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it…And at another moment I may declare concerning a nation or a kingdom that I will build and plant it.” The nation does not own God. God owns the nation. And God’s interest is not limited to the molding and re-shaping of just one nation. This makes God too small.
Both the hangers-on and the true-believers thought that they had God on their side - the hangers-on never questioned it and the true-believers never doubted it. What they didn’t understand was that the power and the overarching purposes of God were bigger and more demanding of them than they ever imagined. This was also Jesus’ message. So, Jeremiah delivered the word that had been given to him, “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.” “Look, I am a potter…”
But what did that crowd of hangers-on and true-believers do? Were they moved by the prophet’s words? Did they humble themselves before God? Did they let go of their precious ideas and prejudices, their small-minded and self-aggrandizing views? Jeremiah records their response. “It is no use!” they proclaimed, “We will follow our own plans, and each of us will act according to the stubbornness of our evil will.”
This is the danger of crowds, in Jeremiah’s day, in Jesus’ day, and in our own day. But we have heard now the divine potter’s message to us, and we have heard Jesus’ call to true and costly discipleship. May God help us to avoid the mistakes of the hangers-on and the true-believers.
