Sermon Transcript:
As a preacher, one of the things I watch for is the temptation to smooth out scripture’s rough edges, to skip over the hard and harsh parts. Our faith story this morning and its central image is a favourite of many—God as the potter. It’s a beautiful metaphor to be sure, to see God shaping us with gentle hands even as we allow ourselves to be shaped. But what did you make of the part after that?
“House of Israel, can I not do to you what this potter does? — it is YHWH who speaks. Indeed, like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand, house of Israel. At any moment I may announce that a nation or a dominion is to be uprooted, pulled down or destroyed… ‘Thus says YHWH: Beware! I am preparing a disaster for you and devising a plan against you. Turn away from your evil life, each one of you, give up your evil ways, amend your conduct.’1
Now that’s harsh stuff: the potter doesn’t just shape and create; the potter destroys the object that does not take the form they want it to take.
By the time Jeremiah makes his entry into the story of Israel, his people have been settled in the Promised Land a long time and they think that nothing will change that; after all, God promised and God delivered. Why should that change? Well you see they have forgotten that the land depended on the keeping of a covenant, that God would be their God and they would be God’s people.2 Lately, the story goes, they haven’t been God’s people: Israel has been worshipping other gods and forgotten what their God has done for them.3 It’s Jeremiah’s job to warn them of the consequences. Taken at face value, this scripture is a prophecy of what is to come if Israel doesn’t change. As such, it comes across as harsh—realistic in the sense that actions have consequences, but harsh—a re-enforcement of the image we have of that “Old Testament God”. This is where context and scholarship matters.
Most biblical scholars agree the evolution of what became the book of Jeremiah involved some process of oral tradition (stories handed down from generation to generation), one or more persons writing the stories down and then an editor bringing the different pieces of the story together and deciding what to include, what not to include, and in what order to put things. The current scholarship4 suggests that the Hebrew Scriptures began to take final form while the people of Israel were in Babylonian exile, the event about which Jeremiah warns his people. This makes sense to me: when do you begin writing stories down? You begin writing stories down when you fear they may be lost. Like when you begin to write or record the stories of your parents or grandparents. With Jerusalem and the temple destroyed, the priesthood and the people deported, the loss of the stories would have been a very real fear.
So, bizarrely, this seems to be a prophecy about something that’s already happened. How does this make sense? Biblical scholars believe originally this scripture wasn’t so much a prophecy as an explanation. As a story that looks back and explains what happened, it begins to release a sense of hope from its words: exile is not proof of God’s absence but rather proof of God’s presence. God cares about Israel and won’t let her people get away with breaking the covenant. That’s why the land was lost. It was the people who walked away from God, not God who walked away from the people.5 It’s not so much a prophecy veiled as a threat but an explanation of what happened and a path forward. Because if it’s the people who walked away from God then the people can decide to walk back towards God. The deeper message of this story from the perspective of a people already in exile is that God is in this tragedy. Israel just needs to listen and pay attention; even in exile, faith brings opportunities. Israel has a choice as to how it will confront its future in exile: will they let God’s artistry form them or will they allow other forces to misshapen them?
Faith is always a choice: who or what will shape us? Will we surrender to love, compassion, self-giving, humility and allow ourselves to become supple and malleable in God’s hands? Will we let ourselves be misshapen by the forces of fear and despair?
I don’t know about you, but especially now this feel like a time of exile; humans are getting farther away from God and God’s purpose, which is love. Increasingly I read and see people expressing that technology, the climate crisis, polarization, inequality and authoritarianism are making them feel as if they are in a strange and unknown land. For example, I couldn’t read this scripture without the horrors of what’s happening in Palestine infusing Jeremiah’s words. It seems unbelievable that a people who are direct descendants of the Holocaust would be complicit in another genocide. Guy Shalev, director of Physicians for Human Rights-Israel shared this recently: “As the grandson of a Holocaust survivor, it’s very painful for me to be reaching this conclusion…But after growing up in a society where the Holocaust was so important, it demands some kind of responsibility.”6 It’s disorienting what’s happening—where are we?
When we look at Jeremiah’s words today as an explanation rather than a prophecy it gives us some guidance for how to be in exile. Exile is a time of re-evaluation. Exile is a time to ask, “How did we arrive in this strange, unknown and frightening land?” Some Israelis and non-Israeli Jews are asking those questions. The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem in a recent report said, “Genocide is usually the result of a gradual development, over years, of conditions in which a repressive and discriminatory regime turns genocidal. Decades of occupation, oppression and apartheid have produced deep dehumanization of Palestinians, who have come to be viewed by Israelis as a threat and as a problem to be ‘solved.'”7 In this explanation and re-evaluation of how Israel got here is an opportunity to re-trace steps, to walk back toward God and away from exile, to choose faith over fear and despair and to ask the central question, “what does love look in the midst of all this?” Perhaps it begins by treating Palestinians as something other than a problem to be solved. I don’t know, but the answers that lead us back home, out of exile are those which lead us out of fear into hope, lead us out of isolation into community, lead us away from our egos into humility.
Jeremiah’s story of God as the potter is not the story of a harsh, megalomaniacal god. It’s a story about our own agency in choosing the forces that will shape us. In the end, will we be a work of art, a reflection of the artist’s hands and heart? Will we be shaped, imprinted by the Holy artist’s vision of love and service? Faith leads out of exile; faith leads us home into the potter’s hands.
Rev. Joe Gaspar
1 Jeremiah 18: 6-7a, 11b. The Inclusive Bible.
2 Exodus 6: 7 & Jeremiah 7: 23.
3 Anna Grant-Henderson, http://otl.unitingchurch.org.au/index.php?page=jeremiah-18-1-11.
4 As outlined in this blog post, http://theologica.ning.com/profiles/blogs/final-form-of-the-old.
5 Walter Breuggemann, The Land: Place as Gift, Promise, and Challenge in Biblical Faith, Fortress Press, Philadelphia, 1977, 109-114.
6 Sam Mednick, Two Israeli rights groups say their country is committing genocide in Gaza, “Los Angeles Times”, July 28, 2025,
latimes.com/world-nation/story/2025-07-28/two-israeli-rights-groups-say-their-country-is-committing-genocide-in-gaza
7 B’Tselem, Our Genocide, July 2025, p. 5, https://www.btselem.org/sites/default/files/publications/202507_our_genocide_eng.pdf