Year C

Luke 14:25-33

The Very Rev. Denise Vaughn

God’s Shaping & Molding of Disciples

Have you ever had the opportunity to work with clay? If you have, you know that it can be a lot of fun but also frustrating if you are trying to make something look perfect using your bare hands. Clay is a bit easier to work with if you are using a potter’s wheel but it still takes skill and practice. The first potter’s wheel was invented sometime between 6,000 and 4,000 BC in Mesopotamia and other than the invention of the Kiln and electricity, the equipment hasn’t really changed much in the past 2,500 years. Pottery is one of the most durable forms of art and when a person makes a piece of pottery, they’re likely to consider it’s lasting quality and what it means to have something made and formed by their own hands.

Around 25 year ago, in my home town, the local Habitat for Humanity held a community fundraiser called Souper Bowl. They partnered with a local church and invited the community to come mold out of clay a soup bowl that would eventually be sold as a fundraiser. Both my daughter and I had great fun making our bowls. After we finished molding the clay, we put our initials on the bottom, left the bowls at the church so they could be fired in a kiln and returned later to paint them. There were at the very least, several hundred of these beautiful bowls in all shapes and sizes, painted in all different colors, made by many different hands, laid out on the tables ready to be purchased and taken home. The night of the fundraiser, you paid $10 to choose a bowl; and $10 for a bowl of soup. I didn’t choose the bowl I made but one made by someone else’s hands. It was a huge success and made a good amount of money to help build affordable housing in Charlotte County.

Just like the clay that was shaped into a useable bowl, our lives are subject to being shaped by the hands of forces within and without, constructive and destructive, and we can freely choose whether God the master potter is one of them to be able to use us. We like to think we are the shapers and makers of our souls, but we are increasingly taking our cues from voices that surround us, sometimes ignoring our inner voice. The question for us, as it was for the Israelites, is whether we will allow God’s voice and hands to shape and mold our lives. This image of God as like the potter, in one of the best-known passages in Jeremiah, shaping and forming the clay in his hands, helps us to understand better what God is doing and what our response ought to be.

This image reminds us that God is at work on our world and on us and is there anything that is not in need of being shaped for the better it can seem these days? While this image from Jeremiah gives us a helpful insight into God’s actions in the lives of the Israelites, and of course into our lives as well, it does not take into account our human freedom, our response to God’s actions. A key theme in the readings today is not that God shapes passive creatures. Rather, it is our response to God’s shaping and forming through the use of our freedom to make choices. In fact, God shapes us through the gift of freedom entrusted to us, according to God’s will for us. Yet, all our choices are not necessarily a reflection of the divine potter’s design for us and this is the reason that Jeremiah speaks of a potter breaking clay that has been deformed. 

Today’s readings help to direct our freedom, our choices, toward its proper end, toward a relationship with God through discipleship in Christ. We become deformed pieces of clay needing to be reshaped when our choices get in the way of being genuine followers of Jesus Christ. Today In our gospel, Jesus speaks to the challenges that family might pose to following Christ. Let’s admit it. Jesus made some strange comments and this is one of them today. Must we hate our mother and father in order to choose Christ for our lives? Aren’t we supposed to promote family values? In my opinion, we can only make sense of this passage if we take his words seriously but not literally. 

Luke tells us that Jesus is on the way to Jerusalem with a large group of supporters accompanying him. We know he is on his way to the cross but his followers have not yet grasped the significance of this journey. These are folks enthusiastic about this nice religious procession, but have given little thought to the cost of being followers of Jesus. Jesus will pay the ultimate cost for his ministry but there will also be a cost to his followers. Several of the disciples will be martyred and many of the others will be arrested, beaten and finally put to death just for being followers. For the next couple centuries, many Christians will worship in secret simply to avoid arrest and death.

Jesus tells his followers that day that they must give serious thought to their walk with God. They must count the cost of faith because that cost, Jesus insists is very high. “So therefore, he says, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.” Following Christ means his followers are to commit themselves totally to a relationship with him that will shape their lives not just on Sundays but through all the days and all the years that lie ahead. We are invited to a lifelong connection through the working of the Holy Spirit that will affect our shaping at the deepest level of our being. All our relationships, whether with people or possessions, all our plans, causes, and interests are meant to be shaped by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The good news is that God does not give up on us because this is not easy but continues to work out the flaws and continues to shape us into the image of God’s Son. No one seemed to recognize this more than Paul who was not only shaped by God, the divine potter, into the image of his Son but recognized God’s shaping at work in a runaway slave willing to return to his master. Paul the potter had completed his work, and now he invites Philemon to witness what God has achieved through him. Paul invites Philemon to see Onesimus “no longer as a slave but more than a slave as a dearly loved brother.  Philemon and Onesimus have to learn to be brothers, because Paul loves them both but more importantly so does God.  

We don’t know if Philemon really managed to love Onesimus like a brother but the early Church commentators gave this story a happy ending, by suggesting that this Onesimus later became Bishop of Ephesus. The whole of Paul’s letter witnesses to his effort to shape a forgiving and reconciling Christian community. By allowing himself to be shaped by God, he is indeed enslaved to Christ and uses his freedom by placing himself wholly at the service of the gospel. Freely choosing Christ for our lives will mean freely choosing the cross that will come our way. It will mean we are to be shaped into a forgiving and reconciling community. The fact of the matter is that being a follower of Christ is costly, very costly. We have to be willing to allow God, the divine potter, to continue breaking and shaping us into the image of God’s Son.

A song that I have often sung on a Cursillo weekends titled ‘Have Thine Own Way, Lord! and one of my favorites that sums up our lessons today….