Well, ok, a couple weeks behind ...

It's been quite busy, as more energy and interest builds in our St. Paul's Community, our ideas for a day community center for people who have few other places to go during the day. We'll collaborate with local friends, agencies, businesses, churches, to open our parish hall to people in need. Lots to do -- the need is great.
A terrific day on Pleasant Street, today! Tony, from the clothing store, and Fred, from the laundromat, organized dozens of teens and adults to pluck weeks and sweep trash from the sidewalks. They fed everyone with a picnic on our front lawn. Nice, indeed, to participate in a community ritual of hope and reconstruction.
What would Jesus do in such a time and place? No doubt pick up the rake and join in.
There probably was a time when Pleasant Street was always clean and tidy -- when it was Pleasant, indeed -- perhaps even a green and pleasant land. Some people would say, it's just chaos here now, a mess, why bother to clean it up today? "They" will just trash it tomorrow.
What would Jesus do? I don't think he'd give up on Pleasant Street; I think he'd pitch in.

God doesn't give up on us, any of us. Read on ...

Proper 18 C 9-9-2007 St. Paul’s Jeremiah 18:1-11

Psalm 139 Philemon 1-21 Luke 14: 25-33

When I was growing up, our neighbor was a potter. He was a very fine potter, taught in an art school, and made wonderful sculptures. But in order to pay the bills, to feed a family of four children and to fix up an old farmhouse with a barn for a studio, he had to make these, these blue bowls. He made hundreds of them, and they are lovely. They are smooth, perfect, whole, and the blue glaze he developed himself. I think these blue bowls, as beautiful as they are, became a burden to him. Now that he is retired, I’m pretty sure he doesn’t make blue bowls anymore.

We children were welcome to visit Henry in his studio. Sometimes he would give us clay to play with, or we could look at the racks of pots waiting to be fired in the silo kiln, or watch them be pulled out, finished, put on racks to cool. One day one pot – a small vase – came out not a perfect blue but a mottled brown and green – an unnatural color, really. Henry was ready to throw it out. Wait, I said. Can I have it? It was shaped perfectly; it was only the color that was wrong. Henry looked at his wife. An artist of his skill would of course smash any pots not up to his standards, especially pots that were supposed to be fired in his signature blue glaze, pots that were the livelihood for his family. Henry looked at the pot. His wife looked at me, and then said, “Oh, come on, Hank. Let her have it.” It’s a treasure of mine, I love the mottled color, the bumpy surface. He couldn’t sell it. He would have destroyed it, but it is quite fine and unusual indeed.

The image of the potter, from the prophet Jeremiah, is a familiar one. “You are the potter,” the Christian crooners sing, “I am the clay.” The lesson Jeremiah took from his visit to the potter’s studio was also one of an imperfect creation, a flawed pot in the potter’s hands, which he nonetheless reshaped into something pleasing and beautiful. This flawed pot, for Jeremiah, was the people of Israel, who had wandered from God – who had even done evil. They were so flawed, as Jeremiah saw it, that God had every reason to smash them to the ground. But like the patient potter, God will try again. God will implore the people of Israel to try again. God will even threaten them with destruction. But what God really wants is for them to come back. The prophet Jeremiah might mention a pot like this thrown on a potter’s wheel, but what he is really talking about is, about our relationship with God, and how God yearns for us and has created us as perfectly, as minutely, as carefully, as this potter created this bowl.

It’s a busy world, 2007. How do we find God, this God whom Jeremiah says is looking for us? Is God there among the hundreds of cable TV channels at our disposal? Does God hang among the racks of dresses at Macy’s? Is God a guest at our weekend picnics, or jumping in the waves at the beach? We who come to church every Sunday might think we have it all figured out: God is locked up here, waiting for us. Well, yes, God is here, and we do meet God – in the bread and wine, in the fellowship at coffee hour, with each other, serving lunch at St. Paul’s Table.

Here, God rules. Here is our Sabbath place, the place where we find companionship. As one wise rabbi describes this Sabbath place, "There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control, but to share."[1] It is a place where we can listen to hard lessons, like today’s lesson from Luke, where Jesus tells us to leave our families to follow him – where Jesus tells us to lay a solid foundation to our work – where Jesus advises us not to enter into a war we cannot win. We don’t have the absolute answers to the questions those stories pose, but like the potter we can take those bits of clay and work them into something pleasing, something beautiful, something meaningful, something we can share.

Life is full of tough questions like the ones we read in today’s gospel, and all of us yearn for some time to stop and think and figure things out – we yearn for some people with whom to share our struggles, and we would like a little refreshment and nourishment along the way. We are a tiny group, but we have kind of figured out how to do those things for ourselves, here and in our relationships with each other.

But what about people who have not yet stumbled across our threshold? They are still looking for something meaningful, for community, for refreshment, for something – the word, the gesture, the music – that will change their lives.

How many of you have been to Starbucks?

Starbucks was the idea of one man who visited Italy and realized that coffee houses there were not just for getting coffee.[2] They were, as he said, the “third place” in people’s lives, between work and home, a place where people lingered, where they met other people. He found that these places were attractive, welcoming, inviting. “Everything matters,” Starbucks would say. Here’s your coffee, but here’s also a comfy chair to sit in while you drink it, and here’s today’s paper, and some nice music, and someone across the table you can have a conversation with. Location matters for Starbucks. They are located at the busy places in town, where many people’s paths cross; not isolated but central, easy to find, open.

If the point was just coffee, well, you could go anywhere for coffee, any hole in the wall, any lunch counter, even make it at home, alone. But Starbucks took that lump of clay, that ordinary, kind of misshapen thing, and reformed it into something pleasant -- maybe not as beautiful as this blue bowl, but certainly into something that gives people a respite in their busy lives.

God is the potter; we are the clay. How is God re-forming and re-shaping our lives, re-forming us into disciples and followers of Jesus? Where is your lump of clay, and what might your blue bowl look like? How is God re-forming and re-shaping our life as a community? If we open our doors even more, invite more people in to this place of respite and community, how will it change us? What shape will we be in when God has reformed our clay?

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[1] Abraham Joshua Heschel, TheSabbath

[2] "Cafes of community: the Starbucks principle" by Billy Coburn. Strategic Adult Ministries Journal, (Vol 18, No 5, Issue 145). Pages 8-9.