"Sing A New Song"
First Congregational Church - Wauwatosa, Wisconsin
Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost - September 9, 2007
Rev. Steven A. Peay, Ph.D.
[texts: Jeremiah 18:1-11/Luke 14:25-33]

Today we seek to sing a new song, but the Scriptures we’ve read don’t make a direct reference to music. It’s ok. I think I can make the case, because to sing a new song means that we have had to make a choice, make a change from what we’ve been singing before. Choices abound and each day we have to rise and make choices that not only affect ourselves, but others as well. We not only have to make choices about what we will do to make a living, what we will 'be' when we grow up, but now it seems we can also choose never to grow up. We also have to make choices about how we will live, what we will eat, wear, what music will go on our digital music storage device or our mobile phone, the list is virtually endless. And every one of those choices involves our making some sort of change, too.

Soren Kierkegaard, the existentialist philosopher, referred to choices overwhelming us as the source of two kinds of despair – which I am sure I have talked about before. The despair of possibility, he tells us, comes from the lack of necessity. And the despair of necessity comes from the lack of possibility. Those living in the two-thirds world may suffer from the second, but those of us in the United States, where life is a matter of choice and convenience, certainly can understand the first -- even when it comes to something as simple as shopping for groceries or for shoes, because we have so very many choices.

We live in a very different world than folks who lived before us; different than many of the great composers. As the contemporary keyboard artist and music scholar Stephen Halpern has pointed out:

When Mozart was composing at the end of the eighteenth century, the city of Vienna was so quiet that fire alarms could be given verbally, by a shouting watchman mounted on top of St. Stefan's Cathedral. In twentieth-century society, the noise level is such that it keeps knocking our bodies out of tune and out of their natural rhythms. This ever-increasing assault of sound upon our ears, minds, and bodies adds to the stress load of civilized beings trying to live in a highly complex environment.

While we can comment on the situation in our own time, we cannot think that this concern is one unique to us. Kierkegaard, for example, lived in the nineteenth century and we could find something about choice and change in every age. So, choice and change must be a part of the human condition.

Perhaps that is why the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah inviting him to the potter's shed so long ago? The story we read in the prophet is one of choice and change. The potter works with the clay, but the clay is not a passive agent. As clay is spun on the potter's wheel centrifugal forces are engaged and the clay pushes out from the center. The clay resists the potter's hands and if the potter isn't careful the clay can get away and spoil the creation. The imagery suggests to us that change is an essential part of life. It is, I believe a central characteristic of the divine-human relationship. John Henry Newman's wise words in the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine come to mind, "to live is to change; and to be perfect is to have changed often."

The potter seeks to make something both useful and beautiful and I think we can see examples of everyday items that manifest those qualities all around us. I used to enjoy watching the 'art nun,' Sister Wendy. She was always so exuberant, so obviously drawn into the art she was talking about. I remember once being particularly struck by her enraptured comments on a truly lovely piece of 18th century Japanese lacquer work. What is to us a piece of high art started life as a Sake bottle. What this says to me is that the most common, ordinary things of life, including us, are raised to the level of the beautiful and the good because of the imprint of the Creator's touch. As Matthew Fox writes in Original Blessing: A Primer of Creation Spirituality:

Humanity is not separate from the royal kingdom/queendom that the universe is. As science has made clear, humanity represents the most laborious and lengthy effort of the cosmos and therefore of Dabhar [the Creative Word of God] to grow ever more beautiful. In humanity for the first time in twenty billion years, the cosmos can reflect on itself. Here the awesome doctrine of our being royal persons finds a beautiful expression, one that moved Teilhard de Chardin to exclaim, "Being in the forefront of the cosmic wave of advance, the energy of humanity assumes an importance disproportionate to its apparently small size." [p. 101]

Clay, then, is an apt metaphor for the human person and human society. As long as clay is kept moist, it is workable. And the clay, though it is an inanimate object, through the forces of physics becomes an active agent in how it is formed. It is only when clay has been fired that it becomes rigid and breakable, rather than bendable. How then, following on this metaphor, do we keep ourselves in a formative state, so the Potter can guide us in our formation toward the useful and beautiful beings we were meant to be? We get a hint of what we must do in the writings of Irenaeus of Lyons, one of my favorites among the great teachers of the early church:

It is not you who shape God; it is God that shapes you. If then you are the work of God, await the hand of the Artist who does all things in due season. Offer the Potter your heart, soft and tractable, and keep the form in which the Artist has fashioned you. Let your clay be moist, lest you grow hard and lose the imprint of the Potter's fingers.

We allow our clay to remain moist by making choices that are consonant with the will of God. We remain open to formation by striving to become the other-centered, loving people God made us to be in the beginning -- mixing the metaphors again -- coming into harmony with God’s purpose and singing a new song.

However, because we are an active agent in our formation, we react to the Potter's fingers. Unlike clay, we are gifted with the freedom of will and the ability to make choices. Clay cannot choose to be anything other than what it is and must stay that way until it is formed into a vessel or some other piece; not so with us. We may have been made from the "dust of the ground," but we have had "Divine breath" blown into us and have become "living souls." We can choose to make ourselves into something other than what the Creator desires precisely because we have been given the freedom to choose.

When Jesus addresses the crowd that follows him he reminds them that they must make a choice in doing so. Jesus may choose those whom he wishes to be his disciples, but the disciple must first count the cost and realize that the demands that are to be made upon him or her will be real. Jesus uses some very difficult hyperbolic language here to make his point. While we can see the hyperbole in the call to "hate father, mother, wife and children," we can't get away from the importance of what Jesus is saying.

The one who chooses to follow Jesus must relativize everything else in life. Everything, including the human relationships that are most dear to us, becomes secondary to the love and service of God. We make a choice to follow and that involves our keeping faith with our action in the way we live, in the way we relate to other people, and in the attitudes we hold. Jesus' call to "take up the cross" is no small thing. For Jesus the cross is more than a metaphor for the difficulties one encounters in life. The cross is a total offering of self on behalf of others, it is loving without measure, and it is complete devotion to God. In short, it is the way of discipleship and it tells us that half-hearted discipleship isn't. The follower of Christ is not one who seeks the lowest common denominator or the path of least resistance.

So, back to the question of the clay, how do we become better followers, better singers of a new song?

Those who choose to follow Jesus are in a constant process of formation -- we are always becoming what we are to be. As the potter works on the clay reforming it over and over again until it is perfectly useful and beautiful, so does God work on each of us. So long as we keep ourselves moist -- and we do that by means of study, of prayer, and of active service -- God can turn us into something useful and beautiful. We become better followers by everyday opening ourselves to formation, realizing that God is far from finished with us, and by seeing each day as an opportunity for growth, for change, for improvement. We are possessed with the freedom of conscience, but we are called upon to form that conscience and to use it in the right way. To go back to our musical example, someone once asked Johann Sebastian Bach to divulge the secret to his genius as a composer. He responded, “Ceaseless work, analysis, reflection, writing much, endless self-correction, that is my secret.”

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in his Letter to a Young Poet, "People have (with the help of conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult." What he wrote is true for the Christian. Our choices are not the easy ones, but the difficult. Over the years those who have chosen to follow Christ in the Congregational Way have treasured this freedom of conscience, this matter of choice. For us the Way cannot be the one of least resistance, but the freely chosen one of Covenant relationship. It's comes down to choosing to "strive to walk in the ways of Jesus Christ as we know them now or may come to know them." It is singing the new song that the Lord has put into our hearts and not succumbing to the noise of the world around us, with all of the demands it makes upon us.

As we begin another program year together I would invite you to reflect on the artwork you are, the new song you sing. Are our lives marked by the touch of the Creator’s hand? Do our thoughts, our actions, our choices and our changes reflect God’s harmony? Take a moment as the anthem is being sung, let the music wash over you, and as it does read the covenant of this church. In those simple straightforward lines there is a a call to discipleship with its cost and its joy. At the close of the service when we stand to sing, "Change My Heart, O God . . . Make me more like You. . ." let it be an act of covenant renewal for each one of us here today, member of the church or not. I invite you to do this; you are free not to do so. It's a matter of choice, a matter of entering into growth and change, of being formed by the Potter's hands or by our own -- a matter of choice to sing a new song, to live a new life.