The sermon today was about that potter in Jeremiah. The takeaway: God is deeply involved in our lives. Forming us into something worthwhile is a messy business. God pushes us, smashes us. Molding requires pressure, and gets mud all over God’s hands. If we resist God, we end up useless paperweights. But if we allow ourselves to be changed, we can be shaped into something useful, and then maybe covered in a beautiful glaze. But if we resist, if we turn from what God is trying to make us, eventually, God will give up. Useless paperweights we will be. Forever.

It’s true! Spiritual immaturity is useless. You can tell the people who refuse to become what God is trying to make them into. They aren’t much use. Is God asking you to grow up? Is God asking you to surrender your will in favor of his? Be mindful of the ways God is pushing you. He is trying to make you into something. And your resistance is more dangerous to your soul than you might think. After all, you are either with God or not. There is no in-between. and being with God means doing what God asks. Loving the people in your life. Being a positive contributor to your community. Changing your priorities in response to God’s pushing and molding. If you don’t go along with God, you can say all you like about loving God, but you aren’t doing it.

A joke we’ve all heard:

There’s a flood. A man is watching the water rise on his street and a truck pulls up to offer him a ride away from the rising water. He refuses the help, insisting, “God will save me!” The driver pleads with him but eventually drives off without him. The water rises higher and the man has taken refuge in his home. A motorboat comes up along the now flooded street and offers to rescue him. The man refuses, insisting again that God will save him instead. The rescuers in the boat plead with him but eventually speed off to help others. The water rises higher and the man now stands on his roof! A helicopter approaches and tells him he needs to climb in or he’ll drown. The man refuses to be rescued, insisting still that God will save him. The helicopter leaves him on the roof, the water continues to rise, and the man drowns. He goes to heaven and meets God. He says, “God! Why didn’t you save me? I had faith that you would save me!” God sighs and replies, “I sent you a truck, I sent you a boat, I sent you a helicopter…”

This joke is a tragedy. (Or, better said, a tragicomedy, as we are meant to laugh at the tragic outcome.) In jokes, everyone goes to heaven to talk with God, so the end isn’t that bad. In real life, although the calculus of salvation is complicated, this man’s failure to see and respond to the hand of God is nothing more or less than sin, refusal of God’s will, the opposite of having a relationship with God, and therefore real tragedy. (Remember, within the tiny closed universe of the joke, God’s will was that he escape the flood and live.) In the end, to paraphrase C. S. Lewis, God says to the man, “Thy will be done.”

I am told that Dante wanted to call his Divine Comedy only the Comedy, without the modifier, because there is only one Comedy: God’s story of salvation. And we are all either part of that Comedy, or we are nothing. That “nothing” is tragedy: we destroy ourselves by stepping outside of God’s Comedy, by refusing God’s truth and help. They say the doors to Hell are locked from the inside. Every one of the characters in C. S. Lewis’s Great Divorce who refuses Heaven is a tragic character.

I think this means we should pay close attention to the genre of tragedy and learn to recognize it in our real lives. Where we see tragedy, we see perdition itself.

What is Tragedy? Sometimes the tragic character is aware of the tragedy in some way and may not be morally culpable, as in Oedipus. But more often, maybe, the tragic character has found a way to ignore all the instructive information he has been given. The audience can see that he is going to regret his decision, but the tragic character has some strange, blind dedication to some misguided principle: his own power, his own happiness. Creon is undone by his unbending allegiance to his former decision, an edict which mandates the death of the princess Antigone as punishment for burying the body of her brother (who died while leading a rebellion). Creon refuses to re-evaluate his decision because he doesn’t want to compromise the legitimacy of an already pronounced edict. He trusts his own wisdom, rationalizing away all the many arguments he hears from his advisers, who press the issue from three different directions. Antigone explains that her actions were the will of the gods, objectively good and honorable, and a higher law than Creon’s edict. His son tells him it would be a pragmatic administrative decision to pardon her and keep peace in his city. His seer tries to show him how his decision will bring him personal harm. But Creon seems impervious to each line of reasoning. In the end, he has arranged his own undoing, and he has worked evil in the lives of others.

The joke is about recognizing what we’ve been given and responding correctly.

The principle applies to nearly every aspect of the Christian life. Grace is precisely that: a gift from God that we have to accept. A boat or helicopter that we have to recognize and climb into. God offers us good things! When we realize that and accept them, we are part of the Comedy! When we don’t, we are our own little tragedy.

Consider what God sent to Creon: He sent Antigone, He sent Creon’s son, He sent the seer. God did all He could short of bypassing free will. Then it was Creon’s job to get into the helicopter.

The Bible tells us that God gives us second chances, and even third chances, to do what is right. But He does not give infinite chances. I think this is expressed beautifully and painfully in the story Jeremiah tells about a potter. This potter fashions his clay into jars and other beautiful shapes, but the clay is flawed and breaks as he shapes it. The potter smashes it down and starts over. (The clay is a tragic character. The potter is God. The clay is Israel, and all of us, intended by God for some beautiful purpose that we frustrate by our sin.) The next scene is God telling Jeremiah to buy a finished, fired pot and take it to the gate and smash it in front of the city leadership. It is God’s way of saying, “No more chances.” The pot has been fired. If it breaks now, the potter cannot just re-work it. Endgame. It’s over.