Growing Up - Jeremiah 18:1-6

2022 Bavin House Chapel Sermon

What do you want to be when you grow up?

It’s a question that’s filled with so much anticipation and joy, and probably just a bit of anxiety as well. When we’re young we have so many ways in which we can answer that question and as we get older that answer becomes a little narrower.

Yet that answer is always changing. The answer we give when we’re six is no doubt very different to the answer we give when were sixteen. And hopefully, it’s a question we keep asking ourselves as we move through adulthood; always anticipating growing up, never feeling like we’ve completely grown up.

I love this theme of growth for our Chapel Service tonight. As I reflected on this theme it caused me to think about my own growing up and my journey through life thus far.

When I was a very young child, I loved the writings of A.A. Milne. Of course, his most famous writings were the stories of Winnie the Pooh in the Hundred Acre Wood. But for me, my favourite were his collections of poems in two books called ‘When We Were Very Young’ and ‘Now We are Six’. I was given the first volume when I was very young, on my second birthday, and remember feeling very grown up when I was gifted the second volume when I turned six. I loved pouring over the beautiful illustrations, by E.H. Shepherd, and reading the poems with my parents.

As I was reflecting on this Sermon over the weekend, I was at my family home and found my old copies of those books on the family bookshelf. Flicking through them I came to the last poem in ‘Now We are Six’. It’s titled ‘The End’. It talks of Christopher Robin reflecting on his six years of life and finishes with these lines.

‘But now I am Six, I’m as clever as clever.

So I think I’ll be six now for ever and ever.’

I love the certainty of that. That at the age of six you feel really grown up and that you’re set for life. I remember feeling that way when I was six.

Yet as we reflect back on our life we know that we’re constantly changing and evolving as a person. We’re constantly growing and changing, whether we’re nine or ninety.

When I was six and asked the question ‘what do you want to be when you grow up’, I’d answer the question ‘I want to be a doctor’ because that sounded like an important, good job to do. But I was never really interested in science or medicine.

When I was in Year 12, I thought I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I was pretty sure that I’d have ‘grown up’ in the next year by the time I left school. I wanted to be an archaeologist. I loved History and wanted to study it and work in that field. But the realities of an Ancient History degree at Uni was very different to what I thought. And I soon realised that being an archaeologist wasn’t anything like Indiana Jones made it out to be. So instead, after nine years and four changes in degrees, I became a History teacher.

I thought by that point I had a good idea of what I wanted to be when I grew up, but God had different ideas. Along that journey to become a History teacher I also felt a call to ministry and a desire to work in the Church. As so along side to my teacher training I worked in various Church roles and trained as a Pastor in the Uniting Church.

Time and time again, I was reminded that I was never completely grown up but rather in a continual process of growing.

Often as I reflected on my journey to this point and discerned what I wanted to do with my life I came back to the writings of the prophet Jeremiah in the Old Testament of the Bible. Jeremiah was someone chosen by God to deliver God’s message to God’s people. Jeremiah lived in a difficult time for the Jewish people when they faced Exile in Babylon and were removed from their homeland of Israel. Through that period God asked Jeremiah to deliver God’s message, often a message that was difficult or sad. Jeremiah struggled with his role and what God wanted him to do.

Yet, throughout the book of Jeremiah we get a picture of God as ever-present and ever supportive. Even though the situation wasn’t always good or the message easy, God never abandoned God’s people. God sustained them through the good times, and the difficult times.

We see this in the reading we heard today where God gives Jeremiah a vision of a potter at his wheel moulding a piece of clay. The potter shapes it and reshapes it. If his not happy with the shape of the pot he breaks the clay apart and reworks it. Then God says to Jeremiah, and through him to the people, that in God’s hands we are like that clay being shaped and re-shaped by the eternal potter, God. When things are not right or break apart, we can be reshaped by God into something wonderful and good.

This was a message of great hope of the people Jeremiah was ministering too. They felt dislocated from their homeland, lost and broken. Yet God offers them words of hope to say that they are never finished. Even when things look bleak, God reworks you into something beautiful.

I think this image of clay in the hands of a master craftsman is a wonderful way to look at our lives, constantly being reworked and remade. For those of us of faith, we trust that that reworking comes with and through God’s hands. But even if we don’t have faith, the image of the malleability of clay reminds us that we can always change, we don’t have to be set exactly the way we are. We can grow and develop into something new and different.

I still don’t really know what I want to be when I grow up, no doubt it’s a question I’ll be asking myself when I’m eighty. Yet until then, until I really do grow up, I’ll rest in the comfort of that image of the clay in the potter’s hands; being shaped and remade into something as time goes on.

Amen