Gabriel who usually delivers our talk is on holiday in his home nation of the Philippines.

Today we focused on Jeremiah and how the reading helped us understand the words of Jesus. The Psalm was also significant in out discussion.

We noted how God is viewed as a potter working with the clay. The clay has all it’s character and God works with it. We see how the original lump proved spoiled and the potter knocks it back and starts again. Christ, incarnate God is the new Israel. The nation is renewed in Christ and the potter continues to work with the clay.

Just as in Philemon, where Paul says :..I preferred to do nothing without your consent in order that your good deed might be voluntary and not something forced, God works. Humanity spoiled is remade by the divine hand who draws out the clay in Christ. There is no coercion just healing and setting on the narrow way of love. This is being saved.

We are secure in God’s hands as the Psalm reminds us, formed in Christ the One who is forgiveness from the beginning, humanity formed from the very earth and God’s image, a humanity he took upon himself. The Psalmist writes: How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! I try to count them—they are more than the sand; I come to the end—I am still with you. The last part tells us that our resting place is in Jesus not the beyondness of divinity or our thoughts on God.

And so Jesus prepares his followers for hard times. For most of us, our times are not as hard as they were to experience. Yet we will have hardships to bear and our security threatened by wars or rumors of wars. Jesus warns his followers their security needs to be in him not in family or possessions and they were to be peacemakers. In our comfort and security we need to listen to this carefully and continue to draw on the unforced, ever flowing love of God the father, revealed in Jesus.