When I was in seminary, one of my very first assignments was to pick a favorite verse, and then write about why it was my favorite. I picked Lamentations 3:22: “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning.”
It is, in fact, still one of my favorite scripture passages. It is beautiful all on its own, but like so many passages of scripture, its meaning and beauty are enhanced when one considers the context. It comes in the midst of a book of, well, Lamentations, a book of communal laments, a book of mourning, consisting of a series of alphabetic acrostics written in a limping 3:2 meter, originally intended to be read on days of fasting or mourning. That such a passage appears in the midst of such sorrow is a wonderful thing.
In 1923, a man from Kentucky by the name of Thomas Chisholm wrote his own poem based on this passage from Lamentations. It was put to music by William Runyan, and we know it today as the hymn, “Great Is Thy Faithfulness.” It’s a good hymn, but it seems to me that Chisholm’s interpretation of the Lamentations passage is slightly different from my own.
The hymn, as those of you familiar with it know, begins with these words: “Great is thy faithfulness, O God my Father, there is no shadow of turning with thee; thou changest not…” And it’s there that I have to stop and wonder. What did Thomas Chisholm mean when he wrote, “thou changest not;” what did he mean by that?
In Lamentations, it says that God’s mercies are new every morning. To me, that suggests that God is doing something new, something wonderful, something different, every day, that what God is doing today is perhaps even better than what God did yesterday, and that what God will do tomorrow will somehow be even better than what God does today. It suggests to me that every day is full of new surprises. And I kind of like that.
But Chisholm (who, by the way, also wrote “Living for Jesus”) seemed to have a slightly different take on the Lamentations passage. Like many other people throughout the years, he seems to have believed in God’s unchangeable, unmutable character. It’s like another song I remember from long ago that goes, “I know God, he don’t ever change, he always stays the same.”
It’s true that God’s character, God’s love, God’s passion for compassion never change. But there are ways that God does change. I think the idea that Goes doesn’t ever change derives from the idea that God is perfect; and how can anyone or anything that is perfect ever change? How can you improve upon perfection? How can what is perfect change, do something new, do something different, and still be perfect?
John Calvin was one of the Christian reformers, and his followers – the Calvinists – believed in the doctrine of predestination. They believed that God was so perfect and so all-knowing – so omniscient – that everything that happens, including and especially what happens to human individuals, has been known and determined since the beginning of time.
Going back further, to the thirteenth century, there lived a man named Anselm, a Christian theologian and philosopher who described God and the greatest, most perfect thing one can imagine. To be precise, he defined God as “that than which nothing greater can be thought.”
Most of us today, when asked to describe God, would say that God is perfect, and that, being perfect, God doesn’t change, that God has no need or reason to change. However, the concept of perfection really isn’t a part of the Judeo-Christian tradition. God is rarely described in scripture as being perfect or unchanging. That’s because the concept of perfection as the ideal state is more of a Greek idea than it is a Judeo-Christian idea. It was Greek philosophers who lifted up the concept of perfection as the ideal state.
So if, according to scripture, perfection is not the ultimate attribute of God, then what is? The answer is goodness. Rather than describe God as perfect, scripture prefers to describe God as good.
In all of scripture, the word “perfect” only appears 48 times, and not all of those 48 occurrences are used in reference to God. Some of them, also, may have come about by Greek influence, since the New Testament was, after all, written in the ancient Greek language.
By contrast, the word “good” appears 827 times in scripture. Again, not all of those uses are in reference to God. Even so, it is clear that the concept of goodness was on the minds of scripture writers a lot, while the concept of perfection, not so much.
It wasn’t important for scripture to talk about God’s perfection. It was important for scripture to talk about God’s goodness.
In the beginning, God created the earth, and saw that it was good. God created humanity, in God’s own likeness, and saw that it was very good.
Things that are perfect cannot change. They have no need to change. If they are perfect, and they change, then they become something other than perfect.
However, things that are good…
The earth is good, and it’s changing all the time. Seasons change from one to another. The tides flow back and forth. Earthquakes build mountains, while rivers and glaciers carve canyons and valleys. And – dare I say it? – species evolve. (Churches may not, but species do!)
Near the end of the 7th century B.C., somewhere in the southern section of Jerusalem, the word of the Lord came to the prophet Jeremiah, and sent Jeremiah to observe a potter trying to fashion a vessel of clay. But the clay was not cooperating, so the potter started over, refashioning the clay into something new. It wasn’t working, so the potter changed his mind and began to make something different.
Regarding the potter’s decision to change what he was doing, to change his plan, God says: “Don’t I have that same right? Can I not do with you, O house of Israel, just as this potter has done? Just like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand. At one moment I may declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it; but if that nation turns from its evil, I will change my mind” – the Hebrew word here is repent – “I will repent concerning the disaster that I intended to bring upon it.”
Jeremiah’s image of the clay in the potter’s hand is a metaphor. It is a good metaphor, It is a useful metaphor, but like all metaphors, it can only go so far. There is a point at which the metaphor breaks down.
This particular metaphor breaks down when we realize that clay cannot reshape itself. The clay cannot change itself into something new.
But the people … the people can change themselves. The people can reshape themselves. The people can repent. They can turn around, and go in a new direction. They can cease doing evil, and they can start doing good.
And then comes the really amazing part. If the people change their ways, then God will change God’s ways. If the people repent, then God will repent. Isn’t that what it says in verse eight? “If the nation turns from its evil, I will change my mind…”
This calls to my mind Abraham’s intercession for Sodom and Gomorrah. God had revealed to Abraham the imminent destruction of those two cities, which led Abraham to plead on the cities’ behalf. “What if there are 50 righteous people among all those who are wicked,” Abraham said. “Will you sweep away the place and not forgive it on behalf of the 50 who are righteous?”
God thought about this and said, “You have a point.” Or something like that. God said, “If there are 50 who are righteous, I will spare the cities.”
Then Abraham said, “What if there are 45?”
And God said, “Yes, I’ll spare the cities for the sake of 45.”
Then Abraham said, “What if there are 40? What if there are 30? or 20? or 10?”
Each time Abraham interceded, God’s plan was adjusted. And, if 50 or 40 or 30 or 20 or 10 righteous people were found, God would abandon the plan altogether.
It also calls to mind the prophet Jonah. God called Jonah to preach to the city of Ninevah, to let the Ninevites know that God was going to destroy their city. But the people of Ninevah repented. They fasted. They ceased doing evil. And God, the scripture says, relented and changed his mind, something that made Jonah very angry, because he grew up thinking of Ninevah as evil, and he had difficulty looking at Ninevah in a new way. Sometimes, it’s easier for God to change than it is for people.
So it’s obvious that, in some ways, God does change, and that change can be the result of our actions or even our prayers, which do have an effect on God. Our prayers can change God’s mind. God is not so stubborn that God is not willing to listen. If God was incapable of change, then what good would there be to our prayers of intercession and supplication?
Again, in the book of Amos, God showed that prophet several catastrophes that were set to befall the people, but Amos interceded, and the Lord relented. God had a change of heart, and changed the plan.
So, whether by our actions or by our prayers, God can be changed. A change in our hearts or minds can cause a change to occur in God’s heart or God’s mind.
Going back once again to when I was in seminary, some of my professors liked to talk about a branch of theology called process theology. Unfortunately, everything I heard about process theology almost made sense to me. It almost made sense, but not quite. For me, trying to understand the language of process theology was like trying to understand quantum physics.
I mean that sincerely. Quantum physicists say that when you break down matter into its smallest possible form; when you break down molecules into atoms and atoms into neutrons and protons and electrons, and you keep breaking those down until you have the smallest particle left, what you’re left with is a tiny bundle of energy. There’s really no mass there, no matter. Just a tiny bundle of energy; or, as some physicists have described it, just a thought, a force. And all these bundles of energy, all these thoughts, are interconnected somehow, so that what one does affects another.
It seems to me that the process theologians are saying something similar about God. God is connected and interconnected with everything else in the universe, including you and me. That doesn’t mean that God is everything in the universe, but that God is connected to everything and a part of everything. And anything that happens in one moment affects how God acts in the next. I think it could even be said that anything that happens in one moment affects who God is in the next.
To put it another way, it’s not a theology of being, it’s a theology of becoming.
If that doesn’t make sense to you, that’s OK. But consider this: when God appeared to Moses at the burning bush, and Moses asked for God’s name, God said, “I am who I am;” but that phrase, in Hebrew, is very tricky; it may mean something more like, “I will be who I will be,” or, “I cause to be,” which makes it more of a statement of becoming and less a statement of being … which, to my ears, makes it sound very process-y.
To state all this even more simply: God can change. And we who are made in God’s image can change. And our changing can have – does have – an effect on God.
But it’s not always easy to change, is it? In Jeremiah, after being told about the potter and about how God will change in response to the people’s change of heart, the people say: “It’s no use! We will follow our own plans, and each of us will act according to the stubbornness of our own hearts.”
We know that’s true. It is no small thing to turn from our own ways, and to follow God’s way. It’s a big step to follow the teachings of Jesus. The Hebrews were captives in Egypt; God led the Hebrews out of Egypt, but it took much longer Egypt out of the Hebrews. Repeatedly, they longed to go back. The old, familiar ways were more comforting to them than the new possibilities.
We, too, are held captive in many ways, even though new possibilities and new freedom are waiting for us. We spend more than we should, and so become slaves to our mortgages or credit card companies. The pressure to live a certain lifestyle is strong, and so we continue pursuing our own agenda, the agenda society has set before us, rather than turning to God’s agenda and following the way of Christ. There are things we want to change about our lives, and yet we keep doing the same old things.
We complain about being too busy, and yet we keep overscheduling our lives and making too many unnecessary commitments. We know the things that will improve our quality of life, the things that will bring more joy to us and to those around us, and yet we don’t do those things.
But it’s not impossible. Change is possible for those who believe and who are willing to work hard at it. If God can change, then so can you. New life awaits. You don’t have to live in Egypt any longer. God will lead you to the promise land, if you allow him. God will lead you into the kingdom that is available on earth as it is in heaven. It’s never too late to stop doing what doesn’t work, and to start doing something new. It’s never too late to refashion the clay into something new.
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