After all the rugby since Friday evening, I don’t know how I’ve managed to put together a sermon at all. Today, Ireland’s opening match in the Rugby World Cup is this evening. So that’s handy, kick off is just when our evening service begins! It was enjoyable though, to have the distraction of the Rugby World Cup to look forward to after a gloomy time in Glencraig. It was lovely waking up on Wednesday morning when, it was not Sunday, neither was I involved in a wedding or a funeral.

I’ve mentioned to you many times before, I’m sure, a very prolific and famous Christian writer, Philip Yancey. His books are very honest and sincere; he asks the difficult questions and his most famous book is arguably, “What’s so amazing about Grace?”

He was a speaker at a Clergy Conference we had in Donegal a number of years ago, and he has been clearly the best speaker we have ever had. He had had a strange relationship with the ‘Church’ all his life. And it started when he was a young boy and his father lay dying in a hospital bed. The elders of his Church gathered around his father’s bed, and, convinced that his father was going to get well through prayer, the elders insisted that all his medication and intravenous drips should be stopped, and they would pray for his recovery around his bed all night.

His father, however, died. How do you explain that one to a young Christian boy who has just lost his father?

Philip Yancey’s theme at that Clergy Conference was Paul’s idea of us being really no more than broken pots of earthenware which hold this amazing treasure. Yet, Philip Yancey asked, if we are the body of Christ, and all of this is meant to be true, this Gospel, then why doesn’t the Church work better?

At the time, he made us wonder, was it because we are no more than pots of broken earthenware, that this church of his doesn’t work better, and if so, is it really then all our fault. Is it really our fault, after all, he did make us didn’t he?

Philip Yancey came to mind when I read our Old Testament lesson this morning from Jeremiah; the potter moulding and shaping the clay, “Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel”. Here the parable is used in the sense that God has the unquestionable right to remould the spoiled nation of Israel.

If God has moulded us as individuals, indeed, if he has created us from nothing, then has he deliberately made us with flaws? Has he made us in such a way that we are but cracked pots of earthenware?

The one thing that God wants from any one of us is that we should love him. That was his purpose from the very beginning. He could have made us in such a way that we would be like robots; that we could respond to his every command, that we would obey this rule or that rule. He could have made us in to very effective robots, but that is all we would be; simply robots.

If he wanted us to really love him, then he couldn’t make us like robots, because robots have no freedom to do anything else other than what its creator had programmed them to do. No, if he wanted his creation to love him, then he had to make his creation in such a way that they would have the freedom also not to love him; indeed, to hate him. He would have to make his creation in a way that his creation had the ability to do wrong and, indeed, he would have to make his creation in a way that his creation had the ability to make mistakes. Otherwise his creation could never truly love him.

You can only truly love when you have the freedom to truly love, or else it isn’t love. But with that comes also the freedom not to love, and the freedom to make mistakes.

Today has been designated ‘Hard Gospel Sunday’. The hard Gospel project is a Church of Ireland initiative to help us deal with difference. It is a project which encourages us to, and I quote, “live positively with difference”. In Northern Ireland this has many connotations, of course it does, and that was its main agenda, I think, initially. But across Ireland, it has taken on many different hues. Today is also Racial Justice Sunday and it deliberately coincides with that occurrence. It can have huge implications across right across the country, not just on religious grounds, but on grounds of background, and cultural divides in what is becoming a multicultural nation. Its aim is that “everyone should be treated a member of God’s creation

It might sound a bit namby-pamby, but if we are to take the reality of God’s love for us really into our hearts, and the freedom we all have to make mistakes, then we have to be prepared to accept those who have made mistakes against us.

It is not that we have been moulded or created with flaws; but that we have been created with complete freedom; a creation which can truly and freely love him, but also a creation that can choose not to love him.

Our prayers this morning said, “Lord God, in our freedom guide us, that we may choose love and not hatred...that we may freely turn to you, and so abide for ever.”