The Dialogue of Change

This is the sermon delivered by Rev. Don Van Antwerpen to the congregation of Unfinished Community on Sunday, September 7, 2025, drawing from Jeremiah 18:1-11

Today I wanted to talk to you about one of the most difficult, painful, impossibly challenging things in all of our lives. It’s something that we all hate to do, and will often fight against doing with every fiber of our beings. Consciously and subconsciously, we will do everything in our power to resist this one, fearful, terrifying thing.

And that thing is to change.

We humans are naturally stubborn people, as it turns out. We want to be right, and what’s more we want the people around us to see us as being right, because admitting that we are wrong about anything, ever, feels like a sign of weakness, of vulnerability, of failure.

So we hold on to our own sense of identity, convincing ourselves that we are unchanging, consistent, and that our thoughts and opinions are as they always have been; unchanged and unchanging.

We often succeed in convincing ourselves of this too. We tell ourselves that we are the same people we always have been, that no matter what we might say or do, we remain utterly and completely the exact same person we always have been.

And then we use that inflexible certitude as a yardstick by which we measure everything else in our lives. The relationships we enter into - friendships, communities, even marriages - are measured in terms of “compatibility;” our assessment of how well the fixed and unchanging constants of other people connect to the fixed and unchanging constants of our own selves. And when we find those compatibilities are no longer in alignment, when we find that our communities no longer totally fit us, or that our relationships are at odds, or that our friendships have drifted apart, our immediate reaction is to simply…toss them out.

We discard relationships, cast away connection, and abandon fellowship all because the fixed, inflexible, unchanging self we hold up in our heads no longer fits in that space anymore.

This inflexible sense of self seems strong to us. It seems firm, even powerful; it feels like safety, like boundaries, like the security of knowing exactly where we end and the world begins. Being inflexible in our self means that we have complete control over any change in our thought process, that we have complete control over the direction our lives choose to go, and that only we can determine just who and what we are.

Only us. And nobody else.

But, there’s an interesting psychological problem with this kind of thinking. A vulnerability to which we’re all at risk of falling victim, and which I’d like to talk about. I’ll warn you in advance though, that this is going to require me using a pretty inflammatory word. I’ve seen people react really, really strongly when this word is used, so I want you to understand that I don’t bring it up now lightly because in truth, this thing has become a huge problem, particularly in the American cultural context.

And that word is brainwashing.

Did you notice that immediate feeling you just had when I said that? That tension, like I’ve said something which trespasses beyond the reasonable well into the realm of the ridiculous? This word is the definition of a conversation ender because it just reeks of conspiracy theories, and tin-foil-hatted insanity. The minute that word comes on the scene, all credibility disappears.

Everything you say from then on seems ridiculous, or unbelievable, because you’re talking about brainwashing; mind control. And that’s just a ridiculous notion!

This reaction is perfectly reasonable, I must admit, when we consider what the common perception of “brainwashing” really is. We imagine that brainwashing is some powerful, over-the-top act of blunt mental manipulation and control. We imagine mustache-twirling villains with chemicals, and machines, and all sorts of crazy electrical devices forcibly suppressing the free will and independent thought of other people. We imagine that something as brutally sinister, as terrifying as brainwashing must really as blunt and as brutal as it sounds; the literal scrubbing of ones brains.

But the truth is that real brainwashing, real and true manipulation of the thought process of other people, is an actual thing, and it’s a much subtler thing than that.

Because the truth is that no matter how we like to think otherwise, the human mind isn’t “just like a computer.” It isn’t subject to brute-force attacks, it can’t be forcibly overridden or reprogrammed, and it’s not possible for someone else to just take control of another person’s thinking through sheer willful force. Actual brainwashing requires cooperation. Consent. In order for someone to redirect the thinking of another, to shape them into someone different than who they were, that person first has to yield control, surrender their control so that another can take it from them.

And the problem comes with the fact that this is just not something most people would ever actually choose to do.

So if you - the discerning, power-mad manipulator that you are in this hypothetical - want to control people, really control people, you need to understand how people work. You need a way in. And for that, you need trust.

At the beginning, a manipulative, brainwashing person is simply someone or something else we trust; a friend or a colleague, a media source, a politician, or a celebrity. And once that trust is given, the first step isn’t to ominously declare that “now you must follow my every whim” or something crazy like that.

It’s to use small amounts of misinformation to quietly reframe your reality, and to separate you from other people who might question the new ways in which you’re being encouraged to look at your world. Fellow elder millennials might remember that this stage of our full-on slide into American fascism began with a surge in news articles decrying the laziness of our generation, then newly-emerged from our education and ready to induce change and progress into a world so desperately in need of it, despite being burdened by multiple wars, a broken economy, and enough student loan debt to bury several small nations.

Once the world was convinced that Millennials were really lazy grifters, and not a generation ready to hold the world accountable for its enslavement to power and privilege, it wasn’t hard at all for those in power to start adding another enemy. And then another. And then another.

And before you know it, you’re sitting on a street corner in a red baseball hat screaming at immigrants.

Now, 20 years later, it looks crazy. We look at these rabid, conservative, political nut jobs in the US and we wonder how it’s even possible for someone to think such rabidly amoral things, let alone actually support them. What could possibly have convinced them that any of this is right, or even vaguely ok? We see people standing in the public space claiming that empathy - empathy - is a fundamentally anti-Christian belief!

Now imagine for a moment, if you were to go back in time 20, maybe 25 years, and tell exactly this to the most rabid, conservative nut job you could find. Imagine telling them that you wanted the United States to be controlled by a single, temperamental authority figure with absolute power, that you wanted all the wealth of the nation to be accumulated in the hands of a small collection of wealthy oligarchs, and that you wanted free speech, free assembly, and a host of other rights to be gutted, or outright eliminated.

They would look at you like you were a psychopath, and rightfully so.

That kind of change seems huge to us now, absolutely terrifying, but the key was that it didn’t happen immediately.

The changing of minds like this was a gradual, subtle process where so many of us were invited to consider very, very small ideas - ideas like “our kids are too lazy” or “someone else is to blame because I’m struggling to make money” - and so many of us did. So many of us allowed small, subtle mistruths to sneak into our thinking from sources we trusted. Not enough to change us immediately, of course.

But just enough to take us one step closer to the edge.

We’re so very confident that we can’t change, that we have a very hard time realizing when we do. And because we don’t recognize it, because we don’t recognize how we are designed to embrace change, because we don’t know the mechanisms of change, we wind up not only missing it when it happens, but we wind up allowing others to change our minds for us.

Brainwashing, I remind you, is a subtle act; it doesn’t force change. It works in dialogue with you, taking advantage of your natural, human desire to take the path of least resistance, moving you farther and farther away from objective reality and into a more controllable position with every totally reasonable-seeming step you take. It gaslights you into doubting yourself, doubting the people who care about you, doubting your friends and your family, all by taking advantage of that all to human desire to be in dialogue with people; to believe that you understand.

Because we feel, deep in our hearts, that if we understand others, we too are understood.

We all have that desire, deep within our own hearts; to flow in dialogue, to grow in conversation with each other; to change, and to be changed. To exist in a state of fluid, creative relationship.

In the end, brainwashing works because it plays on what might seem like design flaw in our normal thought processes; we tend to give people the benefit of the doubt. When someone comes to us and says that there’s a problem, our first instinct is to believe them, because we are hardwired for cooperation.

This is why this verse from Jeremiah has always spoken to me. Oh, the analogy of the potter and thing clay isn’t exactly a new one, especially to anyone who’s had to listen to conservative Christian music, or any evangelical sermon ever. When it comes up, and in those places at least it comes up all the time, this analogy is presented as though God (in this case the potter) knows exactly what sort of thing they are creating out of the clay (us), and we need only to yield to the potter’s hands so we can be made into whatever it is that we’re supposed to be. And since we’re just clay, we really don’t have a say in the process; our whole job is to just sit there while God does the shaping, and make sure that we don’t every resist what God is forming us into.

And it’s true that, sometimes, that’s how pottery works, I suppose. But when a potter starts out with a clear idea in mind, when they know exactly what they are going to make, they choose their ingredients carefully.  They select the exact right clay for the job, water it just so, and shape it precisely and carefully to get the right form and function. And if, along the way, they discover some imperfection in the clay, then they simply remove it from the wheel and discard it, since unsuitable clay would, naturally, result in an unsuitable finished product.

So when we hear “potter” and “clay” in the same sentence, this is the kind of image we’re taking with us; a harsh, unyielding sort of relationship, in which our only option is to surrender or be destroyed. We assume that those are the only two options available to us; to be the one controlling the formation process ourselves, or to surrender entirely and be formed into something whether we want to be that thing or not.

But what is being described here in the scriptures…isn’t that kind of pottery. The process we see here isn’t the kind of intentional, potter-directed, “be what I will you to be or be cast aside” act we jump to in our imaginings. Rather, what we’re seeing here seems to be less an intentional process in that way, and more a creative, dialogic one.

In today’s scripture, the potter had to hand some clay, and was trying to shape it one way, but the clay wasn’t really suited for it. This wasn’t the fault of the clay, as it wasn’t right for that task, nor was it the potters fault, as he’d have no way of knowing the clay wasn’t suitable until it was in the wheel and being worked.

Both potter and clay were learning about each other during this creative process. No great, specific destiny is set for the clay, and while the creator starts trying to shape the clay into one thing, they quickly realize that this clay isn’t meant to be that thing at all.

The clay resists, pushes back, doesn’t allow itself to become something it is not. And what’s so very important here, so desperately important, is that the creator sees that.

The creator sees that, and doesn’t discard the clay.

Seeing it’s unsuited for the first task, the potter doesn’t throw it aside and run to something new instead, hoping that will give them the vessel they wanted. Instead, the potter learns about the clay more deeply, takes the measure of it more fully, and then sets aside any expectations of what they had set out to form this thing into initially and, with gentle hands and even gentler heart, tries to learn what it is meant to become.

Potter and clay, working together to form and be formed into something wholly new, and wholly unique.

It’s a dialogic act of creation, the very dialogue of change itself. Our lives both shaping, and being shaped, but the guiding hand of God. Not being forced into a form that doesn’t suit us, or being discarded because we failed to suit the creator, but being informed by the creator in becoming the best possible vessel of love we could be.

And it only happens when these two acts of creative expression meet. The creator does not cast aside their designs entirely because the clay resisted, nor does the clay refuse to be formed entirely. The clay is shaped by a creator, whose process is in turn altered and shaped by the clay.

Throughout our lives, so many of us try to be one thing or the other; to yield, or to control. We look at the relationships in our lives, and we want them to conform to our standards, to be the kind of vessel we want them to be, and are quick to discard them when they fail to form in the way that best pleases us. And we want that because we fear that if we do not hold fast to the form we want, then we be made to yield instead, to become a vessel that we are not suited to becoming.

So we break our bonds with each other. We flee, and we harm, and we hurt, and we destroy, because we don’t want to be forced to be a vessel we know we’re not meant to be.

But love exists in dialogue, a never-ending dialogue of change, and when we truly embrace that and allow ourselves to both change and be changed together, we start to discover what new things can be made as God’s people truly come together in unity, rather than conformity.

God’s dialogue of change, God’s love for you, is not about forcing you to fit into a shape that isn’t you. It’s not about forcing you to be who you aren’t, or forming yourself in a way that hurts you, breaks you, or neglects the reality of who and what you need to be formed into.

God’s love for you is an act of creation via conversation, a dialogue that begets change.

God doesn’t want a cabinet full of identical vessels, because our God is a creator. God wants to embrace the infinite diversity of clay, and explore what wonderful and unique things can be made from it, each according to their own beautiful identities. And when we embrace that in our own lives, when we begin to approach others with this same wonder and joy of a God who beholds a rebellious piece of clay with excitement and thinks, “I wonder what this is one is going to be!” then we begin to learn about the full depth and strength of divine love. God’s love. A love that doesn’t want that any should perish, but that all should be formed into beautiful vessels, unique in our own expression made even better through the touch of Gods creative hand.