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Anyone who works in a hospital emergency room can relate many stories of persons who come in under emergency situations and have suffered what appears to be a heart attack or have stopped breathing for other reasons. They are put on a breathing machine. Some of these persons do not regain consciousness even after they are put on the breathing machine. Then after a period of days or sometimes weeks the doctor and family must make the decision to remove the machine. Often it means that the person will not breathe on his or her own and thus die. Reaching the decision to remove the machine is always a very difficult and painful decision for the family members to make. It often seems to them, emotionally at least, as if they are causing the end of the life of their loved one. Of course, this is not true. In our text for today we have a clear declaration by the prophet Jeremiah that our lives are finally in God’s hands and he is the one who decides when we will be born and is there to preside when our lives end, too. However, the advances of modern technological medicine have raised some very serious and deep questions about how much doctors and family members should have to say about ending the life of a person who cannot let their own wishes be known. Who should have the final say? Who is the one who should finally determine when the switch is turned off the breathing machine or the plug is pulled to stop it? The doctor? The family? Or perhaps even the government? The setting of our text for today has little relationship to the setting of a modern medical facility, but the root issue which Jeremiah, speaking for God, was confronting in the people was not all that different. Here we once again have the picture of God’s wayward people. Oh, they certainly didn’t think they were wayward people. They actually believed that their superior knowledge and experience led them to make decisions and take actions which were superior to anything God could do. After all, they lived on the earth, they tilled it, they cared for the animals who provided meat and clothing, they established towns and cities. And God -- where was he? They never saw him. So it was natural for them to want to do things their own way. You have to admit that it was a pretty arrogant attitude that these people had. And they continued to show how stubborn they could be. In no way would they turn and acknowledge their sinfulness. The parallel I see between the people of Israel and those in a modern hospital who have to make a life and death decision is that it is easy to slip into the belief that they alone are actually making these decisions. The decision they have made is to use a machine that for many people has great therapeutic value. There are dozens of persons in any hospital who thank God that there was a breathing machine to help them breathe or even breathe for them when they needed it. But to suppose that this machine or any others of the “miracle” machines of modern medicine give us the power to have control over life and death is just not true. Jeremiah reminded the wayward people of his day that just as they had come from the dust of the earth, they were still like clay in the hands of a potter to God. When the potter doesn’t like what he is making, he flattens the clay and starts over. God could surely do that too when he discovered that his children were wandering too far from the way of life he intended them to lead. This could seem like a very harsh word. But certainly it need not be received as such. Through Jeremiah, God also reminds the people that he is even more willing to forgive them and help them shape their lives into the kind of lives he had envisioned his people to have. He urges Jeremiah to call them to repentance so that he (God) can shape them with his creative spirit into the persons he intended them to be in the first place. Certainly we need to be reminded of whom our God is as we struggle with the many dilemmas with which modern technological medicine has confronted us. Yes, we are responsible to be the very best caretakers we can be of the lives and gifts God has given us. But God is still very clearly in charge of our comings and our goings. At those times when the momentous decision to remove life support systems is being made, there is often a chorus of persons, including doctors and nurses, who join in reassuring families that they are not making the decision as to whether their loved one dies or lives. Each person is still very clearly in the hands of God, who accompanies her from her very last breath into eternity. But there is mercy and abundant goodness when our lives are in God’s hands too. Most of the time, death, when it comes after a breathing machine has been removed, is quiet and peaceful. Let us affirm today that even though we now have machines, which can prolong our lives past the time we normally would die and have the power to turn these machines on and off, still our lives finally are in God’s hands. Still he is the potter, and we are the clay. Still God is in charge of our world and all of us in it. Still we live by the gift of faith so as to learn more fully the spiritual dimensions of this life we have been given. Let this sermon be the occasion for you to think about and discuss with your loved ones how you feel about the use of life support systems. But as you do, do so with much prayer and a healthy dose of awe that it is really God who gives us life and every good and meaningful experience in it! Amen.