I know we have at least one potter in the congregation this morning, Sue Spears.
Has anyone else here ever thrown and fired a pot? Sad to say, I haven’t, but at
least on occasion I’ve been able to observe my sister-in-law at work. She’s a
professional potter. Indeed, it’s she who made for me the beautiful earthenware
chalice and paten that we’re using for communion today, along with some molded
pottery plates and a pitcher.
The craft of pottery is still very much alive and well today, although it’s no
longer central to everyday life in the way it was in biblical times, when nearly
every village had a potter’s house to which people had to go in order to procure
their utensils for daily living. In archaeological excavations of ancient biblical
sites, potsherds are ubiquitous. They’re found everywhere!
So in our First Lesson, we read that, through a vision, God commands the
prophet Jeremiah to go down to the local potter’s house, there to observe the
potter working at his wheel—well, actually at his pair of wheels: a smaller,
stone wheel on the bottom, which the potter turns with his feet, and then, joined
to it by an axle, a larger, wooden wheel on the top, on which he shapes the
rotating clay with his hands.
As Jeremiah watches the potter, something in the active interchange between
the properties of the clay and the fingers of the potter—something goes wrong.
Jeremiah doesn’t tell us exactly what. Perhaps that particular piece of clay’s
own inner inclination to configure itself isn’t in accord with the ways in which
the potter is manipulating it. Or perhaps the clay is turning out to be harder
than anticipated and is resisting the potter’s shaping of it. Or perhaps the
clay is proving to be too soft, too watery, to retain its shape.
In any event the vessel that’s being fashioned is spoiled. Yet the potter
doesn’t consign that piece of clay to the scrap heap. Rather he chooses to start
afresh with the same piece of clay and to patiently rework it, using a somewhat
different approach. And the vessel that now emerges turns out well, beautiful and
ready to render useful service.
As Jeremiah observes this interaction between the potter and the clay, the
process strikes him as offering a metaphor, a metaphor for the interaction between
God and God’s people.
And we today may also see in the interaction between a potter and clay a metaphor,
a metaphor for the interaction between God and any people or between God and any
individual person.
You see, when God, in working on us and with us, encounters a resistance from
inside of us that spoils our emerging beauty and utility, God does not abandon us.
Rather God chooses to start afresh with us, patiently taking a new tack to rework
us into persons of worth and serviceability.
At the heart of the good news proclaimed by the Christian faith is the
affirmation that it is in Christ and through Christ that God has chosen to come
afresh into this world to re-form the spoiled clay that is humankind and to reshape
us into splendid, useable vessels, into a new, transfigured humanity.
A vivid example of such a new and transfigured person, one whose life has been
turned around and re-formed by Christ the Potter, is the first-century apostle Paul.
In our Second Lesson, a student and disciple of Paul reminds us, in the name of
his mentor, of Paul’s having been transformed many years earlier by an experience
he’d had of the risen Christ. During Jesus’s lifetime, Paul had never met or known
Jesus. But some three years or so after Jesus’s crucifixion, the risen Christ had
appeared to Paul, on the road to Damascus, in the form of a blinding light.
Before Paul encountered the risen Christ, he had been an angry, destructive
person, engaged in the active persecution of Christ’s disciples, consenting even to
their execution. Indeed, the very reason Paul had been traveling that road to
Damascus was to track down more followers of Christ and to bind them over for delivery
back to Jerusalem.
But the risen Christ had other plans for this spoiled lump of clay that was Paul.
Toward this vessel of sinful humanity, Christ, like the potter in Jeremiah, showed
utmost patience, refusing to consign him in anger to the scrap heap. Instead, Christ,
in an act overflowing with grace and love, created Paul afresh and transformed him into
a new person, calling him to become an ambassador for Christ and a visible example of
Christ’s power to save. And the First Letter to Timothy proclaims that if Christ could,
in mercy, reshape and re-create Paul, the foremost of sinners, then Christ can, in
mercy, re-form and re-create us!
Today, when Christ observes the spoiled pots that are humankind here on Earth,
Christ must be sorely tempted to lash out with a sweeping forearm to knock us
altogether off the Potter’s wheel and to sweep us out into whatever cosmic trash bin
is reserved for failed species and planets.
How could Christ not be angered by the likes of that so-called “Protestant” mob
that’s been hurling taunts, and, yes, even a pipe bomb, at Catholic girls walking to
school through its Belfast neighborhood. Spoiled pots!
And how could Christ not be visibly shaken by the likes of the inflexible Taliban,
who are proclaiming their belief in the prophet Jesus but putting on trial those who
witness to Christ as the Son of God? Spoiled pots!
And how could Christ not be outraged by the likes of all those in the Middle East
who commit in the name of God acts of violence or of persecution—suicide bombings
perpetrated in the name of Allah; settlements established on another people’s fields in
the name of the God of Abraham. Spoiled pots!
And how could Christ not bristle at the likes of all the various players around the
table in Durban, South Africa, at the U.N. Racism Conference that’s now ended, largely
in shambles?
What a tremendous opportunity that conference offered—an opportunity for nations and
peoples to gather humbly and contritely to confess our mutual sins of racism and
discrimination and to lay the foundations for moving beyond all the shame and degradation
of the past and into a future where the patterns of relationship among persons and
nations can be radically different and better.
Instead, all of the peoples and nations postured there at Durban and played false,
each one seeking to divert attention from it’s own sins, each one seeking to avoid
making any expression of remorse for it’s own actions—instead, making a scapegoat out
of Israel, or, in the case of our own nation, hiding behind the scapegoating of Israel
in order to offer some excuse for why we should stay at home and not confront in any
way our own shameful history of slavery and racism and discrimination. The United
States hasn't confessed anything. Spoiled pots, indeed!
In the face of all these scenarios, which seem so typical of humankind, how tempted
Christ the Potter must be to wipe the wheel clean of all us spoiled pots.
Yet I Timothy reassures us that, far from yielding to anger, Christ remains patient
with us beyond all measure, that Christ is ever-willing to work with us anew so that
Christ may save us, reshaping and transforming us.
Yes, the risen Christ does possess the grace and the will and the power to change our
lives from faithlessness to faithfulness, from disobedience to obedience, from resistance
to God’s will to doing God’s work. Christ has the grace and the will and the power to
re-form our sinful selves into selves who serve both God and neighbor. It is Christ,
the patient and ever-gracious Potter, who is the hope of all humankind.
Friends, this sanctuary of ours is a house of Christ the Potter, and this table, the
table of holy communion, is a Potter’s wheel, a place where Christ is truly present,
through the bread and juice, working with us and on us to reshape and transform us,
refashioning our hearts, our minds, and our wills.
Today, as we come to this table, may we experience the risen Christ and yield
ourselves to that Potter’s work of re-formation.
Let us pray in unison, using words found on page 12 of your order of service, page
12 of your bulletin. Let us offer together as our spoken prayer the words of verses 1
and 3 of the hymn we sang earlier today, verses 1 and 3. Let us pray:
“Have thine own way, Lord! Have thine own way!
Thou art the potter; I am the clay.
Mold me and make me after thy will,
while I am waiting, yielded and still.”
verse 3:
“Have thine own way, Lord! Have thine own way!
Wounded and weary, help me I pray!
Power, all power, surely is thine!
Touch me and heal me, Savior divine.”
Amen.