Clay in the Potter's Hands

Sermon for the 16^th Sunday after Pentecost, September 4, 2016

All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Minot, ND

The Rev. Mary P. Johnson, Priest in Charge

Texts:  Jeremiah 18:1-11; Philemon

The children will be making and squishing teeny tiny pots, I’m sure, through the rest of today’s service. What are we to make of the object lesson that God presented Jeremiah with? 

God asks Jeremiah to watch as the potter makes a vessel on his wheel, decides it isn’t what he had in mind, and smushes it so he can make something better. 

There are beautiful songs about this.  We’ve sung “Change my heart, O God…make me be like you.  You are the Potter, I am the clay.  Remold me, make me, this is what I pray.”  We will sing later this morning: “Have thine own way, Lord, have thine own way. Thou art the Potter, I am the clay.” 

How do we move beyond the trivial with this image?  What can we learn that might deepen our understanding?  Here are some things to think about:

1.  God is speaking about the politics and behavior of nations in this passage in Jeremiah’s prophecy.  Do we even have a right to apply this metaphor to ourselves as individuals, or is this really about the fates of kingdoms and nations?

Here’s what I think: often the images we see in the Old Testament apply at BOTH the macro and the micro level.  Nations rise and fall;  and while cruel and powerful nations rise quickly, they also often fall just as quickly, wreaking terrible havoc in their wake, to be sure.  But they don’t last.   The nations that aspire to be just and to treat their weakest members with compassion may go through terrible times, but they endure.  The United States has broadened its understanding over 2 and a half centuries of what it means for all people to be equal.  Men AND women vote. Slavery is illegal.  We have a very long way to go to offer equal opportunity to every baby born, but we are working on it.  God can take nations and permit them to break down.  God can also raise up nations.    That was Jeremiah’s point.  Yet I don’t believe it is wrong to think on a personal scale, too.  I do know that God can bring enormous pressure to bear on the clay of our lives and remold those lives into something better. 

2.  God sent Jeremiah to the Potter’s house because clay has some important properties that we need to pay attention to.  Clay  (not the stuff I made from corn starch and Elmer’s glue, but the real stuff that pottery is made of) comes from the ground, the earth.  If we are clay in God’s hands, then perhaps we can remember our humble origins, our fundamental relationship to the earth.  God made human beings out of the dust of the earth.  God breathed into human nostrils the breath of life, says our Genesis origin story.  And the prophet Jeremiah told us last Sunday that God is the source of living water.  What is clay but a special kind of dust mixed with water?    Who are we as human beings in the Potter’s hands but clay made from dust and living water?  We human beings live our lives in a matrix of materials that we share with the planet. Plus God’s breath of life.  We are “fearfully and wonderfully made,” as one translation of the psalm we read this morning puts it.

3.  God is speaking of nations and people as clay.  God is asking, through the entire prophetic scroll of Jeremiah, for people to repent, to return again to God, to receive God’s gracious invitation, God’s deep and lasting love.  Yet the metaphor of clay is problematic in that it doesn’t give much agency to the clay.  It doesn’t give ANY agency to the clay!  Let’s remember that this is a METAPHOR, a way of speaking about things.  It is not the only metaphor.  A metaphor brings one aspect of the truth into focus.  It is not the only way of seeing things.  Every metaphor by itself becomes a lie.  But in the context of the many symbols and metaphors for our relationship with God, it opens truth to us by giving us new insights. 

4.  And one of the most important insights of Jeremiah’s trip to the Potter’s House was that Clay is flexible.  The potter can re-work it for hours if he or she chooses.  This image of us as clay and God as the Potter means that we can remember that God is still working on us. God is still changing us, shaping us.  What we are right now (whether it is pretty fine or whether we are really unsatisfied) is not what we will ultimately become.  God can still make us useful.

And that brings us to the Letter that Paul wrote to Philemon.  Paul is under house arrest as he writes.  He may receive visitors but his own movements are restricted.  A slave named Onesimus, who had been part of Philemon’s household has made his way to Paul.  His name, more than coincidentally, means “Useful.”  While there with Paul, Onesimus becomes a follower of Jesus.  And that changes everything.  If we hear this letter in the context of the image we carry from Jeremiah, God is taking the social structure of Paul’s and Philemon’s and Onesimus’s day and smashing it all together in order to make something new and more beautiful and useful, something that more closely reflects on an earthly plane the values of the Kingdom of Heaven. Once Onesimus was useful to Philemon, and then, by being un-trustworthy and running away, he became Useless.  Now Paul is proposing to Philemon that Onesimus is no longer useless.  In fact, Paul would like Philemon to stop seeing Onesimus as a commodity at all.  Onesimus has become Paul’s spiritual child, and Onesimus has become Philemon’s brother.    In this context, to talk of one human enslaving another human is simply monstrous.   This is the New Testament letter that really speaks most strongly to the abolition of slavery.  And divine transformation (clay-smooshing) occurs in the hearts of both Philemon and Onesimus, and must be reflected in the behavior of both. 

A small change—making Onesimus useful by restoring him again to being an obedient and trustworthy slave—that’s not how the Potter works.  The change God had in mind was far greater.  It required change in Paul.  Paul could say that he (a free Roman citizen) was a slave and a prisoner of Christ Jesus.  Paul could say that slaves were to rejoice in the freedom to which Christ set them free even if the political situation did not yet reflect that great reality.  Philemon and Onesimus were to regard one another as brothers. Onesimus was no longer to regard Philemon as an employer to whom he owed the least he could get away with.    Philemon was no longer to regard Onesimus—or any other human being--as a commodity.  Paul doesn’t actually write this, but I believe that if Philemon had other slaves in his household, it was time to grant them their freedom, as well.  It was not the fact that Onesimus had become a Christian that obligated Philemon to make a change.  Rather, the occasion of Onesimus’ return forced Philemon to see the reality of God re-shaping the clay of the human heart and human society. 

Jesus wasn’t interested, either, in seeing people just put their toe in the pool of the Kingdom of Heaven.  Today’s reading shows us Jesus speaking in hyperbole.  “Unless you hate your family, you cannot be my disciple.”  “Unless you give away everything you have, you cannot be my disciple.”  You can’t order any of your other loves correctly unless your love of God is utter and absolute.  But once you recognize the absolute and infinite extent of the reign of God, you find that the vessel of your social relationships is being collapsed and re-shaped in the hands of God the Potter.   No human being may any longer be regarded as a resource or a commodity.  The elements of the earth itself have clothed the Son of God in the clay of flesh.  We see how God the Creator has knit our flesh together out of the elements of this earth.  We can’t dishonor God by allowing the pillaging of the earth for profit.  We can’t put at risk the waters that we depend on for our life.  For leaders of the Episcopal Church, the decision to support the Standing Rock Dakota in their efforts to protect their ancestral lands and the Missouri River from the Dakota Access Pipeline came directly from this realization. 

I’m sure that, in a few weeks we’ll sing the song again:  “Change my heart, O God. Make it ever true.  Change my heart, O God.  May I be like you.  You are the Potter; I am the clay.  Mold me and make me.  This is what I pray.”  But in light of the reading we had from Luke this morning, I remind you that being clay in the hands of the Potter can sometimes feel brutal and disorienting.  The Divine Hands are gentle and persevering.  When God molds us the outcome is often quite different from what we might expect.  It is  always more than we can ask or imagine.