October 18, 2020 “Clay” – Jeremiah 18:1-12

Jeremiah 18:1-12
“Clay”
October 18, 2020 – Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost

When my mother died, I inherited something I made for her sixty years ago. Usually it sits on my dresser, but I brought it downstairs to show you. It’s a homely little gray glazed elephant, my first (and nearly last) attempt at ceramic work in kindergarten.

I’ve never been artistic, as they say. I would sit and watch clay or Play-Doh or poster paints wielded in the hands of my classmates become all sorts of wonderful shapes and figures. A few years ago one of our church children, Alyssa, gave me a beautiful little diorama of animals made from Play-Doh. But no matter how I tried, no matter how clear the image was in my mind, my creations always came out as misshapen lumps or ugly blobs of color on paper. In my hands, it always felt like art media had a mind of their own.

Jeremiah’s visit to a potter’s house in chapter 18, page 242 in Prophets, teaches us that God felt something like I did about the clay. God was the master potter, the master artist, but like a human craftsman, He felt the clay beneath his fingers become misshapen. And like a human potter, He was going to smash it down and start over.

Jeremiah never intended to suggest that a defect in what God shapes is any way God’s fault. The potter at his wheel in Jerusalem was an experienced craftsman. If the clay under his hands failed to form properly, it was the clay’s fault.

Verse 3 says the prophet saw the potter “working at his wheel,” literally “at the stones.” A potter’s wheel then consisted of two stone discs connected by a vertical axle. He used his feet to kick and spin a bottom larger stone, thus turning the smaller stone wheel above. Wheels like this are still made and used. The potter places his clay on the small wheel at the top and shapes it as it spins. For a truly skilled potter, if the pressure of his fingers results in a flawed pot, it is not his error. It is because the clay has impurities in it or is not wet and pliable enough.

In verse 4 Jeremiah tells us the jar the potter was shaping “did not turn out as he hoped.” But it was not the potter’s fault. The problem was all in the clay. So the potter stopped the wheel, crushed down the clay he was working, removed the impurity or added more water, and started over, making another jar.

Beginning with verse 5, God spoke directly to Jeremiah, drawing the connection between the clay on the potter’s wheel and what God was doing with Israel, with the people of Jerusalem and Judah. “O Israel, can I not do to you as this potter has done to his clay? As the clay is in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand,” says God in verse 6.

Most of us generally only see the final product of a potter’s hands. I have a lovely little gray glazed pot made by a Chinese friend 40 years ago. We use it for burning palms on Ash Wednesday every year. When we worship in our sanctuary and celebrate Communion, we use beautiful plates and a chalice crafted by potters who were part of our congregation when it began. If you were to watch them or a skilled potter like our friend Kent, they would make molding clay look almost easy.

What we might not see is all the disasters and start-overs a potter deals with. Our Chinese friend and another Irish potter friend led us around the pottery shop and kilns at Notre Dame. We saw a few gorgeous pieces with shiny glazes in stunning colors. But we saw even more cracked, crooked, scrapped bits of pottery, waiting to be smashed down, soaked in water, and reworked into something new and better. Jeremiah got a glimpse into God’s pottery shop to see how He was reworking human lives into new and better shapes.

Our first inclination in approaching this text is to see our own individual lives there on God’s potter’s wheel. That’s the gist of an old hymn we sometimes sing. “Thou art the potter, I am the clay.” We understand that God is shaping and molding each of us into some beautiful product we can’t yet see. Jeremiah reminds us that our sins, our individual failures and defects, mean that God may start over with us many times.

It’s good news about bad news. God does not reject us when we fail Him. He may let us get smashed down by the consequences of our sins or crushed by our stupid mistakes, but it’s only so He can rework, remold us into someone better, stronger, more beautiful. It’s a good thought and it reminds us not to despair when we fail or suffer. As Philippians 1:6 says, “he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion…”

Yet God’s word to Jeremiah that day in the potter’s house was not about his own individual life. In fact, singing, “I am the clay,” is a misquotation of Isaiah 64:8, which says, “we are the clay, and you are our potter, we are all the work of your hand.” As we’ve noted several times now in reading the prophets together, that perspective of being a community together in the hand of God, rather than mere individuals, is sometimes hard for us modern, western Christians to grasp.

We also let that same individualistic perspective color the way we read Paul’s use of the prophets’ potter and clay imagery in Romans 9. Paul was telling how God’s choice and favor moved from focusing solely on Israel to include all nations, all peoples. But somehow theologians read Paul saying in verse 21 there, “Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one object for special use and another for ordinary use?” and came up with the idea of individual, double predestination. They claimed God arbitrarily chooses to make some individuals to be saved and other individuals to be damned. What those lumps of clay might choose has nothing to with it. But that misses the whole point.

In our text and in Paul’s interpretation of it in Romans, God’s sight is not on individuals, but on nations, on kingdoms, on groups of people. And verses 7 to 10 there just above the middle of page 242 in Prophets explain that what those groups do or do not do has everything to do with it. God adjusts His plans, the shape of what He is creating, for any group of people whose hearts change as He works with them.

If God has planned punishment for a nation, but its people repent of evil, then “I will not destroy it as I had planned.” If God had good plans for a nation, but the hearts of its citizens turn toward evil and disobedience, then “I will not bless it as I said I would.” The peoples of the earth are free to go their own ways. And the heavenly Potter is free to respond with a blessing that builds them up if they turn toward Him and His ways, or, if they take an evil direction, to crush them down, destroy them and start over.

Jeremiah tells us in the middle of the page, in verse 11, that God specifically applied the principle of the potter’s wheel to Judah and Jerusalem. As the storm cloud of an invading Babylonian empire gathered on the horizon, God told Jeremiah to go and warn his people. There was still time for them to repent, to “turn from your evil ways, each of you, and do what is right.” The gracious hands of the divine Potter could still save this pot as it spun wildly on His wheel.

God did say to “turn,” to repent, “each of you.” God’s creation of His kingdom is the molding of a community that glorifies Him by its love both for Him and for each other. But there is a place in God’s plan for individual action, for taking personal responsibility for what is happening to one’s people as a whole. God molds us together into one beautiful vessel for His glory, but the individual bits of clay still need to cooperate, to coordinate in His creation of that community.

I believe Jeremiah’s trip to the potter’s shop is a powerful word for the United States of America, and for any country which might imagine itself to enjoy God’s favor or blessing, or God’s wrath for that matter. There is a place for national pride and spirit, but even more for national humility and repentance. When evil is being done in a nation, whether it is systemic racism, the killing of unborn children, or economic injustice, then it is the responsibility of us all to repent and to change.

In Judah they had decided what their answer was. In the last verse of our text, verse 12, we heard, “But the people replied, ‘Don’t waste your breath. We will continue to live as we want to; stubbornly following our own evil desires.’” How often do we also assert our freedom to do as we please over what is good for others? How often do we place a higher value on liberty to choose our own way than on doing what shows love toward God and toward our neighbors? If the law of the land allows it, we imagine, then I have the right to do it, even it is harmful to others and offensive to God. We stubbornly follow our own desires, and it leads to disaster, to pain and trouble for ourselves and for others around us.

Yet that backhanded, gracious promise remains there in the middle of our text and in the middle of almost everything the prophets spoke. Evil behavior and the consequent disaster is not the way it has to be. As some of us keep hearing from Jemar Tisby in The Color of Compromise, much of what we do together as a nation was and is contingent, which means it did not have to be the way it was or is. Things could be different. God says here, “If I announce that a certain nation or kingdom is to be uprooted, torn down, and destroyed, but then that nation renounces its evil ways, I will not destroy it as I had planned. God is always ready to be gracious to a people, and to individual people, who repent.

I stand by my contention that this text and this whole image of the potter and the clay is more about communities, nations, or groups of people than it is about individuals. But let me tell a story that begins with an individual to make that point. My mother once told me that she knew she was not doing what God wanted when she married my non-Christian father. But she was in love and did what she wanted anyway. In many ways it was a disaster. It ended in an early divorce and long years, her whole life in fact, of loneliness and struggle to make a living as a single parent and then to grow old alone.

Yet go back to that promise that God will change His plans for disaster if we change our ways. He is full of grace. Our disasters are not His disasters. My sister and I were born out my mother’s marriage disaster. After the divorce my mother turned back to the Lord, to the church, to bringing the two of us up in faith. Our Lord took my mother’s mistake, smashed her down just a bit for it, and then formed it into something good in the long run in the lives of her two children.

Because of my mother’s disastrous marriage, I’m here to share God’s Word with you today. My sister serves God by her work for a non-profit that cares for children with cancer. What happened in my mother’s life was not just about her, but about the reshaping of several lives, about the making of our family, and now the making of the communities in which my sister and I live and serve the Lord. God makes His pottery corporately, working on us all together into the shape of His kingdom.

We can also say a bit more than Jeremiah could about just how God is going to reshape human community as a whole. The potter’s wheel spins us beautifully back toward Jesus Christ. When some of the church fathers read this text and thought about the clay being formed, they thought of the clay out of which God molded humanity. That word for “potter” in Hebrew is from the same word used in Genesis 2:7 when it says “the Lord formed the first human being from the dust of the ground.” It says God was doing pottery then, shaping clay from the ground into human flesh and blood.

Methodius, a church father in Greece, and Rufinus, a church father in Italy, read Jeremiah about clay being crushed and then reformed into something new and better. They thought of Jesus. They remembered that the Son of God took on our human clay, was born as one of us, lived his life in the same flesh you and I wear. And they remembered that God let the clay of His Son’s Body be crushed with whips and pierced on the Cross. The Father let the Son be smashed down and laid in a tomb. Then, like the potter raising up a new pot from the crushed clay, the Father raised up Jesus from the dead.

That raising of Jesus was not just the resurrection of the clay of His own body. It was the resurrection of all our human clay. In Jesus, not just one human being was raised, but humanity was raised. Remember that when you sing “I am the clay.” “We are the clay.” We are the clay which Christ became so that it could be crushed and rise again. We may find our own individual selves crushed by sin or by suffering. We may find our nation bent and broken on the spinning wheel. But in Jesus Christ we may always feel the Potter’s hands raising us, reforming us, making us together into what He designed us to be.

That plan for God’s molding of us is exactly what Jesus was talking about in our Gospel reading today from Matthew 22:15-22. They asked Him a question about paying taxes and He asked for the coin that was used to pay the tax. “Whose image is on it?” He asked them. They replied that it was Caesar’s image. Then He told them, “give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and give to God what belongs to God.”

Jesus told us to give to the governments of the world the things which have their imprint, their image on them, whether it’s pictures of emperors or of presidents. But give to God what belongs to Him, what has His imprint, His image on it. And that, of course, is us. Human beings are the creatures in this world who are molded, formed, made in the image of God. It is we ourselves that belong to God.

Our Lord Jesus died and rose again so that that image of God could be reformed and remolded more perfectly in us. He got crushed so that humanity could be reshaped into something better than we make of ourselves. And He calls us to come and die with Him, to let ourselves be crushed in humility and repentance so that through Jesus we too can become something better than we are now.

As it was in Jeremiah’s time, the Potter and the Clay are both a warning and a promise for us. The warning is that when the clay gets itself full of sand or dries out or simply becomes rebellious and recalcitrant, the Potter can and will start over. That’s not going to be easy on the clay. It will not be easy on us.

The promise is that no matter how bad the pot turns out, how lousy and dry the Clay might be, the Potter can and will start over and make something better with clay that allows Him to do that. When you and I repent both of our sins and of the sins of the communities of which we are a part, whether it’s a family, a church, a city or a nation, God will change His plans for us, start again, and remake us into something good and blessed.

I urge you today to be part of God’s own Clay, part of the Body of Jesus Christ. Leave behind, as Jeremiah said, your own evil ways and the evil ways of the nations and kingdoms of this world. Be reformed and remade in Jesus. Become pliable, like Jesus was, in God’s hands. Let your life be remolded in the image of His life. Let our lives together be made into the new and lovely vessel that God raised up when He raised Jesus Christ.

Amen.