Wednesday after the Fourth Sunday in Lent: Pottery

Lessons: Psalm 101; Psalm 109; Jeremiah 18:1-11; Romans 8:1-11; John 6:27-40

 "Come, go down to the potter's house, and there I will let you hear my words."  So I went down to the potter's house, and there he was working at his wheel.  The vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter's hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as seemed good to him. (Jeremiah 18:2-4)

When I was in seminary my classmate, Martha Blacklock had a field placement in a vastly underused church in midtown Manhattan where she set up a potter’s wheel and invited people on weekdays to come and experiment with throwing pots. It seemed odd to me to make pottery in church and I could not see its evangelistic qualities.  Yet every time I come on this passage, I realize there is a potentially sacramental quality to the potter’s wheel.  Here is an invitation to experience both the gentle quality of being molded to usefulness and the need to be remade. The potter must begin with clay centered to the wheel.  If ever you have begun to feel the coming pot begin to wobble in your hands, you know it is time to slow the wheel, center the clay if you can, guide it more clearly to the shape it is to hold. Too much wobble and it is best to collapse and begin again.  Too much speed and clay can go flying.  Nothing is attained by impatience. The first pots are usually awkward and thick or thin in the wrong places.  Perhaps they are beautiful to the potter but they will never sell.  Yet there is something about those early awkward pots which the potter prizes, almost loves.

It reminds me of me. I know what is it to be awkwardly made, to yield my stubbornness, allow myself to be reworked by a will beyond my will and beyond my Dad’s will.  I know what it is to be thick and thin in the wrong places, we might say too sensitive or insensitive, morally aware or not.  I can need another’s help to be my better self.  Perhaps I need to strengthen or to soften, to hold a boundary or to yield to a better way of being.

Jeremiah will be clear with his audience.  It is time for them (us) to yield to the potter’s hand, to God and be better made. Amend your stubborn hold on life as you want it just now and yield to a larger vision held by God.   How hard this message was for them to hear and can be for me.

I often find St. Paul convoluted in his thought process. He seems so often like someone with an algebraic theory to prove. There is a complex logic he is working within and we are to follow it.  That is never more true than when he is writing on the subject of law and grace, his core understanding for our need of Christ Jesus. He comes to his central point in today’s passage form Romans (8:3-4).

For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do: by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and to deal with sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, so that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.

His deeper point is that neither you nor I can do all things in perfect obedience to God’s created purpose, to live in full justice and charity toward our Creator and one another.  We so often fail or simply don’t conceive the need. The one who steps into the breach is of God’s own making, Jesus.  He alone lives this perfected life.  Humanity's sinful hate will require his life which he so freely yields.  But he is more.  Through him the Spirit, the creative hands of God begin our remolding, softening the clay of our existence, reworking our yielding lives, thinning our thickness of will, recreating our beauty.  We are each forever under construction.  Sometimes our pot collapses.  People doing 12 step work know this image of lost and bottom.  Others of us know something perhaps less severe but totally heart rending.   Then the remaking might occur in profound ways.  But for many it is regular, ongoing yielding and becoming.  We are continually shaped by Scripture and sacrament and the alertness of prayer, by repentance and clearer purpose.

The odd thing is I often don’t know I am being shaped, fashioned, remade. Sometimes I learn it because someone else sees it and reflects it back to me.  Sometimes I am in a situation and feel myself deal with it better than in the past. Sometimes I am in that situation and I handle it no better, but see my error and my need to grow.  I look out at a sunrise or sunset or rainbow or bird on the wire and I recall how loved all things are, me included.  I feel the hands of grace on my life.  I yield to the Potter knowingly.  It is a good day.

I wonder if I had gone to the Church of the Holy Communion and made pots with Martha, would I have seen all this sooner and yielded better.  I wonder.