Texts: Jeremiah 18;1-11; Luke 14: 25-33
On a really cold January night I was standing in line to get into the old Embassy theatre to see Lawrence of Arabia when people from the coffeehouse two doors down brought out cocoa to warm our bodies -- and then they suggested we visit the coffeehouse afterwards to warm our souls. Now sixty years later, the Potter’s House still stands as part of an outreach ministry to the poor and marginalized in a changing neighborhood.
Originally founded by Gordon Cosby, pastor of the Church of the Savior, it took its name and inspiration in Jeremiah’s story of God’s molding us to be the good news to the poor. The Potter’s House serves the Adams-Morgan neighborhood through feeding the poor and educating the rich in mission. It has also become a bookstore and free lending library. Finding its hope in the fact that we can be molded as is the clay, the Potter’s House speaks to the powers on Capitol Hill through its witness for social justice and peace. The unanswered question for us is how we will be molded.
Anyone who has taken a pottery class knows what it means to throw clay. You start with a lump that is somewhat wet. You put the clay on a flat round surface called a bat connected to a wheel on a pole connected to a pedal; when you push the pedal, the wheel turns. As you begin to shape and mold the clay into something recognizable, like a cup or bowl, you have to add more water to the messy -- and potting is messy -- clay that you are working with. You dip your hands into water and shape the clay until you have what you want. And, hopefully, it will look something like what you intended.
We are molded much in the same way: we begin with some raw material -- that’s the lump of clay and then we are shaped by the parameters of the wheel and the hands that shape us. We have water thrown on us as we change shape and become a finished piece. Fired by tragedy and misfortune, we emerge hardened through anger, bitterness, and forgiveness, hatred and love. Glazed, we present an image to the world. And we are a pot, a dish, a cup. The question is whether after this process we can be remolded and become something different than what we were made to be or does the pot have to be broken in order to be recast.
In this passage from Jeremiah, God is the potter and we are the clay. And this image of God is a mixed one. God tells us that we can be cast down almost at will -- but that perhaps God’s mind will change if the nation turns from its evil ways. The prophet here is speaking in a certain historical context.
Judah has been faithless and has not kept God’s commandments, and we’re not talking about the piddly ones: the dietary laws or the strictures regarding Sabbath. Breaking those are only symbolic for breaking the really serious ones: worshipping other gods and gouging the poor. For the prophets, all of these laws are related: small infractions lead to wholesale abandonment and God’s justice will visit those who abandon God.
This passage is also about the possibility of change, which we hold within us individually and collectively as a society. Rather than trying to be finished too early in the process, we can have the potter throw more water on us so that we are shaped in a way that allows us to be fully responsive to God. None of us is really a finished work until the day we die. Until then, we are being constantly shaped and reshaped as is the clay on a potter’s wheel.
What we do individually affects us as a society. Our consumption with the good life, the easy life has affected us as a society where we try to take the easy way out. Just look at our political scene today. Political candidates create outright lies and pander to fears.
Jeremiah put the events of his day into the context of God’s anger at the people forsaking the ways laid down by the law. Jeremiah had worked with Josiah to restore the law as God had given it; however, after Josiah was killed in battle, his son relapsed to the old evil ways. To put it mildly, God was not happy. Rather than being shaped by God’s law, Judah had chosen to disobey it. From our modern perspective, we explain the disaster that befell the kingdom as the result of bad geopolitical choices; from Jeremiah’s point of view, this is God’s judgment. In some way, they are related to each other.
Our bad geopolitical choices didn’t just arise in a vacuum but are related to serious flaws and failings just as they were in ancient Israel. We all bear some responsibility for mess we find ourselves in. It’s not just a mess that continues in the Middle East but it extends to the whole way we do business as a nation from being bamboozled into believing that capitalism was going to lead to a democratic China to ignoring the growing income gap between rich and poor. We are tempting God and, more than that, we are tempting judgment. For it will come.
Politicians still invoke 9-11, telling us we must still be fearful of the strange and different. We became complicit in creating such measures as the Patriot Act, which eats away at our fundamental freedoms as a people. We sit here and nod, but the real answer is to become part of the solution -- not in a partisan political way but by acting on our individual and corporate conscience. The question remains for us as it remained for ancient Israel: how will we be shaped and who will shape us?
Let us pray: God of the ages, shape us, mold us, use us for your will. In the name of the One who is our model, even Christ Jesus our Lord, Amen