The Tie That Binds: Formation
Jeremiah 18:1-11, 2 Corinthians 4:5-12
June 21, 2020
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley
Image: Lidded jar of the sort used to store the Dead Sea Scrolls. From Qumran, Israel, 1st century CE, British Museum, London, Great Britain
A recording of the service in which this sermon was preached may be accessed here. https://youtu.be/OxuDcBWJ9rI
On a Sunday a few years ago, I gave you clay. I gave everyone in the sanctuary some clay to play with, to form into any shape you wanted. I gave a few more instructions than that, but it was a pretty open exercise. I was not asking you to create a certain finished product. Most of you went along with it at the time, because you are great sports, but as soon as worship was over, you dropped your work into the trash. I know because I went around and rescued the clay from the garbage cans. Of all my attempts at creating engaging worship elements, that was one of the more stunning failures.
I wonder what happened. Some of you said you don’t like to work with your hands like that. Some of you said you don’t think you are artistic. I wonder if some of us are, in fact, fairly creative, but clay is just not a medium that we know how to work with. I wonder if any of us found the clay resistant. If it was hard to make it soft and pliable enough to work with, so we got frustrated.
Jeremiah compares God to a potter, working with clay. I wonder if God ever felt like that. The first time God is described as a potter in the Bible is at the beginning. In Genesis 2, God kneels on the ground, grabs a piece of moistened clay and from it fashions a human being. The Hebrew word translated as potter in Jeremiah 18 is the same word used in Genesis 2. And not long after that beginning, human beings start to assert their own ideas, their own will which is not always in keeping with God’s plans. By the time Jeremiah comes into the potter’s shop, God has been dealing with disobedient humans for a very long time. Jeremiah has too.
Jeremiah has been calling the people to repentance for their false worship and social injustice. They have not listened. In fact, a few verses after our reading, the leaders of Judah plot to kill Jeremiah. They don’t like his message and want to shut him up permanently.
The message that Jeremiah hears in the potter’s shop is harsh. It sounds like God is saying “I am the potter who made you and I can destroy you. I brought you into this world and I can take you out.”
It is strong language and we should note that the prophecies of Jeremiah are full of strong language. He repeatedly warns the people of impending doom and they pay no attention to him. His language gets more and more harsh in his attempts to get their attention.
It is also important to hear all of what he says. The Lord is sovereign over Judah, over all of creation, but also hoping not to exercise that power. Four times in these verses, God uses the word “If”. “If” the people will do X, then God will do Y. If the people will change their behavior, then God will change God’s plans. The Creator is responsive to the creature. There is give and take in the relationship.
If this was the only example of divine and human interaction in the Bible, then we might conclude that God is some kind of angry tyrant, a puppet-master who compels humans to do what God wants. But what we actually have in Scripture are stories of unexpected grace, of people receiving what they needed, instead of what they deserved. What we see in Scripture are the times when God’s change of mind was a decision not to punish. We might remember the time when people were in the wilderness and Moses was gone for too long, and they got anxious and built a golden calf to worship. God was going to destroy them, but Moses pleaded with God and God relented. Or we might remember when Jonah went to Ninevah with a message of coming destruction from God, only the people took the message to heart and changed their ways and God decided to spare them instead.
I read up a little bit on potters this week. I learned that they never waste clay. If something falls apart on the wheel, the clay goes into a bin called “reclaim” which is all the scraps and pieces that have failed somewhere in production. They’re kept together to be mixed back into usable clay.
Another potter said that clay is passive, but it has its own life and nature which can resist the potter. So the potter strives to open it up. Keeping it centered on the wheel is important to shape and reshape it. The outside of the vessel must conform to the inside. Sometimes the clay gets exhausted and must be set aside for awhile.
The relationship between potter and clay certainly seems an apt metaphor for the relationship between God and humans. If we understand potters, then we might recognize God not as bent on human destruction, but like a potter who is eager to coax something beautiful from resistant clay.
From the point of view of the clay, it might feel either like punishment or like growth. It seems significant that the metaphor holds as long as the clay continues to be malleable. In the next chapter of Jeremiah, the image is of clay that has been fired and shatters. One scholar suggests that is what happens when we harden. When our shape, our ideas, our faith, become fixed, we leave little room for God’s grace to reshape us.
Jeremiah was speaking to difficult people, his own people, in love. Some five hundred years later, Paul was also dealing with difficult people. The first church in Corinth was resisting his leadership. He had made mistakes. He wasn’t as flashy or as articulate as those who challenged his authority. Paul knew his Bible. I have to wonder if this passage from Jeremiah was in his mind when he mentioned clay jars. Maybe he wanted the Corinthians to remember that God could take them off the wheel and throw them into the reclaim bin. But he doesn’t go there.
Instead he recognizes his own weakness. He recognizes his own suffering and also the suffering of the Corinthians -- they are all afflicted, perplexed, persecuted and struck down. We humans are fragile and easily broken. In Paul’s analogy, we are more like inexpensive pottery that shatters than like malleable clay.
But Paul says, “we have this treasure in clay jars”. We have this treasure that is the Good News of Jesus. We have the extraordinary power of forgiveness and generosity and hospitality and justice through Jesus who dwells within us. And so Paul says,
“we are afflicted in every way
but not crushed;
perplexed but not driven to despair;
persecuted but not forsaken;
struck down but not destroyed”
We suffer, sometimes for the sake of the gospel, sometimes simply because that’s the nature of life, but God’s strength is often demonstrated in our weakness.
Archeologists have recovered clay jars from the first century. Perhaps this is what Paul had in mind – ordinary, functional, not valuable containers. They were considered fragile and disposable. But we might note that jars like this held the Dead Sea Scrolls, preserving that treasure for thousands of years, which kind of makes Paul’s point for him.
“We have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us.”
A few years ago, some of us had the privilege of being on retreat with Libby Little. Those of you joining us from beyond Albany may not know about Libby and her husband Tom Little. They were from upstate New York, but they spent 30 years living and working in Afghanistan, where they raised their three daughters. They stayed through the Soviet occupation. They hid in their basement during the Taliban rule of the 1990’s, all to provide eye care for the Afghan people. Tom was an optometrist. In 2010, he was returning from a mission to an outlying area with 9 other people when they were attacked and killed by the Taliban.
On that retreat, Libby talked about her life in Afghanistan. She talked about the loss of her husband and other hardships they had endured, but she did not dwell on that. What was perhaps most vivid in her presentation were her teapots. In Afghanistan, there is a highly skillful process of repairing broken pottery. Glue and metal staples are used to make containers watertight again. Her repaired teapots were fascinating.
There is a similar artistry in Japanese culture, called kintsugi. They use gold in the glue to mend the cracks in an object. They recognize that imperfection is credibility and scars are signs of improvement. So they highlight repairs and make them beautiful.
When the Russians left, Afghanistan slipped into a protracted civil war. Speaking about that time, Libby said, “One hundred rockets a day was a good day. We kept thinking it was going to get better, but it was a terrible time. It was a time when really the ground was levelled. We felt like we were able to come alongside Afghans and their suffering. Until then, we had no idea what suffering was.”
After Tom’s death she said, "We may never know what happened. We're not out for revenge or retaliation at all. We pray for whoever did this and keep working toward forgiveness."
Sometimes it is simple obedience. Sometimes it is fortitude in the midst of unjust suffering. Often it is a combination. But the tie that binds is our formation, our responsiveness to the God who shapes and reshapes us and forgives our sin and is made strong in our weakness.
“We have this treasure in clay jars,” Paul says, “so that the life of Jesus may be visible, so that the extraordinary power of God may shine from our hearts.” May it be so for you and for me. Amen.