Clay in the Potter's Hands

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Thirteenth Sunday After Pentecost by the Rev. Holly Huff.

“Come with me down to the potter’s house,” the Lord says to Jeremiah, “and there I will let you hear my words.” So Jeremiah, a prophet to whom God’s word regularly turns up in the material stuff of everyday life, in luggage and loincloths and legal contracts, goes down to watch the potter working at his wheel. 9th grade art class did not me an artisan make, but I do remember for a few weeks that fall the soothing whir of the wheel each afternoon, and the way cups and bowls and vases rose gracefully in our teacher’s hands while flecks of wet clay spun off into her long gray hair and spattered the apron wrapped over her tie-dye shirt. My own attempts all came out rather wobbly, destined to hold pennies and keys in my parents’ entryway, but it was a marvel to watch her gather and center the clay on the spinning wheel, adding water to keep it pliable, then pressings her thumbs into the lump to begin to give it shape. 

Watching the potter at work, the first thing revealed to Jeremiah is creation. “Just like clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand.” Or as Psalm 139 puts it: “You press upon me behind and before, and lay your hand upon me…For you yourself created my inmost parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I will thank you because I am marvelously made; your works are wonderful, and I know it well.” God like the potter woman has made us, just as we are, and loves us, just as we are. She is giving us form, shaping our lives moment by moment, and so nothing is finally forsaken or hopeless or lost. Jeremiah is shown this miracle of clay which is pliable and yielding, and so even when it is spoiled can be reshaped by skill of the potter, that same clay reworked into a vessel that God is pleased to call good.

God made us, and God is remaking us. Lord knows we all bear the marks of what’s happened to us, the various distortions we’ve acquired as we grow up into self-conscious awareness apart from awareness of union with the living God as the core truth of our being and source of our life. We think we are separate from God, that God is an object out there, to be found and acquired, possessed. That’s the apple in the garden and the snake in the grass, this illusion of separation. And we try to close the gap in all sorts of ways, searching for God in all the wrong places, pursuing security or pleasure, affection or reputation, power or knowledge or control as our particular histories dictate. But these cannot answer the longing of our hearts, which were made for and are tuned still to God and God alone. “Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee,” St. Augustine prayed, and he recounts all the places he searched before discovering that “You are in me deeper than I am in me.” The God we seek under so many different guises already lives within us, looking out through our eyes in each moment, and the task of the spiritual life is not a task at all but the blessed surrender of coming home to find God already at home within us, knocking on the door of the heart if we will only open up. The kingdom of God is within you, the word is very near you, and just like clay in the potter’s hand, your life is already in God’s hands. 

Yes, God’s remaking and reshaping sometimes entails the spoiling of all the wonderful plans we had for our own life! But as creatures of God we are called to live like little children with reliable parents, depending on God for simply everything and always trusting we will be given what we need. God will work the substance of our lives, even what we regard as pure failure, into good order we can hardly imagine ourselves. Later on Jeremiah hears these reassuring words, “I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope” (Jeremiah 29:11). There is great comfort here! Nothing is lost, nothing is wasted. Even in the mistakes of our lives, pursuing unhappy substitutes for God, in the deformities and disasters and the collapse of our plans—there is hope for good to come through even these paths we would never have chosen. Like clay recentered on the wheel under the potter’s skill, it all gets used, worked gracefully into the whole.

Remember the art teacher with clay in her hair. God is not unmoved by our pain. In the Incarnation God joins us in our human dust and clay. Jesus comes to be with us in it in solidarity and transforming love. As the hymn puts it,

God is Love; and love enfolds us. 

All the world in one embrace: 

With unfailing grasp God holds us, 

Ev'ry child of ev'ry race. 

And when human hearts are breaking 

Under sorrow's iron rod, 

Then we find that selfsame aching 

Deep within the heart of God. (Hymnal #379)

Jesus takes up our human nature in all its weakness and frailty. St. Gregory of Nazianzus reminds us that what has been assumed is being saved, that God’s full entering into human nature is the reshaping of the ruined vessel, with the potter’s distinctive mark pressed into the clay indelibly as the image of God is renewed in each human face. Our salvation, our calling into the life with God for which we were made depends not on anything that we can do but on the Divine Potter “whose property [or character] is always to have mercy.” And so we are in capable hands. Our part is simply to be pliable, to assent to God’s shaping in our lives. “My life is in your hands, O Lord.” 

Or, as Jesus says from the cross, with the psalms on his lips, “Into your hands I commend my spirit.” Our assent to God’s work in us, letting ourselves be molded, shaped and refashioned in God’s hands, trusting that everything life brings us is being work for good and receiving it in our own outstretched hands: that’s carrying the cross, as Jesus says his disciples must do. “Into your hands I commend my spirit.” We embody this prayer when we practice walking in Jesus’s narrow way of trust, humility and surrender, looking to his loving Father for absolutely everything. Jesus in today’s Gospel passage sums up this radical trust to which we are called, saying, “None of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.” Yes, this is a call to live with empty hands materially, relinquishing the bountiful goods that are a gift from God and rightly belong, if they can be said to belong to anyone, to the poor. And it is a claim also to relinquish all the ways we try to possess and master our lives, the way we position ourselves as the potter and not the clay. Surrendering all that we have and all that we are, walking in the way of the cross, we find that, in Christ, God is building all of us together into a holy temple, a dwelling place for God to live in us by the Spirit (Ephesians 2:21-22).

Discipleship, radical trust in God following after the pattern Jesus set, is not in the end about whether we have enough money to finish our high-rise construction projects. These towers look suspiciously Babel-like anyway, when we fancy ourselves the project managers. I suspect that the answer to that question, whether we have enough to complete these projects of the self, is meant to be a simple no. It is not for us to build towers or fight wars, winning or losing under our own power, confiding in our own strength, but to carry the cross as Jesus did, humbly trusting his Father. Taking up the everyday crosses of our life in trust, giving up our possessions, especially our attempts to build and conquer, to control our own lives and dominate others’, we can say humbly, with Jesus, “No, No, I can do nothing on my own” (John 5:30). And so we can blithely ask for the terms of the peace that passes understanding, which our gracious God of mercy is all too happy to give, terms of peace that God has in fact been offering us all along, even within our grasping efforts—but now, in surrender, we can finally receive it. 

True peace, the life in God for which we were made in the beginning and are still being shaped, comes on strange terms. It costs both nothing and everything. Surrendering to God, we are asked to offer up all that we have and all that we are—including fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, even life itself. And we find that in trusting God and relinquishing our possessive clutch on life, we have been freed and given everything, at no charge. Like the bread we bring to this altar, we offer up our lives, just as they are, and Jesus gives them back to us transfigured, broken and blessed. And when we come forward with empty hands, we can finally receive what God is dying to give us.

So let’s wave the white flag! Like the vessel in the potter’s hands, my life is in your hands, O Lord. “Into your hands I commend my spirit.” “Let it be with me according to your word.” Amen.