The Potter

A sermon for Sunday, September 9, 2019

Just before the sermon started, we watched the first four minutes of this video of a potter making a teapot. This sermon relies heavily on this video. We recommend that you take a few minutes to watch it.

Would you pray with me?

God who shapes us all, thank you for bringing us to this time and this place. Be with us here today. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

Amen. So this week, the lectionary starts leading us through a series of well-known biblical images. We begin with the potter, and then we have the lost sheep, and the balm in Gilead, and then Abraham’s Bosom, in the story of Lazarus and the rich man. I want to take the next few weeks to journey through these images and to see if they might speak to the situations that we find ourselves in today. The Bible is full of enduring truths, both hope-filled and challenging, and my hope is that these enduring truths will shake us up and guide us forward. And we start with the potter, one who might have shaped a pitcher like this.

I was visiting with my parents this weekend, mostly so they could get me to take some of my stuff out of their house. I’m sure those of you with adult children will understand that struggle. I have textbooks and photo albums and some odds and ends that haven’t followed me in my various moves since I left home in 2007 that have stayed in storage at my parents’ house, and they are ready for these items to find a home with me once again. So we sorted through some things, and as we worked on clearing out my grandmother’s hope chest for me to take back with me, I noticed this pitcher on a nearby shelf.

Knowing the passage for this morning, I immediately asked if I could borrow it. Being from a rather nomadic sect of my generation, I haven’t had the chance or the will to purchase much pottery for myself. I’ve lived in five different places in the last five years, one of them overseas. I’m not going to cart around anything heavy and breakable. But my parents have lived in their house since I was two and this pitcher fits right in with how they live their lives.

My mother said, sure, I could borrow it and my dad asked why it had flowers in it. My mother told him that it was because he never let her use it as a pitcher and it got a chip in it and now it was only good as a vase with a handle. My dad didn’t think that was true and off they went into the type of fight where no one’s right or wrong and each party can get to the other side with a little bit of compromise and light teasing. The pitcher was bought so long ago and has been such a fixture of the house that no one can really remember how the chip got there or whether it fit on the kitchen table at the time. So the flowers were removed and the pitcher traveled the two hours back up the mountain with me and here we are.

And what I love about this pitcher, as I love about all handmade pottery, is its uniqueness. The clay gives it color, with little flecks of black here and there. It has lines on it from the potter’s fingers. The clay bunches up at the bottom of the handle in a way that isn’t perfect and symmetrical but still beautiful. If l trace my fingers up it, my thumb fits perfectly in the groove at the top of the handle. I’m sure that many other pitchers like this were made in the shop that my mother bought it from, but no other one will look quite like this one. It is unique.

You all know this, I’m sure. You’ve been going to church a long time and this passage has shown up in the lectionary once every couple years. We live in a part of the state with abundant access to clay and plenty of people willing to throw it, so I’m sure you’ve seen some beautiful pieces over the years, each unique and lovely. You all know how pottery is a labor of love, sitting at the wheel day after day, learning the clay, learning to listen to it and how to shape it. We saw some of that as the potter making the teapot explained what he was doing.

I want to highlight three things this morning to let this image speak:

1.     Clay has to be ready to be shaped

2.     In pottery, there are many stages, and no stage is more important than another.

3.     There is always a chance to be reshaped.

Clay has to be ready to be shaped; in pottery, all the stages are important; and there’s always a chance to be reshaped. I want to use these three ideas that come to us from pottery to talk about not only our individual faith journeys, but also our journey as a community.

The first, that clay has to be ready to be shaped, comes to us from watching the potter, Mr. Pothier. I love that he gave us some pottery chemistry this morning. Clay is made of dirt and water, as we all know, but that dirt is made of silica, or silicon dioxide, and alumina.

Now, silica and alumina are abundant materials here on Earth. We know them as the main components in sand and in your regular dirt, which we have in abundance. The name Earth actually comes from an old English word for dirt, which is a lovely thought when you think about the rest of the planets. Mercury, named for the swiftest of the gods. Venus, named for the most beautiful. Earth, named for dirt. Mars, named for the warrior god.

You get the picture.

But maybe we need to revise our idea of dirt. Silicon is made in the core of large stars, stars that are 8-11 times bigger than our sun. Aluminum is made in the element formation that happens in supernova explosions. (To learn more, click here and here.) Dirt, clay, is stardust that we get to see in our everyday lives, and so maybe it’s fitting that that’s what we call our planet.

So silicon, then, combines with two oxygen to make this molecule, silicon dioxide.

You can see in the picture that it is oblong, like the potter says. It’s not like carbon, which makes nice neat circles. The molecules have to line up in order to form a crystal. Now, I’m not an expert in clay, but what Mr. Pothier says makes sense to me: the clay needs to be worked in order to be ready to be shaped. After all, it’s quite a journey from the stars to the potter’s wheel.

And that journey, for the clay he used, includes being brought together from all over North America. It’s good, solid clay and its mixed heritage is an asset, not a problem. Bringing together clay that formed in different creek beds and river beds all around results in a strong clay, good for practical uses.

Now Mr. Pothier knows when he’s got the clay in his hands whether it’s ready or not. And when the clay is ready, it’s easy to work with. He can feel when the clay, each unique ball of it, is ready.

Jeremiah tells us that God is like a potter. God knows us with the intimacy that a potter knows their clay. God is aware of the wonder that we are, that we, like clay, are everyday stardust, and God knows that it takes some time to get our molecules in alignment too. None of us is exactly like another and so there is individualized work that happens even before we begin to be shaped. As Methodists, we know that as prevenient grace, the grace that goes before, where God reaches to us before we’re ready to reach back to God. (To learn more, click here.)

For some of us, that grace came to us in bible stories and Sunday school and years of worship and growth within the church. For some of us, we found that grace in trees and oceans and the beauty of the sky. For some, it was in other people, whether in church or in not, who taught us what it means to love. But in all of these things, God was preparing us to be shaped. And when we’re ready, God can work with us.

And this brings us to our second point: in pottery, there are many stages, but none of them is more important than another. We can’t be impatient with one stage or another. It might take more time than we anticipated for us to be ready to be shaped by God. We might have come from particularly difficult clay, or we might have been set aside for a while and not taken care of. We can’t be shaped until we’re ready. But that doesn’t mean that someone who is being shaped is more important, or better, than another. After all, Jeremiah tells us that the clay on the wheel, clay that was already ready, spoiled, and that the potter had to rework it. Even when we’re ready, even when we’ve been justified by God’s grace and are ready to be shaped for our lives as redeemed Christians, we still have the potential to spoil on the wheel.

Which may seem odd to us. After all, God is reaching out to us always with prevenient grace. Our psalm this morning, Psalm 139, which we read part of as our call to worship, tells us that God is everywhere. No matter where we go, to the heights of heaven to the depths of the grave, God is there, and God knows it all. The rest of the passage in Jeremiah talks about how God can shape Israel any way God wants, can shape the nations that will rise up against Israel as God sees fit. It seems that God has this whole world, all this dirt and water, in the palm of God’s hands.

So why, then, does the clay spoil?

Surely God, the maker of the clay, would see the clay spoiling and be able to prevent it, instead of having to rework it.

I think this is one of the great mysteries of life, something to do with the glorious messiness of creation and with the beautiful unpredictability of our human selves. We are malleable, shaped by the environment that we grew up in, but we also have wills of our own and some ability to choose our own way. Jeremiah uses a perfect metaphor here for us as humans. We are clay in the potter’s hands and any potter will be able to tell you that clay, even prepared clay, has a mind of its own. There are many stages in pottery, and each is important, and in each, the potter has to consider the clay at hand, working with it, not imposing their will on it.

And so we have to be prepared. We have to be ready to be shaped. We have to be shaped, and then, before we are ready to be put to use, we have to be fired and hardened.

And here we come to the paradox of the last point. Even if we have been glazed and fired, with God, there is still a chance to be reshaped.

Now for me, I can’t wait until I’m shaped into what God wants me to be. I have yearned for that for years. I have waited as the potter has spun me this way and that, molding me through school and work and family and friends, occupations and relationships of all kinds, and I still don’t feel finished. Sometimes I feel like the lid we saw being made, or the spout of the teapot. I’m upside down or maybe there’s just some extra clay that needs to be cut away. Or I feel as if I have spoiled in the potter’s hands and my job now is to be patient and to see what God makes of me. This is particularly frustrating for someone who is used to the idea that she makes herself.

But you may not be in the same malleable place that I am. Remember, each of us is unique, formed from unique clay and shaped by the world and by the Potter in ways that can’t be repeated. Many of you have been shaped by careers and families that have been a part of your life for decades. You have been shaped by your understanding of faith and of your church that has also been with you for decades. God has shaped you and life has glazed and fired you and you have found yourself as one of many vessels that God can use in this world. You may, just like my parents’ pitcher, have a chip or two, and have found yourself used in ways you didn’t expect.

Now, as we learned before, every stage in pottery is important and none is more important than the others. Being sanctified, being shaped and formed into who God wants you to be, is a wonderfully important part of the Christian journey, the part of our lives, that we hopefully, by God’s grace, spend most of our time in. But for most of us, we will not be fully sanctified, fully alive in Christ, a fully complete work of God, until the end of this life or in the world to come. And that means that no matter how life has hardened us, there is still grace for God to make us anew.

We may find ourselves like Philemon, in today’s epistle lesson, asked to do something unexpected, something requiring forgiveness, something that may cost us, and something that goes against what the world around us tells us. Sometimes the story of Paul’s letter to Philemon slips past us in the Bible-ese of the verses, but Paul is asking a leader of the church to free the person he had enslaved, Onesimus. Not only that, but Paul is asking Philemon to free Onesimus even though he owes him a great debt. Philemon has every right to take Onesimus back into service, to punish him, to extend his slavery, and to profit off his labor, and yet Paul is asking him to do none of those things. Paul is asking for freedom.

Remember, as we talked about two weeks ago, a word from the Lord is a word that unbinds people.

Philemon is likely clay that has already been glazed and fired. He knows who he is, how he fits into society, what his role is. And yet Paul is asking him to be reformed. How can this be?

By the grace of God, even that which is firmly shaped can be remade. God can bring new life and new malleability.

I’ve seen it happen. I’ve heard it from some of you. There was a need in the community and even though it was a new thing that you were unaccustomed to, you built a food pantry. You sorted through clothes. And when one of your own went through a struggle with addiction, you learned a new way of seeing. You allowed yourselves to be shaped with new compassion and now, we read letters from and send letters to this dear one in recovery. You thought that God had shaped you as a vessel into which compassion was poured. You realized that God had given you a spout, so that your compassion might be poured out.

Here, I went to the pitcher and poured grape juice into the cup for communion.

Friends, this morning, I want to you to take home three questions.

Are you ready to be shaped by God?

Will you be patient with how God is shaping you and others, each in their own way?

How is God reshaping us here at Whittier?

I’ll be honest, these are difficult questions for me. I don’t have straightforward answers. But I look forward to hearing your answers and I trust that God is guiding us and shaping us as we move forward and I trust that if we’re ready to be shaped, and if we’re patient as God works with us, God will make something beautiful here, within each of our hearts and within our community as a whole. We will be covered in grace and we will find a way to pour that grace out into the world.

Amen.