Shaping Up and Counting Costs (A Sermon from First Church in Cambridge)

First Church in Cambridge, Congregational UCC
5 September 2004

J Mary Luti

Shaping Up and Counting Costs

The image of God as a potter that Jeremiah presents to us this morning is an enormously appealing one. Over the years I've heard many sermons based on it, and you probably have too. And there's also a popular evangelical praise song I learned once that begins, "You are the Potter, we are the clay," and goes on to make reference to our passage for today—but now I can't remember how the tune goes, so you will be spared my rendition of it.

The book of Jeremiah isn't the only place in the Bible where the potter-clay connection is made, of course. Remember how Genesis describes the creation of Adam? God shaped an earthenware figure, breathed the divine breath into it, and it came to life. From the beginning, the Bible's authors believed, God's "hands" have been handling us, shaping us like a potter working clay.

For Jeremiah, the clay on the potter's wheel represents the people of God, Israel, and it is to that collective that God speaks in this text. God, the prophet says, is sovereign over the whole earth, and God is ready, willing and able to shape the destiny of entire nations according to their deeds. But it has become customary over the years to apply this image to God's dealings with individuals too. God, we believe, is also about the work of intimate formation, shaping my heart and yours after God's own.

One of the conclusions that the Christian tradition has drawn from this metaphor of God as potter is the notion (or better, the faithful hope) that God treats each of us as a work in progress. This implies that, when we are having trouble being useful and pleasing vessels, when we look at our hearts and find them flawed or shapeless, we need never fear that we are fit only for the trash bin.

We can instead confidently expect that the God who first made us in the divine image (and saw that we were good) will re-shape us lovingly and will one day hit upon just the right shape for us, a form that mirrors God's own. I'm told by people who know something about making clay pots that even if a fired pot falls off a shelf and smashes to smithereens, it is not a lost cause, but can be reconstituted. If we spin out the metaphor a bit more, then, it seems that you can't ever be too cracked, too broken, too shattered or scattered for God to locate all your pieces, sweep you up and fashion you into something new.

This is good news for people who've given up on themselves or who think that God has. It's good news for people who regard themselves as damaged goods, or who think God won't love them unless they are flawless. It's good news (or ought to be) for people who routinely judge others harshly—it could finally relieve them of the endless and anxious anger inherent in the self-appointed task of seeing to others' perfecting. It's also good news for anyone who is worn out with grief or depression or anxiety or burdened with sinfulness and stupidity. God, we are invited to believe, is always at the wheel, working on us little by little, day after day. There is hope for us yet.

"You are the Potter, we are the clay..." Good news, indeed—as far as it goes, that is. But there's a small hitch we need to contemplate, for the sake of truth in advertising.

Every time I've watched my evangelical friends sing the song about the potter and the clay, I've noticed that they tend to sing it with their eyes closed and their hands lifted high in the air. They sing it with a dreamy swaying motion that seems to say, "Take me, God! Do with me whatever you see fit. I surrender. I won't resist your will. After all, what could be better than to be clay in your hands?" But whenever I witness this sort of dreaminess about things like surrender to God, it always makes me want to act out. I feel a cranky need to ask: Have you guys really read this passage? And have you ever seen a potter actually work?

The potter in this passage is frighteningly straightforward about what you need to do with a pot that's not turning out according to plan. Although he does not discard it (and we believe that he never will), he sure doesn't go easy on it either. What he does to it bears little resemblance to the tender, loving inner reworking of the heart that the song humbly welcomes. The potter in Jeremiah is prepared to be considerably less unsentimental. He is even willing to "work evil" against the pot if that would remedy its imperfections.

And in fact, he rather decisively and unsentimentally smooshes the clay of the pot he's been working on. Before making a new version, he wreaks havoc on the old one. He may even remove the clay from the wheel (as I once saw a potter do), sling it against the workbench, and pummel it for a while before he's sure that it's ready to be used again. And do you know what fired clay has to go through in order to be reused? You have to pulverize the shards and grind them into powder. You have to make matters worse before you make them better, and you can't be dainty about it.

So now, what could be better than being clay in God's hands? Well, let me see... I can think of a few thousand things...

God is the potter. We are the clay. Good news, yes—but no picnic. To be clay in the potter's hands can be rough; it's about really changing and really being changed and, therefore, it is also about loss and wrenching relinquishment. It's serious business. It costs something.

III

This is Jesus' message today too. It's going to cost something to put ourselves in his hands as well. It may be "ardent hyperbole" when he says that in order to be his disciple we have to hate our families and shoulder a big heavy cross and give up all our possessions, but it's no exaggeration to say that for the faithful disciple, some sort of sacrifice is always somewhere in the picture.

The joy of discipleship that Jesus repeatedly promises is an unimaginable joy, but it is a hidden thing, like a treasure in a field. The paradox of discipleship is that we most often discover its most amazing joy in the course of paying its most demanding cost—such as when we leave the ninety-nine to search for the one, or sweep the whole house to locate the coin, or stop for the enemy who has been set upon by robbers and is bleeding at the side of the road.

We sometimes think that first we need to experience the joy, and that then, joy in hand like gas in the tank, we will be able to accept and bear the costs. But the truth is otherwise, I think, for most people. The joy of finding the pearl of great price comes after the searching. The joy of the treasure cannot be had without the digging. We'll never know the Samaritan's joy until we stop, tend, lift and carry. Until we leave hard cash with the keeper of the inn and promise to pay even more when we return.

I think, then, that we would be making a big mistake if, in an effort generously to welcome everyone to our way of hospitality, we were to present our Christian practice and our congregational life as things that are fairly undemanding and require no significant sacrifice, as things worthy of little serious effort, not really important enough to be costly. Even now the bar for joining the Rotary Club is higher than it is for joining most congregations, and if were we to require what Rotary requires for its members to remain in good standing, we could lose half our people in a month.

Will Willimon writes that most of us know "in our heart of hearts that life is so perplexing, its questions so unanswerable, that ... if there is anything that can speak to us, anything that can make a real difference in our life, it will not come simply," and it will not be cheap. It will ask something of us, and we will have to give it and change in order to get better.

Willimon also believes that we routinely underestimate people's willingness to make such sacrifices. And I agree. I think more people than we imagine are willing to pay the cost, to be clay in the hand of a potter who in order to make them more useful and lovely, might also need to sling them around a little bit. Maybe you are one of those people, eager for something that is worth your whole life, but so far no one has asked you to give it. Maybe you are ready, but your church doesn't act as if anything we do matters in a crucial enough way for you to step out and offer. Maybe we are oblivious to the treasure we hold in our clay hands, and so we don't understand why someone like you might really want it.

And this, dear friends, is as far as I got in writing this sermon yesterday before I picked up a voice mail message that put a name to an unidentified fire victim I'd read about in the paper. The message was from Norm Bendroth, a UCC clergy colleague, and the woman who died in the Brookline condo fire was Ginny Brereton, a splendid historian of American women and religion whom I knew briefly at Andover Newton. Norm and Peggy Bendroth, on the other hand, knew and loved her very well as a close family friend and treasured colleague of Peggy's, with whom she co-edited and co-wrote so much wonderful history over the years. It is an unspeakable loss.

And when, listening to Norm's message, my mind turned from these two hard, demanding lectionary texts to focus on this hard, troubling tragedy, it was a mind already reeling with images of a dozen more people blown up in Iraq and unanswerable questions about the horror at a hijacked Russian school. And when I felt in my body the weary ache of anger and bewilderment, when the bile rose in my throat in reflex response to so much senseless waste and pain, it occurred to me that perhaps the cost of discipleship that Jesus asks us to sit down and calculate today is not so much about big, heroic gestures like selling all our possessions or telling the truth to power on the public stage or putting our life on the line for the poor—although God knows it is all that, and more.

No, perhaps the biggest toll on us who are his friends, the price we have to be willing to pay no matter what, is the sheer courage it takes every day in this sad, capricious, cruel and dangerous world simply to believe in a merciful, benevolent and compassionate God when all the evidence points to one far more callous and indifferent. Perhaps the cost of discipleship is nothing less than stubbornly to trust the One who seems to be a stone cold killer as the One who is in fact the giver of indestructible life.

Perhaps we are called to be made over on the potter's relentless wheel not in the image of some great virtue or sanctity, but in the more mundane (and rationally-indefensible) image of hope against hope. Perhaps we're being asked to sacrifice and surrender not our things so much as our human right to atheism and despair.

Perhaps in the end the well-shaped pot and the worthy disciple are simply those who gamely put one foot in front of the other every day, come hell or high water, and manage not to be embarrassed by the gospel, but to announce with conviction that really, God is good.

As I said, when I picked up Norm's message about Ginny and the fire, this was as far as I'd gotten in the sermon. I'm not sure how to finish it. Maybe you can.