|
Foundry United Rev. |
|
|
“The Potter’s Work” Sunday, September 9,
2007 |
|
|
Jeremiah 18: 1-6
Rev. |
The
prophet Jeremiah was listening for a word from God. The job of a prophet is
to listen for a transcendent word in the midst of the confusion and disarray
of ordinary life – to hear a word that somehow goes to the heart of things
and helps us find our way again when we are lost. The
prophet Jeremiah was listening for a word from God in the midst of a
confusing and violent time in the life of the nation And he
had an impulse to go to the Potter’s House…the Potter’s Shop…where the potter
was working at his wheel. The image of a potter at his wheel, her wheel,
became for Jeremiah an image for God. It is
this image that we want to sit with for the next five weeks here at Foundry.
In the Potter’s Hands. And we
will have potters here with us at work in our sanctuary for five Sundays. It
is almost a requirement of the Scripture that we do this. In the
Hebrew language, the language the Old Testament is originally written in,
there is a word for what potters do that has no real parallel word in
English. The verb in Hebrew for what potters do is the same word for the noun
“potter” except with a verb ending. Sometimes
the translators translate it “shape” or “form,” but that is just because we
have no word to translate it exactly. So
really the only way to understand what the Hebrew verb is saying is to watch
what a potter does. A potter does more than shape. A potter throws, a potter
opens the clay, a potter pulls and pushes, a potter impresses, bulges,
flutes, and incises. A potter even jiggers and jolleys. So the
only way really to get a full sense of what Jeremiah is trying to say about
God is to watch what a potter does – which is what I hope you will do as part
of your worship these five Sundays. To hear what Jeremiah wants to say to us,
watch the potter. During
roughly the same time that we will be watching the potter here in worship we
will be having house meetings. Dee and I hope to participate in 20 house
meeting with a total of 300 Foundry folk participating. Our hope is that
whatever the potter is doing to the pot, God will do to us as a community
through those house meetings. Our hope is that in listening to each other,
God will form and shape us, God will open us and jigger and jolley us.
Whatever the potter does to the pot God will do to us. Jeremiah
uses the image of the potter and the clay as a metaphor for God’s
relationship to But it
is an image that can be applied in other ways. It can be applied to the
spinning and whirling galaxies and universes. Galaxies and universes are in
the potter’s hands. And it
can be applies at the most personal and individual levels. You and I are
clay, we are mud, in the potter’s hands. We are the potter’s work. There
are three things I want to say about the potter’s work this morning to start
us off living into this image of the potter’s hands. And then we will see where
this takes us over the next weeks. First,
the work of a potter is personal. You might even say it is intimate. A potter
works with his or her own hands. They may use tools, but much of the work,
especially early on, is done by hands willing to get dirty. It is personal.
Even intimate. And it
is personal in the sense that every piece a potter throws and works on is
individual. Jonathon, our other potter, was telling me the other day that
each piece a potter throws has its own particular and peculiar wobble. I
thought to myself: that sounds right. No
piece, no pot, is perfectly symmetrical. There is no perfection. Every piece
is off-center in its own particular and peculiar way. Jonathon was telling me
that, if you are the potter, you have to work with a piece’s particular
wobble. If you try to force the wobble, the pot, he said, will lose its base.
Every
pot is unique. Every pot has its own peculiar wobble. The potter doesn’t try
to force the wobble so as to destroy the piece’s uniqueness, but works with
the wobble to shape and form the particular pot that that clay has the
potential to become. Jonathon
makes the tea cups for the Teaism restaurants. Each cup, he tells me, takes
only a few minutes. But for those few minutes that cup has his absolute full
attention. The
potter’s work is very personal. Intimate. This is not mass production by a
machine. It is the work of the potter’s own hands. The
second thing about a potter’s work: a potter’s work is evolutionary, except
when it’s not. A potter’s work is not instantaneous. It is not like the
plastic molding machine I operated as a summer job during seminary that pops
out Tupperware each piece instantly fully formed. A
potter’s work is gradual and patient. It takes time. The shape and form
emerges under the push and pull and squeeze of the potter’s hands. The shape
and form a pot is at any particular point of the process is not what it will
eventually become. It is always on its way to becoming. I
believe that evolution is God’s standard operating procedure. All the debate
about whether we believe in God or evolution misses the point. Evolution is
God’s ordinary way of doing things in most of our lives. If we are healthy
and spiritually flexible, we evolve. I even
believe we evolve after we die, which is why I am guilty of the Protestant
sin of believing in something like purgatory. We never stop evolving. I said
that a potter’s work is evolutionary, except when it is not. Because there
are times when a potter will collapse a pot and start over with it. This is a
part of the image that Jeremiah applies to There
are some of us who have had these kinds of experiences in life, too. Jonathon
told me a very interesting thing about this. When he has to stop a project
and start over on it again, he tells me he has to let the clay sit for a
while, at least a day, because the clay has a memory, he says. If he tries to
rework it immediately, whatever the problem was will reassert itself again. The
clay is not just a passive object here. The clay pushes back. The clay
asserts itself. It is from the tension between the potter and the clay that
the pot emerges. The
potter’s work is evolutionary, except when it is not. The
third thing about the potter’s work is this – it is spiritual work. It is the
potter’s work to discern in the clay potential that the clay cannot see for
itself. The potter’s work is about spiritual discernment as much as it is about
the physical work. Karen
was telling me yesterday that work at her wheel is a spiritual experience for
her. If I heard her correctly, it takes her out of the busy world and centers
her and connects her to herself and to the clay. Jeremiah
says that the work of a potter is to work the clay into “a vessel as seem[s]
good to him [or her].” (Jeremiah 18: 4) There
is a spiritual bond between the potter and the clay…the potter and the pot.
The pot takes on some of the spirit of the potter and in the process becomes
both useful and beautiful. Watch
the potter. To understand our relationship with the divine, watch the potter.
It has
been a tough summer. I find myself beginning September more tired than I
usually am. There is a lot going on…a lot that needs attention...a lot to
worry about. Lots of us have a lot of good ideas for Foundry. We put a lot of
pressure on ourselves to do lots of things, have lots of meetings, do lots of
activities. But
what we may need the most is the grace to surrender to the potter’s hands. To
allow the divine potter to see in us possibilities for usefulness and beauty
we cannot see in our lumpy old selves, and to let the potter’s hands shape
and rework us. Watch
the potter. www.foundryumc.org |
|
|
|
|
|
|
